I will add only one comment, which, although a truism, is perhaps worth noting, since some, at least, do not seem to comprehend it. To begin with, if we are even minimally serious, we apply to ourselves the standards we rightly apply to others: more precisely, harsher standards, because it is our actions for which we are responsible and that we can modify. In the case of official enemies who have committed crimes, we count not only those who they personally murdered, but those who died as a consequence of their acts.
To move from abstract to concrete, consider the crimes of Communism in the 20th century. These have received enormous publicity, reaching a peak with the publication of the "Black Book" in France and then in the US, with major reviews in early 2000 expressing amazement and horror at the depths to which humans can descend. The centerpiece of the accusation was the Chinese famine of 1958-61, which accounted for 1/3 of the grim total. Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he "intended" that any die at all.
Rather, these crimes were the outcome of institutional and ideological structures of the Maoist system, as discussed in the primary scholarly work on the topic by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his colleague Jean Dreze. These charges are unchallenged, and rightly so. I will not elaborate because I have done so elsewhere in a ZNet commentary in January 2000, reprinted and extended in _Rogue States_.
It is taken for granted, rightly of course, that the crimes are not mitigated by the obvious lack of intent. These are crimes that flow from deep-seated institutional and ideological structures, like the bombing of the Sudan, and innumerable more severe cases. Nor would the worst of the crimes of Communism be mitigated in the slightest if it were discovered that something in Mao's personal life might have had some role in the orders that led to the crime (as is speculated, dubiously in my view, with regard to this minor crime of the Clinton administration).
If anyone were to argue, in extenuation, that Mao did not personally kill or intend to kill the victims, or that the crime that is the centerpiece of the indictment of Communism is mitigated by the fact that it was a failure of information (as Sen and Dreze argue) or had to do with something in Mao's personal life, they would be dismissed with contempt as apologists for atrocities. And if these apologists actually shared the responsibility for the crimes, as Casey does in the present case, the judgment would be far harsher, and rightly.
I will not insult the intelligence of readers by spelling out the conclusions that follow at once for the case at hand.
Be less lazy please.
