any names or links in your response. Better get that next straw man up or people will start seeing the BS.

Remember the Michael Jackson trial and the jokes that surrounded that?  Remember JeanBonet?  Remember dozens of other trials?  Remember Vince Foster?  And of course, Bill Clinton and the BJ case?  That's not a liberal or conservative quality.  Liberal demand if anything is for an official presumption of innocence.  

I'm not saying it's in any way right, but this has long been a bad habit.  It's almost a part of the culture.    

The courts themselves make certain pretrial assumptions about innocence or guilt in deciding to set bail or not, doesn't it?

I'll note that war atrocities are an odd and  damaging situation to notice this and demand consistency-- from liberals of all people.  It's a place where demanding silence from liberals would assent to one crime above others.  It seems to me something that conservatives should be concerned about too.

Courts-martial tend to be more B&W than civil juries, because it's like having a jury of all engineers, people who tend to see everything as very clearcut.  

And they usually don't run people up for a court-martial unless the investigative work has been done pretty thoroughly.  

That said, I doubt you'll see premeditated murder convictions.  Just too much trash going on for anything to be clear of reasonable doubts.

any machine or team is a system, and different systems are more or less well adapted to handle different situations.

Marine rifle companies are frighteningly well adapted to coercion.   The problem is that coercion is a solution only as long as you are willing to pay for them to stand there with fixed bayonets; and over the long term, it's a bad solution because it's prohibitively expensive.

War has to come to an end, and that means either (a) you kill of maim your enemies including ALL those who may get mad enough to shoot at you, or (b) you come to some sort of agreement with them - agreement is often helped by the understanding of who is the fuckor, and who is the fuckee; but of course there can be differences of opinion there, and it's damnably expensive to mount out a couple regiments to prove your point, and even more expensive to keep them in fighting trim.   That's the reason a Japan or Germany can be made to understand by destroying their air force or shipping.  But the Zulus don't give a damn, because they are on a different wavelength - you come to them, you fight on their ground, and you have to be ready to do what it takes - and that could mean, kill them all and salt the earth - are you ready to do that?

As most of us learned before we were out of 6th grade, it is incredibly easy to take things apart, or just break them.  It is much more difficult to put them back together.   The job of Marines is to break things - it's very dramatic, but it's only the first 10% of the solution.   Having them hang around and lose 1 man a week does not get us any closer to a solution.  

Politicians are responsible for solutions, but what they're doing here is hoping that we'll muddle through, sort of like a 6th grader who hopes that his sloppy homework will get him a C, and instinctively understanding that it's a balance of whether his teacher really wants to see him next year, or can shuck his irresponsible lazy ass off on the next grade without getting fired.   That would be OK, except that American lives are being wasted, and it's not a glorious sacrifice to the people involved.   It's no more glorious than Dubya puking after a frat party.  Real glorious, conservative chickenhawks.

It's not that there's nobody in the Bush administration (ie the Pentagon) that understands this.   It's that there are hundreds of issues to balance, and the Bushes simply do not put that much weight to the long term feasibility of the plan.  

They just don't worry whether they are putting soldiers into a situation that is no-win, because of lots of reasons - 1st, they don't have a gut understanding of the problems, because they had other priorities, and just never dealt with it.  2nd, they have a fine understanding that it's not so much about managing the nation responsibly, as keeping their party in power; and if they can kepp the debate shallow enough, they have a pretty good chance.   So they just don't pay attention to those people who say, look, if you want us to police Arabs, we'll need twice as many men to keep the locals suppressed, without using gas or nukes on them.

Killing people is easy.   Policing them is not so easy.  Soldiers are not cops, and much less social workers.   Putting them in a situation where the locals are inevitably hostile is telling them to stand in a killing zone.   Let them shoot, there will be Hadithas.  Refuse to let them shoot, there will be Hadithas.   Soldiers are not social workers, period; and sending them to teach democracy is a lose-lose proposition.

(Look at Korea - took us 50 years, and then we were successful ONLY because we could bottle the bad guys on one side of a border.   Even then, it was the Koreans themselves who did it by building Hyundai, etc.   What will happen when we can't bottle up the bad guys?   You get a Vietnam.)

What Republicans refuse to understand is that the math eventually catches up to them - you cannot bullshit Mother Nature for very long.   And of course the RNC knows this well enough, and they-re in it for one reason only, and that is the propagation of their own power, at the expense of everybody else, including all the 17 year olds who think they want to be all they can be.