And well he should, in China there is a very common practice of basically enacting the very harshest punishments with extreme swiftness on people that “embarrass the state.”
For example factories that essentially enslave people to work in them are not totally uncommon in parts of China. When a brick factory was exposed as doing this in the Western press some of the people involved were sentenced to death and executed within weeks.
This is exactly what should not happen, individuals should not receive harsher punishment because their offense embarrasses the government.
Barack Obama has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in regards to human rights when it comes to the Haditha case. A court made a ruling and President Obama respected that ruling.
That’s the tough pill to swallow of real human rights and real freedom: it applies even when you don’t feel it should on a personal level. To step away from the extreme taint of politics that brings out the maximum craziness on these boards when talking about the U.S. military, let’s remember the O.J. Simpson trial. It’s a situation where the U.S. court system almost certainly failed to convict a murderer. That is part of a real court system, sometimes people who deserve to go to prison do not go to prison.
The alternative that you guys may be suggesting (and perhaps inadvertently) is a system in which the President personally makes sure any soldier who is charged with a war crime is convicted and executed, regardless of what a court may think because that is the “right thing to do.” To me, that is a far worse thing than what this soldier did in Afghanistan. This soldier committed murder, but if we were to just “insure” he himself were put to death that would be a crime against the very fabric of American society, a far worse thing than a simple violent act by either a mad man or a simple homicidal monster.
I always find it interesting, liberals are typically soft on domestic criminals. They roll their eyes at conservatives who mutter about how someone ought to “take care” of bad guys who beat the rap. But when a soldier who is accused of a crime “beats the rap” it’s a sign that America is the worst country in the world, that our military justice system is irredeemably corrupt and etc.
I’ll tell you this though, as someone who was in the military I don’t remember anyone I ever met who would prefer a courts-martial to a civilian criminal court. Personally the only reason I might prefer a courts-martial is the JAG attorneys they provide for you (IMO) are better than some places public defenders (but I won’t insult all public defenders, just in some places I know they aren’t great), but I do not know that that is a very strong counterbalance to the disadvantages: being tried not by a jury of civilians but of military officers who are not prone to give much leniency to a soldier and who are not prone to care about emotional appeals like some suburban soccer moms might be, being tried under a criminal code that criminalizes things that are not offenses at all in the civilian world and etc.
Anyway, just last year we sentenced a soldier to life in prison for a murder committed against a civilian overseas: link, that’s exactly what a real criminal court system and not a kangaroo court system, looks like. Some people get punished, some do not.