Kill em all, let God sort em out.

I nearly threw up my breakfast this morning when I read the letters to the editor in the Washington Post. Check out this gem, in which J.W. Smith more or less condones the slaughter in Haditha based on the well-established legal premise that the victims may have been involved:

But can we really assume that none of those killed -- excepting the small children -- had been involved in planting the bomb? If the Marines reacted to the most plausible source of the threat, don't we owe them the benefit of the doubt that those killed were involved or complicit in the murder of their fellow Marine?

While disturbing, this reasoning is useful to understand how far we as a society have come from the idea of the rule of law and due process. I'm not really aware of how possible involvement (apparently because they lived in the area?) leads to conviction and execution under our system's ideals, but certainly it's the very practice for which Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein is on trial. It's simply stunning to have someone argue that entire families -- children included, even if the letter writer seems to discount their involvement -- inside their homes needed to be exterminated as the "most plausible source of the threat."

J.W. Smith continues in this "willing executioners" style, finishing with this tidbit:

Must we continue to expect Marines to treat all people as noncombatants?
While this does not justify killing unarmed civilians, it certainly mitigates the accusation of "cold blood," which evokes the idea of emotionless action.

The answer to the question is "no," since it's obvious that even the insurgents and the marines themselves are "people," so that's nothing more than a red herring, and a really clumsy one at that. Furthermore, J.W. Smith's conclusion goes the further distance of attempting to do exactly what it claims not to do: it is an attempt to justify killing unarmed civilians by painting them as complicit with -- or perhaps active participants in -- the killing of 1 marine.

So long as we have apologists for state-sponsored murder like J.W. Smith around in significant numbers, our democracy will always be at risk, and our international moral standing will be driven deeper into the ground.