On War And Murder

(Photo: CA)

Until Sunday, The Commercial Appeal's own reporting about the war in Iraq seemed terribly limited to articles about local deployments, parades, goodbyes, homecomings, reunions and the occasional funeral. Nothing overly controversial that might be misconstrued as questioning the sanity of the war itself.

Sunday's story about Michael Patton Williams continued that safe trend, which is a disservice because the CA should have been focusing on why Williams--smart, depressed and troubled--was even allowed to join the Army in the first place.

To make matters worse, the second part of "War And Murder" is a wire story culled from the reporting at the Sacramento Bee, which spent the past year examining suspect soldiers.

The Bee's special project was published Sunday and continues until Thursday.

Sigh.

This is not to suggest that Bart Sullivan wasted his time in writing his story, which was mostly based on "thousands of pages" of court-martial trial transcripts that the CA got from the Army though a Freedom of Information Act request. Yet, it's unclear when that FOIA request was made or who inspired it.

Whereas the SacBee spent a year researching, did Sullivan only spend a few months working on the story? Sometimes, newspapers collaborate on special projects but did that happen here? I'm just disturbed at what the Williams story suggests about the lack of resources, will and vision at the CA.

Would the CA would have even bothered with this potentially important story if Williams wasn't just another Memphis City Schools graduate gone wrong?

[Shouldn't the CA have provided a sidebar about its own Iraq coverage with an explanation of why Williams's initial arrest wasn't covered back in 2004? Is that the Army's fault? If so, doesn't that smell of a cover-up?]

Sigh.

Sullivan does a serviceable job of using the trial transcripts to take readers back to 2004. (I question the relevancy of the dated AP pictures, which also appear in a montage during the Appeal TV video interview of Williams' father. More on that video in a sec.)

However, I lost interest in recapping the events in Sadr City after reading Williams' letter to the CA (which doesn't seem to be addressed to Sullivan) and the excerpt from what I guess is an autobiography or just plain court testimony.

Those two documents alone provide such an ironic insight into Williams that it makes the video of his father, Mike Williams, seem like a man trying to bleed his conscience to compensate for the lack of emotional support that his son claims that he didn't get his father as a teen. The desire to make his father proud was one of the reasons that Williams joined the Army in the first place, according to Williams.

So, it's just sad that it took this to bring his family together on one accord.

But I digress.

As for Williams, who allegedly had a 129 IQ at age 5, he says the Army trained him to be a killer.

Maybe, he just fulfilled his sociopathic potential.