toledo (24) cleveland (14) ohio (14) columbus (5)

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Perrysburg area SEAL accused of beating Iraqi

The Iraqi people have faced a lot of abuse over the past few years. There is so much money and life being wasted there, all because people like this willingly join the US military. There is no way I will ever believe these soldiers are "defending America" from terrorists by engaging in foreign aggression and occupation. Yet they still force me to pay for their actions with my hard earned dollars.

I have no sympathy for soldiers who wind up in the kind of situation this young Perrysburg SEAL is in. I don't even know if he or his Iraqi accuser is really telling the truth. Why should I believe someone just because they are American and wrongly claim to be defending me?

Nowhere is the crushing defeat of government failure seen than in this dreadful military occupation. Which is only possible because these young people voluntarily fight for a lie. It's all the more puzzling that people who supposedly believe in Liberty and Freedom will lend themselves to such vicious militarism.

I think it was a mistake for the US army to have even be created. Anti-Federalist #10 does a decent job of explaining why. If humans ever finally get tired of too much government, maybe some day they will even manage to scrap State armies all together and rely on the private Production of Security.

1 comment:

Ken Swift said...

An objective examination of this incident looks to point at one of several possible scenarios:

1. The SEALs beat up the man they detained.

2. The Iraqis at the detention center where the SEALs were directed to turn over the detainee beat up the man.

3. The detainee inflicted injuries upon himself to distract the legal process from the accusation that he planned / resourced / executed an attack on Americans that killed four.

A. In all likelihood, the SEALs would have been more likely to kill the man, if the situation presented itself, than to hit him or beat him severely. The logic being "why leave a living witness" and someone who could possibly escape conviction and return to the street? These Sailors are highly trained and especially proficient at killing, why do anything less?

B. Not detailed in any of the press releases I have been able to find has been an examination of Iraqi holding area / detention center to which the suspect was turned over. If he was a Sunni and the detention officers were Shia, as is the case with certain portions of the Iraqi Police, there is a good possibility that the Iraqi Police would beat the man themselves to address feuds from before the American occupation.

C. Another issue not examined in detail, or at least not released to the public, is the nature of the injuries and the possibility of them being self-inflicted. Most patrols will immediately photograph detainees upon capture, as will detention centers upon intake, giving the ability to compare the appearance of the detainee over a given amount of time. There has been some argument that the detainee would have received training to injure himself when taken into custody along with the explosives and tactical training that he allegedly put into use to kill the four Americans for which he was detained. As this type of self-injury has also been detailed by some criminals within justice systems around the world, it is not a stretch to imagine it also being used in this situation.

Of final note on this issue is that this incident was originally to be handled by "non-judicial punishment" meaning that it would have carried very minor, if any, real weight in the performance file of the accused if they had been found guilty. However, the SEALs in question all refused to proceed with this "Captain's Mast" inquiry and demanded a trial by court martial, meaning that the punishment, if found guilty, was exponentially more severe.

What this demand for an actual trial seems to point toward is that none of those involved were willing to have their names / reputations / careers dirtied by some Navy Captain somewhere deciding to "just get this over with" and find them guilty, instead bringing this to the attention of Flag Officers (Admirals) and the entire Naval chain of command.

All things being equal, if they had been guilty, the safe bet would have been to take the "Captain's Mast" punishment and just move on with their careers, as they could have survived the minor outcome of that much more likely than the jail time and dismissal from the Navy that a court martial conviction would have brought.