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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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December 29th,
2007 - A Trying Year for Marine Corps News article by North County Times Summary
of the Haditha Massacre |
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A Trying Year for Marine
Corps By Mark Walker North County Times December 29, 2007 Camp Pendleton - On the
legal front, the last 12 months have been a trying time for the Marine Corps. While most troops went about
the business of training and deploying to battlegrounds in Iraq and
Afghanistan or spent months on expeditionary cruises, a series of hearings
and trials involving men accused of committing murder or being derelict in
duty in Iraq dominated much of the news coming out of Camp Pendleton, the
service's premier West Coast base. It was also a year in which
the service cracked down on drill instructors at the Marine Corps Recruit
Depot in San Diego, charging four with abusing enlistees. At year's end, the service
was dealing with yet another high-profile homicide case, this one alleging
that current and former Marines murdered four insurgent captives during a
fight for the city of Fallujah in November 2004. Each case involves
battlefield decisions. The cases have also raised issues surrounding the
rules of engagement, the fog of war and whether anti-war politics in
Washington influenced the decisions that led to criminal charges against the
troops. Taken together, the cases
caused some to question whether the Corps was somehow losing its grip on its
creed of honor. Not so, say Marine
commanders, who nonetheless were ordered by Commandant Gen. James Conway to
conduct a unit-by-unit refresher in the laws of war. Gary Solis, a military law
professor at Georgetown University and a recognized scholar on the subject,
said in an interview that he does not believe the Marine Corps has lost its
way. But he and others said they do worry about the impact the prosecutions
may be having on troops in the field. "The prosecutorial
focus has been centered on the Marine Corps, but that does not suggest it is
out of control or has more lawbreakers than other branches of the
service," Solis said. "Instead, it reflects a very aggressive
approach the Marine Corps has taken to these kinds of charges. "It does, however, set
a high bar and we have to be careful that the aggressive approach does not
become a case of eating our young." The cases The three cases generating
the most notoriety involved incidents that took place in Iraq's dangerous
Anbar province. One case stemmed from an
incident in the rural village of Hamdania northwest of Baghdad. Seven Camp
Pendleton Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and related
offenses in the April 2006 kidnapping and killing of a 57-year-old retired
Iraqi policeman. Only one of the men, squad
leader Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III, remains in jail, convicted of murder and
sentenced by a Camp Pendleton military jury to 15 years behind bars. The men he led either served
out the terms they agreed to in plea deals or had their sentences commuted by
then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis. Mattis ordered the men below
Hutchins' rank released after a jury found Cpl. Trent Thomas guilty for his
role in the incident but limited his sentence to time already served. In
releasing the others, Mattis determined that Thomas' sentence created an
unfair disparity for his squad mates still behind bars. Haditha The Haditha case involved
four enlisted men accused of murder in the death of 24 civilians following a
roadside bombing in November 2005. Four officers were charged
with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate a suspected war crime at
Haditha, and three others received career-ending letters of censure from the
secretary of the Navy. At the end of hearings to
determine if the charges against each of those Camp Pendleton-based men
should go to trial, the Marine Corps withdrew murder charges against one
enlisted man and the dereliction charges for two of the officers. Murder
charges against another were withdrawn in exchange for his testimony. One enlisted man, Lance Cpl.
Stephen Tatum, and one officer, the battalion commander at Haditha, Lt. Col.
Jeffrey Chessani, have been ordered to trial for the Nov. 19, 2005, killings
at Haditha. Decisions in the cases of a third officer, 1st Lt. Andrew
Grayson, and the squad leader at Haditha, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, are
pending. Fallujah The Fallujah case has led to
involuntary manslaughter charges against one former Marine based at Camp
Pendleton, Jose Nazario Jr., and murder and dereliction of duty charges
against an active-duty Marine, Sgt. Jermaine Nelson. Attorneys for each man say
they will vigorously contest the accusations and point out there are no
complaining Iraqis, no bodies and no identities of the alleged victims. The
case is instead based on interviews with some of the men in the squad Nazario
led, statements that have not been made public. The Fallujah case will also
test the Military Extraterritorial Judicial Act and the legality of a
civilian prosecutor charging a former serviceman with a crime on a
battlefield. Nazario's attorney, Kevin
McDermott, said in a recent interview that civilians with little or no
military knowledge may now have to decide appropriate battlefield conduct. "It's one thing to have
senior military officers and investigators decide there are issues on a
battlefield that need to be examined," McDermott said. "We could now
be asking civilians to issue their own second-hand opinions." Issues and impacts The Haditha case is the
largest prosecution of a group of U.S. troops since the March 2003 invasion
of Iraq. Coupled with Hamdania and
now Fallujah, the prosecutions are sending a dangerous message, according to
David Brahms, a former Marine Corps general who once was the service's chief
legal officer. "We are creating a
mind-set in our troops and our commanders that has the potential to make them
tentative on the battlefield," said Brahms, who represented a lance
corporal in the Hamdania case. "The next benefit Congress ought to give
is to provide legal insurance to all combat commanders so they can hire
themselves a civilian attorney." At the same time, Brahms
acknowledged that in the Hamdania case, there was reason to believe the
Marines and corpsman went outside the norm and proper behavior when they
seized a man they believed was tied to the insurgency and responsible for
attacks against them. "But are these cases a
permanent blot on the Marine Corps? I don't think so," he said.
