Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-18-2025

Abstract

This chapter contemplates the “Green Wall of Silence” through several examples. In Iraq, following the detainee abuse scandal at the U.S. military operated prison in Abu Ghraib in 2004, military officials announced that the abuse was the result of just a “few bad apples,” reaching this conclusion through a series of investigations that chilled or blocked witnesses from revealing actual truths, and avoided examining the role of higher-level officials who contributed to the abuses. In Afghanistan, military leaders lauded U.S. Army Corporal Pat Tillman for his conduct in a heroic firefight with the enemy, but concealed from the public the more embarrassing reality that his death was the result of friendly fire. Similarly, at the end of the Afghanistan war, the Pentagon touted a “righteous strike” against suspected terrorists when a U.S. drone destroyed a car and killed several people in the suburbs of Kabul, until a follow-on investigation by teams of journalists produced incontrovertible proof that the attack actually killed humanitarian aid workers. In each of these cases, military members who had erred or engaged in wrongful (sometimes criminal) conduct, had self-interested reasons to conceal or distort the actual facts. Those biases then went unexamined by military investigators, who, like the suspects under investigation, shared strong incentives to put bad situations in a more favorable light and minimize the alleged wrongful conduct. With the “Green Wall of Silence,” wrongdoers and their superiors alike, if unchecked by any independent body, can close ranks and evade a proper accounting of what happened.

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