interesting overview of US combat troops' responses to a Pentagon-administered survey on military ethics.

Soldiers are trained to "kill people and break things." To highlight the fact that "a third of troops...had cursed at civilians" is just ludicrous. This whole article is cherry-picked troop bashing. Read the full MHAT (link at bottom) report and be surprised upon seeing the full picture.

This report on the survey is revealing of the sad state of ethical behavior within the military. The failure consider ethics in initiating the invasion and occupation is almost matched by the lack of ethics in executing it. The question is not addressed as to whether the attitudes are a function of our culture, lack of training, or unguided attitudes developed in a war zone.

This story gets big dings on fairness and the "big picture". The reporter obviously cherry-picked what she believed were signs of bad ethical behavior without putting any of the questions in a clear context. For example: What constitutes torture - pulling out of fingernails or sleep deprivation? Do the questions take into account the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from insurgents considering that insurgents routinely masquerade as civilians? Did she note that each of these "did you do this to a civilian" questions required a soldier to answer "yes" even if he had done something only once. Setting a context for the findings gives a more complete picture of what the survey revealed. Finally, the reporter hit several ... More »

The most important part of the article is the link to the actual MHAT reports, which are extremely informative (the article much less so). There is some good sourcing outside the MHAT report that attempts to give perspective, but too much is made of out-of-context statistics. Why are statistics for physical abuse of non-combatants lumped together with property damage in the article, when they are separate in the MHAT report, and when the rate of physical abuse is about half that of property damage? Very misleading. Is it surprising or troubling that front-line soldiers and marines would approve of torture or any other means of saving lives or getting important information? What is the point of emphasizing those findings? And no ... More »

Like others, I also found it to be a cherry-picked hit piece designed to malign the military. While it seems to be sourced, there's no indication of how the numbers were arrived at, what the wording of the questions was...all information necessary to understand what the reporter wants us to accept.