Don't misconstrue that with wanting a murderer to escape justice Kaz. We are perfectly capable of executing our criminals on our own without that whole dragging the body through the streets by his heels thing that's likely to occur if we handed him over to the mob.

Besides what if his actions were the result of insanity possibly caused by the Traumatic Brain Injury he suffered in the line of duty during one of his previous combat tours?

That's assuming that the US will indeed execute him. Most likely, they'll drag the case out until the furor dies down in the maze of the American legal process, find some excuse like the insanity you mention below and give him less than his due.

That doesn't send a signal like sending him to the wolves will. It is also wrong b/c though MAYBE he isn't all there, but he clearly has enough control left to function, and thus enough control to be responsible, fully, for what he did, not get passed off on insanity.

It is true that stopping all atrocities won't stop everyone from hating America or organizing bomb attacks, but it'll certainly give them one less reason.

And to stop atrocities, you need to send out strong signals. Feeding this guy to the wolves tells the other soldiers that even insanity is no defense for killing civilians. If your sanity is going, shoot yourself if you have to, but don't touch civilians.

Not a bad message to send out, isn't it?

That's assuming he's guilty. AFAIK he has not even been arraigned let alone convicted and you already have moved on to the punishment phase.

Well yeah it is a bad message.

Basically you're saying that our soldiers should shoot themselves if they think they might be going insane. That's of course assuming that they are still sane enough to self diagnose their own mental problems. I hope you can see where that could be a bit sticky...

The other message you're sending to our soldiers is: "If you're contemplating mass murder don't surrender peacefully afterwards. Go down in a blaze of gunfire while taking out as many as possible."

Either way I seriously doubt a person who'd gun down 16 innocent people is going to care all that much about the consequences of his actions. Why? Because he is insane.

He's not convicted yet, but I don't see many plausible scenarios for his innocence. The "best" that can happen is that he gets off on some insanity charge, at the price of what relations America has with the relatively neutral part of Afghan society.

I did not say they should shoot themselves. I did say it is preferable that soldiers are indoctrinated such that, even when they go insane, what's been input into him will make him deviate from the course of killing a bunch of civvies. If that means he shoots himself, well obviously that's not great but it is better than him shooting a bunch of civvies.

And of course you can't appeal to complicated concepts such as "honor" or "ethics" at times like this. So what can you appeal to? His fear. Fear is primal and powerful. Fear of a very painful end. Fearful of abandonment by his country and his fellow soldiers.

Such fear certainly is not going to happen if you send messages out that even if he shoots up a bunch of foreign civvies, his country will think him one of their own and shield him from the society. then rule he's insane and let him go off light.

Even when you are breaking down, there are some things you just don't do.

Afghan officials now claim 20 American troops were involved in the incident.

http://publicintelligence.net/nearly...ghan-massacre/

Well its pretty accademic what happened here and why, what about the big picture?
This is just one of many sorry events that could have been avoided if we werent occupying these countries in the first place.
I'm with Ron Paul, get the troops out of there, use the money help pay off defecits.

Terrorism willl always exist, civilians in the west will just have grow a pair of balls and learn to take their chances as they go about their daily lives, imagine if we 'decalared war' on threats that are statisticly far more likely to kill us,
We'd have a war on Cancer, a war on bad drivers, and a war on violent felons at the very least.
The war on terror is a farce, it has nothing to do with counter-terrorism, its about special intrests and the whole world knows it. Even many of the soldiers fighting it are starting realise - and they every reason to be fed up.

This attitude of 'screw what the world thinks - we can do what we want' (like a spoiled teenager) well, thats gonna come home to roost when
we are fresh out of friends and can no longer print our way of our debt bubble.

"4000 killed in...................... "What kind of
traffic on Ger- ..................... war do they
man streets!"...................... have over there?"
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/kr...ormat=format10
source: Der Tagesspiegel

We already declare war on just about everything. We have the war on drugs, war on hunger, the 'other' war on drugs, a war on greed, war on poverty, the war on hip hop, war on global warming, war on cancer, whale wars, war on crime, greenwar and the war on pollution, a war on religion, price wars, Cod wars, war on gangs, war on globalization, war on guns, a war to end all wars, war on fishing, a war on strip clubs, war on heroin, war on zombies. You name the problem we're gonna wage war on it!

As tragic as this whole affair has been, looks like revenge is at work.
Ofr course when 70 NATO troops are killed this way in 42 seperate attacks, Karzai says nothing. When the Taliban catch up with him in the future, I will say nothing when they put a bullet in his brain.

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news...ecurity-forces

Lets hope that Obama or whoever replaces him in november takes a lesson from Jimmy Carter and refuse to let him in the US after he get's deposed.

The two dead in the above link were British soldiers.