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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 6th,
2009 - Trying to Understand the Mahmudiyah Massacre |
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Trying to Understand the
Mahmudiyah Massacre In 2006, a group of American soldiers brutally raped a young Iraqi
girl and murdered her and her family. Gelf talks to some of the soldiers
convicted of the crimes. By Sarah Bowles & Hadley Robinson Gelf Magazine May 6, 2009 "All my life, I just
hoped for the average American dream," Pfc. Jesse Spielman wrote from
Christian County Jail in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 2006, eight months before
he was sentenced to 110 years in prison. "Get a nice house, good job, loving
wife and settle down and start a family. I thought I started out good. I
graduated when I was 17, got married right out of Basic. I joined [the Army]
mainly to get a jumpstart on life. It has great benefits and we were planning
on starting our family soon. I did it for me and for her, but now it has
ruined our life, well at least mine anyways." Spielman was convicted for
his involvement in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a
14-year-old Iraqi civilian girl, and the murder of Abeer's sister Hadeel, her
father Qassim Hamzeh Rasheed, and her mother Fakhariya Taja Muhassain, in
Mahmudiyah, Iraq, on March 12, 2006. "I could have stopped
it." - Pfc. Jesse Spielman on the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer
Qassim al-Janabi The trial of the alleged
ringleader in the crime, Pfc. Steven Green, began last week in Paducah,
Kentucky. Green is charged on 16 counts, including premeditated murder,
conspiracy, and sexual abuse. He may face the death penalty. The testimony and statements
made by Spielman and three of the other soldiers involved have clarified many
of the details of the killings, but the major questions remain: How did
someone like Spielman end up involved in a quadruple murder of innocent
civilians? What happened to his dream? How did he go from a man planning a
family to a man who helped destroy one? Before the War Spielman, the
then-22-year-old soldier who stood feet away from Abeer and held the door
shut as she was raped, grew up in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. "I've had a full-time
job ever since the week I turned 16, met my wife in October 2001, went steady
until I proposed to her on her birthday, May 4, 2004," Spielman wrote
from jail. Spielman joined the army in
March 2005. "I supported our country and wanted to be patriotic, get
respect and experience new things," Spielman wrote. Spielman was married
in his Army uniform and his bride wore a T-shirt saying, "I love my
soldier." Jeff Cosey, the best man at Spielman's wedding, said he was
"just like one of your friends." Spielman described his family
as supportive. After authorities detained Spielman for his role in the
killings, his grandmother organized a trust to accept donations from friends
and family to pay for a civilian lawyer, according to his letters. She
offered to sell her house to help. Sgt. Paul Cortez, who
sexually assaulted Abeer and held her down while another soldier raped her,
grew up in Barstow, California. Barstow, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, is
midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It is home to the US Army National
Training Center at Ft. Irwin and the Marine Corps Logistics Base. Cortez didn't think much of
his hometown. "Barstow is a real shitty place to grow up," he wrote
in a letter from prison. "There's nothing but drugs and trouble there.
It is the armpit of California." Cortez's mother, Pat Adams,
a recovering methamphetamine addict, calls Barstow the drug capital of
California. "You can go on any corner and buy drugs," she said. Adams, disabled and living
in and out of motel rooms for several years, credits her son with helping her
stop using drugs. She has lived on a disability check since 1975. "If I
don't have that check coming in I'm as bad as a bag lady out on the
streets," Adams said from her motel room soon after her son was accused
of the rape/murder. "I guess I've just learned all these years that this
is how it's going to be. I'm surviving … by a shoestring, but I'm
alright." "He's my baby,"
Adams said about her son. "I love him. I wish I had been rich and I had
been able to send him to college and he would've never gone [to Iraq], but
that's wishing." Cortez has grown up from the
boy his mother shows off in his high-school photograph. The handsome,
dark-featured man is tall and imposing in person. His demeanor is
straightforward and matter of fact. His voice is tough, smooth, and
confident. The day before his arraignment, his voice sounded seasoned,
hardened by his experience, but underneath, desperately sad. Spc. James Barker, who raped
Abeer and held her down while Cortez was on top of her, comes from Fresno,
California. Barker dropped out of high
school and became a father at age 18. He had a second child with his wife whom
he later divorced. He then had a third child with a girlfriend. Barker
enlisted in the Army in November 2002 and went on active duty in March 2003. Before he joined the army,
Barker worked a minimum-wage job as a go-kart attendant at Boomers, an
amusement park. Steve Castro, one of his co-workers at Boomers, has lived in
Fresno his entire life. He said he hardly remembers Barker. "I saw it on
the news," he said about the killings. "There wasn't a lot of talk
here. He didn't work here very long so no one would remember him,
anyway." At his arraignment in
