Three military trials: Who's to blame?

This past week three major military trials came to their verdict or sentence, two criminal and one political.

At Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Hassan was convicted of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murders in a killing rampage against his fellow soldiers four years ago. He awaits sentencing, and could become the first American soldier to be executed since World War II.

At Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, Sergeant Robert Bales was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in the massacre last year of 16 Afghan civilians.

At Fort Meade, Maryland, Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning was sentenced to 35 years' imprisonment for having leaked classified information relating, among other things, to atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the shooting of two Reuters war correspondents by a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship.

"'Forgotten humanity'

None of the factual allegations in these cases was in dispute. Major Hassan admitted his killings with pride, Sergeant Bales with remorse. Private Manning stipulated the charges against her, but claimed a higher responsibility to disclose war crimes. Manning's statement is worth quoting:

"We have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those we perceived as the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of our national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability."

Manning doesn't deny that innocent civilians will die in wartime. What's morally impermissible, she contends, is to evade responsibility for such deaths when they become known or knowable to military authorities.

Technical breach

Americans have a long history of such evasion, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in Vietnam and the Philippines. Only when independent sources have verified notorious events— such as firing on wedding or funeral parties— and only when we have been publicly rebuked by "host" governments, have we offered monetary compensation. On almost no such occasion have we offered justice.

Manning thus invoked a higher authority in an admittedly technical breach of confidentiality— namely, the responsibility of all citizens to disclose crimes of which they have knowledge, especially of a systemic nature. Failure to disclose such crimes may be, at law, a crime itself.

Manning did not think the fact that the crimes in question were committed under government aegis and the evidence they generated suppressed by government command excluded her from responsibility, however legally excused she might be. And she quite rightly concluded, as did Edward Snowden, that it would be merely futile and likely hazardous to try to bring such matters to the attention of superiors whose settled policy, up to the level of theater commanders and the highest civilian officials, was denial.

Manning's trial has been and will be widely debated. I would like to suggest that her case is intimately related to those of Hassan and Bales. In each one, we are dealing with the casualties of illegitimate wars.

Fourth tour in Afghanistan

It's easiest, perhaps, for us to see Bales as a victim. No other explanation of his appalling rampage is possible except that he snapped under the strain of an involuntary fourth tour of duty that had taken him both to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the Army, to its disgrace, tried to discredit him by pointing to a couple of alcohol-related incidents on his civilian record and an unproved accusation of fraud, he had the reputation of being a good soldier. Nothing known of him could account for his horrific act except that, like many others, he was under the unique stress of multiple deployments from which there seemed no exit.

The longest combat zone deployment in World War II was 411 days. Many in our all-volunteer Army have exceeded that, especially since, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinction between battlefield and rear area has been substantially eroded.

There is no telling how many cases such as Bales's there may be, with fewer victims, no notoriety and no on-site confession. The Army, obviously, doesn't want to know.

Proud jihadist

It's harder to compare Hassan to Bales or Manning. Hassan was a U.S. career officer who turned not on civilians in a faraway war but on his fellow soldiers (and incidental civilians who crossed his path) in the protected environment of a military base in Texas.

He was, however, an American of Arab descent and of the Muslim faith. He brooded over wars in which his co-religionists were the invariable targets, and which had come to seem to him, as they do to some of us, unjustified and finally immoral. He identified with the victims of those wars and felt it his duty to avenge them as far as it lay in his power. Accordingly, he came to see his fellow soldiers as his enemy, and the enemy of Islam.

Bales, one may believe, is sincere in his contrition. He's not a monster, but a man driven to a monstrous act by pressures that only his comrades in arms can fully appreciate. For that act he will be punished to the last day of his life by the system of forced redeployments that drove him to it. He can't deny his own responsibility, and he doesn't try to.

Unpunished atrocities

But who will hold the system itself accountable? We pass our young men and women through a meat grinder because we won't fight our wars with a draft army, or, better by far, fight no war at all unless attacked, and then only against our actual attackers. That wasn't the case in Afghanistan, and still less so in Iraq, where we were unprovoked aggressors.

Chelsea Manning tried to hold the system accountable, and for her pains got a prison sentence 14 times longer than that ever before handed down against a whistleblower. None of the atrocities she exposed was prosecuted. She accepts her sentence not as just punishment but as the price of an act she felt morally compelled to perform.

Nidal Hassan does not ask for our sympathy. He has defined himself as a jihadist, and says he looks forward to execution as a martyr for Islam. He, too, feels morally redeemed. He refused a defense at his trial. His demeanor throughout was that of a man fortified, not shamed, by his act.

"'Higher law'

If Bales had committed his crime in a civilian context, he might have been adjudged criminally insane. But the Army couldn't consider an insanity plea without admitting its own culpability (and ours) in Bales's mental state. In that sense his sentence too is unjust.

Manning violated military law in favor of the higher law of conscience. She, too, is a victim.

Hassan rejects entirely the role of victim. Yet he, too, is someone who has voluntarily sacrificed himself for his beliefs, and however repugnant we may find them, we are ill advised to dismiss them. Hassan is part of the whirlwind Americans have reaped from the havoc we've sown in the Middle East since the imposition of an American-backed dictatorship on Iran 60 years ago.

Nidal Hassan gave up a comfortable life and career; he gave up friendship and respect; he gave up his freedom and, possibly, his life. These were all choices, but choices, too, made under duress. Hassan would reject this defense, but from my perspective it is a reasonable one.

People have given up comfortable lives to become hermits, or saints, or volunteers in dangerous places. They don't become mass murderers without something having gone terribly wrong to them or for them.

Whether or not we choose to regard Hassan, too, as a victim, is in a final sense immaterial. But he is indisputably a product of wars whose grievance has spread to a billion people. What the trials of the past week demonstrate is their continuing cost.