Air Defense Artillery Online News

THE U.S. ARMY FACES A MORAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL DILEMMA
By Carl Osgood
Published in the Executive Intelligence Review, 3 December 2010

ADA Online published the article (linked above) in the January 2011 edition encouraging professional dialogue/discussion. We thank Major Douglas A. Pryer for his participation. What follows is his Letter to the Editor:

In his recent article in your online journal, "The U.S. Army Faces a Moral and Constitutional Dilemma," Carl Osgood wrote a few paragraphs about a recent article of mine.

His conclusion was that "Pryer does not directly address the process of contamination of the chain of command that began at the White House soon after 9/11." He also refers to my saying that CJTF-7 (Combined/Coalition Joint Task Force-7) did things completely differently than the 1st Armored Division (1AD).

The first reference is a mischaracterization of my published work--perhaps understandably so, since he probably only read that one article. I've actually written quite a bit about the tragic errors with regard to interrogation made by leaders at all command levels in the early years of the War on Terrorism.

Osgood's second reference is simply inaccurate, since 1AD was part of CJTF-7 (and thus 1AD could not have done things completely differently than CJTF-7).

Although I focus exclusively on the operational and tactical levels of command in the article that Osgood cites, I would like to encourage him to read my book, "The Fight for the High Ground: the U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom." This book was published slightly more than a year ago, and my publisher just recently made it publicly accessible from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Fight-High-Ground-Interrogation-Operation/dp/0615332749/.

Chapter 3 of this book, titled "The City Upon the Hill," deals with the tragic mistakes made in this area by the Bush Administration. In the book, I also describe the vast majority of CJTF-7 units (including the 1AD) as adhering to the moral high ground, though I devote another entire chapter, "Tragic Blunders," to conventional units who did not. Yes, more chapters in the book are devoted to the operational and tactical levels of war than the strategic level, but there is a very good reason for this: while there are scores of books and thousands of articles about the Bush Administration's role in the enabling of enhanced interrogation techniques, there has been very little written or understood about how various tragedies and triumphs were acted out by our military in the field, at facilities less well-known and further down the chain of command than Abu Ghraib.

Please pass on this email and my regards to Mr. Osgood for an otherwise fine article. Thank you.

Major Douglas A. Pryer (MI), assigned to the 14th Signal Regiment (United Kingdom) as a
Senior Intelligence Officer