My Lai Massacre Essay

My Lai Massacre versus Prison Torture and Abuse Scandal at Abu Ghraib Prison

“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity” Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa. To start off I'm going to be talking about two very tragic events that occurred, one of them being the My Lai massacre and the other one being the prison torture and abuse scandal in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I will go into further detail in answering the following questions, what are some key differences? Who is most responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib? does Abu Ghraib, as well as incidents involving rape and killings of civilians in Iraq suggest that we haven't learned our lessons of My Lai? And lastly what needs to be

2004). June of 2003 an army reserve brigadier general names Jane Karpinski, was granted the commander position of the 800th Military Police Brigade and was given responsibility of prisons in Iraq (Hersh, 2004). She was unfamiliar with running a prison due to the face she has never had the responsibility to run one before, she had been given the job to run 3 large prisons eight battalions and thirty four hundred military soldiers most of which also did not know how to handle prisoners (Hersh, 2004). After a month of doing this she was reprimanded and silently suspended, due to the fact that a major investigation was being done on the army prison system, which was authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, A fifty three page report written by General Antonio M. Taguba was later leaked and in the possession of The New Yorker last February. The report concludes that the organized failures of the army prison was tragic, Taguba went on about how from October to December of 2003 there were multiple times where there had been atrocious and very tragic reports of criminal misconduct and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison (Hersh, 2004). They later found incriminating evidence to support their allegations and