The Profile in Courage Award
Charles Johnson
Mon May 16, 2005 at 11:09 am PDT • Views: 214
Out of the 150,000 Americans serving in Iraq, the Kennedy Library Foundation chose to give their Profile in Courage Award to Sgt. Joseph M. Darby, who revealed the first photos of Abu Ghraib to military investigators: On Abu Ghraib: One sergeant’s courage a model for US leaders. (Hat tip: hector.)
“To be courageous,” wrote John F. Kennedy in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” “requires no exceptional qualifications…. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all.”
When the opportunity was presented to Joseph Darby, he grasped it and rescued American values from further degradation.
Monday Darby will be given the Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage Award by Caroline Kennedy for “upholding the rule of law that we embrace as a nation.”
But to fully honor Darby’s courage, it is essential to determine how the values he and other American soldiers are defending came to be trampled on at Abu Ghraib. A number of military investigations have been completed and low-ranking soldiers prosecuted, but so far little attention has been paid to the linkage between what happened in the prison and the high-level policies adopted two years earlier that swept aside international standards for interrogating prisoners in the war on terrorism.
Frank says: