Talk:Sabrina Harman

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[edit] "War Criminal"?

A contributor made several recent excisions, including the inclusion of Harman from the category "War Criminals" with the edit summary does not meet the requirements of international "war criminal". Surely, since she committed acts that were humiliating to her prisoners, and common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions forbids humiliating prisoners. She has violated the Geneva Convention, so, by definition, she is a war criminal. -- Geo Swan 23:41, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

No. That is not the way that it works. There are soliders in armies all around the world committing acts that violate various laws and conventions. They are caught and punished all the time, quite a few people each year. And not just in the U.S. Army or just U.S. forces overall, but in other countries forces. Now, these common criminals (and that's what Sabrina Harman is, a common criminal) are not convicted by a international war tribunal of a war crime. The folks that were convicted at Nuremberg are war criminals. They committed unspeakable acts, were caught, and convicted by an international tribunal. That is not what happened to Sabrina Harman. She should be listed in another category, but not the category of war criminal. Best,--Getaway 23:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Just to give you an example, after we talked I looked around for an appropriate person to put in this list that was not alread in the list. I added Rudolf Hess. You can review my edit here: [1].--Getaway 00:05, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


There are soldiers, around the world, who violated various laws, like petty theft, or grand theft auto. They are common criminals, and should be prosecuted by the local authorities. The USA has some agreements in place which allow US military justice officials first crack at prosecuting and punishing GIs accused of ordinary crimes overseas.
But a soldier -- or anyone else for that matter -- who violates "the customs of war", is, by definition, a war criminal. Humiliating your prisoners is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. It is clearcut. Harman participated in humiliating her prisoners, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. That makes her a war criminal.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice was written so that violations of international conventions, like the Geneva Conventions, were also violations of the UCMJ.
Note: As of this writing, Jeremy Sivits, Javal Davis, Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick -- her squad-mates, are all listed in [[Category:War criminals]]. -- Geo Swan 14:26, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
Under your personal commentary, anyone convicted on a violation of the UCMJ would be considered a "war criminal." That is not right. Are you an attorney? If an attorney, have you been certified in the military court to know and understand the UCMJ? If you have been certified, have you practiced in the military courts? I don't believe that whether you have or haven't takes away your right to edit this article, but I do believe it does play a role in your interpretation of UCMJ law, which is what you are doing when you state this: "They are common criminals, and should be prosecuted by the local authorities." So are you saying that the UCMJ cannot be used to prosecute petty theft, etc?? Also, just because Graner is listed in the "war criminals" category has no bearing whatsoever on whether Harman should be listed. Graner was the ring-leader of the idiocy and he was convicted of several specific charges that Harman was not. The term "war criminal" is a very specific thing and we should not put people into that category just because they have violated the UCMJ, that is too simplistic, concerning that Wikipedia is attempting to put together a biography on a living person. What were the exact charges with which she was charged? The article does not say. What is does say is giberish such as this: "Striking several prisoners by jumping on them as they lay in a pile; Writing "rapeist" [sic] on a prisoner's leg". This is NOT a formal charge on the UMCJ. This is giberish. It is the description of a what Harman did then a Wikipedian wrote down the words charges under UCMJ is front of the description and called it a charge. Whether it is the charge or not (and it isn't) it NOT enough to be listed in the category "war criminals." That is ludicrious. I know that there is great desire to run Mr. Bush out of office and I know that it is tempting to use Wikipedia to blast Bush and U.S. Army each and every chance we get, but that is NOT the point of Wikipedia. It is supposed to be about balance and be encyclopedia. You deciding that she is "war criminal" when she is simply a solider who has been convicted of battery is non-NPOV. Battery does NOT rise to the level of mass execution that Rudolph Hess did. We should not present the material that way. It is not NPOV.--Getaway 16:24, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
No, as you said in your edit summary, battery is not mass murder. Who said it was? But humiliating your prisoners is a violation of the Geneva Conventions -- by definition a war crime. You can call that ludicrous. You can repeat Attorney General Gonzales's line, and call it "quaint". But it is the law. She violated it. Hence she is a war criminal, just as Graner and Frederick are.
Read the first sentence of your reply. Then read my comment again. I said the UCMJ incorporated the proscriptions from the Geneva Conventions. I did not say the UCMJ == the Geneva Conventions. The UCMJ is much longer than the Geneva Conventions, and describes many offenses that have nothing to do with Geneva Conventions.
Did I say the UCMJ cannot be used to prosecute lesser crimes?
As I read through your reply, I see you are repeatedly ignoring my main point. She is a war criminal because she violated the Geneva Conventions. Graner is a war criminal because he violated the Geneva Conventions. Yes, the term "war criminal" has a specific, narrow meaning -- someone who violates the laws and customs of war. In practice that means violating an international agreement, like the Geneva Conventions, or the Hague Convention..
