Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?. The Face of the Executioner.

Earlier this past week I ran this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?: The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

And then the whole week turned to crud and became exceedingly weird, so I was not able to followup as I had intended.  I'm doing so now.

The item linked in above, as people will recall,  dealt with the topic mentioned above.  I noted in that post that:

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?

He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:

The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.

No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

I didn't say a lot more about Loan. Right now, unless you've looked into it, you know about as much about Loan as you do about Lem.

Well, let's correct that.

Loan was about 37 years old at the time the photograph was taken, and the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. He'd live another thirty years after this photo was taken.  He was an ardent Vietnamese nationalist and was noted to not accord Americans any special treatment in the ares he was in charge of.  He openly disagreed with some American backed efforts  including the CIA backed Phoenix Program that sponsored assassinations.  He was a sponsor of hospital construction.  A few weeks after this photograph was taken he was badly wounded in a battle and his life was saved by an Australian journalist.  He lost his leg as a result of his wounds.

He moved to the United States in 1975, after the South fell, and opened a pizza restaurant in a mall.  His identify was later made known and he was harassed to the point where he had to close it. He died of a heart attack in 1991 at age 67.  His wife died a few years later of cancer, also at age 67.

Bad guy, or a guy acting badly in one bad moment?  Or none of the above?

What about these guys:

These are American military policemen and the men on the poles are German commandos who are about to be executed as they infiltrated American lines wearing American uniforms.  Specially chosen for their ability to speak English, they were quite a concern to the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge, but they were largely (or maybe completely) caught and executed.

Now, that execution is completely legal under the law of war, or at least it was at the time.  I wager now that it would be regarded as murderous, but it wasn't at the time.  And because it wasn't at the time, and because of course we won the war, this is never questioned.

How about this.

At one point, during the World War One, John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, authorized officers to shoot men who were fleeing the battlefield.  You don't hear much about this, and I strongly doubt that the license was used while it existed, but it did briefly exist.

That sort of conduct would clearly be illegal, then and now, but there was a time when the use of deadly force in that situation was regarded as legitimate, if not legal.  Pershing apparently believed he had sufficient latitude so as to be able to order it. It was, we might note, fairly common in some armies at that time, if not the US Army.

Changing times?  Different circumstances? Selective blindness?