November 2006, in his green dress uniform, the 5'6'' dark-haired Barker
looked afraid. Pfc. Steven Green, who
allegedly raped and killed Abeer and murdered her parents and six-year-old
sister, grew up in Midland, Texas. One of the few publicized
images of Green shows a lean, tough-looking man holding an AK-47 with his
chin up, a cigarette dangling between his lips. Green was convicted of
several minor misdemeanors before joining the US Army at age 19. In 2005,
with recruitment numbers down, the Army was issuing an increasing number of
"moral waivers" enabling potential soldiers with previous criminal
records to enlist. Green was honorably discharged in May 2006 for having a
"personality disorder," after serving 11 months as an infantryman,
according to the affidavit that charged Green with the killings in June 2006. The men who were involved in
the rape/murder did not initially confess to their roles in the events of the
afternoon at the al-Janabi house. When the family was found dead, soldiers in
the same company were sent to investigate and declared the incident a result
of sectarian violence. The soldiers' involvement was not revealed for three
months until June, when Pfc. Justin Watt, who had pieced together what his
fellow platoon members had done based on conversations with some of the men
involved, reported his suspicions to a combat stress team. Because Green was charged
with the rape and murders after he was discharged, he is being tried as a
civilian. Except for Green, none of
the other soldiers had a history of violence or crime. Nothing about their
backgrounds indicated a predisposition for rape or murder. The four men came
to the US Army from different parts of the country. For personal, economic,
and patriotic reasons, they all became members of the 101st Airborne Division
from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, and were sent on a tour of duty to one of the
deadliest regions in Iraq. The Conditions In October 2005, the death
toll of U.S. soldiers in Iraq reached 2,000. It was also the month this group
of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division took over the checkpoint in
Mahmudiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. They were stationed within the area
then known as the "triangle of death" because of the high frequency
of roadside bombs. Army recruitment was down,
President George W. Bush had recently conceded that some intelligence going
into the war was inaccurate, and Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha called
for redeployment of troops, saying in a letter to the President that their
presence in Iraq was "fueling terrorism, not eliminating it." It was Sgt. Cortez's second
tour of duty, which he said was much worse than the previous one. "The
stuff we were asked to do was too much for the amount of people we had,"
Cortez later wrote from prison. "We were way undermanned and no one gave
a damn. We were left to die." The company started
suffering casualties and injuries early in their deployment. According to
Spielman, an improvised explosive device (IED) killed two in his company in
November. Weeks later, on Dec. 10, both his team leader and his squad leader
were shot to death in front of him. "I killed the gunman," Spielman
wrote. "There were four of us there and all of us were directly shot
at." Twelve days later, two more
were killed. "Our platoon leader and another from my squad were blown
into pieces by an IED," Spielman wrote. "I picked up body parts
from both - my platoon leader's lower jaw and my squad member's
torso-up." Cortez described the
difficulty of watching his friends die. "Losing all my friends is the
worst feeling," Cortez wrote. "Think how you would feel if you lost
10 of your close friends that all died in front of you and there was nothing
you could do to help them but talk to them and try to take their mind off the
fact they're going to die. It's a rough thing to deal with. It's not the
stuff that people deal with. It tears a person's mind to shreds." The conditions in Iraq had a
strong effect on Barker, too. "To survive there, I became angry and
mean," he stated during his arraignment. "The mean part of me made
me strong on patrols. It made me brave in fights. I loved my friends, my
fellow soldiers and my leaders, but I began to hate everyone else in
Iraq." Spielman said there were
instances when they didn't have the resources required. "The entire
deployment we usually had between two and four people there at once,"
Spielman wrote. "It wasn't a steady position, see, we didn't have a
building, beds, positions and [we had] only one humvee." Faced with death daily,
Cortez didn't feel the Army supported soldiers seeking help. "When you
want to get help through combat stress, you are looked at like a piece of
shit and they talk to you like you're a bad person because you can't deal
with it," Cortez wrote. The Associated Press
reported that an Army combat stress team diagnosed Green as a homicidal
threat three months before the killings, but he remained on active duty. At
his second examination eight days after the murder and rape (but well before
the crimes were discovered), he was diagnosed with the antisocial personality
disorder that eventually led to his discharge. The Crime But on March 12, 2006, Green
was still on active duty. During four hours off, he, Spielman, Cortez, and
Barker were playing cards and drinking illegally-purchased Iraqi whiskey in a
traffic-control-point room. According to Barker's testimony, Green proposed
going to the nearby home of Abeer, raping her, and murdering her family.