You state that the charges the article states Harman faces were not the actual charges she faced. If true, that is a good point. So why didn't you copy the actual charges here? Why didn't you copy the actual charges, or a link thereto, into the article?
I resent you accusing me of using the wikipedia to blast Bush each and every chance. I do my best to conform to the NPOV policy. I don't expect to do a perfect job. But frankly I think I do a pretty good job.
Let me remind you of the edit summary you put when you removed that category. You put: "Does not meet the requirements of international 'war criminal'." -- what you put was not a statement of fact. It was an interpretation. IMO your position was an insupportable one. One doesn't have to be a mass murderer to be a war criminal. One merely has to violate an international agreement, like the Geneva Conventions.
Note: I didn't make the initial decision to put Harman into the [Category:War Criminals]. I reversed a removal from a category that was justified by what appeared to me to be an incorrect and biased edit summary. I see the category's criteria limits it to individuals convicted of a war crime. If the actual charges she was convicted of aren't a reasonable match with articles from the Geneva Conventions I will agree she doesn't meet the stated criteria for this wikipedia category. Although I would continue to personally regard her as a war criminal, I would agree to her removal from the category. If I had put her in the category I would have made sure she met the category's stated criteria.
How long should I wait for you to bring back the actual charges she was convicted of?
I think you should have waited more than ten minutes for me to state my position on the talk page.
FWIW, the opposite of a neutral point of view is not a "non-NPOV", it is a "biased point of view" or "bias".
Your comments about Graner, above, confuse me. Are you arguing above that Graner, as the ringleader, is a war criminal, and Harman, as a follower, is not? If so why did you remove Graner, Sivits, Frederick and Davis? Don't you think you should have waited until we had finished our discussion of whether violating an article from Geneva Conventions made someone a war criminal?
Do you agree Edward Richmond belongs? -- Geo Swan 22:30, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm glad somebody brought this up. I mentioned this absurdity in Talk:Lynndie England but no one responded. I say putting the Abu Ghraib gang in the category of war criminals is inherently biased. There is one good reason to include them anyway, but I doubt it would be justified. It is far outweighed by the reason to exclude them. It's a matter of balance.
The American Iraq war veterans who are entered as "war criminals" had committed crimes that pale in comparison to any of the others in the war criminal category.
If it was fair then we should either be putting all war criminals in there, or only the major ones. Choosing committers of major atrocities, and mixing them with minor committers of obscene photography (who naturally just happen to be American) is blatantly and laughably biased against the U.S.
One might come away reading Wikipedia and think that every other nation in the world treats prisoners with polite dignity. I see there are no prison guards from Iraq (nor anyone from any Arab country) listed as war criminals. Why not? Who, other than some nitwit at the NY Times believes the rest of the world treats prisoners as well as we do?
The one good reason to include these minor figures is that it illustrates a very interesting point. Note that all these contemporary American "war criminals" were tried and convicted by the U.S. military. The others in this category were tried only when captured by another nation. You may think this is overly-patriotic, but it's punctuated by the clearly limited interest shown by the rest of the world in demanding that the Geneva Conventions apply to anyone else, even when children are killed because of it, as is the case in Hezbollah's use of human shields.
This makes it seem as though the U.S. is the only nation on earth that brings justice to war criminals even when they are of its own.
That observation aside, I'm still opposed to adding minor figures.
It may appear to be more reasonable to include Edward L. Richmond Jr. but first I'd like to see some attempt at real parity. Find some other non-Americans who only killed one person, and yet still fits in that category.
-- Randy2063 22:38, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
All very good points, Randy. Also, notice that there are categories for "Iraq War Criminals" which of course only include Americans. And these folks are all in that category. There is also a category called some like "Prison Guards at Abu Grab" or something or other. There is a complete lack of balance. So three slightly different categories to name the seven people that engaged in assault, battery, and other humiliating picture taking. And with a straight face the argument is the these folks should be listed next to Rudolk Hess. It is completely biased and it is non-NPOV. I'm going to remove these folks from the "War Criminal" category each and every time they appear there. It is just a misuse of Wikipedia to grind out 3 different categories just slam the U.S. in non-NPOV. And, yes, I used the term non-NPOV and I will again in the future, whenever I want to. It is proper English and I don't have to change for any reason. I guess I just could not find the Wikipedia rule that states that I must not say non-NPOV. --Getaway 01:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
Somebody -- maybe Randy -- expressed some frustration, some months ago, with the relative space devoted to American GIs who were war criminals, torturers, abusers, murderers, rapists, compared with those of other nations. That correspondent said something like, if this trend continues, it will look like American GIs are the most cruel and callous, when we know that this kind of crime is more common in the armies of totalitarian societies, but we hardly hear any details because (1) they are way more tolerant of abusers there; (2) they don't have an open press, or independent judiciary, who can investigate rumors of war crimes. I have thought about this comment since then.
