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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 9th,
2006 - A Soldier’s Shame |
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From Time Magazine July 9, 2006 Family members describe
Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi as tall for her age, skinny, but not
eye-catchingly beautiful. As one of her uncles put it, "She was an
ordinary girl." So perhaps it was sheer proximity that made the
15-year-old so tantalizing. Her house was less than 1,000 ft. from a U.S.
military checkpoint just outside the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah, and soldiers
manning the gate started stopping by just to look at her. Her mother, who
grew concerned enough to make plans for Abeer to move in with a cousin, told
relatives that whenever she caught the Americans ogling her daughter, they
would give her the thumbs-up sign, point to the girl and say, "Very
good, very good." Abeer's brother Mohammed,
13, told TIME he once watched his sister, frozen in fear, as a U.S. soldier
ran his index finger down her cheek. Mohammed has since learned that
soldier's name: Steven Green. Last week Green, 21, a former Army private
first class who was honorably discharged because of a "personality
disorder" a month before the criminal allegations came to light, pleaded
not guilty to charges of raping Abeer and killing her along with her parents
and 7-year-old sister. Five other soldiers have been charged, four of them
for conspiring with Green and one for dereliction of duty for not reporting
the crimes. The grisly March 12 slayings - in which Abeer's skull was smashed
and her legs and torso set on fire - sparked the military's fifth
investigation into U.S. personnel accused of murdering Iraqi civilians. But
unlike the massacre in Haditha, where Marines are suspected of shooting up to
24 innocent people in November following the death of a beloved comrade, the
butchering of Abeer's family does not appear to be the result of vengeance or
confusion. Instead, all signs point to premeditated depravity. According to an affidavit
based on sworn statements from several members of Green's infantry unit,
Green and three other soldiers abandoned the traffic checkpoint they were
manning 20 miles south of Baghdad, in a region littered with roadside bombs,
before heading to Abeer's house. Some of them had been drinking, and all but
one had changed out of their uniforms, allegedly to avoid easy
identification. A fifth soldier, who remained at the checkpoint to monitor
the radio, said that when the men returned in bloodied clothes, each of them
told him not to speak of the incident again. Given that the area was
known to be a terrorist stronghold, many former and active-duty officers are
wondering how such a small convoy of soldiers - a single vehicle's worth - was
left on its own, apparently far from the watchful gaze of a superior officer.
"Where were the older sergeants, and the lieutenants and captain who
should have prevented this crime from happening?" asks Barry McCaffrey,
a retired four-star general. The apparent lack of
supervision makes it harder for military officials to cast this as a
one-time, isolated incident, particularly after an Army general concluded
last week that Marine officers had been negligent in failing to probe the
deaths in Haditha. In a joint statement, the U.S. ambassador and the senior
U.S. commander in Iraq called the soldiers' alleged acts in Mahmudiya
"absolutely inexcusable and unacceptable." Officials say one
purpose of their pledge to vigorously and transparently investigate and
prosecute the crimes is to quell the calls from Iraqis, among them Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to stop granting U.S. troops immunity from local
prosecution, a notion that Pentagon officials consider "a
nonstarter," especially in a country whose legal system is practically
nonexistent. If there was an element of
strategic calculation behind the public remarks of U.S. officials, there was
genuine emotion too. In private meetings with Abeer's relatives, military
officers apologized repeatedly, and a one-star general hugged her two
orphaned brothers. "The general seemed emotionally distressed. He was
not pretending," concluded Mahdi Obeid Saleh, Abeer's cousin, who says
he rushed to the crime scene and doused the flames on her burning body. Both
Saleh and Army investigators initially thought the attack was the work of
insurgents. "This is what happens when you harbor terrorists," a
military translator lectured Saleh on the day of the slayings. It wasn't until some three
months later that officers got wind of a different story. In June, after
insurgents killed a member of Green's troop and kidnapped and beheaded two
others - there's suspicion, but no evidence yet, that this attack was a response
to the rape and killings - another soldier in their infantry unit told Army
combat-stress counselors in Baghdad about the alleged murders in Mahmudiya.
Within 24 hours of the initial report, Army officers turned the case over to
military criminal investigators at Iraq's Camp Slayer. Six days later, the FBI
arrested Green near his grandmother's house in Nebo, N.C., where he was
visiting after attending a troopmate's funeral at Arlington National
Cemetery. The details of Green's
biography contain little to suggest he was destined for trouble but nothing
that indicates he knew how to avoid it either. He was born in Midland, Texas,
and bounced between parents who divorced when he was 4. Green, who was in his
teens when his mother spent six months in jail for drunken driving, dropped
out of school after 10th grade. In February 2005, fresh from a three-day jail
stint for underage possession of alcohol, he enlisted in the Army, and a
month later - during basic training - he was baptized in a makeshift prayer
room in a kitchen at Fort Benning, Ga. In December, after Green had been sent
to Iraq, he was quoted in a newspaper article as saying of a house-to-house
search for insurgents, "It's kind of disappointing that we didn't find
anything." Five months later, Green was
honorably discharged with a "personality disorder." In fiscal 2005,
1,038 soldiers - or 0.21% of those on active duty - were discharged with this
classification, which used to be referred to as Section 8. (Corporal Klinger
was always trying to get one on M*A*S*H.) An Army spokeswoman says such cases
can take weeks or even months to process and require a psychiatric evaluation
followed by an opportunity for the soldier to modify his behavior as well as
the option to file an appeal. The Pentagon won't say how
long it took to process Green's case. But even if his possible instability
helped lead to the atrocity, that doesn't explain why his fellow soldiers
allegedly participated in the incident - including one who reportedly joined
Green in the rape - and helped him cover his tracks. The names of these other
soldiers have yet to be released. Green, meanwhile, is
scheduled to be arraigned next month in Kentucky - home to Fort Campbell,
where he was most recently stationed - and could end up facing the death
penalty. Close relatives won't talk about him. Even distant ones are
reluctant. In tiny Denver City, Texas, where he spent a couple of years with
his mother's ex-husband and which he claimed as his hometown on Army
paperwork, Green's former stepgrandfather thought back about the meals they
had shared. "He always seemed a little bit different," B.J. Carr
said, before his wife interrupted, "We don't know that boy." External link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211562,00.html |