Defending an accused war criminal, Rep. Duncan Hunter says he posed with enemy corpses, too

Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter has added to the din of conservative voices that have seized on the notion of pardoning U.S. war criminals with an opinion column on behalf of a Navy SEAL team leader being charged with the murder of an ISIS prisoner. Hunter's column did not mention that Edward Gallagher's fellow SEALs described him as a serial killer, repeatedly targeting and murdering civilians with such chilling consistency that they went so far as to tamper with his sniper rifle in efforts to foil his aim. The Republican congressman omits all of that, instead painting Gallagher's prosecution as the actions of military prosecutors "more obsessed with career advancement" than the law.

Rep. Hunter, a former Marine, continued to defend Gallagher in a weekend town hall, admitting that he himself had, for example, violated strict rules about posing with the corpses of dead fighters during his service. It was a pitch best described as “Who among us has not committed an odd war crime or two?”

“Eddie did one bad thing that I’m guilty of, too—taking a picture of the body and saying something stupid,” Hunter said at the meeting about border issues in the Southern California town of Ramona, according to the Times of San Diego.

It has been clear for a while now that Duncan Hunter is not himself a stickler for abiding by irritating things like laws. Hunter is currently awaiting trial on federal corruption charges after he and his wife were discovered pocketing roughly a quarter million dollars of campaign funds for their own personal use; that he would have played loose with military law during his own service is not particularly surprising.

He remains unapologetic about that corruption, by the way. Instead, he has settled on the defense now being trotted out party-wide by Republicans caught violating U.S. laws, the defense peddled by everyone from an ever-enraged Donald Trump to the smalltime crackpot Dinesh D'Souza: It is all the fault of overzealous prosecutors looking for reasons to jail the movement’s ideological nobility for crimes that are actually No Big Deal, things that everybody does. The real crime is that these laws are being applied to important people—or rather, important conservative people.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2EFvx5z