Trump's Pardoning Of Men Found Guilty Of War Crimes Is Extremely Dangerous

Ruben Gallego stood with Ted Lieu on the day Lieu was promoted to a colonel 

Ted Lieu (D-CA) served in the air force and today serves as a colonel in the Air National Guard. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) was deployed in Iraq as a Marine corporal. Today the two of them are prominent voices for peace within the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On Friday the L.A. Times published an OpEd the two of them had penned, Trump’s Leniency On War Crimes Weakens National Security. "George Washington said, 'Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable, procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.' The United States has the best military in the world," wrote the two vets, "in part because our soldiers abide by, and believe in, good order and discipline. President Trump’s pardon of a war criminal and potential pardoning of other troops accused of war crimes strikes at the soul of our armed forces, undermines unit cohesion and weakens national security."

Trump never served. We did. One of us fought in the Iraq war. The other prosecuted members of the military who violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice. From the first day of basic training, like every member of the military, we were taught to follow orders, regulations and laws. Unit cohesion suffers and lives are put at risk when troops go rogue and are not punished.

Discipline is so important to the military that Article 134 of the Uniform Code specifically makes it a crime for members to engage in conduct that is prejudicial to “good order and discipline” or that “bring[s] discredit to the armed forces.” Enforcing discipline in an organization as large as the U.S. military requires the certainty of punishment for those who violate regulations or the law. If only certain provisions of the code are enforced, or if members think they can get away with crimes because of a presidential pardon, it will have a corrosive effect on every aspect of readiness, and it will encourage others to disobey orders.

If our adversaries know the American military will flout the law of war, they will be more inclined to do the same.

All members of the military are taught to obey the Law of Armed Conflict, also known as the law of war. Its many provisions enshrine principles we all recognize as basic to appropriate military conduct, including this one: Unarmed civilians are not legitimate military targets. Articles 118 and 134 prohibit murder. It is criminal to intentionally kill a defenseless civilian or to kill prisoners of war.

Some of the war crimes committed by U.S. personnel are indistinguishable from murder.

Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder in a combat zone by a military court. He drove an unarmed Iraqi prisoner into the desert, stripped him naked and shot him in the head and chest. Trump recently pardoned him.

Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher has been charged with committing multiple war crimes in Iraq, including shooting an unarmed civilian girl and an unarmed civilian senior citizen, stabbing to death a defenseless teenage Islamic State captive, and indiscriminately spraying a neighborhood with rockets and machine gun fire. Seven members of SEAL Team 7 came forward and reported Gallagher’s actions to Navy authorities just as the law, their training and their honor demanded. Gallagher has pleaded not guilty. Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn will be court-martialed for the killing of an unarmed Afghan. Golsteyn admits to the act; the Army calls it murder, he calls it a legitimate ambush. According to news reports, Trump is considering Memorial Day pardons for Golsteyn and Gallagher.

Our military follows the law of war not just because it is the moral thing to do but because it is critical to mission success.

When troops kill civilian children, senior citizens and prisoners of war without justification, those crimes make peace more difficult to secure and hand our enemies a great recruiting tool. If our adversaries know the American military will flout the law of war, they will be more inclined to do the same, including killing future American prisoners of war. If American troops don’t obey the law, Iraqi and Afghan officials will be less likely to cooperate with U.S. military efforts, and civilian anger will put our deployed personnel at increased risk.

We acknowledge the president’s pardon power is nearly unfettered (although it can’t be used to obstruct justice). Trump can pardon war criminals, and there is not much Congress can do to stop him. But we can speak up against this travesty.

Trump may think that formally forgiving those who have been convicted of or charged with committing war crimes is being pro-military. Exactly the opposite is true. Rather than bring “esteem to all,” Trump’s pardons would undermine good order and discipline, increase the risk to our deployed personnel, and stain the soul of our military.