I strongly suspect that what my correspondent says about the relative brutality of, for instance, the Serbian army in the 1990s, or the Janjaweed militia in Sudan today, or the security forces in Uzbekistan, where being boiled alive is an interrogation technique, is correct.
I am not unsympathetic to the feelings of patriotic Americans who would like to see the relative amount of space devoted to American abusers reflect the true relative frequency of that abuses occurrence. But I don't agree that we should cut back on verifiable content on American abusers because we can't verify the existence or details of the abuse from less open societies. Is anyone suggesting this here?
Taking the heat for failing to measure up to professed national ideals is the flip side of feeling pride in those ideals. People identified America as the pre-eminent land of freedom and opportunity -- freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from repression, surviellance, arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial detention, and other injustices. Patriotic Americans take great pride in the reputation of being the pre-eminent land of freedom.
I used to engage in discussions of these issues on slashdot. What I found there was that there were two basic responses from patriotic Americans when some darned foreigner tried to talk about instances where American GIs, or some other organ of the US government acted in a way that feel far short of the high principles that America was founded upon. One reaction was basically anger, denial and obfuscation; the other reaction included a fair measure of angle, but those patriots wanted to get to the bottom of the story. They would be fierce with people whose allegations proved false, or, once looked into, lacked credibility. But, if a clear-sighted examination of the allegations seemed to confirm that American GIs or other US officials were falling short of American ideals, their anger would be directed towards the Americans who were letting the rest of America down. They were willing to openly criticize those Americans who were letting the rest of America down. I admire the second group. Yes, open criticism of those nominally on our side can be embarrassing, in the short term. But there is no doubt in my mind which approach will make America stronger in the long term, and is most likely to preserve those high ideals. What many American patriots are apt to forget is that one doesn't have to be an American to honour the high principles America was founded upon. And, of course, these high principles are honoured in other nations, other nation's laws, other nation's judiciaries. -- Geo Swan 22:24, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
Interesting essay, but it does not have anything to do with this page. There is no need for three different categories for the same action and convicted battery felons should not listed with mass murderers. All of the seven will stay off the list. I did not read any explanation on why there is three lists. The only thing that I got from the essay is that you clearly do have a political motive for the categories and that is clearly against Wikipedia policy. You clearly point out, and I thank you for your honesty, that you are using the categories for your own political agenda, which you describe as such "to openly criticize those Americans who were letting the rest of America down." --Getaway 01:30, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
Geo,
Yes, we had a similar discussion before. Here's what I said in the article on POWs: "It's not proportionate. Imperial Japan gets four lines. Surely, there were atrocities committed by Americans against Japanese prisoners. This happens in every major war. But was it even enough to merit one line in this article? To do so would imply a 1/4th balance, and that would be incorrect. Note that there isn't a single word about Iraqi abuse on American POWs."
But I wasn't talking about a list of war criminals. This is different. We're talking about the scale of abuse being sufficient for the category. It's not like I would exclude an American guilty of genocide because Saddam isn't on the list yet.
I was not suggesting, that we should cut back on verifiable content on American abusers because we can't verify the existence or details of the abuse from less open societies. Verifying abusers may seem like a problem in this current war (the extent to which this is true is debatable), but that wouldn't be said of WWII.
I've invited you to find others who were listed as "war criminals" after killing one person, to say nothing of frathouse behavior committed by the likes of Sabrina Harman. You don't have to limit this to Arabs, who seem to be given some strange immunity. There is a longer list of war criminals that includes WWII. Do you see any humiliators there? Putting people like Sabrina Harman in this category would be unprecedented.
I should add something in response to your earlier post on Alberto Gonzales describing POW rights as "quaint". He wasn't talking about torture, as most people were led to believe. He was talking about the privileges given to honorable soldiers, which include "commissary privileges, scrip, athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments". Surely, "quaint" was too soft a word. Although the Supreme Court has since ruled against the Bush administration on Article 3, it still hasn't decided that these are technically POWs.
I see there was some discussion of this in Talk:War crime. It was suggested that the category implicitly includes only large war crimes. Another editor had said not every violation is technically a war crime, although I'll have to look into that later.
-- Randy2063 19:24, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Deleted content: I have deleted a statement posted in early October in this location by Chimerarc on the grounds that it violated WP:BLP and was not related to improving the article. The original comment remains in the history and may be examined by anyone concerned about this action. 23skidoo 13:54, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quotes

Placing her quotes will never excuse her sick behaviour. Shes disgusting and twisted and so are the people who think she did nothing wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ArabMexican (talk • contribs) 17:02, 1 April 2008 (UTC)