Wall Street Journal: "Cheney" the Geneva Conventions

I posted yesterday that the WSJ had completely ignored the reality of Fallujah in its editorial pages by leaving out any account of the Marine(s) shooting unarmed, wounded "insurgents" inside a mosque. Well, they finally got around to talking about that incident in an editorial today.

If you can believe these idiots, here is the first paragraph (subscription):

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?

Despite saying later that we let most of the insurgents get away for "humanitarian purposes," Fallujah was still, apparently, "one of the world's worst terror dens." And this somehow absolves our soldiers of all duties to obey the laws of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and of the United States. Both of which require soldiers to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?

Ignore the snide remark that makes it seem that only folks sitting on their (expensive)"Manhattan sofa[s]" could be outraged by this behavior. We all have the standing to judge this Marine. He, along with all his superiors - right up the empty flight suit in the Oval Office - work for us. We expect them, regardless of their situations, to obey the laws and standards that make us (made? are we past that?) the beacon of hope and justice in the world.

It is, in the end, The Wall Street Journal, and anyone who supports their view of this event, who have abdicated the moral position that we should proudly occupy, that raises us above those whom we fight - whether or not we ought to be there. This soldier, and any others who broke the Law of Land Warfare and the Geneva Conventions, ought to be judged by all of us. And we should take that responsibility, to ourselves, to our soldiers and to the world, very seriously.

The Wall Street Journal, obviously, does not.