Someone alert the 101st Chairborne!
Now military tribunals are smearing the troops:
Four American soldiers accused of involvement in the slaying of prisoners in Iraq will be brought before a military tribunal in Germany next month, the Army said Thursday.
The enlisted soldiers are scheduled for an Article 32 hearing Aug. 26 to determine if there is enough evidence to court martial them on charges of conspiracy to commit premeditated murder, according to an Army statement.
The four — Staff Sgt. Jess Cunningham, Sgt. Charles Quigley, Spc. Stephen Ribordy and Spc. Belmor Ramos of the Germany-based 172nd Infantry Brigade — have not yet entered pleas.
The charges stem from allegations that they were part of a unit that killed “male detainees of apparent Middle-Eastern descent” between March 10 and April 16, 2007, in and around Baghdad, the statement said.
It is alleged that each soldier “and members of his unit took male detainees to a canal and members of his unit did shoot the male detainees,” according to the charge sheet.
I blame Scott Beauchamp. Oh, wait:
The four soldiers being charged with of conspiring to murder Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad last spring are in the same company as The New Republic’s former man in Iraq, Scott Beauchamp, Media Mob has learned.
Weird. I was told unequivocably that those guys wouldn’t even hurt a dog.
b. hussein canuckistani
After the Beauchamp mess, they had their Bradley dog-crushers taken away and these guys had to find another outlet for their mischief and high spirits! It’s nothing worse than happens at a Yale fraternity. Just ask Ebenezer Bush, the forgotten brother who was buried in a New Haven ditch after failing the Skull and Bones initiation.
HumboldtBlue
We’re in for a 20-year expose on what happened in Iraq the day that statue went down. Wait until vets start retelling the horrors of what they witnessed, participated in or abetted.
If there is a God, Bush and Cheney will spend eternity working in a hospital ward filled with the dismembered bodies of our soldiers and Iraqi civilians, emptying bed pans and changing dressings.
DrDave
There is no God. If there was, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would already be breaking rocks in Leavenworth.
Mike S
More proof that John Cole is an Amurka hating lib. This is happening in Germany where Hitler Obama just gave his speach.
Obviously this is a plot hatched by Obama and his furren friends.
Mike S
That’s weird. I slashed Hitler and that showed up in the preview. But in the comment above it isn’t slashed.
I guess it’s another example of John’s transformation .
capelza
I am waiting with bated breath for Bob Owens to comment on this….
Will there be a sandbox model of a ditch to prove this is simply not possible?
MAX HATS
I came back from a tour in Iraq, and I saw both tremendous obedience to duty from some and some displays of awful discipline and judgment from others (stuff the 101st Chairborne has made clear to me I should never publicly disclose), but just taking detainees and executing them? Absolutely beyond the pale. I don’t want to believe this is true. I’ve seen lots of fuckery, but it was always adolescent stuff. This is a whole other league. I’m floored.
Zifnab
If this doesn’t prove that Democrats are trying to deliberately lose the war on terror, I don’t know what would.
Splitting Image
They wouldn’t.
The problem is that Middle Eastern looking males aren’t dogs.
Punchy
This is devestating news for Democrats…
LongHairedWeirdo
Re: “If there is a god”, Beauchamp’s old unit was involved in something awful enough to lend credence to his stories, and you think there *isn’t* a god (who is, to quote Spider Robinson, an iron)?
RSA
Scott Beauchamp can expect a long prison term for his transparent attempt to frame his fellow soldiers for his own crimes (doubtless carried out in the hope of publication in TNR).
David Hunt
My first impression of this was that if this is your vision of Hell, then you are much too decent a guy to be handing out the punishments there.
More seriously, you’ve described a situation that would be hellish to a decent fellow with a conscience who had done something damning. It says good things about your personal character. However, it is my opinion that the only thing about that scenario that Bush/Cheney would consider a punishment is that they’d be doing actual work for all eternity. If I were coming up with something like an appropriate punishment in the afterlife, it would be something like spending eternity being tortured for information that they didn’t have and knowing that if you could just find the right piece of B.S. to confess to your torturers, that torture would stop for a brief moment…but you’d never be able to find the right crime. Kafka on steroids, basically.
Chuck T
I’m sure MSNBC or FOX is diligently working to find a way to make this into a positive for McCain.
“John McCain, he wouldn’t shoot a detained Iraqi. We think. Obama might, if it would win a political contest.”
Zifnab
The best spin in the world is silence.
sidereal
Well that explains it. The four soldiers are obviously Scott Beauchamp.
Martin
4 out of, what, a quarter million troops? A large population like that allows for a very long tail.
Jose Padilla
“4 out of, what, a quarter million troops? A large population like that allows for a very long tail.”
That’s four in one company. There are about 150 soldiers in a typical Army company. That’s a lot of bad guys in one company.
