Trump’s Behenna Pardon is Proof the Terrorists Won

The US has abandoned all pretense of moral superiority

On Monday, the White House announced that President Trump issued the eighth pardon of his administration to former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna.

Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder in a combat zone for killing Ali Mansur in 2008. Mansur had been questioned about a roadside bombing that killed two members of Behenna’s platoon. Following the questioning, Behenna was ordered to return Mansur to his village in Iraq.

Instead, Behenna drove Mansur to a remote location, stripped him, interrogated him, and shot him.

Behenna was originally sentenced to 25 years in prison, but an appeals court reduced his sentence to 15 years and he was released on parole in 2014. Trump’s pardon will spare Behenna another five years of parole.

While this pardon may seem like an easy political win for Trump, it is actually a hard-earned, long sought after win for jihadists.

By openly condoning the extrajudicial killing of a prisoner of war, the US has abandoned all pretense of moral superiority, and handed jihadists an invaluable recruitment pitch.

Under Trump, we have completed a transformation that began on September 11, 2001.

Our institutional underpinnings already on shaky ground given the undemocratic intervention of five Supreme Court Justices to install the son of the man who helped install them, we succumbed to a nasty case of rally round the flag syndrome following the most deadly, dramatic attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor.

In just under two decades, we have fallen from the dominant world power in a unipolar order to one of many former great powers vying for influence in a multipolar melee. We have done so largely as a result of our increased paranoia, political radicalization, and militarization.

After pumping trillions into unnecessary wars and allowing our military and intelligence apparatus to grow largely unchecked, our middle class is a fragile shell of what it could have been, we are deeper in debt than we’ve ever been, our credit rating has been downgraded, and our democracy is in tatters.

As long as we refuse to hold ourselves accountable to the rules of warfare we helped establish in the Geneva Conventions, as long as we engage in extrajudicial drone strikes around the world, and as long as our President says it’s okay to summarily execute a prisoner of war, the jihadists who carried out the attacks that so terrified us have won.

Not only did we stoop to their level, we have so normalized our belligerence that we barely skipped a beat when Trump announced this pardon. A cynical observer might even suggest that the White House timed this pardon strategically, burying it under a medal of freedom ceremony for Tiger Woods that received far more coverage.

This September, people who have only lived in a post 9/11 United States will turn 18. For me, the day is merely a fuzzy memory of my parents keeping me home from school but not really explaining why.

This paranoid, over-militarized version of the US is all we know. This has gone on so long, and become so normal, that I fear there’s no turning back.