In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman examines why David Petraeus received two years of probation for mishandling classified information while former C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling received three and a half years in prison for a comparable offense, and what that gap reveals about how the justice system treats people in and out of uniform.
Petraeus, Sterling, and Two Very Different Sentences
Ackerman lays out the near-simultaneous sentencing of Petraeus, a celebrated retired general, and Sterling, a relatively obscure former case officer convicted under the Espionage Act, and the arguments that Sterling's legal team made, unsuccessfully, for a comparable punishment.
Haditha and Nisour Square
Ackerman draws a parallel disparity between the light punishment given to the marines involved in the 2005 Haditha killings and the decades-long sentences handed to the Blackwater contractors convicted in the 2007 Nisour Square shooting, noting that only one marine was convicted of any offense.
Uniform, and the Line Between Us and Them
Ackerman argues that these disparities trace back to a kind of pseudo-speciation, in which people still inside the military and national-security establishment are treated as "us," while those who have left it, whether disgraced intelligence officers or private contractors, are more easily treated as outsiders and punished accordingly.
Read the Original Article
This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.