Scapegoats

Courtesy of my friend Bill Calloway, this about the SEALs facing a court martial:

Three Navy SEALs involved in nabbing one of Iraq's most wanted terrorists are reportedly facing criminal charges related to his capture, all because he claimed he had a bloody lip. The SEALs took down Ahmed Hasim Abed, the alleged mastermind of a ghastly 2004 incident in which four American contractors who worked security for Blackwater USA were murdered in Fallujah, and two of the bodies were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. But, instead of being praised as heroes, the SEALs are all facing charges and have hired lawyers, FoxNews.com reported. The three, Petty Officers Matthew McCabe, Jonathan Keefe, and Julio Huertas, got into hot water after Abed, whose military code name was Objective Amber, said his captors had punched him. To prove it, he showed off the bloody lip. A legal source told Fox News that Abed made the complaint when he was in the hands of Iraqi authorities, causing him to be returned to American custody.
An official investigation was launched and led to the three SEALs. McCabe was charged with assault, dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, as well as making a false official statement. Keefe and Huertas were both charged with dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement. Huertas was also charged with impeding an investigation.
All three have refused a non-judicial punishment, called an Admiral's Mast, and have requested courts-martial. (They will be arraigned on 7 December, already a day of infamy. Talk about a farce: had they just killed him they would have been honored with a medal. By socking him in the jaw, they get a court martial.}
Lieutenant Colonel Holly Silkman, spokeswoman for the special operations component of US Central Command, told Fox News the proceedings are scheduled for January.
Two officers and an enlisted sailor, who haven't been charged, have been identified as witnesses in the case. One of them gave a handwritten statement to investigators, which was obtained by Fox News. In it, he described events in the hours after Abed was captured in September and held at the SEAL base at Camp Baharia. The SEAL told investigators he had showered after the mission, gone to the kitchen and then decided to look in on the detainee. "I gave the detainee a glance over and then left," he wrote. "I did not notice anything wrong with the detainee and he appeared in good health." The murder of the Backwater security guards, whose bodies were also burned and dragged through the streets of Fallujah, sparked international outrage, especially after photos of the hanging corpses were beamed around the world.

This is reminiscent of the sad tale of Breaker Morant, the Australian who was convicted of killing Boers in the Boer War, 1899-1902. The Boer War was also a guerilla war.

Rico says this is the official (and surely Photoshop-prone) photo of Erik Prince, the president of Xe (formerly Blackwater):