Marine 'devastated' at sentence

[cronus]

yay for murder!

I don't advocate it but I'd be more pragmatic in that guys shoes upon realizing that I'd gone and shot someone. Good and evil reside in us all. See this can? If it contained airborne ebola I'd open it the same. See.

[Seth]

The fact that you are wounded doesn't make you the enemy.

The fact that you were shooting at the marine moments before you got wounded does.

The issue in this case is whether it's okay to murder you in cold blood because you're an enemy, even after you get wounded.

The fact that you dumbly believe that that's what happened, when you weren't there, and have no actual facts to go on, reveals your mentality. Which is much the same as theirs, apparently.

This guy was hit when an Apache helicopter let rip on an area. Nobody has any proof that he shot at anybody. I haven't heard of any weapons or ammunition being found on him, either in court, or the press. My reasoning is, that means that they weren't there. Unless I hear solid evidence to the contrary.

Your reasoning seems to be, they shot him, therefore he must have been shooting at them. If you can call it reasoning.

I assume by "this guy" you mean the Reuters photographer killed in an aerial attack on armed terrorists, the video of which was released by the traitor Bradly Manning.

War is hell. Shit happens. When you hang around with the enemy, you're likely to get shot or blown up. So here's a clue: Don't hang around with the enemy. The international laws of warfare do not mandate that soldiers attacking the enemy absolutely avoid collateral damage, they merely require that known non-combatants not be deliberately targeted. In this case, the air assault was made from thousands of feet away using video targeting and it targeted known armed combatants who were not in an identifiable military uniform. Therefore it was reasonable to assume that any person present and moving with the group, as the photographer was, was a member of that group because he was not otherwise identified as a non-combatant. This is a risk that all combat photographers assume when they go into the field, particularly when they associate with non-uniformed combatants.

War is not subject to the use of force rules of civilian life. In war it is perfectly lawful and reasonable to kill the enemy where they are found, when they are found, whether they are armed or not.

As for killing wounded combatants after the battle has concluded, that's a Geneva Convention matter, not a matter of historical fact. In point of fact, historically speaking, the summary execution of wounded enemy soldiers was the rule rather than the exception throughout history all over the world. Before modern medicine this was seen by many as a mercy, given the awful and lingering deaths that wounded soldiers faced and the burden upon the prevailing army that caring for them would cause.

With the advent of modern medicine and the modern rules of civilized warfare (if there is such a thing) the other concerns take precedence, concerns like the moral and ethical issues, the political and social effects of such acts and the ultimate goals of the conflict. Since the goal of the combat in Afghanistan is not to decimate or wipe out the population of the country so that the territory and its resources can be appropriated and used by the conqueror, but rather to obtain peace and prosperity for the vast majority of the Afghan people by convincing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to cease their insurgent terrorist activities, it's politically counterproductive to summarily execute wounded soldiers after they have been rendered incapable of fighting.

That doesn't mean that one should not attempt to kill the enemy during combat.

On the other hand, the reason that we do not use "dum-dum" projectiles and are strictly limited to full-metal jacket rounds is that the reduced lethality of non-expanding bullets serves as a force multiplier in the field. A dead soldier does not require any care by his fellow soldier, while a wounded soldier takes two or three soldiers out of the fight immediately and uses up vital enemy resources in treating him.

Of course this only applies in classic warfare scenarios where each side is responsible for the evacuation and medical care of its own wounded, which is not the case on the asymmetrical battlefield of Afghanistan, where a wounded enemy soldier may well be evacuated and treated by our own military.

Generally speaking however, the political benefits of treating a wounded insurgent humanely and providing him with medical care are sufficient to make it a good idea to do so.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

We send our most thuggish, over-testosteroned, belligerent youths out to war and cry horror when they act true to type?

The powers that be know very well that "this sort of thing" goes on in any combat zone and are quite happy to overlook it so long as it is not rubbed in their faces. Audio/video evidence is pretty much as "rubbed in your face" as you can get! There really was no choice but to enforce the Geneva Convention. I am surprised he didn't get a longer sentence.

[Seth]

We send our most thuggish, over-testosteroned, belligerent youths out to war and cry horror when they act true to type?

It's a bit of hypocrisy isn't it? The alternative is to send our women out to do battle, and it's a good alternative precisely because they are not testosterone overloaded and will generally negotiate before fighting...but if forced to fight they will fight as fiercely as any mother will to protect her children and will get it over with as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. Therefore, I subscribe to the idea that our professional military forces should be led by women, and our combat troops should ALL be women, with men serving only in support capacities. How's that for sexual egalitarianism?

The powers that be know very well that "this sort of thing" goes on in any combat zone and are quite happy to overlook it so long as it is not rubbed in their faces. Audio/video evidence is pretty much as "rubbed in your face" as you can get! There really was no choice but to enforce the Geneva Convention. I am surprised he didn't get a longer sentence.

Yup. Shit happens. War is hell. The first rule of war is that young men die. The second should be "No GoPro's in the field."