Trump Pardons Convicted War Criminals

[FitzForShort]

I served for 11 years Active Duty and reserve. Never served in combat, so I won't take that away from you. And, yes, I was in a Service Support Role. Frankly, none of you sounded like model soldiers according to the WaPo article. Sounds like 1LT Torance got off on a bad foot with you guys. It also sounds like his NCO's really didn't support him and his CO didn't give him clear guidance. 20 years of war in Afghanistan wrecked the army. Then you wonder why the Army can't meet it's recruiting goals.

Frankly, the fact is that military courts are hardly fair. Once the system decided it was going to make an example out of Torance, that was kind of it. 19 years was excessive. Trump did the right thing (entirely by accident, because we are talking about Trump here.)

Every war we ever fought, when it was over, we make these kinds of decisions. Rusty Calley got released after a year, for killing an entire village.

So I ask the question, are you upset he wasn't punished enough, or are you upset he's a right wing celebrity now while the other guys had to deal with PTSD and other issues after they left?

Again, you're missing the point that the "system" didn't decide to make an example out of him. He committed MULTIPLE crimes over three days and was turned in and there was more than enough evidence to convict, which we did. That came from the ground up, not the top down. And I don't know what part of the WaPo article you're referring to about us not being "model soldiers" but I can personally tell you I never so much as got a write-up on five years and nobody else was getting written up or reprimanded during my time down there. So it seems like some pretty baseless slander, which as I said, originated from the lawyers who were defending him and was never supported by anyone else.

The question is decent, I'm not upset that he didn't get punished more. I'm not even upset that he got pardoned. Nor do I consider him a "right wing celebrity", he wrecked his own life and he has to live with the consequences. I've seen ehat happened when he tried to make a social media account, it was kind of rough to watch to be honest but what can someone expect? What pisses me off, now and then, are the thousands of arm-chair quarterbacks and Fox-news brainworms running around for years telling everyone else how he was "defending" any of us or saying that his very deliberate actions were, somehow, "a mistake" as if committing and trying to cover up murder could ever be a mistake. I'm pissed at his lawyers and Fox News who KNEW they were full of shit and refused to speak to anyone besides the one person convicted of murder. They brought Bergdahl's unit on, didn't they? But the guys who did contact them were rebuffed and, like we see here, accused of some very vague bad behavior without any instances or evidence. I'm especially pissed at Allen West, who refused to hear from any of us, deleted all my comments, and blocked me from his page because I dared contradict his bullshit stories. And then he had the nerve to accuse us of "flipping"?? Nobody flipped, we literally turned him in, we urged the action. Imagine spending years trying to tell your experience only to have countless uninformed or misinformed people just dismissing you wholesale because someone who is profiting off of defending a murderer decided to make some shit up. That's what I'm pissed about. Sometimes I get accused of hating Lorance. I don't. He was wrong and he deserved his punishment, but there were also very human things about him that he talked about in the docuseries. Not that I've ever publicly spoken about it but his personal struggles were something I had no idea about until he was already in prison and I do genuinely feel bad that his parents didn't give him the love and support any human being deserves. Kind of fucked up the things they said about him. But at the end of the day, I harbor no ill will towards him. I just won't defend his callous indifference to the deaths of innocents. If he were honest about what he did, then maybe I'd have more of a heart, but lying is part of the reason he ended up where he ended up.

 

[JoeB131]

Again, you're missing the point that the "system" didn't decide to make an example out of him. He committed MULTIPLE crimes over three days and was turned in and there was more than enough evidence to convict, which we did. That came from the ground up, not the top down. And I don't know what part of the WaPo article you're referring to about us not being "model soldiers" but I can personally tell you I never so much as got a write-up on five years and nobody else was getting written up or reprimanded during my time down there. So it seems like some pretty baseless slander, which as I said, originated from the lawyers who were defending him and was never supported by anyone else.

The question is decent, I'm not upset that he didn't get punished more. I'm not even upset that he got pardoned. Nor do I consider him a "right wing celebrity", he wrecked his own life and he has to live with the consequences. I've seen ehat happened when he tried to make a social media account, it was kind of rough to watch to be honest but what can someone expect? What pisses me off, now and then, are the thousands of arm-chair quarterbacks and Fox-news brainworms running around for years telling everyone else how he was "defending" any of us or saying that his very deliberate actions were, somehow, "a mistake" as if committing and trying to cover up murder could ever be a mistake. I'm pissed at his lawyers and Fox News who KNEW they were full of shit and refused to speak to anyone besides the one person convicted of murder. They brought Bergdahl's unit on, didn't they? But the guys who did contact them were rebuffed and, like we see here, accused of some very vague bad behavior without any instances or evidence. I'm especially pissed at Allen West, who refused to hear from any of us, deleted all my comments, and blocked me from his page because I dared contradict his bullshit stories. And then he had the nerve to accuse us of "flipping"?? Nobody flipped, we literally turned him in, we urged the action. Imagine spending years trying to tell your experience only to have countless uninformed or misinformed people just dismissing you wholesale because someone who is profiting off of defending a murderer decided to make some shit up. That's what I'm pissed about. Sometimes I get accused of hating Lorance. I don't. He was wrong and he deserved his punishment, but there were also very human things about him that he talked about in the docuseries. Not that I've ever publicly spoken about it but his personal struggles were something I had no idea about until he was already in prison and I do genuinely feel bad that his parents didn't give him the love and support any human being deserves. Kind of fucked up the things they said about him. But at the end of the day, I harbor no ill will towards him. I just won't defend his callous indifference to the deaths of innocents. If he were honest about what he did, then maybe I'd have more of a heart, but lying is part of the reason he ended up where he ended up.

Frankly, reading your post, it sounds like he is living in your head rent free, from a guy who was only your platoon leader for three days.

