Eugene Fidell Quotations

Basically, you're not supposed to lay your hands on a recruit. You don't really want to have drill instructors grabbing a recruit by the collar, which is what happened here, and you don't want to have them hitting them with elbows.

I can't recall a four-star general ever being called on as a witness.

It is a fact that having a request for a witness can be a form of leverage; it gives you something that you can negotiate with the other side about. If you don't ask, you're never going to have any leverage.

I think people around the world are going to be scratching their heads at that sentence. The conduct of which this soldier was convicted is highly offensive, and if this is all one gets it's not impunity, but it's getting real close.

It does look like there were some major gaps in the earlier investigations, which were not criminal investigations incidentally.

I think given the personnel turbulence on the Supreme Court right now, as well as the less-than-clear road map the court gave us in 2004, it's a whole new ballgame.

I think many people have come to conclude that the Supreme Court did nobody any favors by failing to move the ball further down the field.

The real question is who is the independent prosecutor who is liberated to pursue these cases. There is no central prosecution office run by commanders. So you don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads.

We will have the equivalent of 'letters de cachet'.

You don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads.

It's to have an exhaustive look at the matter, not only from the standpoint of potentially assigning responsibility but finding out what happened and making recommendations of a systemic nature so that it doesn't happen again.

The administration has shown itself a number of times capable of changing course and speed in response to actual or feared legal developments, be it in the courts or in Congress. This may be another illustration of that tendency.

It's indefensible that something like that happened. And if that change of positions was a function of people changing their stories, then the investigation really has to look into whether false official statements were made, or for that matter, whether there was an obstruction of justice.

It obviously could lead to one of three things. Was there a negligent homicide? Was there a dereliction of duty? Was there a cover-up?

There's this sense that time has no value. I think the government has to explain what its game plan is. The legal system is illusory for people in his position.

This is in itself an important reaffirmation of the rule of law, however it comes out.

How do you get there from here? They haven't persuaded me that this is valid, ... You have to have a disruption of civil authority before the military can perform activities such as surveillance.

General Pace indicated that apparently the earlier investigations had not looked into whether negligent homicide had occurred, and that is exactly the first place that you would look in a case like this. It's quite baffling that it took this long to focus on that question.