(Some of the soldiers had previously seen her pass through the checkpoint and
had been to her family's home.) "At a couple points I
told him he was crazy," Barker said, but he added that the soldiers
hardly discussed it further. A short while later, though, they changed into
black, Army-issued clothing. "It was a combination
of [Green's] and Barker's [idea]," Cortez said. "Spielman and I
were just stupid and went along with it - just said ok." At no point in his testimony
did Barker describe any of the soldiers objecting to the idea or
rationalizing why it was OK. Two other soldiers, Pfc. Brian Howard, who stood
watch outside, and Sgt. Anthony Yribe, who apparently didn't participate at
all, were aware of the plan to go to the al-Janabi home. According to Cortez
and Barker, not one of them asked questions or tried to stop it. When questioned by military
judge Lt. Col. Richard Anderson about the soldiers' intent, Barker replied,
"to rape and kill, your honor." According to Barker, when
the soldiers arrived at the al-Janabi home, Green forced Abeer's father,
mother, and six-year-old sister at gunpoint into a different room. Spielman
held the door shut, while Barker and Cortez held Abeer down and raped her. Barker described the rape in
detail at his arraignment. "My knees were on her hands, holding her arms
down," Barker said. "She was struggling, trying to close her legs,
crying, screaming, yelling. Me and Cortez switched places. We heard shots coming
from the room next door." Green allegedly shot and
killed the three family members, came out of the room, raped Abeer, and shot
her in the head. The soldiers attempted to set fire to her body and the
house. At Barker's arraignment, Anderson asked why he did it. "Because I
hated Iraqis," Barker said. "They smile at you, then shoot you in
the face." Cortez expressed similar
sentiments about Iraqis soon after his arrest. "I hate all those
people," he said. "All of them." Barker, Cortez, and Spielman
are now all sentenced and in military prison. The judge sentenced Barker to
life in prison and gave Cortez 100 years. Spielman contested some of his
charges but was found guilty and given 110 years in prison. All three will likely
testify against Green at his trial, but it seems that they don't fault Green
entirely. "I don't really blame anybody," Spielman said in court
before his sentencing. "I could have stopped it. I take responsibility
for my actions." Letters Cortez and Spielman
wrote from prison suggest the violent conditions contributed to their
involvement in the killings. But other soldiers go through similar tragedies,
are put in similar circumstances, and don't rape and murder innocent people.
Other soldiers would have stopped Green. These soldiers didn't. According to Barker's
testimony, it was "more or less a non-verbal agreement." Cortez and
Spielman just said OK. After hardly any discussion, they started changing. It
wasn't the carefully crafted plot of four sociopaths. It didn't seem to have
been planned much at all. At the end of their trials,
the soldiers themselves still didn't know why they did it. "I still don't have an
answer," Cortez said through tears at his trial. "I don't know why.
I wish I hadn't." Barker also shed tears and
didn't offer an excuse at his sentencing. "I do not ask anyone to
forgive me today," Barker said. "I don't know how that would be
possible after what I have done." The Story Behind The Story When the New York Times
reported on the Mahmudiyah rape/murders came out in July 2006, Sarah Bowles
was shocked. She already felt detached from the war and the people who were
fighting it, and this latest event was unimaginable. She had to understand
how a group of American soldiers were capable of raping a 14-year-old girl,
Abeer al-Janabi, and murdering her, her mother and father, and her
six-year-old sister. Abeer was never able to look these men in the face and
ask them why they did it. Sarah felt charged to find the answers on her
behalf. She first found Jesse Spielman on MySpace and communicated with him
for some time before he was no longer allowed access. She then traveled by
car from California to the East Coast, visiting the hometowns of the soldiers
involved in the crime, and of others in their company, as well. She got in
contact with the people who knew these soldiers. She tried to learn about
their backgrounds and who they were. Sarah developed a written correspondence
with both Spielman and Paul Cortez while they were in prison. She later went
to James Barker's court martial and met in person with Cortez. The letters
stopped coming after the soldiers were sentenced. As Steven Green's trial
approached, Sarah knew it was time to finally explore what she had found and
share it. Hadley Robinson, a journalist who had been following her good
friend Sarah's work, joined with her to write the story. Sarah Bowles lives in New
York. Hadley Robinson lives in San Francisco. External link: http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/trying_to_understand_the_mahmudiyah_massacre.php |