At extreme risk of sanctimony, but worth it to me because I follow your comments:
Maybe consider whether you want to be this glib about military prison guards. MCB Quantico is presumably staffed by the USMC. As I understand it:
(1) People don't join the USMC and then get to choose to work as a brig guard stateside; these are people who volunteered to serve at an extremely difficult time.
(2) The people who land in stateside posts tend to have first done a tour overseas; the "angry guys with guns" administering "minor beatings" are likely to be people who have already served their country in ways I can't possibly imagine doing myself.
I might consider giving these people the benefit of the doubt. (I'm anti-war, a liberal dem, but I have a healthy dose of respect for people who volunteer for the armed services.)
If you disagree, that's fine, I won't have a temper tantrum, but I thought it was worth saying.
Incidentally, there's a Reddit AmA with an MCB Quantico brig guard running right now.
The people who land in stateside posts tend to have first done a tour overseas
Actually, that's less likely than one might think. Deployments to Iraq/Afghanistan are distributed in a very non-uniform manner throughout the military. See [1].
the "angry guys with guns" administering "minor beatings" are likely to be people who have already served their country in ways I can't possibly imagine doing myself.
I don't think the implication was that the guards would abuse him because they were in the military -- but rather because they were in a position of power that tended to turn people into violent crazy people. Power corrupts and all, to say nothing of the Stanford prison experiment.
If you look at the crosstabs for those numbers, you find that the number of Marines in the "Corrections Specialist" MOS that haven't deployed at all are absolutely dwarfed by people with MOS like "Personnel Clerk" and "Finance Technician" and "Administrative Clerk" (and, "Combat Illustrator"? Really?).
One gets the sense that "Corrections Specialists" do in fact deploy.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is probably not a license to assume that anyone working as a prison guard is breaking the law and their own honor code. But, who knows.
I didn't mean to besmirch the honor of the prison guards... "angry" only meant that they would be angry because of the detainee not following the rules, not because they are inherently angry people.
I was reasonably confident that said minor beatings were codified into what the guards are supposed to do. If Manning doesn't do one of the things he is not allowed to do, he will be forced to comply, and said force is likely to resemble a beating.
Maybe consider whether you want to be this glib about military prison guards. MCB Quantico is presumably staffed by the USMC. As I understand it:
(1) People don't join the USMC and then get to choose to work as a brig guard stateside; these are people who volunteered to serve at an extremely difficult time.
(2) The people who land in stateside posts tend to have first done a tour overseas; the "angry guys with guns" administering "minor beatings" are likely to be people who have already served their country in ways I can't possibly imagine doing myself.
I might consider giving these people the benefit of the doubt. (I'm anti-war, a liberal dem, but I have a healthy dose of respect for people who volunteer for the armed services.)
If you disagree, that's fine, I won't have a temper tantrum, but I thought it was worth saying.
Incidentally, there's a Reddit AmA with an MCB Quantico brig guard running right now.