To: yefragetuwrabrumuy
I agree completely on your comments - up to the lighting of the fuse. But I strongly disagree with your presumption that it was Lt. Behenna’s intention from the start to murder Ali Mansur. The Lieutenant vigorously denies that, and his explanation of events would have been corroborated by the prosecution’s own expert witness, whose testimony the jury never heard.
Our military has excelled in past years because junior officers were encouraged to take initiative, make decisions, and be leaders. IMHO this is the kind of warped and disproportionate “justice” that is totally crippling our once proud military. If my understanding is correct, the ultimate irony is that two weeks after the event, the Army ordered that Ali Mansur be taken in dead or alive. Go figure!
Unfortunately, I have to refer to the UCMJ’s purpose in this.
The reality of what happened there matters less than the perception. That is, the trial is really not about Behenna, it is about what other soldiers think and do.
A comparison is Pvt. Slovik in WWII. The US Army in the field was exhausted, morale was low, and there were great concerns about desertion. So an order was issued to pick a deserter, convict and hang him. And the Army was well on the way to doing this, when the Malmedy massacre happened.
This solved the morale problem, because soldiers would believe if they gave up to the Germans they would be murdered. So Slovik was given a choice. Instead of saying you deserted, say that you were separated from your unit and got lost, and you will get time served and returned to your unit.
But Slovik was adamant. He deserted and if returned to his unit he would desert again. Not the smartest apple in the bin. So because he insisted on it, he was hung. Had his wife not been equally arrogant, he would have long been forgotten.
Behenna is in the ugly position of “appearing” to have murdered a POW, and worse, one who had been ordered released. This is extremely bad war karma, and one of the big reason for the Geneva conventions, that being, “If we do it, then the enemy can do it to us.”
While we don’t really give a damn about what the Taliban or al-Qaeda think, this problem is being eyeballed by all the other nations with modern armies. If their personnel think for a moment that Americans kill POWs, the rules of war go right out the window.
Or at least that is the Pentagon perspective. So the bottom line is that Behenna is being made an example of. That he didn’t do what he was accused of doing really doesn’t matter as much.