Murderers, Scapegoats, and Terrorists

Murderers, Scapegoats, and Terrorists

On its face, murder is an abominable crime. Taking another human life involves an abject surrender of one’s own humanity and a total disregard for the sanctity of human life.

Civilized societies today occasionally legally execute convicted reprobates but only after due process and often decades of appeals. Unethical societies treat accused murderers differently, as in the cases of Sgt. Robert Bales and Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

By all accounts, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was an outstanding, highly-decorated soldier, respected and praised by the men in his command.

Before he enlisted shortly after the Muslim terrorist attacks on 9/11, Bales was universally admired by his friends and neighbors. When he was not deployed in battle–three stints in Iraq where he sustained a traumatic brain injury and the loss of part of his foot and recently sent to Afghanistan–Bales lived life as a loving father of two at home with his wife in Washington state.

If the charges of murdering defenseless Afghans, including women and children, are sustained and he is convicted, Sgt. Bales should receive a suspended sentence on the basis of temporary insanity and extreme post-traumatic stess disorder. Better yet, he should be set free today!

Aside from political considerations, chiefly placating the Afghanis and President Hamid Karzai who considers American soldiers “demons,” there is no rational excuse for our military to further punish Bales for actions committed while he was obviously crazed by repeated and intimate exposure to the horrors of war.

He is alleged in the mainstream media to have left his Kandahar base and drunkenly slaughtering 16 innocent people, much as Iraqis and Afghanis have been soberly slaughtering thousands of American troops, many of whom are currently in Afghanistan building roads, schools, and hospitals.

Although Sgt. Bales has not yet been officially charged with the crimes and is now in solitary confinement at Fort Leavenworth, many military-hating American Leftists have already tried, convicted, and scapegoated him, mainly on the basis Bales is a courageous military man, and we all know how the Left abhors the military.

Sgt. Bales’ case stands in remarkable contrast to the matter of Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan who, on November 5th, 2009, allegedly, murdered 13 innocent, defenseless people and wounded 30at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas.

Twenty-eight months later, Hasan has yet to come to trial. The carnage he caused was witnessed by dozens of objective observers and, despite evidence he was inspired by Islamist extremists such as Anwar Al-Awlaki to perpetrate the atrocity, our government chose to categorize Hasan’s actions as “workplace violence.” . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=17812.)