Walter Wojdakowski

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Walter Wojdakowski


Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	1972-present
Rank	Major General
Battles/wars	Operation Desert Storm
Awards	Silver Star Legion of Merit (3) Bronze Star

Walter Wojdakowski is a major general in the United States Army. He has held a number of high positions within the military, including his current post of Commanding General of Fort Benning. The most controversial part of his career is his involvement with the Abu Ghraib Scandal.

1 Military career
2 Implication in Abu Ghraib
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Military career

[edit] Education

Major General Wojdakowski graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1972. He has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Alaska and a Master of Military Arts and Sciences from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. His military education includes the Infantry Officer Basic and Advanced Courses, the Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies, and the Army War College.

[edit] Service

Wojdakowski served in company grade officer positions as a Platoon Leader, Scout Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, Ranger Instructor and Commander at Fort Lewis and at the Army Mountain Ranger Camp. He also was an Assistant Professor of Military Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. As a field grade officer, he served as a Brigade S-3, Battalion Executive Officer and Chief, Tactical Operations III Corps G-3 at Fort Hood, Texas. He commanded the 3rd Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, Tiger Brigade, 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood and in Desert Storm/Desert Shield from 1989 to 1991. He was then assigned as the Senior Infantry Task Force Combat Trainer at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California. He attended the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania and commanded the 11th Infantry Regiment at Ft Benning, Georgia from July 1993 to July 1995. Wojdakowski's next assignment was as the Director of Training, 7th Army Training Command, USAREUR and he became the Commander, Operations Group, Combat Maneuver Training Center at the Hohenfels Training Area, Germany on 1 May 1996. Wojdakowski assumed the duties of Assistant Commandant of the Infantry School and Deputy Commanding General, Fort Benning, on 21 January 1997. In September 1998 he became Chief, Office of Military Cooperation, Kuwait at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City, Kuwait. He assumed duties as the ADC, 24th Infantry Division (Mech) (Fwd) and Deputy Commanding General (DCG), 1st U.S. Army on 17 August 2000. In September 2002 he assumed the position of DCG V Corps. He was later named DCG of the former Combined Joint Task Force 7, later redesignated as Multi-National Force-Iraq and Multi-National Corps-Iraq. Wojdakowski here served as top deputy to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the force commander. After this post, he was eventually named Commanding General of Ft. Benning.

[edit] Awards

Wojdakowski's awards include the Silver Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit (with 2 oak leaf clusters), the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal (with 2 oak leaf clusters), the Army Commendation Medal (with 2 oak leaf clusters), the Navy Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal (with oak leaf cluster), the Combat and Expert Infantryman Badges, the Ranger Tab, and the Master Parachutist Badge.

[edit] Implication in Abu Ghraib

It was while General Wojdakowski served under General Sanchez that he became involved in Abu Ghraib. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a general who was later disciplined for her role in the scandal, placed Maj. Gen. Wojdakowski at a meeting in late November at which there was extensive discussion of a Red Cross report that cited specific cases of abuse.^[1]

In November 2006, the German government received a complaint seeking the prosecution of Wojdakowski for alleged war crimes. The complaint alleges that during his tenure he was legally responsible for the U.S. torture programs.[1]

Other co-defendants include: Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Stephen Cambone, Ricardo S. Sanchez, Geoffrey Miller, Thomas M. Pappas, Barbara Fast, Marc Warren, Alberto Gonzales, William J. Haynes, II, David Addington, and John Yoo.

The plaintiff's legal strategy for the prosecution of Wojdakowski and his co-defendant lawyers is to attempt to use the precedent of the Nuremberg trials, where German jurists whose legal work was complicit in Nazi atrocities were prosecuted. See United States of America vs. Josef Altstötter, et al., 6 Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals 1 (1947) (U.S.M.T. Nuremberg), commonly referred to as the Judges' Trial or the Justice Trial. In 1947, the American military tribunal at Nuremberg convicted a group of lawyers for complicity in international crimes for their role in enacting and enforcing laws and decrees that permitted crimes against humanity, including torture. None of the defendants in the Judges’ Trial were charged with a crime against a particular person. They were charged with complicity in an organized system of cruelty, which they had fostered in their role as lawyers. "The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist."[2]