Richard Nixon pardoned Lt. Calley — he who ordered and led the murder in cold blood of500 Vietnamese women, children and aged men.
Calley is alive, free today when he should have been incarcerated for life. There can be no moral dispute of that.
Calley is a war criminal by any standard and absolutely by the standards established, notably by the victors, most notably by the United States of America, at Nuremberg in 1946. There, Calley would have been sentenced to be hung. Here he has been a free, pardoned but enormously guilty man for nearly 50 years.
Would there were, could be even now a reversal of history to make the perpetrators at Malmedy American. Would Trump pardon those who committed massacre there? Very likely he would.
Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy defended them but two years after the crime as victims of persecution and you can make book — if that one came his way and he had authority to pardon the doers of that atrocity Trump would, because lacking a grain of moral sense or historical perspective, it would have been a great headline, an enormous controversy — and he likes those.
At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed, cynically (he knew it would upset Churchill) executing 50,000 German officers as retribution for Germany’s incalculable crimes. When Churchill predictably took the bait, Uncle Joe upped the ante to 100,000 German officers, prompting Churchill to advocate instead the summary execution of leaders of the Nazi state.
FDR, who sat back and enjoyed a laugh at Churchill’s expense, had a different idea; an idea that rejected the plan promoted by the Treasury Department under Robert Morgenthau to dismantle German industry and reduce Germany to a 19th Century agrarian state .
Instead, FDR proposed what he might have called a “rendezvous with destiny” for Germany and the German people. Given shape immediately after the war, it resulted in the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, the trials it held and promulgation of the Nuremberg Code that gave us all — but presently internationally abandoned — international definitions of what constitute crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Those standards were articulated in the compelling, remarkably incisive, objective, chilling summary charge against the first, main Nuremberg defendants delivered by Justice Robert Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Jackson had taken leave from the court at the behest of President Truman to serve as chief prosecutor at the first trial — the trial of the surviving principals of the Third Reich, who were held by the allied victors (many, too many -far too many — got away into the protection of the likes of Juan Peron, the Vatican and, especially, Syria or like Hitler and Himmler escaped by taking their own lives).
Read Justice Jackson’s charge to the tribunal. Every American should. Every person who can read should be made to read it.
Perhaps its most trenchant sentence is this:
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
The death of one little girl in Afghanistan, shot in deliberate cold blood by an American soldier, is such a wrong.
Atrocity, as Justice Jackson so clearly defined, is not measured merely in quantity, though that counts by a lot, by a great deal. We cannot weigh the awful moral responsibility for the death of one child against the deaths of 1.2 million children. The difference cannot be weighed. But we can observe the calculation and malignancy that it takes to kill a child, children – whether it takes one child’s life or the lives of 1.2 million children.
The deliberate shooting of an innocent child by a soldier is calculated, it is malignant. It is UNPARDONABLE.
That it happened derives from an understood national grant of permission to act outside all norms, outside justice, outside decency and without remorse or fear of retribution.
That makes all responsible, all guilty. None of us can be pardoned for tearing children from their parents at the border but especially, as at Nuremberg, the officers, officials and attendants who work for our government cannot be pardoned. They stand in the dock. So do we all. What can we do in our world, in this country today. Vote. We can vote.
That is more than a year away. For now, now it is this? We come to this” To the pardoning of a murdering war criminal, a pardon granted by a man who daily defames the office of President of the United States — the same office Franklin Delano Roosevelt held in February 1945 while at Yalta? The same office Harry S Truman held when he asked Justice Jackson to go to Nuremberg.
That pardon is to shit on the United States of America, to make all it claims to stand for excrement just as Germans made excrement of their country and nation 85 and 75 years years ago.
Peeling the Onion 
I heard on Brian Lehrer this morning that during the hunt for Saddam Hussein bombings thought likely to cause more than thirty civilian deaths required approval of the Secretary of Defense, but that fewer than thirty civilian casualties would be just a tactical matter.
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That would be pretty suspect under Nuremberg precedent.
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