it most certainly could and would happen here.
And it has happened before, many times, actually.
The massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee is a great example:
The military hired civilians to bury the dead Lakota after an intervening snowstorm had abated. Arriving at the battleground, the burial party found the deceased frozen in contorted positions by the freezing weather. They were gathered up and placed in a common grave. 146 dead Lakota were found on the field: 84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children. 7 wounded Lakota died in the Pine Ridge hospital of wounds received at Wounded Knee Creek.
Colonel Forsyth was immediately denounced by General Nelson Miles and relieved of command. An exhaustive Army Court of Inquiry convened by Miles criticized Forsyth for his tactical dispositions, but otherwise exonerated him of responsibility. The court of Inquiry, however, while it did include several cases of personal testimony pointing towards misconduct, was itself flawed. It was not conducted as a formal court-martial, and without the legal boundaries of that format, several of the witnesses obviously minimzed their comments and statements to protect themselves or peers. Ultimately the Secretary of War concurred and reinstated Forsyth to command of the 7th. Testimony before the court indicated that for the most part troopers attempted to avoid non-combatant casualties. Nevertheless Miles ignored the results of the Court of Inquiry and continued to criticize Forsyth, whom he believed had deliberately disobeyed orders. The concept of Wounded Knee as a deliberate massacre rather than a tragedy caused by poor decisions stems from Miles.
Public reaction to the battle among Americans was at the time generally favorable. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded for the action. Ironically, a decade later when these (and all MoHs) were reviewed, it was Miles himself who saw that they were retained. Currently, Native Americans are urgently seeking the recall of what they refer to as "Medals of Dis-Honor". Many non-Lakota living near the reservations interpreted the battle as a defeat of a murderous cult, though some confused Ghost Dancers with Native Americans in general. In an editorial in response to the event, a young newspaper editor, L. Frank Baum, later famous as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on January 3, 1891:
"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_MassacreWhat happened at Wounded Knee was not an isolated incident.
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