I am the guy that gets a shitload from conservatives almost every time I mention police because I think they need to be reigned in, and now I am saying that they are right to have a code where the bad cops should keep quiet.
Right.
Grow up and start acting like an adult, and people might start respecting your opinion. Keep mouthing off because people who essentially agree with you call you on your factual errors and everyone will continue to treat you like the child you portray.
Pointing out your factual errors is not supporting the people you are attempting to dump on, it is just defending the people who did not do what you are talking about. Or do you have a problem with not smearing everyone with the same brush?
Go back, read my post, and point out anywhere where I spoke out against the man who reported the abuse, or even spoke up in support of the people who abused those prisoners. If you can find it I will retract what I said. If you cannot, I would like an apology. I do not expect one, but I would like one.
I will take your failure to point out where I said anything like you think I said as an admission that I did not say it, just in case you pull the typical position and refuse to mention this again.
Yep.
He ratted out a bunch of cops who were breaking the law, and is a pariah because of it. He crossed the Blue Line.
Nice of you to blame this on the Army though. Being the person you are, you probably haven't educated yourself to the extent that you would know that the regular Army thinks that reserve units are their biggest problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The worst are the ones that are police officers in civilian life, because they are trained to think like cops instead of soldiers. Do a little research on the militarization of police before you blame the Army for what cops did.]
Spc. Joe Darby
United States Army
It sure as hell looks like you are calling out Army Spc. Joe Darby, who followed the proper chain of command reporting the torture and abuse. And that Darby crossed the blue line. If that is not what you are saying then you have my apology.
BUT, I don't agree with you passing the buck here. It's an Army officer's duty to keep everyone under their command in line. If not, there is chaos, lawlessness and men & women that want to do the right thing are not safe from retribution. I believe the biggest travesty with the Abu Ghraib crimes is that no one in a command position was held responsible.
Your article about the abuses of reserve units and people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement is A) an indictment of the growing number of 'thugs with badges' we have in America and B) those abuses pale in comparison to private murderers like Blackwater, who are not bound to US law or Iraqi law. They ARE a Gestapo.
It does?
Please spell out how you jump to that conclusion when what I am clearly doing is mocking your assertion that the Army had anything to do with this, or that any active member of the Army threatened him. I will admit that it is possible that some members of the regular Army might have had issues with what he did, but the reason he cannot go home is he ratted out cops, not soldiers.
What I am doing here, since you seem to have trouble following basic logic, is explaining what happened. I am still awaiting either an apology for you saying I oppose what he did, or support those who threatened him. Failing that, you can just run away with your tail tucked between your legs.
After reading your last two posts it is crystal clear that you are not a classic liberal. Why do you need to lie? Are you so ashamed of being a right wing authoritarian follower?
The reason Joe Darby couldn't go home is because of sickness that has overcome this country. It is similar to the sickness that permeated Germany in the 20's and 30's. It is a group of nationalists who call themselves 'patriots', but they are really enemies of America. They find ways to justify immoral wars, torture of human beings and turn on any countryman that doesn't subscribe to their sickness. You just revealed you are one of them.
Joe Darby interview
But he didn't get support back home in Cumberland, Md., a military town that felt Darby had betrayed his fellow soldiers.
The commander of the local VFW post, Colin Engelbach, told 60 Minutes what people were calling Darby.
"He was a rat. He was a traitor. He let his unit down. He let his fellow soldiers down and the U.S. military. Basically he was no good," Engelbach says.
Asked if he agrees with that, Engelbach says, "I agree that his actions that he did were no good and borderline traitor, yes."
"What he says in his defense is 'Look. IÂ’m an MP. And this is something which was illegal,'" Cooper remarks.
"Right. But do you put the enemy above your buddies? I wouldnÂ’t," Engelbach replies.
Their hometown held a vigil for members of his unit, including the accused, not however, for Joe Darby.
"These were people who knew me since I was born. These were people who were my parents' friends, my grandparents' friends that turned against me," Darby says.
To prevent any soldiers from retaliating against him in Iraq, the military sent Darby back to the states early, ahead of the rest of his unit.
"I get called into my commander's office at like ten o'clock at night. He said, 'Do you have your bags packed?' I said 'Sir, we live in a tent. I always have my bags packed.' He said 'Good. Be on the flight line. In an hour you leave,'" Darby recalls.
When Darby arrived at Dover Air Force Base, his wife Bernadette was there to meet him. He thought they would head back home, but the Army had other plans.
An officer asked Darby what he wanted to do. "I said, 'Sir, I just want to go home. I've always just wanted to go home.' He said, 'Well son, that's not an option.' He said, 'The Army Reserve has done a security assessment of the area and it's not safe for you there. You can't go home,'" Darby remembers. "'You can probably never go home.'"
"They said, 'If you had to choose, where would you want to live?' And you know basically where do you pick, you know? You've lived a whole life in one area," he says.
Asked if it seemed fair to him, Darby says, "No."
"It's not fair. That we're being punished for him doin' the right thing," his wife Bernadette adds.
The Army's security assessment of his hometown had concluded that "the overall threat of harassment or criminal activity to the Darbys is imminent. Â…a person could fire into his residence from the roadway."
The local VFW commander told Cooper the military was right to keep Darby out of town. "Probably so. There was a lot of threats, a lotta phone calls to his wife," Engelbach remembers.
He says there was a lot of anger in Cumberland. "‘Cause it really did put our troops in harm’s way more so than they already were," Engelbach says.
Bernadette Darby says she heard people calling her husband a traitor, that he was a dead man and that he was walking around with a bull's eye on his head.
To keep Joe and Bernadette safe, the military moved them to an Army base with body guards around the clock. "I couldn't go anywhere without security. Nowhere," Darby remembers.
"Even goin' to a restaurant?" Cooper asks.
"We walk in with, me and her and six guys?" Darby says, laughing. "And all of 'em are armed."
Darby says he was protected by bodyguards for almost six months.
While he was a villain to his neighbors, he was a hero to people he had never met, including Caroline Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy, who gave him a "Profile In Courage" award in honor of President John F. Kennedy.
Joe left the Army recently, and he misses it. He and Bernadette miss their hometown as well. They say they'll never move back to Cumberland. Instead they've moved on, but they are still wary.
All Darby will say is that they have started over. He doesn't want to share what he does now, where he lives or talk about his family. "I worry about the one guy who wants to get even with me," he explains. "And that one guy could hurt me and my family."
Asked if this has made him paranoid, Darby says, "To a degree."
And some relatives from both sides of the family have turned against him and his wife.
“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality”
President John F. Kennedy