"Sometimes people make bad decisions, but that is in part the nature of
the combat environment." In the Haditha case, Lt.
Col. Paul Ware presided over hearings for the three enlisted men charged with
murder; he wrote extensively in his reports about his view of whether
sufficient evidence had been demonstrated to win a conviction. In each case,
he suggested there was ample room for a military jury to acquit the men. Scott Silliman, a Duke
University law professor and another recognized military law expert, told a
conference in October that Ware, who was picked by Lt. Gen. Mattis to hear
the cases, went beyond his responsibilities as a hearing officer in
commenting on the evidence. Instead, Silliman said, Ware's only job was to
determine if there was sufficient evidence to believe a crime may have been
committed. Solis, however, said he
thinks Ware acted appropriately. "He clearly had a
strong belief and expressed it," Solis said of Ware's writings. "It
may be unusual, but it's not wrong." Also wrong, Solis said,
would be if outsiders concluded that the number of men originally charged in
the Haditha matter and since exonerated suggests a predetermined outcome. The
pretrial hearings in the military justice system are in effect mini-trials
where all the prosecution evidence is laid out. If that evidence is lacking,
cases should not move on to trial, he said. "The military system is
separate and distinct from the civilian system," he said. "It
serves different needs and sometimes has different imperatives. Those who
have not sat through these hearings should be wary of criticizing the
outcome." Thad Coakley, a former
Marine Corps attorney who served as a legal officer in Haditha before the
civilian killing incident, said he is sometimes frustrated in watching the
various legal cases unfold at Camp Pendleton. "It's the manner in
which some people are using them to support their political opinions and
talking about the cases in very uneducated ways," he said. In the end, however, Coakley
said the cases do serve as a lesson for present and future Marines. "No one has more of an
interest in keeping their honor clean than the Marine Corps," he said.
"Hopefully, at the end of the entire process, there will be enough facts
for the commonsense American to understand what happened and why and be
satisfied with the outcomes, whatever they may be." The drill instructors Far from the battlefield,
the Marine Corps also sent a strong signal to its cadre of drill instructors,
charging four of them with abusing recruits at the recruit depot in San
Diego. One, Sgt. Jerrod Glass, was
convicted by a military jury of cruelty and mistreatment and sentenced to six
months behind bars and a dishonorable discharge. Two others, Sgts. Robert
Hankins and Brian Wendel, also were charged with assault, maltreatment and
dereliction of duty. Wendel was found guilty of dereliction of duty and
violating an order but acquitted on assault and maltreatment charges.
Hankins' case was pending as of mid-December. Glass recently said that the
training and acts he and his fellow instructors allegedly engaged in were
nothing new. "Recruit training is
not being conducted any differently than it was before," he said in a
recent interview with The Associated Press. "It's not like all of the
sudden this is happening. I think it has to do with the Marine Corps not
wanting to admit to the public what it takes to train somebody ... to go to
war." Glass said his only
motivation to testify was to bring to light to what he said were
long-standing training practices. "I just want the Marine
Corps to say, this is the way we conduct our recruit training so the
individuals, and by individuals I mean drill instructors, aren't singled
out," he said. "I'm not trying to force anything on Hankins and
Wendel. I'm just going in to say what happened." Glass was convicted of,
among other charges, ordering a recruit to jump into a trash can, hitting
others with a flashlight and routinely destroying enlistees' personal
property. In an interview with the
North County Times at his Pentagon office in October, Marine Commandant Gen.
James Conway also said the drill instructor cases were
"unfortunate," but a necessary step. "There's only one way
to teach recruits, and that's to demonstrate the right kind of leadership
skills that you want them to use as a model for the rest of their time as a
Marine." External link: http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/12/30/news/top_stories/19_33_5912_29_07.txt |