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"Breaker Morant" was first a play, then a movie, and finally a novel ("Breaker") which told a slightly fictionalized account of the judicial murder of two Australian officers serving under British command during the Boer War. Their offense: murdering numbeous Boer prisoners of war and on one occasion a German missionary they assumed (correctly) was spying on their unit's movements.
Their defense: orders and compliance with existing rules of engagement governing their operations, e.g., "We shot them under rule three oh three [.303 - the caliber of the Enfield rifle the British army then employed] - we caught them, and then we shot them under [Morant's voice rises] UNDER RULE THREE OH THREE"
But practices which brought promotions earlier by then, with peace talks going on, brought a court martial and a firing squad.
The Bristish high command's orders for concentration camps, in which many thousands of women and child died of disease, was hailed as a move of strategic genius.
Does any of this sound familiar? Anyone with the slightest interest in irregular warfare KNEW this was going to happen in Iraq - why does the press treat it as something unusual, when it was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. The scapegoating of the enlisted National Guard personnel at Abu Grahib was proof that it was business as usual - the regular officers get promoted, the CIA officers get promoted, and the enlisted (wo)men who can't get out of the way go to jail.
It will go on until the American people realize it will happen inevitably - the "few bad apples" are the ones at the top who started all this and have since denied responsibility.