Look, man, I feel you, the Army and the government screwed you guys. They sent you off to a war with no point and no end game. It was worse than Vietnam, because we didn't learn a thing from that experience.

I'm not saying that he was a great officer. Far from it. But I can tell you, about half the Company Grade officers I served with probably would have made those same fuckups.

And the last thing I want to do is defend how Fox News operates. They were screaming for Obama to secure Bergdahl's release, until he actually did, and then Bergdahl became the worst traitor since Benedict Arnold, to hear them tell it. (You know, instead of a mentally disturbed kid who never should have been enlisted to start with.)

Final point. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, we ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people. And really, nothing to show for it. So why signal Torance out? He wasn't like those four nitwits in Iraq who killed an Iraqi family so they could gang rape a teenager. Or those nitwits in Abu Grahib who just followed orders and tortured people. He went into a new command situation like a yahoo.

I'd almost call this "Cherry Lieutenant syndrome," but it sounds like he had 8 years as an enlisted man before getting a commission... so I'm not sure what the problem there was. (The biographical information doesn't tell me if he got his commission through ROTC or OCS)

 

[ColonelAngus]

He should have pardoned Assange and Snowden.

 

[FitzForShort]

Frankly, reading your post, it sounds like he is living in your head rent free, from a guy who was only your platoon leader for three days.

Look, man, I feel you, the Army and the government screwed you guys. They sent you off to a war with no point and no end game. It was worse than Vietnam, because we didn't learn a thing from that experience.

I'm not saying that he was a great officer. Far from it. But I can tell you, about half the Company Grade officers I served with probably would have made those same fuckups.

And the last thing I want to do is defend how Fox News operates. They were screaming for Obama to secure Bergdahl's release, until he actually did, and then Bergdahl became the worst traitor since Benedict Arnold, to hear them tell it. (You know, instead of a mentally disturbed kid who never should have been enlisted to start with.)

Final point. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, we ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people. And really, nothing to show for it. So why signal Torance out? He wasn't like those four nitwits in Iraq who killed an Iraqi family so they could gang rape a teenager. Or those nitwits in Abu Grahib who just followed orders and tortured people. He went into a new command situation like a yahoo.

I'd almost call this "Cherry Lieutenant syndrome," but it sounds like he had 8 years as an enlisted man before getting a commission... so I'm not sure what the problem there was. (The biographical information doesn't tell me if he got his commission through ROTC or OCS)

That's a fair opinion to hold and I can see why you'd think it but I wouldn't say he does. I really don't know anything about him anymore or what he's up to, nor am I interested in finding out. Hope he doesn't fuck up his second chance. It's more likely that the people who tried so hard to shut us up and vilify us and ignore us while in the same breath implying that we were the bad guys that he "saved" dedpite all evidence to the contrary, its them who live rent-free in my head. I can acknowledge that. I do check on some of those guys still. Duncan Hunter went to prison. Allen West is still batshit. Sean Parnell is still an ignorant asshat. Tucker Carlson is doubling down on fascism. I guess its hard to relate the experience to someone on the outside of it. I suppose if you lived an event that ended up being news and had to watch/listen to years of disinformation about it, you probably wouldn't exactly be chuffed either.

I'm with you on the Fox thing, they're the streaming equivalent of those magazines I used to see with made-up articles about UFOs and Elvis being alive and shit. Don't know their names off-hand.

As a side note, he was an MP before he went green-to-gold, just as far as his prior experience.

But to the point, you ask "why single him out?" We didn't single him out. He was in charge, we were just a platoon sized element. We didn't have an O-3 on site. And he blatantly murdered people that were known to us, had been working with us, and who had given us actionable intelligence that kept us safe. He committed all of those crimes he was convicted of. He endangered our lives, I don't know how to make that any clearer. If you had a job and your boss kept putting your life in danger, you'd eventually quit or turn him in too, one would hope. The men he murdered had come to our base with complaints about being SHOT AT for no reason (under his orders nonetheless), one of the other charges he was found guilty of. Before they could make it back to their own village, he ordered them to be killed, then he refused to have them biometrically identified and tried to lie about us searching them and finding their identification cards. You can't take someone like that to war with you. That's not a rookie mistake, its not "fog of war", and it certainly wasn't "split second" as some people just love to say. Why would anyone go along with murder? The fact that every single one of us on the ground with him refused his orders and agreed that what he did was wrong should speak volumes. It's not like every single one of us got along. Couple of the guys I served with were just assholes, but even they knew it was wrong in every way. It was a teenager in a gun truck who followed his orders and he simply said he did it because he was told (not that I necessarily agree) but he didn't have the OTG context the rest of us had. If you want a better idea or want actually happened, go to the website for the Fayetteville Observer, search his names, and go to the oldest articles. Those were written from inside the court martial, there are three of them, they should be dated July 2013 and I think one was 1 Aug 2013. I promise it's a far cry from whatever you had imagined. Then tell me that half the Company commanders you knew would do all those same things.

 

[FitzForShort]

JoeB131 I've been thinking about what you've said tonight. I looked back over it and you're right. Thanks for your perspective. I respect the law and what's done is done. I've just been mad about so many things people have said, things out of my control, a really pointless endeavor the more I think about it. I appreciate your responses. I'm gonna leave this up so you see it, I guess, but I don't think there's anything more for me to say.

 

[JoeB131]

JoeB131 I've been thinking about what you've said tonight. I looked back over it and you're right. Thanks for your perspective. I respect the law and what's done is done. I've just been mad about so many things people have said, things out of my control, a really pointless endeavor the more I think about it. I appreciate your responses. I'm gonna leave this up so you see it, I guess, but I don't think there's anything more for me to say.

Best of luck to you in your future endeavors.