East Bay soldiers back up rationale (torture)

[donsu]

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8626075.htm?1c

Like other East Bay soldiers who operated the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, Sgt. Michael Sindar of Antioch witnessed plenty there to disturb him.

He recalls a 14-year-old Iraqi with a broken arm being hurled to the ground and then mocked by U.S. soldiers as the boy wept and wet himself in the prison intake center.

He saw soldiers and officers boozing in violation of military rules and watched his commander quietly leave, accused of taking nude photos of female soldiers in the shower.

Long before the world did, Sindar and others with Pittsburg's 870th MP company viewed some of the now-infamous snapshots of soldiers there abusing and humiliating inmates. The pictures were burned onto CDs and circulated around the prison. Peeks could be had in the chow hall.

"It was like a commodity," said Sindar, 25. "Whatever pictures you had, whoever had the most foul picture out there, everyone wanted to see what it was."

-snip-

Top Army officers were rarely seen, and abusive soldiers faced little discipline.

"The thing with the soldiers there, they think because we're Americans you can do whatever you want," said Spc. Ramon Leal, 25, of San Jose. "They didn't have the nerve to discipline soldiers, so the bad soldiers had no reason not to."
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our officers were afraid of their own men????????