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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 6th,
2009 - Closing Arguments Set in Ex-Soldier’s Trial News article from the Associated
Press News article from Agence
France Presse |
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Closing Arguments
Set in Ex-Soldier’s Trial From the Associated Press May 6, 2009 Paducah, Ky. - Closing
arguments are set in the trial of an ex-soldier charged with the rape and
murder of an Iraqi teen and the shotgun deaths of her family south of
Baghdad. Jurors are scheduled to hear
summations from prosecutors and defense attorneys Wednesday morning in the
case of former Pfc. Steven Dale Green, then begin deliberations. The defense rested Tuesday
after calling a total of four witnesses. Prosecutors ended their case Monday
after six days of testimony. Green is being tried in
civilian court in western Kentucky because he was discharged from the Army
before charges were brought in the case. The 24-year-old ex-soldier from
Midland, Texas, has pleaded not guilty to charges that could bring him the
death penalty if convicted of the March 12, 2006 attack on 14-year-old Abeer
Qassim al-Janabi and her family. © 2009 The Associated Press External link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6410066.html Trial closes
for US soldier accused of Iraq rape, killings From Agence France Presse May 6, 2009 Paducah, Kentucky - Closing
arguments will be heard Wednesday in the trial of former US soldier Steven
Dale Green, allegedly the ringleader of a gang which raped an Iraqi teenager
and executed her and her family. Defense attorneys rested
their case Tuesday after calling three witnesses who testified about the
stressful conditions soldiers faced in Iraq. Green did not testify during the
trial. Green, 23, could face the
death penalty if convicted of the rape of 14-year old Abeer al-Janabi and the
murders of her family in their home south of Baghdad on March 12, 2006. He is being tried in
civilian court because he had been discharged from the army prior to charges
being filed in the case. Former soldier Chris Barnes
testified that the many deaths of friends and mentors had a devastating
effect on Green and the others involved in the case. "It breaks you
down," he said. "You swear it can't break you down no more. It's
just hopeless." Barnes testified about the
particularly gory deaths of two soldiers who died when hit by an improvised
explosive device and the deaths of two others killed in a firefight. Calling it "an
eye-opener," Barnes said he and other soldiers suddenly realized they
were in a "haven for insurgents." After those deaths, he said
many soldiers would write letters back home to parents and loved ones before
going out into the field to tell them how much they loved them "in case
they didn't make it back." Questioned by the
prosecuting attorney about the horrors he witnessed during the war, Barnes
said he got out of the army on a 60 percent disability for post-traumatic
stress disorder. "It ruined my
life," he said. "You didn't murder any
Iraqi civilians while in Iraq?" the attorney asked him. "No," Barnes
replied. "But there were times that I really felt that I wanted
to." Jurors last week heard the
stories of two US soldiers, former army specialist Paul Cortez and James
Barker, both of whom admitted to going to the al-Janabi family home with
Green. They are serving 100 and 90 year prison sentences, respectively, for
their roles in the brutal attack. The pair said they were in
one room of the home trying to rape Abeer al- Janabi while Green was in the
other room with her six-year-old sister and her mother and father. They said gunshots rang out
and when they went to investigate, they discovered that Green had killed the
three. Cortez testified that Green
proceeded to rape Abeer al-Janabi. He said Green then put a pillow over the
girl's face and shot her three times with an AK-47. Copyright © 2009 AFP. External link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jI43JhQ5vQZtozWiBSMqnzSn1saQ Steven Green
Trial Goes To Jury Deliberation By Gail McGowan Mellor Huffington Post May 6, 2009 As former U.S. Army Private
First Class Steven Dale Green waits at the defendant's table in a Paducah,
Kentucky federal courthouse, on trial for his life, his face is notably
expressionless. He is a slender young man with close-cropped hair, an
aquiline face and a habit of lightly tapping his pen alternately against his
right ear and his mouth. Green spent his 24th
