Murderers get off; Whistle blowers go to jail

Private Bradley Manning is a hero. So much so that the US Defence Department has jailed him, and is getting ready to try him because he leaked some video footage containing scenes of blatant murder committed by US forces in Iraq. You can read more about this and see the video HERE. You can support Bradley Manning HERE

When writing about Wikileaks in the New Yorker a few weeks back,Raffi Khatchadourian, the author of the article alleges that there is some legal ambiguity about the actions of the soldiers.

[Julian Paul] Assange [of Wikileaks]saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.(Read more of the article)

Note that it is just assumed that the war is legal, and that the foreign forces which invaded Iraq have a framework for committing acts of murder and destruction because, well, they're there. Curiously, when one's home is invaded in the United States, any force used to defend it is justified. As well, were there an invasion of the US, all means of repelling the invaders would be justified, and the defenders would not be called "insurgents". The off-hand acceptance of the invasion, and the justification that, because there have been roadside bombings committed against foreign troops these troops are somehow justified in gunning down civilians makes you wonder what kind of moral planet Raffi Khatchadourian hails from. And then to go on about legal ambiguities...

This is the danger of War Talk. You start talking in the terms and with the assumptions of the war makers. Soon, you can justify the war, tacitly, even if you oppose it. You do this when you ask for a planned, timed withdrawal rather than an immediate, unconditional withdrawal, or when you get into quibbling discussions about troop levels, or when you use the (illegal, and in any case, immoral) war to frame actions that would be crimes if committed during peace time. War Talk is the obscene gibberish that keeps these things going. To his credit, Mr. Khatchadourian does go on to talk about the coverage by the mainstream media, and their inability and lack of desire to talk about the Wikileaks video intelligently. From them, there is even more gibberish....but then, you know that's what you'd get from them. Of course, Mr. Khatchadourian is less critical of the uncritical media.

If you enjoyed this blog, add it to your bookmarks: