Thursday, June 01, 2006

Haditha, Ishaqi, and Baghdad


First we have last November's massacre of 24 people in Haditha, now we have the unlawful killing of 11 in Ishaqi in March and the murder of one near Baghdad in April. If there is a good side to the number of these incidents, it is that they provide forensic evidence of the criminality of the whole war.

3 Comments:

At 4:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What the hell ever happened to "presumed innocent until proven guilty"? When Clinton was perjuring himself all over the place, that's all we heard from the bleeding heart liberals. "Presumed innocent. Presumed innocent." But when the accused are U.S. military men and women, the liberals suddenly are all hot for lynching, and bothersome trials be damned.

 
At 10:30 PM, Blogger Steven O'Connor said...

It is a common error to say that "innocent until proven guilty" applies outside the courtroom. We know things different ways; I know Hitler was guilty because I read it in a book and he never had a trial. I know my nephew smokes because I saw him. The fact that he denies it and never had a trial does not preclude my knowledge of his guilt.

Court is one way of finding things out, and it has a super-hi burden of proof. if the marines even "probably" murdered people it is a huge problem, but it would not be enough evidence to put someone in jail.

All that being said I did gloss over some uncertainties in my post. Sorry #:^/

 
At 8:49 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Also, as Tony Blankely pointed out on the radio yesterday, we shouldn't forget that the US Army in Iraq is fighting the cleanest war ever fought, from a brutality-to-civilians standpoint. Now, you can say that any deliberate acts of murder are an affront, but war is not a tea party. There were plenty of reports of Allied troops shooting unarmed POWs after D-Day. And don't forget that in WWII, it was the explicit policy of the US government to deliberately mass-slaughter unarmed civilians in an effort to force surrender, as we did by the tens of thousands in the fire-bombing of Dresden, and by the hundred-thousand at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The fact is, by any standard and compared to any other war in history, the U.S. forces are conducting themselves with, as Tony expressed it, "immaculate purity."

 

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