birthday, May 2, 2009, in this room facing 17 counts of gang-rape and
multiple murder, and days have passed with polite, quiet jurors in middle
class clothes sitting in two rows adjacent to him, listening intently to
witnesses or staring attentively into individual computer screens when
visuals appear. On May 5, Green, having never taken the stand, watched the
last defense witnesses testify, leaning forward briefly to put his head on
the table toward the end. Apart from a radio operator who explained
communications acronyms, his visibly traumatized 101st Airborne Division
buddies dominated the witness pool, speaking of months with only four hours
of sleep a night, seeing friends and commanders blown apart and killed, and
expecting to die themselves. As General Ray Odierno noted
in a 60 Minutes tape played by the defense, in 2007 Baghdad and the area to
its southwest would be patrolled by 30,000 U.S. troops; but back in 2006, one
thousand troops were trying to do the same job. The witnesses said that the
family whom Green and the other four soldiers had slaughtered were Iraqi;
that combatants and non-combatanbts were indistingishable; or as one said
with what sounded like bewildered accusation, "they look just like me
and you," they were "all out to get us." The military command does
not buy the "war made me do it" gambit. Four of Green's
co-conspirators have been convicted by military tribunal and put away - for
110 years in one case, and two of the convicted ones were here testifying
against Green. Yet Green - who bragged about his part in the premeditated
gang rape and multiple murders to an Army officer, enlisted men, and a
stateside friend - has pled "not guilty." Unlike the others, Green
is being tried in a civilian court, where jurors might be more sympathetic;
but he could, if he loses, get the death penalty. The crimes in question were
committed in a family home outside the desert hamlet Yusufiyah near the town
al-Malmudiyah southwest of the sprawling city of Baghdad, Iraq. Yet Steve
Green is being tried in Paducah, a subtropical town 7,000 miles away, near
the Airborne's home base of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, U.S.A.. Lush Paducah is in a region
fed by more navigable rivers than any other spot in the world, with a
Lowertown market restoration area, a uranium enrichment plant and a quilt
museum. Yet many people here do not know that Al Jazeera suddenly has a local
press pass, or why it does, or what "that soldier case" is about,
or that the world is watching. For those few local people actively interested
in this, Steve Green is a Rorschach: their opinions serving to underscore the
conflicting perspectives that could decide Green's fate. Overheard sentences
float in from various people. "He's a babyfaced kid; he looks 15!",
"He looks like a velociraptor." "They should remember why he
went there--to serve. Things happen in war," "Death is too good for
him," "He was on Ritalin as a kid. Did you hear that? They ought to
outlaw that stuff." "What he did was a disgrace to this country and
to a proud uniform." Anita Williams, a licensed
counselor who darted in to watch the case, noted Green's lack of affect even
when a horrific photo of the nude savagely raped teen with her head blown
apart was shown. "He did that. One of the others who testified said they
were drinking and popping pills at 9 am., put on ninja masks and suits and
snuck out, cut through fences to 'beat up some Iraqis.' Bottom line he killed
and raped a 14-year-old. He shows no remorse. That's symptomatic of
antisocial personality disorder. Everyone's noticing that there is no family
here to support him. There are a lot of women on the jury and they will feel
sympathetic toward someone that alone but I don't know that that will
outweigh the rest." Clete Libby, studying for a
criminal justice associate's degree, remarks, "The courtroom can hold 45
people not involved in the trial. When I heard about this case, I thought,
'There's no way I'll get in,' but there's no one here. There's an overflow
room downstairs where you can't see but you can pick up audio. I think some
reporters use that so they won't have to stay long. But one of my teachers is
ex-FBI. They were expecting crowds and, because of the death penalty
possibility, protesters. There's nothing." The uniformed men checking
people at the courthouse door indeed look as idle as Maytag repairmen. Most
Paducah folks with whom I talked wondered why the police bothered to block
traffic around the federal courthouse at Broadway and Fifth last Monday.
