Word: lawfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...insights of many other TIME staffers with Viet Nam experience, produced the material for our cover and subsidiary articles. In Nation, Senior Editor Jason McManus assigned the main account of the tragedy to Ed Magnuson, while Peter Stoler and Keith Johnson wrote related stories. Senior Editor Robert Shnayerson and Law Writer Howard Muson dealt with the legal dilemmas involved in bringing the men to trial, and Senior Editor John Elson wrote the Essay on the profound questions of good and evil raised by the tragedy. In addition, Press Writer Ted Bolwell discussed who first broke the story...
WHATEVER its ultimate impact on U.S. policy in Viet Nam, the My Lai massacre will profoundly test an evolving principle of U.S. law-that every wrong should have a remedy in court. How, for example, can the Army try the men (three so far) who openly admit that they killed women and children at My Lai-but who are now civilians...
...world wars changed all that. The Nurnberg Trial of 22 Nazi leaders after World War II revived one of the great tenets of Western thought: that a higher law sometimes requires men to give their primary allegiance to humanity rather than the State. Although the Nazi defendants pleaded "state orders," 19 were convicted and ten were hanged. To skeptics, Nurnberg proved mainly that losing a war had become a crime under international law. Nevertheless, the supremacy of civilized rules of behavior was enunciated in a U.N. report: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government...
...Martial, he is justified in not following an order if "a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal." The trouble is that such echoes of Nürnberg are drowned out by every drill sergeant's most basic lesson-instant obedience. Under military law, in fact, a man who refuses to follow an order is presumed guilty of this offense until he proves that the order was illegal at his subsequent court-martial. Disobedience in combat is even riskier. More than one soldier who has ignored an order in battle has been executed...
...late, however, Washington has come to life with a special Nixonian flavor. Spiro Agnew has become a walking oratorical event, exhaling sulphurous prose on behalf of the Great Silent Majority. Attorney General John Mitchell's dour podsnappery as Southern strategist and antidissenter cheers the forces of law and order and dismays liberals. Mitchell himself has remained as invisible as before. But his wife Martha has emerged as one of the dominant figures on the Washington scene, and her tart tongue has enlivened a lot of cocktail parties (see box, page...