I haven’t really followed, or paid attention to the plight of Joe Darby, the poor soldier who blew the whistle on Abu-Ghraib a few years back, but I noticed Anderson Cooper interviewed him on 60 minutes this past Sunday. It seems that pretty much everyone he’s ever known now hates him and looks down on him.

“These were people who knew me since I was born. These were people who were my parents’ friends, my grandparents’ friends that turned against me,” Darby says.

Apparently he should’ve just kept his mouth shut.
What happened there is likely a war-crime. The Chernobyl disaster decades ago is not, but the way the old-guard Soviet government handled the situation is strikingly similar to how the military brass and the enlisted men would’ve preferred Abu-Ghraib to be handled:

“Everything you saw and heard – keep your mouth locked!” they said. From the photographs [I took,] it was clear that the active zone was badly damaged. Until May, no-one else was allowed to take pictures … “To begin with they did not publish my pictures. In May they showed one on central television, but it was one taken from the ground so the scale of the destruction was not visible. Later they showed one of the pictures taken from above, but they touched it up so that the ray of light emanating like a burning sun from the reactor, along with the smoke, ash and other flakes of material, was not visible.”

Anatoly Rasskazov has not been outcast by his countrymen, although the bureaucracy has seen that his maladies go largely untreated. His fate is worse:

“When I returned home at midnight, I was vomiting. I was all red. I had a sore on my forehead which has remained unhealed for 20 years. A radiation burn. And my whole throat was burning, because I had been inhaling this soup of radionuclides. “

But the principle is the same.