There were only twelve folks viewing the trial yesterday, five of us from the
media. It's arguably not a lack of public intelligence and curiosity; it's a
failure of local journalism. The Paducah Sun, which is blocks from the
federal courthouse, is not supplying daily or in-depth coverage, and local
broadcast news does not supply enough information on the complex case to fill
a tweat. The report of one anchor was simply, "There were two witnesses
today." There sure were; that was the day that two of Green's
co-conspirators testified for the prosecution. To summarize what has been
established in five separate trials: Fourteen-year-old Abeer
Qassim Hamza al-Janabi's home in Iraq was a sturdy farmhouse full of light in
an isolated area but only a few hundred yards from a U.S. traffic checkpoint
[TCP.] After watching the tall, modestly-dressed girl working in her family's
field, the five U.S. 101st Airborne soldiers became bold enough to barge into
her home, leering at Abeer in front of a family which was helpless to stop
U.S. troops in full gear. Off again to themselves, drinking whiskey which
they would later say they got from the Iraqi Army, the five U.S. soldiers
reasoned that the family would be easy to kill and that nothing more
substantial than her parents stood between them and Abeer. Sex was
incidental; they wanted to hurt Iraqis. All but one of them got out of
uniform, putting on the dark Army "ninja" outfits that the Army had
designed to keep them warm at night. Then they deserted their post,
maneuvering through backyards to burst into the house in black clothes in
full daylight. While Specialist James
Barker pinned a terrified Abeer down, Green shoved her parents and
six-year-old sister Hadeel at gunpoint into a room with him and shut the
door. As the mother Fakhriya Taha Muhasen and the father Qassim Hamza Raheem
huddled in a corner trying to shield Hadeel, they could hear Abeer as
Sargeant Paul Cortez raped her, and Aber could hear her family as Green shot
and killed her parents and little sister with bursts from an AK47. He then
re-entered the main room where she was, threw the AK47 down, raped Abeer, and
standing up from doing it, put a pillow over her face and killed her with
shotgun blasts. The soldiers used kerosene to set the lower part of her dead
body on fire, and after they left, flames caught the house, bringing the
family's relatives who saw the smoke then the bodies. They ran to the U.S.
checkpoint for help, but two of the killers who were among the U.S. troops
responding managed to blame the slaughter on "insurgents." Abeer's two younger
brothers, surviving because they had been at school, came home to find their
house burned, their family dead and blood and brains all over the walls. The
killers meanwhile celebrated with a barbeque. Green bragged to anyone who
would listen about what he had done, including an officer. Yet Green,
unpunished, was honorably discharged with a diagnosis of "antisocial
psychiatric disorder." Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] soon
after the gang rape and murders attacked a Yusufiyah checkpoint, killing one
and kidnapping two members of the 101st Airborne - Kristian Menchaca and
Thomas Lowell Tucker. They had not been involved in nthe crimes. Al-Qaeda
operatives tortured the two captured U.S. soldiers, beheaded them, then while
videotaping drug the bodies through the streets, set them on fire, stomped on
Menchaca's head, displayed Tucker's head like a prize, then kicked it.
Al-Qaida put those videotapes on the web, where they briefly remained. As
grief counselors tended to an Airborne battalion overwhelmed by those losses
on top of so many others, a soldier blurted out details of the deaths of
Abeer, her parents and sister. U.S. Government action was suddenly swift. Four of the soldiers who had
taken part were tried and found guilty by military tribunals. Because he had
been discharged, Green could not be tried in a military court, but the
extremely long arm of the law reached for him anyway. Within days of the
capture of the first four soldiers in Iraq, the Army Criminal Investigation
Division [CID] in Iraq contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]
which developed its own complaint and arrested Green. The Iraqi Government
arrested and beheaded the man who it sad had led the Al Qaeda group in
torturing and killing the two 101st Airborne soldiers. Only after three years of
legal maneuvering however was Green brought to trial. Attracting world
attention since 2006, United States v Steven D. Green is thus a starkly
unique case which reflects widespread problems. It calls into question the
recruitment standards of an overstretched U.S. Army, spotlights the ethnic
hate-crime role of rape and reveals a profound failure of U.S. command responsibility.
Countries from Europe to the Middle East moreover are insisting that the U.S.
live up to the standards that it has long imposed on other nations when it
comes to punishing its war criminals, high and low. The attorneys are summing up
the case Wednesday and will release the jury to deliberations later the same
day. External link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-mcgowan-mellor/steven-green-trial-goes-t_b_197573.html |