Court Martial
By Lex, on Mon – February 14, 2005
In the Royal Navy, courts martial are far more common than they are over here. I’m told the Brits will convene a court martial at the drop of a hat (or the loss of an airplane) – we tend to prefer administrative procedures: Mishap investigations, boards of inquiry, Judge Advocate General Manual investigations. Now, the last two procedures can forward a court martial recommendation to a convening authority, but absent a violent crime, are unlikely to do so.
The Brits I’m told, favor their system – since the court martial is so much more common, little odium inherently attaches to the process. And, having been found not guilty of charges in a legal forum, the accused can now claim the mantle of innocence.
It has often been said that if an innocent man had to be tried, that he could want nothing more than to be tried by a court martial. And that a guilty man was to be tried, that there was nothing he should more fear. In a court martial, the truth really will out.
An alert reader * provided me the links to a story about a Marine Second Lieutenant who is up on charges for murder, in consequence of acts having to do with his service in Iraq. This same reader asked me to comment – but I am not sure that he’ll approve of what I have to say:
Bottom line up front? I’m not sure. Don’t know.
To Lt. Pantano, the two Iraqis who came toward him despite his order in Arabic to stop were mortal enemies. Booby-trapped suicide bombers are killing Iraqis by the score and some have even feigned surrender in order to get close to U.S. soldiers. But the Corps views it as murder and filed charges against him Feb. 1.
The case, announced at Camp Lejeune last week, is already driving passions among Marines who know that a split-second delay in defending oneself can result in death.
“Let’s stand together and tell our government that it cannot send our boys to the depths of hell and not expect them to see fire and brimstone,” said an e-mailer to Mrs. Pantano’s site, DefendtheDefenders.org. “It’s called war. Sad, dark, horrible, tragic and, in death, permanent.”
Let me go on record to stipulate that horrible things happen in wartime. That war is, in and of itself, a horrible thing.
And having stipulated that up front, I beg time and space to say only that even in warfare, at least as we in the West have defined the concept, some rules still obtain. We have the law of armed conflict, and from it we draw rules of engagement. Those rules and that body of law govern the most serious thing we can ever ask our soldiers to do in our name – the decision to take a life. Some would argue that the law of armed conflict was adopted in the spirit of reciprocity – that we fight our enemies as we would want them to fight us. Some among those who hold that view think that since the jihadist foe is governed by no law accepted as common amongst the combatants, he does not deserve the protection of the rule of law, that he has not earned reciprocity.
I disagree.
We fight under the rule of law: Not with one hand tied behind our backs, but secure in the shield and buckler of our righteousness. We fight not for land, or even for oil, but to preserve our country – and uniquely perhaps, by that we don’t really mean the land, or even the people of that land – not for us the bloody passions of Völk und Vaterland. No, the American patriot soldier fights for a system of ideas, a concept of nationhood – and the people those concepts represent. We fight for a system that defines government as established by laws among men, rather than the opposite. This helps to preserve who we are as a people, but perhaps as importantly, it preserves the moral authority of our soldiers, who must carry a dreadful weight of consequence on their shoulders for the acts which we have asked them to do in our name. Not for nothing is “moral” the root word of “morale.”
Not for nothing did Napoleon inform his generals that “the moral is to the material as three is to one.”
Did 2LT Pantano stay inside the lines? Don’t know, can’t say, not enough information, not from those few sources. But as people on the right side of the blogosphere should be all too well aware, the problem with taking an article from a single source and using that to pass judgment on an event which happened months ago and half the world away is to risk making a grave error. It’s the kind of error I’ve made before *.
To do otherwise is to admit the possibility that because the cause is just, that all acts which come from that cause are righteous, that the end justifies any means. That there is no crime a soldier can commit on the battlefield. That the only innocents are here at home. Down this lane is found error, tyranny and despair. A crime has been alleged – by all means, let us have a court martial. Let us take witness, evaluate testimony, discover the truth, make judgments.
Because I also know this: If LT Pantano is indeed innocent of the crimes he has been charged with, no better place will he find than a court of military law to discover that fact. And if he is found guilty? Then I believe the horrible circumstances of war surrounding the shootings will serve in mitigation of his punishment.
But not his guilt.
Let the truth out.
* 07-05-18 Links gone; no replacements found – Ed.
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