Opaque Lucidity

Haditha

As you probably heard or read yesterday, charges have been dropped against Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the senior officer charged in the alleged murder of civilians in Haditha in 2006. Chessani can be charged again since the case was dismissed due to conflict of interest reasons. Even if found not guilty, his career is over. In all branches of the military, a public incident of this magnitude stays with an officer and makes him "undesirable" in the eyes of the service. It's as much a PR thing as anything else. The colonel is 44, which means he has given at least 20 years of his life to the service of this nation. To quote a friend, we really need men of his caliber now.

If you're a lawyer or want to become one, you may want to stop reading now. There seems to be a certain prosecutorial zeal amongst military lawyers, namely those in the Navy (as Marines, the men charged with crimes at Haditha were prosecuted by the Navy legal system). I don't know if this zeal exists because these future civilian bloodsuckers want to make a name for themselves, or if they simply do the job and see it as some sort of justice. In reality, the charges in the Haditha case are bogus, so much so that seven of the eight men charged thus far have been exonerated. The Navy took the eyewitness accounts of Iraqi civilians (whose tall tales are legendary, believe me) and used them to accuse a group of Marines with one of the worst crimes that can be committed in a war zone.

This case is a victory for men like Congressman John Murtha, himself a former Marine, who found the men guilty of murder before the first testimony had been heard. To think that he used the incident as a political tool is disgusting, but nothing coming from the Democrats surprises me anymore. What I find more disgusting are the lawyers who wear this nation's naval uniform. Yes, they have a job to do and sometimes that job is difficult. But it seems that no one took into account the fact that the eyewitness accounts were questionable at best. Did they miss the part of law school where they were actually supposed to learn about the law?