Prosecutor: U.S. Soldier Had Blood of Victims on Him

[longknife]

by Associated Press

(JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash.) — The soldier accused of killing 16 villagers in a nighttime rampage in Afghanistan returned to his base wearing a cape and with the blood of his victims on his rifle, belt, shirt and pants, a military prosecutor said Monday. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was incredulous when fellow U.S. soldiers drew their weapons on him when he returned to Camp Belambay in southern Afghanistan last March, prosecutor Lt. Col. Jay Morse said as a preliminary hearing opened at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. Bales then turned to one sergeant at the scene and said: “Mac, if you rat me out …” Morse said. Bales, 39, has been charged with 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder in one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Nine of the victims were children. The hearing will help determine whether the case goes to a court martial. (MORE: The Sergeant in Question: A Portrait of the Accused Shooter of Kandahar) Bales has not entered a plea. His attorneys have not discussed the evidence in the case, but say Bales has PTSD and suffered a concussive head injury during a prior deployment to Iraq. The father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., sat beside one of his civilian lawyers, Emma Scanlan, in green fatigues as an investigating officer read the charges against Bales and informed him of his rights. Bales said, “Sir, yes, sir,” when asked if he understood them. Morse said Bales seemed utterly normal in the hours before the March 11 killings. With his colleagues, Bales watched the movie “Man on Fire,” a fictional account of a former CIA operative on a revenge rampage. Just before he left the base, Morse said, Bales told a Special Forces soldier that he was unhappy with his family life, and that the troops should have been quicker to retaliate for a roadside bomb attack that claimed one soldier’s leg. “At all times he had a clear understanding of what he was doing and what he had ...@ Prosecutor: U.S. Soldier Had Blood of Victims on Him | TIME.com

 

[waltky]

Afghan Villagers Pleaded to Bales: 'We Are Children'...

Afghan girl, 7, says she hid behind father during massacre, as gunman shot, killed him
Nov 11, 2012 - Soldier's hearing in massacre under way in Washington state

Little Robina took her seat wearing a deep-red head covering and a nervous smile, ready to tell her story. She giggled as any 7-year-old in the spotlight might. But when the questions began, what she recalled seemed impossibly dark: how she hid behind her father when the gunman came to their village that night, how the stranger fired, and how her father died, cursing in pain and anger. "I was standing behind my father," she testified by video feed from Afghanistan Saturday night during a hearing for the soldier accused of killing 16 civilians, including nine children, in Kandahar Province. "He shot my father." One of the bullets struck her in the leg, but she didn't realize it right away.

Her testimony came on the second overnight session of the preliminary hearing for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who prosecutors say slipped away from his base to attack two villages. The slayings drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes. The stories recounted by the villagers have been harrowing. They described torched bodies, a son finding his wounded father, and boys cowering behind a curtain while others screamed "We are children! We are children!" Bales sat quietly throughout, betraying no reaction to what he heard.

Robina's friend, Zardana, now 8, also testified, but only briefly to describe what the shooter was wearing. Zardana suffered a gunshot wound to the top of her head, and when she arrived at a nearby military base, the doctors focused on treating the other injured victims first. They figured Zardana had no chance of surviving. After two months at a military hospital in Afghanistan and three more at a Navy hospital in San Diego, she can walk and talk again. Before she testified, Zardana sat at the witness table sipping from a pink juice box through a pink straw. A loose head covering and a barrette held her dark brown hair out of her face.

The hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord is meant to help determine whether Bales, 39, will face a court-martial in the deaths. He could face the death penalty if he is convicted. The Ohio native and father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, has not entered a plea and was not expected to testify. His attorneys have not discussed the evidence, but say he has post-traumatic stress disorder and suffered a concussive head injury while serving in Iraq. The Afghan witnesses recounted the villagers who lived in the attacked compounds and listed the names of those killed, to provide a record of the lives lost. The bodies were buried quickly under Islamic custom, and no forensic evidence was available to prove the number of victims.

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[waltky]

Army Seeks Death Penalty for Bales...

Army Seeks Death Penalty in Afghan Massacre
Nov 14, 2012 - But defense cites toxic mix of drugs, alcohol in stressful environment

A military prosecutor on Tuesday said the evidence against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, presented over the last week here in a pretrial inquiry into the killings of 16 Afghan civilians, was so damning that the case should go forward as a capital crime. “Terrible, terrible things happened — that is clear,” said the prosecutor, Maj. Rob Stelle. “The second thing that is clear,” he added, “is that Sergeant Bales did it.”

But a lawyer for Sergeant Bales, Emma Scanlan, making the defense team’s final argument, said the lingering questions about the crime, and especially the defendant’s mental and physical state, were far too great to proceed with anything but caution. “Alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids,” Ms. Scanlan said, citing the prosecution’s own evidence about what Sergeant Bales, an 11-year Army veteran, may have had in his system in the early morning hours of March 11 when two villages in Kandahar Province were attacked. What would a cocktail of substances like that do to a man’s mind, Ms. Scanlan asked the court, in the “kinetic and high-pressure” environment of a combat zone? “We don’t know,” she said.

The Army has charged that Sergeant Bales, 39, who was serving his fourth combat tour, walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush in the villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children. In the decade of military conflict since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 2001, it was the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier, with consequences that rippled through relations between the American and Afghan governments.

The hearings here, called an Article 32 investigation, beyond offering the first open-court airing of the evidence, are also intended to provide a sort of road map for where prosecutors might go from here in seeking a military trial. The investigating officer who presided over the inquiry, Col. Lee Deneke, said on Tuesday that he would have a written opinion by the end of the week. Higher-ups in the Army, in making a final determination, are not bound by the colonel’s findings, however. The military has not executed a service member since 1961.

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[waltky]

Discrepancies in Army's official victim list...

Charges against Bales challenge Army's official victim list
January 18, 2013 — An unredacted list of the charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales reveals discrepancies in the Army's account of how many adults and how many children died during the nighttime massacre in which he is charged.

The Army has maintained, through its public affairs officers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, that Bales killed seven adults and nine children early March 11, 2012. However, the unredacted charges against Bales, which The Associated Press obtained from his lawyer - suggest the total might have been eight adults and eight children.

It isn't clear what caused the discrepancy. Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, an Army spokesman, said Thursday he could not immediately explain it.

The Army has only released charges that black out the names of the victims, identifying them simply as male or female. But during a pretrial hearing in November, officials did provide a list of nine adult victims. The Army said seven of them had been killed and two injured, but didn't indicate which were which.

The unredacted charges show that eight of the names from the list of adults — not seven — were murder victims. The charges offer the first official list of all victims, including children. Many Afghans use only one name.

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[freedombecki]

He had PTSD, and they sent him on a fourth tour? That wasn't very bright.