Hysterical Justice

The soldier that raped a 14-year old girl, then killed her and burned her body, and killed her entire family to conceal the crime, was sentenced today to 90 years in prison.

Justice has been served, then. He is up for parole in 20 years, though, which is a typical glimpse into how our legal system “works” here. But, whatever, that machine is so broken, who knows if it can ever be fixed.

Most chilling, perhaps is the part of the confession of James P. Baker that outlines how his platoon spotted this girl weeks before on a patrol, and actually plotted, pre-meditatively, the entire event. They actually planned on killing everyone who was in the house when they got into costumes, cut through some fence and went to the house, just so they could rape some girl. How fucking sick can you get?

Anyone who plots this kind of thing has got to be sick in the head.

But, a whole group of people, because of happen-stance, being placed together and then plotting to do something like this...what is that, mass hysteria? It is almost an impossibility that a group of cuckoos just happened to have been stationed together. What is much more likely, then, is that the war in Iraq is turning normal, young soldiers into killer wackos.

The example above is not an isolated event, people. Are we not creating an entire generation of mental cases who will then need to be re-integrated into our society when the war is over? Bush has a hell of a lot of accounting to do, not just for the thousands of Iraqis and Americans killed but for the even greater number of people who have survived and will end up having their entire lives tainted by this conflict. A whole generation of the poor (Kerry was right, they are mostly from poor, uneducated families) went off to serve because it was their only chance of escape. They didn't deserve this, though, did they?

We have done them a terrible injustice by allowing Bush to do what he did.