When the Enemy of the
State Is the State
By Diana
West
DianaWest.net
When St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P.
McCulloch explained that some exonerating testimony
in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, came from several African-American
eyewitnesses who described Brown as having charged
police Officer Darren Wilson before he fired the
fatal shots, it was a powerful moment.
Such testimony was consistent with physical
evidence establishing that Wilson had not fired at
Brown’s back as repeatedly and poisonously alleged.
Indeed, it would seem that the aggressor in this
fatal encounter was not Wilson, but rather Brown.
According to evidence the grand jury sifted and
assessed, it seems that Wilson fired not in cold
blood, as so often declared, but in self-defense.
It was this right to self-defense – “even” for a
policeman – that the grand jury decision left
sacrosanct when it determined there was simply not
sufficient evidence to indict Wilson for any crime.
Shocking as it may seem, self-defense is not a
bedrock right in some courts – specifically, U.S.
military courts, where U.S. soldiers have seen their
right to self-defense on the battlefield negated by
murder convictions.
The St. Louis County
prosecutor has now
uploaded the grand jury proceedings (all 24
volumes), assorted evidence and witness interviews
so all can see how the system worked, and how the
grand jury came to its conclusion. This sets an
unprecedented standard for transparency in the face
of ongoing demagogic efforts to obscure or ignore
these same facts. With incendiary talk of anger
“rooted in reality,” as the president put it, the
need for protests, the specter of federal charges
and “change,” Barack Obama and an army of “racial
arsonists” agitate not for justice, not for peace,
but for power.
Listening to McCulloch’s discussion of how it was
that an unarmed, but powerfully built 18-year-old
(who had a large dose of THC, the judgment-impairing
chemical in marijuana, coursing through his blood)
posed a threat to an armed policeman, I couldn’t
help but think about another case. When former Army
Ranger Lt. Michael Behenna shot and killed an
unarmed Iraqi terrorist named Ali Mansur in 2008,
Behenna, too, claimed to have acted in self-defense
when the Iraqi rushed him. Physical evidence
supported Behenna’s version of events, but he was
convicted and originally sentenced to 25 years for
murder. When the highest military appeals court
affirmed his conviction, it determined that in the
circumstances, Behenna had “lost the right to act in
self-defense and did not regain it.” Sickening.
Think of it. The military appeals court ruling
tells us that justice would really have been better
served had Behenna been killed in the altercation. I
can’t help thinking the agitators in the Brown case,
from Obama on down, feel exactly the same way about
Darren Wilson. To them, self-sacrifice (someone
else’s) is preferable to self-defense.
Earlier this year, an act of clemency released
Behenna from the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth
but not before he had served five years behind bars
– for what? Surviving? The legal travesty of the
Behenna case is unlikely to have occurred in
civilian court, which is one excellent reason why
such cases should be removed from military
jurisdiction.
There are others. More U.S. soldiers remain
behind bars whose main crime seems to be that they,
too, remained alive after a do-or-die point of
crisis. There is Sgt. Derrick Miller, whose fatal
struggle with an Afghan inside the defensive
perimeter over Miller’s own gun, earned Miller a
premeditated murder conviction – and a sentence of
life in prison without possibility of parole for 10
years. Miller, by the way, is an African-American
who fails to rate the president’s “community of
color” concerns, which tells me they are so much
smoke to fire up the mob.
There is 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, currently serving
a 20-year sentence on two murder convictions, having
ordered his men to shoot at three Afghans
approaching their checkpoint in Taliban territory.
There is also Master Sgt. John Hatley, convicted of
the murders of four detainees in Iraq in harrowing
conditions. Not only were the bodies never
recovered, the deceased were never reported missing.
Hatley, however, is serving 40 years in Leavenworth.
There is Pfc. Corey Clagett (18 years for following
orders to kill from scot-free commanders), whose
inhumane abuse at the hands of military wardens is
an egregious travesty. There is Marine Sgt. Lawrence
Hutchins, whose repeated prosecutions amount to
Kafkaesque mental torture.
Surely, these veterans merit the same clemency
that has released literally thousands of enemy
fighters with American blood on their hands, from
Guantanamo to Iraq to Afghanistan. Tragically, Uncle
Sam doesn’t agree.
And this is where a disturbing pattern takes
shape. The Obama administration at these fateful
junctures is consistently and predictably callous or
hostile to those who have protected it from our
worst enemies abroad or maintained the peace at
home. Did you hear even a word from Washington about
the two sheriff’s deputies gunned down in California
last month by a twice-deported illegal alien? No,
you heard amnesty instead.
By now, it’s hard not to notice that these are
the Americans in various uniforms who support the
edifice of law and order, even world order, that the
Obama-ites are committed to dismantling. This would
seem to explain the many cases where Obama
administration sympathies, or even benefits of the
doubt, unduly extend to the other side, whatever
form it takes, from terrorists to mobs.
As usual, this leaves the rest of us in serious
trouble.
Source:
Diana West
Diana West is the author of
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our
Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press 2013)
and
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested
Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization
(St. Martin's Press 2007). In Fall 2013,
West brought out a companion volume to American
Betrayal titled:The
Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the
Book-Burners, which includes essays by
Vladimir Bukovsky and M. Stanton Evans, among
others.