The president is said to be considering pardons for convicted war criminals as we go into the Memorial Day weekend.
Jamelle Bouie names some of the criminals under consideration in a New York Times article.
Last year, a federal jury in Washington convicted Nicholas Slatten, a former security contractor, of first-degree murder for his role in killing one of 14 Iraqi civilians who died in 2007 in a shooting that also injured more than a dozen others. Matthew Golsteyn, an Army Green Beret, was charged late last year with the murder of an unarmed Afghan man during a 2010 deployment. Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq, was reported to authorities by his own men, who witnessed him “stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death,” “picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost” and “indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire.”
It is the president’s prerogative to grant pardons. What does it say about our country that he picked these men?
It says nothing positive on a day set aside to recognize those who gave their lives for our country.
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