On justice and atrocity

It's impossible to call this a "good" thing. But it's necessary.

The atrocities described are not something that most of us want to read about or even think about. They sound like the actions of horror-movie psychopaths, but they are in fact the actions of US troops who decided to rape a teenage girl, murder her and her parents and her five-year-old sister, and then mutilate and burn her corpse.

We don't want to think about what it would have been like to be that girl, or to be a friend or relative of hers and know what was done to her and her family. But we have to. Because we paid them, we trained them, we sent them to Iraq, and the friends and neighbors of that girl and her family see them as just one more extension of us.

Some conservative commentators of the "little green football" variety jabber that US soldiers shouldn't be held accountable for raping and murdering civilians. That they should be allowed to rape any "Hadji Girls" they can catch, and gleefully spray machine-gun bullets in all directions at anyone who they can successfully murder, like some sick parody of a violent adolescent power-fantasy. I suggest that such commentators place themselves at the disposal of the nearest hostile military force that behaves in the way they prescribe. The US military is held to a standard of behavior and honorable discipline higher than that of murderous barbarians, just as the US government is held to a standard of Constitutional behavior higher than that of tinpot dictators or totalitarian Communist regimes, and for very similar reasons. When it fails to meet those standards, at Abu Graihb or Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else, it becomes a clear and present danger not only to innocent foreign civilians near its theater of operations, but to all civilized society, including that of the United States.

But even if these psychos are isolated aberrations from a military that mostly adheres to higher standards, it's disgusting to think that they were recruited, trained, and paid with my tax dollars. Not only are their actions in Iraq hideous to contemplate, but like the author of this article, I wonder if we're creating more such creatures to be turned loose on ourselves when they're discharged from military service into civilian society, like Timothy McVeigh.

I'm glad that they're being put on trial, and I'm glad that it's public. For a while after the initial reports surfaced, I feared that the military might try to cover up this atrocity. From the tone of the CNN article, it seems that the evidence against them is strong. The article states that two of the soldiers could face the death penalty. The gallows or the firing squad would be an appropriate fate for the main instigators. Murder is murder. And the same goes for the three soldiers mentioned in connection with a separate case near the bottom of the CNN article, if they're proven guilty, and any other soldier who disgraces the country in like fashion.

The revolting Abu Graibh scandal -- and the possibility that similarly disgusting things are going on in other US facilities -- have badly damaged both America's reputation abroad and America's own sense of itself as a nation with ethical principles. It's possible -- likely -- that these soldiers were encouraged in their twisted sadism by the sense that there are no moral standards for their behavior, that anything goes. The ethical free-fall has to stop somewhere with a resoundingly public example, and this is where it has to stop. The soldiers involved, and any officers who knew of their actions and failed to stop them, or seek disciplinary action against them after the fact, should be made a very public example. If this isn't hitting bottom, then there is no bottom.

RELATED NOTE: Commentary about the way that the way the US media has treated two different murders of two different girls.