At the risk of furthering what has become an obvious disagreement of context, I respectfully submit my final reply to this discussion. After all, I believe that we can all agree that armed conflicts of any sort are generally least productive for those most affected, and I, as I’m sure do most of you, have other things which hold greater potential for a more rewarding outcome. However, I strongly disagree with your characterization of my opinion regarding the original article in question, and although I disagree on several points, I think I can summarize with one in particular.

Regarding your point about my “vague hearsay” reference, I submit the following:

The captain’s anecdote mentions his experience with an unnamed Sunni man, deemed a “criminal” by an unnamed intel officer for unspecified crimes, who was subsequently released on the orders of an unnamed official (from some unknown governmental branch), for an unknown reason. If that doesn’t qualify as vague, I don’t know what does.

I realize that these sorts of details are vague out of necessity, and wouldn’t expect the captain or anyone else to compromise such an apparently sensitive issue, but just because some details are necessarily secret and cannot be divulged at the risk of some consequence, does not disqualify them from being defined by the adjective in question.

I also am not questioning the integrity of the officer, whom I do not know (which by definition makes it hearsay – to me at least), I have merely expressed my intent to withhold an opinion due to the vagueness inherent to the story, and have suggested that others, for matters of clarity of reason, do the same.

I appreciate your obvious familiarity with details of the larger issue(s); I just think this particular reference to those issues is flat.

I sincerely wish all of you the very best, and have enjoyed (some) of the comments on this otherwise important and relevant blog.

We can reasonably conclude that the incident did happen, that the release wasn’t a mistake of any sort, by the janitor or otherwise—because nothing would preclude rearresting the man—and that it was politically motivated.

You’re right, we don’t know who ordered the man freed. We do know that he was freed from a facility under US control—”we had to release the detainee”; “we lost credibility with the Iraqi police”—which means that whoever was responsible had sufficient clout to order around whoever was in charge of the facility, which means that it was an American who, whether or not he was in uniform, was able to pull rank on the military.

Your comparison of this situation to ones that occur in “democratic, non-military legal systems” is pointless, since we’re not actually dealing with such a system here in any but the most tenuous sense; instead, we have a corrupt government which owes its existence to, and is obviously dominated by, a massive US troop presence.

Even if that were not the case, and Iraq had a functioning civilian legal system, in this instance the arrest was made by the US military, which we know for certain is not subject to any procedural loopholes of the kind to which you allude—there are literally tens of thousands of Iraqis at present detained and imprisoned by US forces with no charge and no judicial oversight—and the arrested man was held at a US-controlled facility. The notion that the guy was kicked on a technicality is ludicrous.

The problem with Eric’s piece isn’t its speculative nature, but rather the degree of surprise he expresses and, perhaps, his use of “fine-tuning”, since US efforts in Iraq seem generally more crude than fine. We have a wealth of non-anecdotal, non-speculative material from which we can conclude that the US does in fact routinely pit one faction against another (and that various Iraqi factions pit the US against one another), as with the now-foundering cooptation of Sunni insurgents to fight the mix of home-grown and imported fanatics constituting al Qaeda in Iraq. Although the conflict between the prime minister’s Shia faction and al Sadr’s hadn’t rekindled at the time Eric wrote, the US also has a thoroughly documented and highly public history of backing Maliki’s Iranian-backed SICI supporters against al Sadr’s nationalist ones, and even of playing off factions internal to the governing majority against one another; consider how Maliki displaced his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jafari, with US support.

You can make a good argument that the captain doesn’t know why or by whom the release was ordered, since he explicitly says so, but I really don’t see how you can sensibly argue that it wasn’t, at some level, a political act by the US.