Reply #43: As Randi Rhodes said on her show earlier this week...

[cascadiance]

The big difference is that Nuremberg trials *only* tried those in charge and it was done first before the prison guards, etc. were tried. It was done "top down", so we got the top level responsibility pinned down first, and then were able to tell who had more independent responsibility at lower levels.

With the way we're doing these trials "bottom up", there's no way to tell how much these soldiers were coerced in their behavior through orders given them, or if they were doing it on their own.

We should be reaching up the chain of command first and try to assess who's guilty at the top first (though that usually doesn't happen to the winning army of course). Until we assess top level responsibilities here, we really don't know if we're allowing these guys to "pass the buck" in terms of their direct responsibilities in the abuses, or if we're overdoing it in terms of making them the scapegoat for something that was more a systemic problem created by abuses at a higher level that aren't being addressed.