Air Force One by Nancy Ohanian

Pete Buttigieg seems as disturbed by this as Lieu and Gallego. Last week, he told a veterans rally in New Hampshire that "The reason that we can stand up tall and say that's not true, that having served honorably in the military, couldn't be more different than being a war criminal is because if we ever did anything that was wrong the United States under the Uniform Code of Military Justice would have held us accountable... And so when the President joins in with this idea, that it's just natural, that if you serve in conflict, that you're going to wind up murdering somebody, he is eroding the integrity of the military, and insulting the Constitution." You know who I'd like to ask about this? Some of the Republicans in Congress who, like Lieu and Gallego, served in the U.S. military. What does Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) think? How about Lindsay Graham (R-SC)? How about Joni Ernst (R-IA), who, this morning, called him on his loony statement about how North Korean missile tests are OK? And Silent Don Bacon (R-NE)? Tom Cotton (R-AR)? Greg Steube (R-FL)? Lee Zeldin (R-NY)? Steve Stivers (R-OH)? Martha McSally (R-AZ)? These are all men and women who know better but who have devoted their recent careers to enabling Trump. So far, none of them have made a peep, although veterans groups are furious over the pardons. I wonder if the Republican legislators will ever speak up on this. One has-- a criminal himself, Duncan Hunter (R-CA), not only excused the war criminal Trump says he'll pardon, but admitted he's guilty of one of same infractions, though not murder! Basically, Hunter's message was "Oh get over it; everybody does it."

Think this isn't all that important? Prominent figures on the Christian right [including] elected politicians have warned that the fight over abortion rights could lead to a new civil war... Republican lawmakers such as Ohio’s Candice Keller have openly speculated that the divide over abortion rights might lead to civil war... Earlier this month, The Guardian revealed that the Washington state Republican legislator Matt Shea had also speculated about civil war, and the 'Balkanization' of America, predicting that Christians would retreat to 'zones of freedom' such as the inland Pacific north-west, where Shea is campaigning for a new state to break away from Washington.

Asked on a podcast if the two halves of the country could remain together, Shea said: “I don’t think we can, again, because you have half that want to follow the Lord and righteousness and half that don’t, and I don’t know how that can stand.”

Shea has introduced a bill-- unlikely to pass-- which would criminalize abortion in the state.

Right-wing crackpot Trumpist, Milo Yiannopoulos was fomenting civil war this weekend too. And offering himself as the 21st Century version of Robert E. Lee, no less!

I abhor political violence. Let me be clear about that. But when someone takes away your freedom, your speech and your ability to protect yourself and your family, there aren’t many options left. At least, that’s how citizens quickly come to feel.

It getting close to the time when, per America’s founding documents, citizens will start forming into well-regulated militias in preparation for the lawful defense of the Constitution. And maybe I’m the right person to sketch out how that should work.

You know, maximum cell size. Encrypted comms. Like I said, I abhor violence. But civil war is coming, and, if it does, well-meaning but poorly-informed and relentlessly deplatformed conservatives are going to need a handbook.

Deplatformed conservatives? Poor widdle Yiannopoulos is pouting that he's been kicked off every social media platform with an audience of more than a thousand.

They Walk Among You... And By "They," We Mean War Criminals

Ever hear of Kim Howells? His dad was a Communist lorry driver and young Kim was a good Welsh union man and a Communist himself, before joining the Labour Party in 1982. Seven years later he was elected to the House of Commons and gradually distanced himself from his communist roots, finally suggesting in 1996 that the word "socialism" ought to be "humanely phased out" of anything to do with the Labour Party. Pleased as punch, Tony Blair gave him a series of junior ministerial positions starting the following year, until, in 2005, Blair made him Minister of State for the Middle East in the Foreign Office. In a post at CounterPunch yesterday, From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried, John Pilger happened to mention Howells.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population-- ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked"-- from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children’s vaccines," he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction."

Pinger had nothing more to say about Howells in his essay. In fact, there were far worse villains than Howells sprinkled throughout-- Tony Blair himself, of course, and another Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair, Peter Hain (lately Baron Hain), currently working as a propagandist embedded at The Guardian, striving hard on behalf of the establishment at character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn. But, in 2009, the former Communist Howells was knighted and is now known as the Right Honourable Kim Howells. Two years after that he was to receive an Honorary Doctorate but made some derogatory statements, publicly, about Libyan students studying in the U.K. being security risks. He eventually succumbed to widespread student pressure to withdraw from the ceremony. As far as I can find, that's the only "punishment" that particular little war criminal ever received.

Of course, we don't have to hunt up obscure British politicians to find criminals and crooks-- Hains was caught stealing £103,156 before he was made a Baron-- who escaped punishment. We have Cheney. We have Bush. Even the worst war criminal of all, Henry Kissinger, still walks among us. In fact, Pinger ends his essay with this paragraph:

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and "coalition" crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, World Order. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century." Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft."  Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

That these politicians go unpunished for their monstrous crimes against humanity, is outright encouragement for deranged sociopaths like, for example, Ted Cruz. Bad for America. Bad for humanity. But for the world.