Airmen shot down, families sue?
The purpose of the lawyers involved in these hearings and probably the hearings themselves is to hold Britain and its aircraft maintenance contractors, if they’ve got ‘em, to the fire on this simple, cheap, but outrageously critical safety issue. Lawyers have gotten a bad rep using judicial process to squeeze money out of BS situations, but it’s really this kind of life and major policy altering issue that we (yeah, I’m a lawyer--a very conservative one) are really trained and supposed to take on. That said, I don’t know if the UK has an equivalent of the Freres doctrine, but in the U.S., the Freres doctrine makes it almost impossible to go after anyone in court for the death or injury of a serviceman. So long as a contractor makes its product within Uncle Sam’s specs, it doesn’t matter how deficient or deadly those specs may be-that contractor is as immune from suit as the U.S., which has sovereign immunity. I don’t want to open our military to any more legalistic second-guessing than it already has, but sometimes I have to wonder if the brass wouldn’t treat our rank and file soldiers with a good deal more respect, if they knew they could be held liable, if they, for instance, sent guys into battle with inadequate body armor or unarmored vehicles, or for that matter a pea-shooter battle rifle, like the M16/4.
Posted by Ay Uaxe
04/01/2008 at 01:21 PM
Ay Uaxe - So if the families showed up without lawyers, the military would just poo-poo the whole thing and shove it under the rug? That does sound like a lack of respect.
I dunno, to me the easy answer would be, “The aircraft didn’t have the foam because for ___________ years we couldn’t get the appropriations to get it done. Remember this the next time you’re downsizing the military budget. *After* the war has started is NOT the time to realize that oops, you really should go ahead and upgrade __________ thousand units of _____________ that is needed on the front lines LAST FREAKIN WEEK. There’s this little concept called time.”
While I understand the lawyers trying to hold the government’s feet to the fire on things like this, it’s not how it ends up working. The people actually responsible, those who pooh-poohed the need for the money and time to do what is necessary, pay NOTHING. They don’t even get voted out of office, hell they don’t even get bad press for their decisions having killed people. Instead, the government has to pay ___________ thousand or million dollars or pounds to the victims. Fine and good in theory, but whose money is it? The taxpayers’ money, not the assets of the legislators who knew they’d never be held accountable for letting their political agendas turn young men and women into splat marks in some foreign land.
