Afghan killings case testing military system

In this court­room sketch from Nov. 5, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, cen­ter, is shown dur­ing a pre­lim­i­nary hear­ing in a mil­i­tary court­room at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Wash­ing­ton state. An Afghan National Army guard who reported see­ing a U.S. sol­dier out­side a remote base the night 16 civil­ians were mas­sa­cred in March said the man did not stop even after being asked three times to do so. The guard, named Nemat­ul­lah, tes­ti­fied by live video from Kan­da­har, Afghanistan, on Fri­day dur­ing an overnight ses­sion for a hear­ing in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. At right is Inves­ti­gat­ing Offi­cer Col. Lee Deneke, and at left is Bales’ attor­ney, Emma Scan­lan. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Lois Silver)

GENE JOHNSON

JULIE WATSON

Asso­ci­ated Press

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — The U.S. mil­i­tary has been crit­i­cized for its spotty record on con­vict­ing troops of killing civil­ians, but a hear­ing against Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales involv­ing a mas­sacre in Afghanistan has shown that it isn’t like most cases.

Gov­ern­ment pros­e­cu­tors have built a strong eye­wit­ness case against the vet­eran sol­dier, with troops recount­ing how they saw Bales return to the base cov­ered in blood. And in unusual tes­ti­mony in a mil­i­tary court, Afghan civil­ians ques­tioned via a video link described the hor­ror of see­ing 16 peo­ple killed, mostly chil­dren, in their villages.

Law experts say the case could test whether the mil­i­tary, aided by tech­nol­ogy, is able to embark on a new era of accountability.

Bales faces 16 counts of pre­med­i­tated mur­der and six counts of attempted mur­der. The pre­lim­i­nary hear­ing, which began Nov. 5 and is sched­uled to end with clos­ing argu­ments Tues­day, will deter­mine whether he faces a court-martial. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The U.S. mil­i­tary system’s record has shown it is slow to con­vict ser­vice mem­bers of alleged war crimes.

A range of fac­tors make pros­e­cut­ing troops for civil­ian deaths in for­eign lands dif­fi­cult, includ­ing gath­er­ing eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony and col­lect­ing evi­dence at a crime scene in the midst of a war.

At Bales’ pre­lim­i­nary hear­ing, the pros­e­cu­tion accom­mo­dated the Afghan wit­nesses, includ­ing chil­dren, by pro­vid­ing the video link and hold­ing the ses­sions at night. The mil­i­tary said it intends to fly the wit­nesses from Afghanistan to Joint Base Lewis-McChord if there is a court martial.

“I think it shows they’re going to pros­e­cute this case no mat­ter what it takes,” said Greg Rinckey, a for­mer Army pros­e­cu­tor from 1999–2004 who is now in pri­vate prac­tice. “This was an atroc­ity. This is not the fog of war. It’s not like we were call­ing in artillery and an artillery shell landed in a village.”

Pros­e­cu­tors say Bales, 39, slipped away from remote Camp Belam­bay to attack two vil­lages early on March 11, killing 16 civil­ians, includ­ing nine chil­dren. 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.

Through a video mon­i­tor in a mil­i­tary court­room near Seat­tle, Bales saw young Afghan girls smile beneath bright head cov­er­ings before they described the blood­bath he’s accused of com­mit­ting. He saw boys fid­get as they remem­bered how they hid behind cur­tains when a gun­man killed peo­ple in their vil­lage and one other.

And he saw dig­ni­fied, thick-bearded men who spoke of unspeak­able car­nage — the piled, burned bod­ies of chil­dren and par­ents alike.

From the other side of that video link, in Afghanistan, one of the men saw some­thing else — signs that jus­tice will be done.

“I saw the per­son who killed my brother sit­ting there, head down with guilt,” Haji Mul­lah Baraan said Mon­day in an inter­view with The Asso­ci­ated Press. “He didn’t look up toward the camera.”

Baraan was one of many Afghan wit­nesses who tes­ti­fied in Bales’ case by live video link over the weekend.

“We got great hope from this and we are sure that we will get jus­tice,” Baraan said.

Through­out his­tory, troops have been accused of heinous crimes involv­ing civil­ians in coun­tries where wars are waged. But rarely have vil­lagers who wit­nessed the hor­ror tes­ti­fied in a U.S. mil­i­tary court — often because of the costs and logis­tics of bring­ing them to the United States.

Vil­lagers may be leery to leave their home­land to go to a for­eign coun­try and con­front mem­bers of one of the might­i­est mil­i­taries in the world. And as for­eign nation­als, they can­not be subpoenaed.

While there have been cases of troops being sen­tenced to life in prison for com­mit­ting atroc­i­ties, the vast major­ity of those con­victed for extra­ju­di­cial killings have been let off with lit­tle to no jail time for crimes that in civil­ian courts could carry hefty sen­tences, legal experts say.

For­mer U.N. Spe­cial Rap­por­teur Philip Alston — who was invited by the United States to exam­ine extra­ju­di­cial killings in Iraq and Afghanistan — pointed out the Jan­u­ary 2006 sen­tenc­ing of Chief War­rant Offi­cer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr.

He was given two months con­fine­ment to his base, a fine of $6,000, and a let­ter of rep­ri­mand after being found guilty of neg­li­gent homi­cide and neg­li­gent dere­lic­tion of duty for the death of an Iraqi gen­eral who had turned him­self in to mil­i­tary authorities.

“Mil­i­tary records released in Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act lit­i­ga­tion make clear that the Welshofer sen­tence is not an anom­aly,” Alston wrote in a 2010 report.

The mil­i­tary hasn’t exe­cuted a ser­vice mem­ber since 1961, when an Army ammu­ni­tion han­dler was hanged for rap­ing an 11-year-old girl in Austria.

Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta has said the death penalty is pos­si­ble if Bales is found guilty.

Afghan wit­nesses recounted the vil­lagers who lived in the attacked com­pounds and listed the names of those killed. The bod­ies were buried quickly under Islamic cus­tom, and no foren­sic evi­dence was avail­able to prove the num­ber of victims.

The wit­nesses included Zardana, 8, who sipped from a pink juice box before she tes­ti­fied. She suf­fered a gun­shot wound to the top of her head, but 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.

None of the Afghan wit­nesses were able to iden­tify Bales as the shooter, but other evi­dence, includ­ing tests of the blood on his clothes, impli­cated him, accord­ing to tes­ti­mony from a DNA expert.

Sev­eral sol­diers tes­ti­fied that Bales returned to the base alone just before dawn the morn­ing of the attacks, cov­ered in blood, and that he made incrim­i­nat­ing state­ments such as, “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Pros­e­cu­tors say he also made a mid-massacre con­fes­sion, return­ing to the base to wake another sol­dier and report his activ­i­ties before head­ing out to the other vil­lage. The sol­dier tes­ti­fied that he didn’t believe Bales and went back to sleep.

Bales, an Ohio native and father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., has not entered a plea and was not expected to tes­tify at the pre­lim­i­nary hear­ing. His attor­neys say he has post-traumatic stress dis­or­der and suf­fered a con­cus­sive head injury while serv­ing in Iraq.

Posted by AP News on Nov 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.