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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 16th,
2008 - In Cold Blood |
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In February, a Georgia soldier was found not guilty of murdering an
Iraqi civilian. But his case raises questions about following illegal orders By Josh Clark & Stephanie Ramage The Sunday Paper March 16, 2008 U.S. Army Specialist
Christopher Shore, a quiet, 25-year-old married father of two from Winder,
Ga., had been living in Iraq for fifteen months when night fell on the
outskirts of the northern city of Kirkuk on June 22, 2007. In the darkness,
he and the rest of his scout platoon stormed what they believed was the safe
house of an insurgent cell responsible for setting a roadside bomb. The
house’s occupants were rounded up and their hands tested for traces of
explosives. Three tested positive. One was taken outside by the platoon’s
commanding officer, Sgt. 1st Class Trey Corrales, who was, according to
reports, keyed up after a friend had been burned alive in an earlier attack. Corrales interrogated the
suspect, but when the Iraqi admitted nothing, the 34-year-old sergeant from
San Antonio, Texas, allegedly tried to force him to hold an AK-47 rifle,
ostensibly to arm him, thus justifying the man’s impending death. The Iraqi
refused to take the gun, his palms turned outward in front of him,
emphatically shaking his head, saying, “No, mister. No, mister. Not me.”
Corrales told the man to run, and when the man turned, Corrales allegedly
shot him several times. According to the Honolulu
Advertiser and the Associated Press, which covered the resulting court-martial
proceedings, there were about 20 scouts at the house during the raid. But
even with so many potential witnesses, the facts become less clear from that
point on. Various published accounts state that the suspected bomb maker lay
bleeding, still alive, and that Corrales called Shore over to where the man
lay on the ground and told him to “finish” the man. Shore, whom fellow
soldiers describe as warm and very funny, raised his rifle and pulled the
trigger, firing twice. A couple of days later,
Shore’s father, Brian, got a call from his son. “He said, ‘Dad, I may end up
in the newspaper, some stuff has happened,’” the senior Shore recalls. Brian Shore wasn’t terribly
shaken by the call. The two always stayed in touch via e-mail or phone, and
Brian is used to his children being in dangerous, and therefore potentially
controversial, situations. Two of Christopher’s brothers serve in the Army
and the Marines, and their father understands that there are things his sons
will see and do that they won’t want to discuss. With Christopher, as with
the others, he has a standing agreement. “If he ever wants to talk
about the military, he can feel free to talk to me about it. But I won’t push
him to talk,” he says. During that first phone call
home after June 23, Christopher didn’t say much, and, true to his word, Brian
didn’t push him for details. “He keeps things to
himself,” Brian says. “He’s always been a private person. He’s a good kid,
but he’s never talked about his personal life.” It became clear just what
the “stuff” Christopher had mentioned actually was when, several days later,
he called his father at 3 a.m. to tell him that he’d been charged with
third-degree murder. His personal life soon
became very public. Corrales was charged with premeditated murder. The
circumstances surrounding the two of them that night in Kirkuk made
international headlines. Reports of the incident stoked an already blazing
forum of public opinion that fed on accounts of abuse of detainees at Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and of Marines murdering civilians in Haditha. The
fact that it was Christopher Shore himself who had reported the incident to superior
officers was lost in the press frenzy as he and Corrales were painted as yet
more examples of a military presence that had gone berserk in the desert - another reason why the U.S. should pull
out of Iraq. Violence, Chance and Reason The picture of an army left
to its own questionable devices is as old as war itself. In his book “On
War,” published posthumously in 1832, the Prussian general and military
theorist Carl von Clausewitz suggested that war is driven by three forces:
first, “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as
a blind natural force”; second, “the play of chance and probability within
which the creative spirit is free to roam”; and third, the “element of
subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason.” The rise of well-organized
armies was supposed to insure that the third would be the dominant force,
