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Old Jun 21st, 2006, 06:56 PM        Soldiers face Iraq murder charges
Marines face Iraq murder charges
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5103558.stm?ls

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The US marine corps has charged seven marines and a navy sailor with murder over the death of an Iraqi civilian.

All eight would also face kidnapping and conspiracy charges, a spokesman told reporters at the Californian camp where the defendants were being held.

They are accused of shooting a disabled man in Hamandiya in April, and covering up the circumstances of his death.

It is one in a series of inquiries into the alleged abuse or killing of Iraqis by coalition forces.

Another Pentagon inquiry is looking into an alleged massacre at Haditha last November, in which 24 civilians are thought to have been killed.

Roadside bomb

The Hamandiya investigation has been examining claims a man was deliberately killed on 26 April in the town in central Iraq.

The accused are alleged to have taken the 52-year-old victim from his house, shot him and then left a rifle and shovel by his body to make it appear as if he were an insurgent planting a roadside bomb.

Local Iraqis are said to have told marine leaders about the alleged shooting, which prompted an inquiry.

The accused were taken out of Iraq and held at Camp Pendleton in California.

A military spokesman said all were presumed innocent and it would be up to the authorities to decide if the men would face the death penalty in any future courts martial.

They have been identified as Sgt Lawrence Hutchins, Cpl Trent Thomas, Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Melson Bacos, Lance Cpl Tyler Jackson, Pfc John Jackson, Lance Cpl Jerry Shumate, Lance Cpl Robert Pennington and Cpl Marshall Magincalda.

"The marine corps takes allegations of wrongdoing by its members very seriously and is committed to thoroughly investigating such allegations," spokesman Col Stewart Navarre told reporters.

"The marine corps also prides itself on holding its members accountable for their actions."

More charges

Correspondents say the Hamandiya and Haditha cases have generated a huge amount of unfavourable publicity for the marines and concern within the corps about the conduct of some in Iraq.

Separately, the US military in Iraq announced that murder charges had been filed against a fourth soldier following the shooting of three male Iraqi prisoners near Tikrit in northern Iraq on 9 May.

The announcement came after three soldiers were charged on Monday with premeditated murder in connection with the incident.

Another US inquiry has cleared marines of blame for the deaths of civilians in Ishaqi in March.

Earlier this month the US military announced that US-led troops in Iraq were to undergo 30 days of ethical training in the wake of the alleged massacre in Haditha.



U.S. Charges Soldiers with Murder in Iraq Case
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5496931

Quote:
Three U.S. soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder after being accused of shooting three detainees north of Baghdad on May 9 and then threatening to kill a fellow soldier if he told the truth about the incident.

The three Iraqi prisoners were killed last month near the volatile town of Balad. The Pentagon said the soldiers face charges including "murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, communicating a threat, and obstructing justice."

The names of those charged have not been released, but they are said to include a sergeant and two soldiers, members of the 101st Airborne Division. A defense official said the three are alleged to have shot and killed three Iraqi detainees on May 9. The soldiers said the detainees were running away and were shot, but investigators say their version is false. Other soldiers have come forward and spoken to the investigators.

The case comes as the U.S. military reviews two other incidents of civilian deaths in Iraq. One took place in Haditha, a city northwest of Baghdad, in which 24 civilians were killed by Marine gunfire. While that investigation is continuing, defense lawyers say they've been told by government officials that murder charges are likely.

The other case involves an Iraqi man killed by a Marine squad in Hamdiniyah, just west of the capital. The suspects in that incident include seven Marines and a Navy medic -- some of whom have confessed. They are all now in pre-trial confinement and charges are expected this week or next.
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Old Jun 21st, 2006, 10:46 PM       
"A military spokesman said all were presumed innocent and it would be up to the authorities to decide if the men would face the death penalty in any future courts martial."

