Here is one of many links on the Web showing that U.S. soldiers could face the death penalty for their alleged actions in Haditha. This comes as little surprise to most sensible people; I publish the link only for the benefit of those (you and you) who called me “disingenuous” (or some misspelled variant of the word) for even suggesting the possibility.
Pronounced "Patter-EE-koh"
E-mail: Just use my moniker Patterico, followed by the @ symbol, followed by gmail.com
Disclaimer: Simpsons avatar may resemble a younger Patterico...
The statements made on this web site reflect the personal opinions of the author. They are not made in any official capacity, and do not represent the opinions of the author's employer.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | ||
Powered by WordPress.
Ok, it is theoretically possible that soldiers will be executed, however I don’t think it is a realistic possibility. Nor do I think any thing about the process will be swift.
Some opinion survey results about Lt. Calley the only person convicted regarding My Lai.
James B. Shearer (fc887e) — 6/2/2006 @ 8:26 pmYeah why don’t we. Are we doing anything next Saturday?
How many do we want to do? Let me see, there are thirteen people in a platoon, how long would it take to jimmy up some gallows?
Mike H. (b823b9) — 6/3/2006 @ 12:00 amI’d prefer due process.
Patterico (50c3cd) — 6/3/2006 @ 1:11 amI hope all the anti-death penalty ppl will be there to protest any suggestion of the death penalty in this case. Just for consistency.
sharon (fecb65) — 6/3/2006 @ 5:41 amI didn’t see the original post although I was here a few times this week. As it happens I am anti-death penalty as well as an ex-Marine and I’ll be happy to be opposed.
The emotion we feel when thinking about our guys commiting an act like this is ugly. Its hard to imagine what that was like – if the reports are true – when women and children are forced to kneel and shot in the head.
Of course “if the reports are true” is a huge qualifier. We’re talking about Time magazine and Murtha, not people known for unbiased observations. Time is a liberal rag and Murtha has become an anti-war media star hero of the left.
Pardon me if I reserve judgement about everything regarding this incident until the investigation is finished.
I suspect that the problem some have with the post is the seeming…anti-military feel of the whole string ’em up and make everyone watch thing. While I understand the feeling behind that it does have more the feel of something one would read on DailyKos or some other anti-military rant blog than a moderately right of center blog.
Its even worse because the whole ‘make the whole Marine Corps watch’ thing makes it feel even more specifically – to me – like an anti-Marine thing. Why make everyone watch? To punish them too? Is their service somehow less because of a possible atrocity commited by we don’t know how many others that may be revealed by an investigation the results of which we haven’t seen yet?
Why not make the army, navy and air force watch too? I mean, if we’re going to force 200,000 honorably serving United States Marines to watch one of their number executed – someone that may have forever tarred the almost mythical reputation of their organization – as some sort of warning then we might as well force the other umpty million honorably serving wartime volunteers to watch the hanging too.
Whatever happened, if there was a crime commited by US Marines it was a crime commited by very young men who volunteered to serve our country at a time when they knew they’d be called to war and shipped off to live in a dessert with a bunch of luntics shooting at them and trying to blow them up while they were sacrificing to try to make the lives of people they never met better.
I will wait before I call for them to be strung up – even as much as the event sounds god-awful and deserving of severe punishment.
But as I said and want to reimphasize, I understand (or hope) that this is emotion talking through good people that cannot live with the idea of atrocities commited in our name.
Dwilkers (a1687a) — 6/3/2006 @ 8:39 amDwilkers said, “Pardon me if I reserve judgement about everything regarding this incident until the investigation is finished.”
Yes, of course, that would obviously be the right thing to do. But, it’s too late for that now, you can’t unring the bell. Speculation, both serious and silly has momentum now, the lines are drawn, and the incident, terrible in its implications, is being reduced to the usual finger pointing and bickering. One more talking point in the ongoing partisan clash.
I don’t know what happened in Haditha, but I do recall several other media triggered outrages which upon closer investigation proved to be quite different from what was initially reported. Korans flushed down the toilet is an example. Dan Rather’s phony documents also come to mind. So, yes, let’s keep an open mind and refrain from drawing premature conclusions.
Most of us know someone who is or was in the Marine Corps. They’re the boys who grew up next door, recently graduated from high school, not really all that much different from you or me at that age. Would you deliberately kill women and children? I wouldn’t and you wouldn’t do it either, and neither would they. That’s why this charge is so terrible, Americans will not approve that sort of thing and we all know it.
Now, can you imagine the terrorists might kill innocent civilians, or shoot the bodies of dead civilians, to make it look like Marines did it, and gull the media into reporting an atrocity? I don’t know, but If this turns out to be something other than reported will we be just as willing to punish the perpetrators if they turn out to work for Time magazine? And, what should we do to John Murtha?
Given a little time, and a good investigation, we might find out who killed those people, and under what circumstances, but as of now I see it as something akin to a violation of the civil rights of those young Marines to debate punishment options. There’s time enough for that once the facts are known.
These young Marines have an absolute right to the presumption of innocence. They’ve earned it, and we owe it to them.
Black Jack (d8da01) — 6/3/2006 @ 10:17 amEveryone in the command who knew 24 Iraqi’s were shot dead – not blown up – and hewed to a fake storyline should be held to account.
By waiting months to investigate, they allowed crucial witnesses time to leaven a practiced recollection. Now we need forensic evidence buried in graves the townspeople refuse to have disturbed. I don’t blame them.
steve (afbf12) — 6/3/2006 @ 10:51 amYou didn’t “suggest the possibility.” — current post. You made an explicit prediction — comment 16, which I quoted precisely.