putting a rigid hierarchy in place to carry out rational policy, thus
avoiding unnecessary chaos and violence. Ironically, the idea of the American
military as a chain-of-command machine that runs with more precision than any
other in the world has made it increasingly hard for civilians to understand
how something that is purportedly a routine duty can become a horrific
renegade action. For the sake of clarity, it
helps to picture the duty of scouts like Shore and Corrales as a shell game,
with an IED lurking underneath one of the shells. It’s the scouts who
determine whether an average-looking house is actually a stronghold for
insurgents, whether it holds a weapons cache, whether bombs are made within
its walls, whether an insurgent leader calls it home, and whether any number
of other activities that will result in the deaths of Iraqi and American
soldiers are going on there. It’s a lot to figure out just by looking. And
the looking itself sometimes draws fire; after all, if insurgents leave no
survivors from a scout troop, the house’s inhabitants and their activities
remain secret. So the suspected enemy combatant safe house becomes a shell in
the deadly shell game, and Clausewitz’s “play of chance and probability”
weighs in. When scouts don’t find a
combatant safe house or stores of guns and explosives, they’re supposed to
find out just where these kinds of things are. To this end, they must be
adept at field interrogation. And that is where Clausewitz’s “primordial
violence, hatred, and enmity” have the opportunity to subordinate policy,
because the policy surrounding interrogation is a bit iffy. The current U.S. Army Field
Manual that Shore and his brothers in arms were issued strictly forbids any
harsh physical or mental stress inflicted upon detainees in the name of
intelligence gathering. Everyone knows there’s a line that shouldn’t be
crossed, but these days, exactly where it lies is up for periodic debate in
Washington. For example, on March 8,
President George W. Bush vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would
have banned the CIA from using waterboarding - a sort of simulated drowning
performed on some interrogation subjects - and other controversial
interrogation techniques. The legislation was passed a month after CIA
Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress that “there are methods in
CIA’s program that have been briefed to our oversight committees, are fully
consistent with the Geneva Convention and current U.S. law, and are most
certainly not torture.” The use of such methods by
intelligence agencies has been hashed out repeatedly by Congressional
committees since 1996, when the Clinton Administration gave tacit approval to
extraordinary renditions - allowing foreign governments to apply their own
standards of treatment when interrogating terrorism suspects wanted by the
U.S. But there hasn’t been a Rosetta stone on the topic as it relates to the
military, aside from the guidelines of the Geneva Convention, which are
apparently flexible, at least in the eyes of the CIA’s Hayden. The confusion over what
should and should not be allowed in the name of gathering intelligence in a
war zone may help explain the outcry in some quarters over Christopher Shore
spending 120 days in the brig for the events of June 23, 2007. Whose Bullets? In October 2007, during a
preliminary hearing at his home base in Hawaii, Shore told military attorneys
that he had intentionally missed the suspected Iraqi bomb maker with both
shots. What's more, he said, he felt he had no choice but to shoot, in order
to “defuse” the tense situation, because he feared Corrales. This corroborates what other
members of Shore's company have said about Corrales, who’s been portrayed by
Shore’s legal staff as a commanding officer with a hair-trigger temper. Essa
Ahmed, an Iraqi interpreter for the platoon, testified that Shore seemed to
shoot at the man under duress. The interpreter himself was fearful that he,
too, might end up dead while Corrales was calling the shots. The atmosphere around the
barracks that Corrales commanded, according to Shore’s defense attorneys, was
permeated with fear by the time the murder in Kirkuk took place. Already,
Corrales had allegedly jammed his gun down the throat of an Iraqi goat herder
during a prior interrogation, and had pummeled a motorist. He was also said
to have punched an Iraqi woman at the house during the June 22 raid. Shore’s
legal counsel suggests that Shore just happened to be the one who was unlucky
enough to be within Corrales’ reach when things went completely haywire. “I know my son,” says Brian
Shore, who sat just behind his son throughout the court-martial in Hawaii.
