An emotionally mature professional whose sole culpability in a matter was to be too trusting and not savvy enough to think carefully before putting through a call might be upset to have made a mistake.
But even many death penalty states bar the execution of the mentally retarded because they deem it barbaric to impose the ultimate penalty on individuals whose understanding, and thus moral culpability, is extremely limited.
Perhaps that would be true if the threat were past and if the debacle didn't still cry out for clarification and admissions of culpability from the men at whose feet the buck stopped.
You wrote that, "... the true test of the officer, the system and indeed the nation (is): how will you treat those who are helpless before you?" and you go on to make a very clear connection between the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and those at Abu Ghraib as well as the culpability of the president under whose watch these events happened.
He looked for grave harm, clear culpability -- and plaintiffs, often poor ones, whose stories would appeal to a jury.
We had reason, then, to assume that there would not be much more: he had been ill, and depressed; and what is the productive life span of a poet anyway, especially one whose subject, so often, is "the tongue's atrocities", the culpability of words and the responsibility to use them with immense and utmost care, if at all?
Mr. Paskaljevic is also one of the few Serbian filmmakers to acknowledge Serbian culpability during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, and one whose oeuvre creates a continuum between the Yugoslav experience and that of the Serbian Republic.
Today's acknowledgment of Stalin's personal culpability over the Katyn massacre comes amid a cautious thaw between Moscow and Warsaw, whose recent relations have been thorny at best.
The action taken by Otello Lorentini, whose grandson Andrea continues to lead the association for the victims' families, helped establish culpability among those responsible and 14 Liverpool fans were also individually found guilty of involuntary manslaughter following trials in Belgium.
"This was a case where the culpability of the defendant did not have to be proven," said Mr Klarsfeld, whose own father, arrested in in Nice in 1943, was among Brunner's early victims.