[Yes, but my prediction was based on the assumption, which has not yet been proven correct, that the allegations are true — i.e. that Marines murdered women and children execution-style. — P]
One that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Iraq of ever coming true — See yesterday’s secretive, conclusive, highly predictable U.S. denial of the allegations of murder at Ishaqi. “Sorry about the collateral damage, folks.”
More important, I take great pride in my spelling and don’t routinely use spellchecks, so I really hope that I am the one who spelled “disingenuous” correctly. ????
nosh (d8da01) — 6/3/2006 @ 11:08 amProven correct?
Pretty unlikely. You can’t at this stage achieve anything approaching an apolitical evidentiary environment.
Example-setting is realistically all that’s left. Like the cringe-inducing closing minutes from “A Few Good Men.” Marines’ Dawson and Downey were supposed to protect PVT William T. Santiago rather than abide by the “code.”
Something like that will be the take-away from Haditha.
steve (afbf12) — 6/3/2006 @ 12:26 pmProven correct?
Pretty unlikely. You can’t at this stage achieve anything approaching an apolitical evidentiary environment.
I’m talking about at a court martial. At a stage where the investigation is complete and everyone gets their day in military court.
Patterico (50c3cd) — 6/3/2006 @ 12:54 pmFirst, it is an unfair use of the blogger’s prerogative to insert comments in the middle of a critical posting by a critic, even if you put it in brackets and italics. Post it below in your own comment.
[I was at the kids’ swimming lessons and was using my Treo. I cannot leave a stand-alone comment with the Treo, so my only way of leaving a comment is to edit others’ comments.
I’m home now, and I am fully capable of leaving a stand-alone comment, but I am doing it this way instead, with your comment, because I feel like it. If you have a suggestion as to how I should conduct myself on my own blog, be advised that you’ll come across as less of a jerk if you phrase it as a suggestion rather than an order (“Post it in your own comment.”).
As long as I make it clear whose comment it is, there’s nothing “unfair” (or disingenuous or dishonest etc.) about doing it this way. I prefer stand-alone comments, but they’re not always possible. — Patterico]
Second, you continue to evade the point — You PREDICTED that offenders would hang. Then you got all bent out of shape when your prediction was rebutted as being unlikely, naive, and yes — disingenuous. What helps to make it disingenuous, unlikely, and put forward for effect rather than honest discourse is exactly the point — the U.S. military and State Department makes it perfectly obvious that the condition that “proven true” would never occur — see the excusing of the allegations of the March massacre, which as I predicted cites national security and the need for secrecy to ignore allegations that civilian victims were handcuffed, shot and executed.
[Here was my PREDICTION: “I expect that, if what we are hearing about this is true, people will be executed.” I don’t know whether the allegations are true, so my PREDICTION is contingent on something we don’t know yet, which makes it less of a PREDICTION than you (disingenuously?) portray it. — Patterico.]
See yesterday’s press conference by the ex-Fox TV now administration spokes-liar where he says that the widely reported and detailed comments by the new Iraqi Prime Minister — that U.S. troops routinely disrespect and injure or kill Iraqi civilians, was a “misquote.”
But the important point is that you DISHONESTLY, yes, attempt to rewrite history: you didn’t “raise the possibility” that offenders would hang, you said that if the allegations were substantiated, you EXPECTED hangings to occur. And then you backed off.
[Wrong. Consider these statements: 1) “It is possible that the offenders will hang.” 2) “If the allegations are true, I expect the offenders will hang.” Both are contingent, my fine feathered friend. I consider both to be true, and saying that I raised the possibility is not DISHONEST, nor is it backing off a PREDICTION. I am sorry you fail to grasp this simple point, but your failure to do so is your problem, not mine. — Patterico]
I expect that W. Bush will be impeached next week. Assuming that the sun sets in the east and rises in the west tonight and tomorrow. I am confident that the D.A.’s office will pursue criminal charges against a USC quarterback next time it is a “he said, she said” sexual assault allegation, as long as that quarterback has trouble completing a long post pattern.
Finally — did I get the spelling correct???
nosh (d8da01) — 6/3/2006 @ 1:32 pmNew Allegations just this week:
CNN reporting today that there is another U.S. shooting north of Baghdad just this past week, where two women, one pregnant, are shot dead because they “sped through a military checkpoint.”
Now which is more likely? A native Iraqi who has lived through over three years of the American occupation of Iraq is foolhardy enough to “speed through a military checkpoint”? Or, there was no “military checkpoint”? Or it was not well-marked? Or this is a justification, almost impossible to refute, conveniently made up after the fact?
But notwithstanding, I am confident that should the facts emerge as alleged, people will hang.
[If they shot people who sped through a military checkpoint (the only allegation you mention), then the shooters will hang? As a PREDICTION, that sounds pretty DISHONEST, or maybe just SILLY. — P]
nosh (d8da01) — 6/3/2006 @ 2:12 pmNew Allegations just this week:
That’s not a “new allegation” of anything. Its a news report of a checkpoint incident. Nothing improper has been alleged about that and it was well publicised when it happened.
That sort of shit is why people don’t believe spewers from the left.
Dwilkers (a1687a) — 6/3/2006 @ 8:55 pmI will pay to be given the chance to take “an eye for an eye”. That us the only thing that these bastards deserve.
Mo (adf54a) — 6/16/2006 @ 9:57 am