Spc. Jeremy Morlock of Wasilla, Alaska takes a plea for being part of a “kill team” (an unofficial one, I mean) that killed innocent Afghan civilians other than the innocent Afghan civilians they were supposed to be killing, for sport. As he said to his court-martial, “The plan was to kill people, sir.”
Said David Petraeus, “These are unacceptable actions that are depicted in those photos.” Col. Comb-over doesn’t really do moral outrage very convincingly, does he?
According to Morlock’s prosecutor, “We don’t do this. ... This is not the Army.” I think I’ll just let that assertion sit there.
Elsewhere, prosecutors at Guantanamo used the Army’s invasion of one foreign country in a genocidal war, and subsequent execution of foreign citizens of another nation as a precedent. See, they’re prosecuting people for “providing material support for terror” for acts done before that was made a crime in 2006, and they’re saying it was always a crime, as seen by Andrew Jackson executing two Brits during the Seminole Wars. The prosecutor has seriously pissed off Seminoles by calling their resistance to the invasion of their lands an unlawful belligerency and basically comparing them to Al Qaida. The Pentagon has had to apologize, sort of, saying that the prosecutors’ brief “cites General Jackson’s campaign and the tribunals he convened not as an example of moral right but as legal precedent: the morality or propriety of General Jackson’s military operation in Florida is irrelevant.” Two wrongs may not make a right, but they do make a legal precedent, which is what the government cares about.
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