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Does the sentencing make any sense to anybody?????????

Perfect sense- but then I'm insane.

I think it may have been a heavier sentence for the lookout because the
pleaded not guilty.
My understanding of such a case is that it ought to have fallen under the
category of strict military justice- in WWII the punishmnent, at least in the
British contingent, for looting, or the rape or murder of civilians would have
been unequivocal and summary execution by firing-squad.
And so it should have been here.

The real leader is facing trial in a civilian court---and the death sentence is a possibility there.

They were all there, nobody lifted a finger- this is not a case of 'I was
obeying orders'.
Therefore they all die.

Agreed once more. This was a heinous, horrible crime committed because the family were seen as being vulnerable.

If anything like it had happened in the US, the public outcry would have echoed across the planet. As it is, there doesn't seem much reaction stateside at all.

Truth, the first casualty......?

More a case of they cannot stand to see their heroes tarnished. The Americans are the guy in the white hat who rides into town and stops the rowdy types killing the settlers. Finding out they are occasionally the killers is a little hard to bear.

They've been doing everything they can to make the war seem like a noble cause, including lying about the death of a notable casualty:

They need to be making the 'noble cause' case to the Iraqis, which
means punishing US military transgressors even more severely than the
locals.
This is part of their fundamental misunderstanding of why they are there,
and how they were aiming to achieve it, Guantanamo/rendition being
symptomatic thereof.

magoo wrote:
Try to be human ....its not hard

I read the whole thing first time. Nothing there seems to mitigate the
crime in any way.
I'm supposed to have empathy for a bunch of rapist murderers? Why,
because they're from broken homes, or weren't breast-fed or their
mummies didn't love themn enough? What about all the other GIs who
don't go around behaving like arseholes? What about all the ruined lives in
Iraq?
People who transgress so heinously have by their utter contempt for the
sanctity of human life effectively resigned from the human race- I feel
absolved therefore of any need to treat them as human. It then becomes
a mere matter of waste-disposal- or perhaps eugenics.