Your beliecs have no value. The law is what counts and after investigation by two DOJ's they say no laws were broken, Laws during wartime and peace time can differ, Perhaps that's the source of your confusion.
There is a maxim, "inter armas silent leges." American laws have always bent somewhat when the U.S. was at war. Former Chief Justice Rehnquist was very interested in that subject and wrote quite a bit about it. There are a couple law review articles about it by him that I haven't read, but would like to some day. Interesting stuff.
Because alien war criminals enjoy almost no rights under either our Constitution or the laws of war, they may be subjected to pretty harsh treatment. During the Battle of the Bulge, for example, a number of German saboteurs were captured in U.S. uniform. All the process they got was a few minutes to try to sell their story to the nearest officer that could be hunted up--and when he didn't buy it, they were taken out and shot.
Americans captured British Major John Andre in 1780, behind the American lines and dressed in civilian clothes. In his boot were found documents from Benedict Arnold, then the commander of West Point. The documents, sold by Arnold, would have effectively given the British to keys to the fort. Major Andre was tried by a commission of fourteen of Washington's generals, convicted, and sentenced to death. He pleaded with Washington to be shot as a soldier, but was refused. About ten days after his capture, Andre was hanged for espionage.
Lambden Milligan and four other less notorious "Copperheads," as Confederate sympathizers in the North were called, were arrested in 1864 by the Army in a part of Indiana President Lincoln had placed under military control. They were then convicted by an Army commission of, among other things, plotting to seize weapons and free Confederate prisoners, and sentenced to death. They barely escaped execution, and only when the Supreme Court, soon after the Civil War ended, held that Lincoln had exceeded his authority by subjecting Milligan to martial law. The error, the Court said, was that that had denied him the right to challenge his detention by filing a habeas petition in a regular court.
Now, every self-righteous leftist knows how horribly this evil country has mistreated the poor Muslim shepherd boys its invaders captured overseas, locking them up in filthy dungeons and throwing away the key, for no crime except gathering firewood for their poor families, in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the self-righteous all know, too, how cruelly those guffawing, jackbooted U.S. stormtroopers have tortured these poor Muslims, countless times, often just for the fun of watching the blood spurt and hearing them scream in agony. Of course many have been murdered this way, and the atrocious tortures hushed up.
But as horrific as these American war crimes against innocent Muslims have been, maybe nothing shows what an unjust, wicked country the U.S. has always been better than what it did to one of its own people in 1942. President Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest liberal politician ever, could not wait to have Herbert Haupt killed, and forget that he was an American citizen. He denied Mr. Haupt his day in court and even told his Attorney General he didn't want to hear about any habeas petitions. Poor Herb got nothing but a military commission, which convicted him and sentenced him to death for what the U.S. government called "war crimes."
Mr. Haupt--a U.S. citizen, remember--never got a jury trial. What happened to the Sixth Amendment? He never even got to be indicted by a grand jury for capital crimes. As every good leftist knows, even cops who murder black people get cleared by grand juries! What happened to the Fifth Amendment? As a fig leaf to cover this railroading job, the Supreme Court "ignored" Roosevelt and agreed to hear Haupt's habeas petition--but it conveniently denied all his claims. And then President Roosevelt got his wish--American citizen Haupt, without ever having a trial by a jury of his peers, was strapped into the electric chair one day, and cruelly killed. For all anyone knows, he was an innocent man.
