Skip to main content

The New Semper Fiefdom

A U.S. soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy was given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others.

According to an Italian court document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, James Michael Brown, a 27-year-old paratrooper from Oregon stationed in northern Italy, was sentenced to five years and eight months for rape in February 2004.

Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help.

The crime would have earned him an eight-year sentence, but the judges reduced the penalty due to the "extenuating circumstances'' of the psychological effects of Brown's year of service in Iraq, the document said.

Leaving aside my thoughts that the leniency had as much to do with the victim's race as anything, this news brief in the NY Times chilled me. It leads me to wonder if they felt one year of duty had rendered him so incapable of feeling empathy, would two or three years have set him free?

This story brought back my childhood fears of vietnam vets snapping and going on killing sprees. Ticking time bombs waiting to go off, trained by the government to kill, returned broken. It makes for good comic book or movie fodder, so I don't actually know how much of that was urban legend and how many acts of random brutal violence were committed by vets. I have heard that more vets have killed themselves than were killed in the war. It ultimately depends on who's statistics you trust more.

Still, weekly another soldier goes on trial for abuses committed at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo and recently a British soldier chose to end an exemplary eight year career rather than continue working with Americans in Iraq.

He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.

-------------------

[He] said the American military's "gung-ho and trigger happy mentality" and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and "most probably" tortured.

It makes me wonder what percentage of our soldiers will return prepared for civilian life. Certainly our military would do better to spend its money preparing for that eventuality than going after the people who deserted from the last unjust war.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Anti-racism', All Trap, No Honey: A Discourse About Discourse

One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Due Process Industrial Complex: "Are We the Constitutional Crisis?"

Democrats, seemingly resigned to political irrelevance, have shifted from principled opposition to obstructionism. They are seeking to stall or block the Trump administration's fulfillment of voter will.  In the face of popular demand for mass deportation of illegal aliens they have positioned themselves as self-appointed experts on due process. Their demands for due process might hold greater totemic power if not undermined by apparent hypocrisy, having supported limited due process for January 6 defendants. The demand for due process is desperate political opportunism driven by faulty political calculus. This explains why a US senator and congressional representatives traveled to El Salvador over a single deported alien. They are demanding that illegal aliens receive more vetting for deportation than they received on entering the country under Biden. In 2016, 38% of Americans supported deporting all undocumented immigrants. Today that number is 56% . There is nothing quite like i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Toolkit

Meet the F--kers http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Meet-the F--kers-9-7.wmv http://canofun.com/blog/videos/tdskatrinagwblewinsky.wmv Iraq war delayed katrina relief effort, inquiry finds http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1003-01.htm http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article316682.ece TIMELINES http://talkingpointsmemo.com/katrina-timeline.php http://www.thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/npr2.htm http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/npr1.htm pt. 2 -the president's timeline http://canofun.com/blog/videos/tdsbushtimeline.wmv -gov. blanco declares a state of emergency Friday, August 26, 2005 http://gov.louisiana.gov/Press_Release_detail.asp?id=973 -gov. blanco asks the president to decl a re a federal state of emergency Saturday morning, August 27 , 2005 http://www.gov.state.la.us/Press_Release_detail.asp?id=976 -the president declares a state of emergency Saturday, August 27, 2005 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releas...
Post a Comment
Read more