"The history of Russia's military interventions -- be it in Ukraine or Syria, or its military campaign at home in Chechnya -- is tainted with blatant disregard for international humanitarian law," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International's Secretary General.
"The Russian military repeatedly flouted the laws of war by failing to protect civilians and even attacking them directly. Russian forces have launched indiscriminate attacks, used banned weapons and sometimes apparently deliberately targeted civilians and civilian objects -- a war crime."
But the scenes unfolding in places like Bucha suggest an intimate kind of violence...
Intimate shmintimate, it's all the same if you're murdered. Not the moments before you're murdered. Being tortured or raped or being hit unawares by a mortar shell--all the same to you if you had your druthers? But--and that is the qualifier the CNN reporter uses to introduce the difference--it is in the state of mind of the perpetrator that the intimacy of a murder is most important.
My brother-the-klansman chose the U.S. Air Force for his military service during the Vietnam War. Why, I once asked him. "I don't know if I could kill a person face-to-face but dropping bombs on them..."
I spent my career as a homicide lawyer, both prosecuting and defending those accused. All murders are not alike. That's black letter law. A murder that is "heinous, atrocious, or cruel", commonly abbreviated to "HAC" by veterans, is one of the big aggravating factors for the death penalty.
I once made a distinction in a murder case on intimacy grounds. "What bothers me so much about this case?" I asked myself. I've been live and in person on fresh murder scenes where I gently stuck my pinkie finger through the hole in the back of the victim's skull to get a personal idea of the diameter of the wound. Terrible, terrible murder. That gun case didn't bother me as much as this other case, a knife case. I don't remember now the details but I remember it hitting me that a knife is a very inefficient, dangerous to the perpetrator, and "intimate" killing tool. You have to get close to the victim to kill him or her with a knife.
A gun, hell. You can fire off a round lickedy-split from a distance and effect the same result. A sniper. Snipers are on-the-ground bomber pilots to me. Yeah, they see their target, sure, but not up close. It's like a video game. "Another one bites the dust."
"But", if you use a knife though you are almost always going to get HAC. You have to get *right* there. It's intimate. One thrust seldom does it. You have to plunge it in, take it out, plunge it in again. It's an orgy of violence. Think of the LaBianca murders. The female killers were almost orgasmic. One of their knives broke (she got another one). I don't remember how many stab sounds Rosemary LaBianca suffered, 50-some?, but it was overkill. That says a lot about state of mind.
If you rape before murdering, that is as intimate as it gets, right? And you're getting pleasure out of it! Can you imagine? That's the hardest thing for me to conceptualize. I could never be a rapist--I couldn't get it up! If a girl said so much as, "I'm on my period," I was done! "Okay." The guys who rape-murder are obviously turned on by extreme nonconsent.
Two more brief anecdotes from my practice and then I'll wrap up: I had a case where the murderer jacked off on the victim's body after murdering her. (?) (That's how we caught him.) I had another one, a knife case too. The perp murdered three young people in the backseat of a car he was riding in, one a 16 year-old girl. I don't remember if he raped her but I remember--And the lead detective remembers it hoo doggie--that when the guy was confessing all of a sudden he stood up. Big guy too. But my detective friend remained seated and, as he told me, just looked up in amazement as the guy said, "And Brad...I don't know why I raped him." We. Had. Not. Known. He. Had. Raped. Brad. Never entered our minds, actually.
Anyway. So, the distinction that the CNN reporter makes, probably intuitively, is real. The Russians do have a culture of brutality in their military, it goes back further than Chechnya, it goes back to World War II, they will terrorize a population by indiscriminate shelling and bombing, but that still is different from torturing and killing children, raping women, those are intimate and show that you are an anthropoid. Even bound executions, although they show cold, calculated, premeditated ("CCP", another big aggravator), are not as visceral, do not reveal your inhumanity in its fullness, the way that "intimate" killings do.
