Haditha

[Haut Medoc]

Re: Haditha

You shouldn't talk about the next president that way, RF

 

[18rabbit]

Re: Haditha

Originally posted by gspig:<br /> Simple answer is they, the soldiers, are US military property. Don't believe me ask any soldier if it's true. The US military should get first crack at trial and punishment. The Iraq gov. gets second crack. The question is should the second trial occur during incarceration or after.

BINGO! You nailed it, dead on the head.<br /><br />Presuming US military personnel are responsible as accused, they violated military law and need stand trial for that in the military’s judicial system. After that sentence is completed, they need to stand trial in a local venue for the local laws that were violated. Justice is not something served remotely. The people of Iraq are entitled to justice, too.<br /><br />Think it is double jeopardy to stand trial twice for the same crime? Think again. LAPD Officer Stacy Coon was acquitted in a local court for criminally beating the crap out of a certain Mr Rodney King. That acquittal cause rioting in L.A. So the feds hauled Coon back into court and tried him in a federal court. One single criminal act but two diff allegations in two diff jurisdictions yielded two diff trials...with two diff results. Coon didn’t walk away from the fed court trial the way he did from the virtually all-police-officer-family-member jury of the first, local court trial that acquitted him.<br /><br />Coon walked from the first trial because of judicial corruption at all levels. The jury was comprised almost entirely of direct family members of police officers. There was no way on this planet they were going to convict any cop of anything! The judge was corrupt for allowing the trial to go forward. The D.A.’s office was corrupt for not challenging the jury’s composition or requesting a change of venue. The whole trial of Coon was a sham to pacify the public’s outcry for the egregious behavior of the cops. There was never a serious attempt at justice.<br /><br />The soldiers need to stand trial twice because the US military does not have the authority to hold a remote Iraqi trial for violations of Iraqi law. If sentenced to death in the first military trial, perhaps executing them in Iraq before any Iraqi trial is held will help quash growing anti-American sentiment that is a result of these soldier’s actions.

 

[18rabbit]

Re: Haditha

Originally posted by Darth D Invader:<br /> ... if we are strictly going by the letter of the law, since a declaration of war was not passed by the congress, ... congress did however give the president the the authority to use force, which is not the same thing as a declaration of war.

And how is it that congress was able to do that, in that it is unconstitutional for any of the three branches of government to relinquish their responsibility to any other branch of gov’t? Congress does not have the authority to give the pres the green light on using troops. That requires an act of war; there is no other option.<br /><br />Remember, a republican congress gave Comrade Klinton the authority to line-item veto any bill that comes before a pres. The Supreme Court immediately smacked both the pres and congress, admonishing them the pres could never have the authority to alter a bill (effectively what a line-item veto does), that is congress’s responsibility and only congress will ever be allowed to do that.<br /><br />Nope, the “war” in Iraq is about as illegal as they come.

 

[treedancer]

Re: Haditha

Nope, the “war” in Iraq is about as illegal as they come.

The last time Congress declared war was on December 11, 1941, against Germany in response to its formal declaration of war against the United States. This was accomplished with wording that took less than one-third of a page, without any nitpicking arguments over precise language, yet it was a clear declaration of who the enemy was and what had to be done. And in three-and-a-half years, this was accomplished. A similar resolve came from the declaration of war against Japan three days earlier. Likewise, a clear-cut victory was achieved against Japan.<br />Many Americans have been forced into war since that time on numerous occasions, with no congressional declaration of war and with essentially no victories. Today’s world political condition is as chaotic as ever. We’re still in Korea and we’re still fighting the Persian Gulf War that started in 1990.

 

[RubberFrog]

Re: Haditha

Soldiers cleared.

 

[bootle]

Re: Haditha

Maj Gen William Caldwell said reports that troops "executed" a family during a raid on a house in March and tried to cover it up were "absolutely false". <br /><br />Questions over the 11 deaths in Ishaqi come amid a Pentagon inquiry into a bigger alleged massacre in Haditha. <br /><br />The US has announced extra training in moral and ethical values for troops.

 

[18rabbit]

Re: Haditha

Originally posted by treedancer:<br />

Nope, the “war” in Iraq is about as illegal as they come.

The last time Congress declared war was on December 11, 1941, against Germany in response to its formal declaration of war against the United States.

That's because 1941 was pre-United Nation. Since the founding of the UN, "there is no longer a need for any war, we are beyond that", or at least as the republican majority of the House would have us believe. And you thought the UN was only for democrats/communists (same thing, no diff).<br />

 

[mikeandronda]

