So much of what we know now and will find out later depends not on justice but on the popularity of the guilty? How long will it take for us to find out what George Bush and Dick Cheney (to take only two malfactors of the past seven years) did during their two terms in office? You have to wonder when you read about the latest discovery in the New York Times.
Sixty-three years ago an Italian prisoner of war, held at a military post on Puget Sound, was murdered -- strangled. Twenty-eight black soldiers were court-martialed and imprisoned for starting the riot that led to his death. The defendants were allowed only two lawyers who were given less than two weeks to prepare for trial. One of the prosecutors was the famous Leon Jaworski who was also special prosecutor during Watergate thirty years later. In this case of the murder of the Italian POW, Jaworski kept exculpatory evidence from the lawyers for the defendants.
This was a case of hidden evidence, prejudice, and injustice. It's now assumed that a white military policemen who behaved suspiciously at the time was the murderer. The conviction of the black soldiers has finally been overturned. Of those who were not acquitted or whose charged were dropped, two are still alive. They and the families of those who have since died will be given compensation. If they apply for it. The military are not making it easy even now.
The ruling does not say that the convicted soldiers were not guilty, but that the process by which they were convicted was unjust.
The ruling notes that white military police were lax in quelling the riot. And it suggests that Mr. Jaworski, who died in 1982, would have been aware of testimony, which he did not share with the defense, that suggested a white military policeman could have been involved in the Olivotto killing.
One black soldier had told an investigator that a white military policeman had threatened to “bust” the skull of an Italian soldier.
In his book, Mr. Hamann said the evidence pointed to a white military policeman who had been present at every critical moment in the days leading up to the lynching, and who discovered Mr. Olivotto’s body. The policeman, who is deceased, was convicted of going absent without leave.
This outcome, slow inadequate though it is, is the result of the work of a single journalist whose book was published in 2005.
The post-Bush/Cheney administration will have an army of forensic researchers trying to put together all the condemning bits and pieces of evidence emerging from eight years of a corrupt administration, an administration whose corruption is so widespread and so deep that we almost don't know how to look for all of it or where. To counter any truth squad, squadrons of aging neo-con think tankers will write books condemning the revelations and questioning the bona fides of the researchers. They'll clap their gums on talk shows in 2025 defending their wisdom and perspicacity in 2003. And most of us will be far too old to demand any rewriting of history or any compensation for a wronged nation. Nothing will be deducted from massive estates left by the perps-in-chief, little will be altered in the displays at the slick presidential library.
That's just the way things go.
