So a Marine Corps jury, after a fair and open trial, unanimously acquits Capt. Richard Ashby, the pilot whose jet accidentally sent 20 skiers in a cable car plummeting fatally to the ground. It was a horrible accident, the jury decided, but it was an accident. Nonetheless, Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema complained during his recent trip to Washington: “We shall say we are satisfied when whoever is responsible for what happened is found guilty and punished.”
D’Alema must have forgotten what was going on in Italy 10 years ago — no doubt jetting off for ideological summits in Beijing and Moscow as the head of the Communist Youth Federation was distracting. Otherwise, he might have remembered that the Italians let Palestinian terrorist Abul Abbas walk away from the Sigonella air base in Sicily after his thugs had quite deliberately murdered Leon Klinghoffer on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Not even a trial: Abbas was allowed to just leave the country, no matter the American warrant for his arrest. Perhaps, thanks to his ideological training, D’Alema simply doesn’t grasp the notion of a trial being conducted according to neutral principles of law.