Re: Haditha

Special Report<br />Keeping the Faith<br />By Ben Stein <br />Published 6/2/2006 2:03:31 AM<br />www.spectator.org/dsp_art...rt_id=9903<br />Now for a few thoughts about the war in Iraq and historic context.<br /><br />First, I keep running into men and women of the left who tell me that going into Iraq unprepared and undermanned and under-armed was the worst foreign policy and defense mistake this government has ever made.<br /><br />Certainly, it was one hell of a mistake. That's obvious and cruel for all concerned. And to continue Donald Rumsfeld's stewardship of the war effort when he has made such a hash of it strikes me as extremely peculiar. The man has his points, but guiding the Iraq war is not one of them. We are three years into it, have spent many lives and hundreds of billions we can ill afford, and we are worse off than we were three weeks after hostilities commenced. With the best troops on the planet and the best weapons on earth, we are clearly in a desperate mess.<br /><br />But it is a small mess so far.<br /><br />It pales by comparison with FDR's acts of hostility to Japan and Germany, provoking Pearl Harbor, when he knew or should have known we were drastically unprepared for World War. When FDR taunted Japan, stopped shipping them supplies we had always sent them, and practically begged them to go to war with us, it was probably the right moral thing to do. In fact it surely was. But he was the most popular President of all time. He had fairly good (but far from perfect) control of Congress. He could have made sure we were better armed before he got us into war. The unpreparedness of U.S. forces caused us terrible losses at Pearl Harbor and far worse ones in the Philippines. They let hundreds of U.S. vessels go to the bottom along with their brave crews under the U-boat onslaught. Yes, he did learn and geared us up for total war. But the mistakes at the beginning were extremely bad.<br /><br />That was a far bigger foreign policy mistake than Iraq.<br /><br />FDR caving in at Yalta, baiting the greatest man of all time, Winston Churchill, and instead siding with the worst killer of his own people of all time, J.V. Stalin, to create a Soviet slave empire in Eastern Europe -- that was a far worse mistake than the Iraq war and cost far more lives. Sending captured Russians back to Stalin to be murdered by the hundreds of thousands -- that was a far worse mistake than Iraq.<br /><br />Getting us into Vietnam -- a gift from JFK and LBJ, done under the falsest of pretexts especially by LBJ -- that was a far worse mistake than Iraq. I don't think anyone believes we will lose fifty thousand men in Iraq. But that's how many we lost in Vietnam, thanks to an adventure started by gung-ho warriors who had no clue of what they were in for -- just like Iraq only far worse.<br /><br />Iraq was a mistake. And it's turning out badly. We lack the national will to win this war. We had no good reason to be there in the first place. (Thank you, CIA.) We were supposed to not get into any more wars we did not absolutely need to be in. If we did get into them, we were supposed to go in with enough force to win. We screwed up every part of this and it's a mistake. But the worst foreign/ defense policy mistake of all time? Very far from it.<br /><br />Second, Haditha. Another disaster. There are explanations. Obviously, if Marines, our toughest and roughest, see their friends blown to bits by terrorists hidden by the general population, they are going to be furious at the general population. They are going to be tired and frightened and ready to kill. A dear friend who has killed in Iraq says that a civilian just cannot imagine the feeling killing gives you in terms of power and release. ("Ye shall be as gods," comes to mind.) So, it's understandable that the Marines killed the innocent because as they saw it, in Haditha, there were no innocents. It is understandable, but it's terrible in the way many terrible parts of the human soul are understandable.<br /><br />Again, humans hate seeing their friends killed for no reason. Humans are fearful of getting killed themselves in war and especially in wars like Iraq, where the enemy is everywhere. And humans like to kill those they fear. But explicit killing of civilians is not allowed any longer, and the men involved will be tried, as they should be.<br /><br />But what is truly incredible about the war in Iraq is how FEW civilians U.S. forces have killed. In World War II, it was explicit doctrine to bomb, blow up, incinerate, and suffocate as many Germans and Japanese as we could. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan around the clock for years. We attacked civilian neighborhoods explicitly (under the inspiration of the British, who wanted "...measure for measure..." as Churchill said against the Nazis for bombing British cities, and rightly so).<br /><br />We set off firestorms that killed tens of thousands in a night in Japan and Germany. Children were incinerated in their mothers' arms. Whole districts and all the people in them were simply erased from history.<br /><br />This was the way we, the best, kindest nation on earth by far, fought the biggest war of all time. We are not talking about killing twelve civilians but about killing millions.<br /><br />Now, under Mr. Bush, we did not carpet bomb Baghdad. We do not level whole neighborhoods though we easily could. We risk and lose lives every day to fight and kill or capture only the guilty.<br /><br />This is new in the history of warfare in the past sixty years. In a war that has been going on for three miserable years, there have been only a handful of reports of civilian deaths at U.S. hands. Any is too many. But let's not kid ourselves. Mr. Bush and the incredibly brave and decent men and women who are fighting this war are fighting with a restraint that is novel in the history of war.<br /><br />I don't excuse the killers. I do offer some understanding and some context about them and about history. Things could be a lot worse, and we have every reason to be deeply proud of the men and women who fight the most inhuman killers on the planet almost always by extremely humane rules of engagement. And Mr. Bush has made some dreadful mistakes, but a look into the past offers some hope that we have gotten through far worse mistakes and gone on to a wary happiness. "There is a lot of ruin in a nation," as Adam Smith so brilliantly said. The key is to ascend the learning curve. And to keep the faith with those in harm's way in Haditha and everywhere else.

 

[mikeandronda]

Re: Haditha

sorry double post

 

[PW2]

Re: Haditha

Rodbolt,<br /><br />That has always baffled me, why we decided to set up a court and put Saddam on a public trial in the first place.<br /><br />In the middle of an insurgency, why would we give this madman any voice at all. It makes no sense. There are significant numbers of people over there that have lost power and influence due to the overthrow of Saddam, and don't like it---why we would want to make such a public display to continue to fester an open wound like this just baffles me.<br /><br />Just keep him locked up in a dungeon somewhere, and keep him out of the public eye. Perhaps he will suffer a tragic accident.<br /><br />It works at Gitmo.

 

[bernieb]

Re: Haditha

Bringing lawyers into the subject of war or what ever you want to call it ,is opening a can of worms and nobody wins but the lawyers. When a 19 year old man/kid is in a fire fight at night and the tank just blew up in front of him ,he's not going to ask the sargeant if it's okay to fire a shot back. War is ugly,and painful for the families and I want to believe that it's all worth it in iraq, so a 6 year old kid can go to school and not be afraid (all kids).