Andy: Boy, there are going to be some bread rolls flying across the table at the next Drones Club meeting. Just a few points on your rebuttal.

1. If you are going to describe the statement that “The drug dealer got off scot-free, and furthermore X, Y, Z,” as the “propaganda version,” and if you then concede that the agent did, in fact, get off scot-free, you would be wise to go back and remove the first part in those quotes, the stretch from “the” to “furthermore.”.

2. Since you have not read the court transcripts, where are all your certitudes coming from? I understand your point about the release of transcripts coming within the purview of the court, not the prosecutors. However, I find it hard to believe that if the White House and DoJ wanted those transcripts released, they would not be released; or, that if the WH-DoJ did not want them released, they would be. If for some technical reason the transcripts can’t be released–if they were lost, or incompletely made–then how can appeals proceed? Given the high public profile of this case, and the stakes for the defendants, should not the unavailability of trial transcripts be cause for declaring a mistrial?

3. How does anyone know–how CAN anyone know–that the drug dealer was unarmed? He got away, and had plenty of opportunities to dump a weapon. Do we have any testimony that he normally carried, or did not carry, a gun when engaged in his business? What good reason, or even feeble reason, can you give me for believing Aldrete-Davila to have been unarmed? Should not Law Enforcement officers be given the benefit of the doubt in unknowables like this–a benefit you are very emphatically (based on WHAT?) not giving them? Similarly with other points on which an interpretation favorable to the agents might be made. Their picking up the casings of their bullets, for example. Don’t some LE officers refill their casings? There seem to be a lot of doubts in this case. Where were Compean and Ramos given the benefit of any of those doubts?

4. Like a lot of people steeped in law and legal procedure, you seem not to be able to grasp what this case looks like to that dwindling portion of the U.S. public that has not been to law school. Not to put too fine a point on it, Andy, it looks like a load of nonsense. Very few ordinary citizens, I would guess, believe that these agents did anything egregiously awful, even on the worst possible coloring of their actions. I certainly don’t think so. They shot at a fleeing suspect, then realizing they had violated their rules of engagement, tried to cover up having done so. That’s about the WORST interpretation that can be made. Personally, I’d give ‘em a 90-day suspension without pay. Eleven years? Twelve years? It’s an outrage. This, in a country where you can stomp on a girl’s face, condemning her to a lifetime of reconstructive plastic surgery, and get off with probabtion. The beadle was right.

5. The political angle. When millions of conservatives–key Republican base voters–are seething at the administration’s cloth-eared approach to illegal immigration, the highest-profile case brought by the govt. in this zone is one in which Border Patrol agents are being sent down for a decade each on the testimony of an illegal alien drug smuggler? Hel-lo? Does anyone in the Bush administraion have a goldarned CLUE?