Fuck that, HANG THEM NOW!!!
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Old Jun 22nd, 2006, 09:50 AM       
That was a HILARIOUS joke, Kevin.
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Old Jun 22nd, 2006, 09:56 AM       
boohoo, Ziggy the downer.
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 08:57 AM       
Good follow up....

http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-...ricanWay.shtml


The American way of war crimes
June 9, 2006 | Pages 6 and 7

JOE ALLEN is the son and nephew of Marines--his uncle, a veteran of the Vietnam War, died from cancer as a result of his exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange. Joe’s articles on the history of the Vietnam War have appeared in the International Socialist Review. Here, he explains why the massacres of civilians in Iraq are part of a long and bloody record of U.S. war crimes.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ON MAY 24, Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, made a quickly arranged flight to Iraq to deal with the growing political fallout from a series of criminal investigations into the murder of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines.
Hear Joe Allen speak at Socialism 2006, a political conference scheduled for June 22-25 at Columbia Univerisy in New York City. For more information, go to the Socialism 2006 Web site at socialismconference.org.

According to an “amended” copy of his speech that appeared on the Marine Corps Times Web site, Hagee stressed what he called the “core values” of Marines in combat. “We do not employ force just for the sake of employing force,” Hagee said, in his speech titled “On Marine Virtue.”

“We use lethal force only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful...This is the American way of war. We must regulate force and violence, we only damage property that must be damaged, and we protect the non-combatants we find on the battlefield.”

It is, of course, difficult to take Gen. Hagee’s statements seriously given the widespread destruction wreaked on Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation more than three years ago. The “American way of war” has produced, to name a just few highlights: the wholesale destruction of cities like Falluja, the deaths of well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the creation of Shiite deaths squads.

This is much more in line with the definition of Gen. Fred Weyand, one of the architects of the Vietnam War. “The American way of war,” Weyand said, “is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things’--artillery, bombs, massive firepower.”


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

GIVEN THE level of misery and suffering brought to Iraq by the U.S. military, homilies by a commanding Marine general about “respecting human life” and “regulating force and violence” may seems like a macabre stand-up comedy routine.
Yet there is something deeper going on. “The emerging details of the killings [in Haditha] have raised fears,” according to the New York Times, “that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.”

Now, military investigations are clearly revealing the tip of the iceberg of the extent of war crimes committed by the U.S. forces--especially the Marine Corps--in Iraq.

The most important of these investigations so far has focused on the massacre of two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians in the small city of Haditha, west of Baghdad--an atrocity reported in Time magazine in March. The Marines involved in the massacre at Haditha could face capital murder charges under the Uniform Conduct of Military Justice.

A second investigation has opened up into whether the Marines’ superior officers engaged in a cover-up by filing false reports claiming that the civilians died in crossfire or were killed by a makeshift bomb.

The circumstances of the Haditha massacre and the cover-up that followed may remind many of the infamous My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. How the Army handled the case after it became public tells us much about how the Pentagon officialdom deals with war crimes.

In March 1968, members of Charlie Company of the Americal Division entered the village of My Lai and murdered more than 400 elderly men, women and children, including babies, over a period of four hours.

Among the dozens involved in the killings, only one man, Lt. William Calley, was eventually found guilty and sentenced to life at hard labor.

Calley was found to be personally responsible for the murder of 20 people. However, President Nixon ordered him released from the stockade after his guilty verdict. Calley’s sentence was reduced to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army, and he was released from custody (most of the time spent in his apartment on base at Fort Benning) after three years.

The record during the current Iraq war is worse in many ways. Take the case of Army Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, who was found guilty of the “mercy killing” of an Iraqi civilian. “He was sentenced with dismissal from the United States Army...there will be no confinement time,” a military spokesperson said.

In May 2004, when U.S. troops were pursuing suspected militiamen supporting Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr near the Iraqi city of Najaf, Maynulet fired on a car, wounding the driver and a passenger. Maynulet said he then shot the driver, a local garbage collector, dead. His reason? “He was in a state I didn’t think was dignified,” Maynulet said. “I had to put him out of his misery.”

On January 21, 2006, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, a U.S. Army interrogator, was convicted of causing the death of Iraqi Major Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush during a questioning in November 2003. Welshofer killed him by putting a sleeping bag over his head, sitting on his chest and covering his mouth.

