09 December 2008
Blackwater Pardons?
I am ambivalent about the prospect that the six Blackwater security guards who have been indicted for killing 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square should be pardoned by President Bush. That is obviously the objective of their plea bargain strategy following their surrender in Utah this week.
Certainly, someone must be held accountable for the unprovoked slaughter of victims of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—indeed all of the violence caused by the U.S. invasion was unprovoked. On one hand, the Bush Administration has to be made to account for all the lives, both American and Iraqi, and all the money lost in that ill-begotten war. On the other hand, that does not release from responsibility for their own actions mercenaries who willingly joined in an effort that allowed them to wreak havoc under the banner of America’s War on Terror.
When U.S. voters elect a President who they ought to have known would use the powers of his office in a mean and bullying way, it is unfair of them just to punish the President’s contractors for doing his dirty work. Our constitution gives that President the right to pardon those contractors, even though what they did would have merited punishment if it was not, by extension, in fulfillment of the will of the electorate. Among the reparations we owe the Iraqi people for letting the President get off scot-free for invading their country is compensation for the atrocities committed in his name. At the same time, it is understandable that security guards could reasonably have assumed they were acting legally when they directed unwonted firepower at supposed insurgents in their authorized range
I am ambivalent about the prospect that the six Blackwater security guards who have been indicted for killing 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square should be pardoned by President Bush. That is obviously the objective of their plea bargain strategy following their surrender in Utah this week.
Certainly, someone must be held accountable for the unprovoked slaughter of victims of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—indeed all of the violence caused by the U.S. invasion was unprovoked. On one hand, the Bush Administration has to be made to account for all the lives, both American and Iraqi, and all the money lost in that ill-begotten war. On the other hand, that does not release from responsibility for their own actions mercenaries who willingly joined in an effort that allowed them to wreak havoc under the banner of America’s War on Terror.
When U.S. voters elect a President who they ought to have known would use the powers of his office in a mean and bullying way, it is unfair of them just to punish the President’s contractors for doing his dirty work. Our constitution gives that President the right to pardon those contractors, even though what they did would have merited punishment if it was not, by extension, in fulfillment of the will of the electorate. Among the reparations we owe the Iraqi people for letting the President get off scot-free for invading their country is compensation for the atrocities committed in his name. At the same time, it is understandable that security guards could reasonably have assumed they were acting legally when they directed unwonted firepower at supposed insurgents in their authorized range
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