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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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April 5th,
2009 - US Soldier Faces Death for Murder and Raping Iraqi Girl |
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US Soldier Faces
Death for Murder and Raping Iraqi Girl From Agence France Presse April 5, 2009 Under the cover of darkness
and warfare, five US soldiers broke into an Iraqi home to rape a young girl,
murder her family and set the house alight to cover their crime. The alleged ringleader - a
soldier discharged for a "personality disorder'' before the slaying was
discovered - faces the death penalty in a trial set to begin with jury
selection Monday. Four other soldiers have
already been sentenced in the March 2006 atrocity and the details which
emerged during their court martials are chilling. The plan was allegedly
devised over whiskey and a game of cards at a traffic check point in
Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. Specialist Steven Green told
his friends he "wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis,'' said
Specialist James Barker, who received a life sentence for his role in the
crime. The soldiers changed into
black silk underwear and masks so they would look like insurgents and headed
for the house of a 14-year-old girl they had seen walking through the
village. They had decided the girl
would make an easy target for their plan to "have sex with an Iraqi
female'' because her father was the only man in the house, said Sergeant Paul
Cortez, who also received a life sentence. Cortez testified that he
raped Abeer Kassem Hamza al-Janabi while Barker pinned the sobbing girl to
the floor. The men switched positions
and then heard about four or five shots from a bedroom where Green had taken
the girl's father, mother and six-year-old sister, Cortez said. Green shot the girl when he
was finished raping her and the soldiers set the home on fire by tossing a
lighter onto a Kerosene-soaked blanket covering her naked body, the other
soldiers said. They then went back to their
checkpoint about 200 meters away and grilled chicken wings. The allegations came to
light a few months later when stress counselors talked to the squad after an
incident in which two soldiers were abducted at a checkpoint and later
brutally murdered. "It's going to be a
difficult case to defend,'' said Darren Wolff, one of Green's court-appointed
defense attorneys. "There's no offer on
the table right now so we have to go forward and attempt to save this guy's
life,'' Wolff said in a telephone interview. "The defense that we're
going to put forward is in essence that there's more to the story than had
been told by the codefendants.'' Green faces 17 criminal
counts - including rape, murder and obstruction of justice - in civilian
court because he was discharged from the army before the allegations came to
light. He was arrested by the FBI
at his grandmother's house in North Carolina and told the agents "You
probably think I'm a monster'' and that "George Bush and Dick Cheney
ought to be the ones that are arrested,'' court records show. Green's lawyers failed to get
the case transferred to a military tribunal where they say he would have been
judged by a jury which understood the situation in Iraq. They also withdrew
plans to mount an insanity defense. While Wolff would not
comment on Green's mental state, he said the army "bears a tremendous amount of
responsibility'' for what happened. "This did not happen in
a vacuum,'' Wolff told AFP. Private Jesse Spielman also
received a life sentence for raping Janabi and participating in the murders
while Private Bryan Howard was sentenced to 27 months in jail for acting as a
lookout. Spielman, Barker and Cortez
will be eligible for parole in ten years under military rules. External link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25292567-2703,00.html |