A court-martial jury decided that Welshofer was not guilty of murder but negligent homicide. He faces a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

DESPITE HAGEE and other commanders’ claim that these actions are an aberration from the “training” that Marines and Army troops receive, these atrocities are directly attributable to a war for conquest--and the racism that flows from it.
It has long been a recognized military strategy that the most effective way to get soldiers of a conquering army to kill their opponents is to dehumanize those opponents. Racism is the most effective tool to accomplish that.

One Vietnam War veteran said that during basic training, “The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. That’s what we got in practice. Kill, kill, kill.”

William Calley’s initial psychiatric report revealed that he did not feel he was killing human beings at My Lai, but “rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason,” an Army psychiatrist wrote.

Racism against Arabs and Muslims pervades the U.S. military today, despite the hot air about “cultural sensitivity” training for soldier heading to Iraq. “Raghead,” “camel jockeys” and “sand ******s” are just a few of the racist hate spewed at the people of Iraq by American soldiers.

The Marines, with their cult-like worship of death and destruction, always add an extra dose of fanaticism to any situation.

A short time ago, Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, made this clear. “Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know,” Mattis said. “It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”

In the 1930s, retired Marine Gen. Smedley Butler described his activities as a soldier invading one country after another throughout Latin America as being a “high-class muscleman for Wall Street.” Despite what Gen. Hagee may claim, such musclemen are not known for their virtues.
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:00 AM       
damn if these soldiers are facing possible death penalty charges for what they've done, think about what those who were responsible for misleading us into war and covered up these war crimes may be facing if they were ever indicted.
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:06 AM       
YEAH!
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:06 AM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinTheOmnivore
Racism against Arabs and Muslims pervades the U.S. military today, despite the hot air about “cultural sensitivity” training for soldier heading to Iraq. “Raghead,” “camel jockeys” and “sand disreputable persons of African-American descent, whom I think are quite nice” are just a few of the racist hate spewed at the people of Iraq by American soldiers.
I love our filter.

That is a very interesting article. I've sort of wondered whether this rash of charges is just some sort of publicity stunt to bolster the illusion that Americans really believe "no one is above the law" or if it's the result of some hyper sensitive legalist who sees no problem with trying a war crime while the war is still going on...
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:11 AM       
Good point, here's another good one!

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...5&ItemID=10470

Note to Kerry: It's Lie and KILL, Not "Lie and DIE"
by Paul Street
June 23, 2006

Someone should tell United States Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA) that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the rest of the nation’s imperial, right-wing “leadership” are still alive. Kerry seemed unaware of this when he responded Wednesday to the by-now standard Republican charge that he and other Democrats advocate a “cut and run” policy in Iraq. The war party in power, Kerry retorted (in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper), is conducting a policy of “Lie and Die” (CNN, “Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees,” June 21, 2006 at 10 PM ET), the last word referring to the 2500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq.

Kerry is obviously right to accuse Cheney and Bush et al. of mendacity on Mesopotamia. From the start, the monumentally illegal and brazenly imperialist occupation of Iraq has been accompanied by truly remarkable levels of coordinated White House and Pentagon deception. The most relevant Washington war lies include the claims that:

* Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed significant stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that posed a threat to the U.S. and the world

* Saddam was a suicidal madman who would have signed his own death warrant by attacking the U.S. or Israel (or another U.S. client state) with his (fictional)WMD

* Saddam’s regime was linked to 9/11

* A significant coalition of democratic nations and people supported the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq

* Saddam’s regime would have handed off (fictional) WMD to its extremist Islamo-terrorist enemies in al Qaeda

* Saddam’s Iraq was a relevant base of operations for al Qaeda

* The U.S. seeks a genuinely free, independent, and democratic Iraq and has no imperial designs on Iraq’s stupendous, super-strategic oil reserves

* U.S. forces are agents of peace, stability, democracy, and reconstruction in Iraq


But who has died because of these and numerous other related and criminal high-state deceptions, enabled and all-too dutifully disseminated by dominant U.S. war media? Not the Republican “chickenhawk” elite, as Vietnam veterans like Kerry and antiwar Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) know.