“He’s no saint, but he’s not a murderer either.” With the testimony of his
fellow soldiers squarely pointing to Corrales as the truly guilty party,
Shore might have been off the hook, but the evidence didn’t exactly dovetail
with his account. The man had been running away when Corrales allegedly first
shot him, and Shore claims that he then fired twice, at Corrales’ command,
and intentionally missed. However, the medical examiner who conducted the
autopsy of the Iraqi man found that he’d been shot five times, twice in the
face. None of the witnesses could say how many times Corrales had fired, nor
could anyone say for certain that Shore missed the man when he fired. But other testimony,
including Shore’s, said Corrales walked over to the man after Shore’s shots
were fired, and fired on him again himself. Corrales was also alleged to have
staged the scene by placing the AK-47 he’d earlier tried to force the man to
take next to the dead body. Ahmed, the Iraqi interpreter
with Shore’s unit, testified that the man was not only alive but pleaded for
his life after Shore’s shots were fired, saying in Arabic, “Help me, by
Christ’s sake … I am a Christian, too.” These testimonials sparked
two key questions: Whose bullets actually ended the victim’s life? And even
if it were Shore’s bullets that killed the man, should he be culpable for the
consequences of his commanding officer’s orders? "This Is War” Eventually, the Army seemed
to answer the latter question in the negative. The investigators looking into
the June 22 murder grew confident of Shore’s innocence, recommending that the
charges against Shore be reduced dramatically from third-degree murder to
lesser charges, like assault. But the charges were not
reduced. Shore was court-martialed for third-degree murder, ostensibly at the
direction of Maj. Gen. Benjamin “Randy” Mixon, the head of Corrales and
Shore’s division, the 25th Infantry. Georgia State Sen. John
Douglas, who represents the district where Brian Shore lives, became involved
in the case after news of the charges against Christopher Shore became
public. He met with Brian Shore and offered to hold an inquiry into the matter
in the Georgia legislature. He also swung a pair of tickets to the
Georgia-Kentucky game for Christopher Shore when he was home on leave last
fall. Douglas finds himself in a
unique position. Not only is he the Shores’ state senator, he also attended
North Georgia College with Gen. Mixon, the 25th Infantry commander who
refused to allow charges against Shore to be reduced. “He was a very rigid and
straight-laced person,” Douglas says of his fellow North Georgia alumnus.
“There didn’t appear to be any gray area with him.” Nonetheless, Sen. Douglas’
theory about why Shore was court-martialed on charges of third-degree murder
reaches beyond Mixon. “It seems like we’re taking
even the slightest cases and blowing them out of proportion just to satisfy
those opposed to the war and the Iraqi government,” he says. Brian Shore agrees. “I was mad they could do
that to him,” Shore says of the charges against his son. “He didn’t even hit
the man. This is war we’re talking about.” The Wrecking Ball And in war, as Clausewitz
wrote, the forces of violence and chaos are held in check by a chain of
command and a rational policy. The command, however, may have failed to keep
Corrales chained to policy, or even encouraged his brutishness. He was openly
referred to by some soldiers as the “wrecking ball” of Lt. Col. Michael
Browder, who was never charged in relation to the death of the civilian in
Kirkuk, but who has been relieved of his duty as commander of the battalion. Ultimately, the military
jury agreed with the Army investigators’ assessment, and Shore was convicted
on Feb. 20 at Wheeler Army Airfield in Hawaii of the lesser charge of
aggravated assault. The prosecution sought three years in prison and a
dishonorable discharge, but he instead received a written reprimand, a $400
reduction in his monthly pay and four months in the brig. Shore’s fellow platoon
members who are stationed back at the base in Hawaii don’t seem inclined to
forget him. Most have become certified for specialized prisoner escort so
they can transport Shore anytime he leaves the brig, rather than allowing an
MP to do it. Corrales will go on trial
April 22 for premeditated murder, wrongfully soliciting another soldier to
shoot the Iraqi man, and wrongfully impeding the investigation by planting an
AK-47 rifle near the victim. He faces life in prison without parole. Shore, who joined the army
shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, hasn’t changed his plans for a
military career. “He plans on staying in,”
says Brian Shore, adding that he recognizes a change in his son, though he’s
not sure if it developed before or after the deadly incident last summer.
“You can see a bit of difference in him; he’s more mature,” he says. “But
he’s still my son.” External link: http://tinyurl.com/2nyxxl |