GUILTY! - June 9, 2011

From time to time we hear reports from the US Government about events in the Great World in which this nation or another stands in the court of public opinion. Sometimes DC will contribute this principle or that to indicate which nation or another is in violation of something that DC likes to call the opinion of humankind. It often happens that the choice of judgment coincides with whether the accused country is a US ally or not. Today we are witnessing the opening of the trial of Serbian General Mladic. People parroting the US line are saying that since he was in charge of the Serbian army at the time, any violations of common understanding can be laid to his command, and that he is thus individually guilty of many crimes, one of which is murder. Yet when the accused is a major political figure of a DC ally, or even DC itself, a different set of rules is adduced, notably what actions the accused has provably done. Just as a coincidence, the past 2 weeks featured the exhumation of President Salvatore Allende of Chile. The Nixon administration, which had borne the accusation by many observers of having sponsored the Pinochet coup, was thought by many to have murdered President Allende. But they had Allende buried without a post-mortem and all succeeding presidents, including Pres. Obama, have not rushed to condemn Nixon, who announced that Allende had killed himself with his AK47. The burden of individual conviction for murder, they said, required proof of individual action beyond reasonable doubt. General Mladic, by contrast, was said to be convicted by the suspicions of the observers. Now, by coincidence, it is reported that Allende’s body showed 2 shots: a small caliber to the head and a major one from the assault rifle. It is hard to imagine the scenario, in which a coup soldier had found the corpse and put an extraneous bullet in the head, which can still be tested for as the cause of his death. I think that he was murdered, and that under the Mladic precedent, Nixon must be accorded the status of his murderer.