Not the centrist elites of the Democratic non-opposition Party (which could produce only 13 Senate votes yesterday in support of Kerry’s proposal to set a July 2007 deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq), who continue to grease the wheels of the rolling imperial slaughterhouse with pathetic babble about the need to maintain U.S. “credibility” (ala Rumsfeld's hero Al Capone) and to prevent Iraq from “sliding into chaos.”

The leading victims, of course, are Iraqis, whose body count runs into the hundreds of thousands when we include people who have died from disease, crime, injury, and unimaginable stress resulting from the war’s devastation of their nation’s fragile economic health and civic and social infrastructure.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been more directly murdered by Empire, their lives ended by American and British bombs, bullets, shells, chemicals, pellets, flashes, percussions, and flames.

In some cases (e.g. Haditha), Iraqi civilians have been executed up close by “liberating” U.S. forces on the ground.


Whatever the precise methods leading to their demise, all of these dead Iraqis were killed by Washington’s criminal occupation, an action enabled by leading U.S. Democrats (Kerry included) and the “liberal” U.S. news and entertainment state.

The American troops charged with directly executing this inherently mass-murderous operation have done so under orders they are conditioned to accept as legitimate through Orwellian brainwashing that instructs them to believe they are “avenging 9/11,” fighting “terrorism,” and “defending America” in Mesopotamia.

The true mass killers are found in Washington and atop the nation’s military-industrial and war media complexes – at the soulless pinnacles of Empire and Inequality, Inc. They stride in expensive suits through the calm, cool, and air-conditioned corridors of power while children weep and soldiers’ lose their limbs in the sweltering bloodbath of “liberated” Iraq. As Bob Dylan put it in 1962, “they fasten the triggers for the others to fire” and “sit back and watch while the death count gets higher. They hide in their mansions, while young people’s blood, flows out of their bodies and gets buried in the mud” (Dylan, "Masters of War"). They are the real butchers of Haditha, Fallujah, and Baghdad – the murderers of Iraq.

The other victims, of course, are the mainly working-class U.S. soldiers sent to kill, maim, and die. Twenty-five hundred of these generally well-intentioned and commonly young, disadvantaged, and poorly educated GIs have died so far. They have been killed by the Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld cabal and its large and bipartisan number of enablers. They died for lies not of their own making.

They commonly enlisted for reasons that included a sincere desire to serve and defend their country, not to be pawns in a petroluem-soaked and imperialist power grab. They were systematically deceived by their superiors, who worked to fill their minds with false and all-too commonly racist notions designed to turn them into killing machines.

The real killers are in Washington. Their victims include 2500 Americans and a much larger number of Iraqis.

It’s good to see public opinion pushing Kerry to greater courage in challenging the jingoistic war party. But genuinely antiwar politicians should acknowledge that the war hawk’s policy is Lie and KILL, not Lie and DIE, and that the main victims of their murderous conduct are Iraqis, not Americans.


Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer, speaker, activist, and historian based in Iowa City, IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005)
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:19 AM       
The parents of the charged and as yet uncharged soldiers in each of these incidents are reporting that the process being used is abusive of the rights afforded them by the USCMJ. They are being threatened, and shackled in some cases (at least were for a while) even in their cells.

That indicates to me that something funny's going on. Why so many cases all at once? Why the aggressive behavior even before charges are filed? Each case seems to hinge on the testimony of Iraqis... How long before our entire military force is crammed into the brig at Camp Pendleton?
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mburbank~ Yes, okay, fine, I do know what you meant, but why is it not possible for you to get through a paragraph without making all the words cry?

How can someone who obviously thinks so much of their ideas have so little respect for expressing them? How can someone who so yearns to be taken seriously make so little effort?!
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KevinTheOmnivore KevinTheOmnivore is offline
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 10:24 AM       
Well deal with it, Preechr. Everybody knows that American troops are guilty of everything they're accused of, and if they get put in shackles, well what about all of the babies and grandparents they've intentionally executed?

Chew on that, jerk.
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Old Jun 23rd, 2006, 04:41 PM       


Kevin you idiot. Everyone knows that a soldier in wartime is INCAPABLE of committing murder. People die in war. It's not a crime. It's just how war is. Quit crying about it you sissy liberal douchbag. War crime indeed! How can it be a crime if it's a war?! That's, like, an oxymaroon.
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