Foxhunter
Yes, I know this is totally OT, but please go check out SN’s latest take down on the ‘Obama is too skinny to be Prez’ saga. This is truly a classic in research methodology via the use of yahoo message boards. The WSJ has truly been hijacked by the inturds from Faux news.
calipygian
Anybody know anything about that video? My semi-educated guess is Russian draftees getting training in an anti-tank unit.
nightjar
Lush Rimbaugh will summarily christen them phony soldiers whereupon the Dogs of Hell (wingnut bloggers) cwill rip them to shreds with keyboards and optic fiber.
Ninerdave
No, but my favorite part is the guy on the right who nonchalantly walks over to his buddy who just got creamed by the gun.
Martin
Except that stuff like this has a social component to it. As Max noted:
You really only need one sociopath in a company, a commander that doesn’t have his guys on a tight leash, and a few guys willing to go along for the ride (common, both in and out of the military – certainly there would be 4 out of every 150). Again, we’ve seen this script before – Japan, Germany, etc. A tight group going astray will do things that they would never do as individuals. The commander doesn’t need to be complicit, but he does need to give them enough rope to do it. Then you really only need one bad apple in there to make the whole thing go – and there were 140 or so that *didn’t* go down that road – either because they aren’t wired to follow, or because they didn’t know it was going on.
Abu Graib was likely exactly the same. And we know for a fact that those things happened. That individual behavior doesn’t exist in many people in the military (or outside) and there’s no way they all got concentrated in one place. But if one person is predisposed to that behavior and can get away with it, there were invariably be others that go along, out of character, simply because they are followers.
Jon H
I’ll bet all four soldiers get off without even a slap on the wrist.
“Anybody know anything about that video? My semi-educated guess is Russian draftees getting training in an anti-tank unit.”
They seem vaguely Asian.
Dreggas
One day in the future, George Bush has a heart-attack and dies.
He immediately goes to hell, where the devil is waiting for him “I don’t know what to do here,” says the devil. “You are on my list, but I have no room for you.
You definitely have to stay here, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.
I’ve got a couple of folks here who weren’t quite as bad as you. I’ll let one of them go, but you have to take their place. I’ll even let YOU decide who leaves.”
George thought that sounded pretty good, so the devil opened the door to the first room. In it, was Tom DeLay and a large pool of water. He kept diving in, and surfacing, empty handed. Over, and over, and over he dove in and surfaced with nothing. Such was his fate in hell.
“No,” George said. “I don’t think so. I’m not a good swimmer, and I don’t think I could do that all day long.”
The devil led him to the door of the next room. In it was Dick Cheney with a sledgehammer and a room full of rocks. All he did was swing that hammer, time after time after time.
“No, I’ve got this problem with my shoulder. I would be in constant agony if all I could do was break rocks all day,” commented Jesse.
The devil opened a third door. Through it, Geoge saw a naked Man sitting in an open toilet stall with his feet chained to the floor.
George looked at this, somewhat bemused, and finally said, “Yeah, I can handle this, can’t be too bad.”
The devil smiled and said . . . . . . . . .
“OK, send in Larry Craig.”
JWW
Ya Know John,
Even if the are found guilty, that was not close to being funny. Tanker
JWW
Oh John,
You being a Tanker, Roger Waters has a line just for you “The Bravery of Being Out of Range”
Take pride in your accusations.
Tanker
Martin
Most of Russia is in Asia, you know.
Snowwy
That’s a lot of bad guys in one company.
No, it’s not.
The thing is that once the willingness to commit atrocity appears in a unit, there are really only two possibilities:
1. It gets stomped out immediately. Whether by the grunts themselves or their leaders doesn’t much matter.
2. It spreads quickly and corrupts many people in that unit. Those who aren’t willing to actually execute the crimes are silently complicit in the name of unit cohesion.
Take it from an ex-soldier, groupthink is hideously powerful. And a huge part of military life.
JWW
Think John,
Where did your rounds go? Since they were fired mostly at night. What did you hit?
I don’t condone what is stated to have happened, but I think you should give the situation a little time to work itself out.
As a minimum don’t make it a joke for your readers too jump on.
John Cole
JWW- WTF are you rambling about? I haven’t accused these guys of anything. The military has, you jackass.
capelza
JWW…the “joke” is on the wingnuts who spilled a Gulf full of ink decrying Beauchamp for saying bad things about soldiers, because soldiers are ALL angels. Beauchamp just had to have been a liar, because his unit was pure as the driven snow!
You repsonse was to say bad things about a soldier, because you didn’t like what he said. In that quivering lip “you are so mean” accusatory voice.
Btw, has Confederate Yankee addressed this yet?
HumboldtBlue
My guess is that that vid is of Japanese Defense Forces or ROKs.
capelza
HumboldtBlue..
May i ask if you are from Humboldt County, CA?
Jon H
“Most of Russia is in Asia, you know.”
True. I did consider that it might be somewhere in Russia’s far east. But somehow I can’t see that yellow helmet in the Russian military. No this isn’t an Asian=yellow thing, it’s a style/culture thing.
Though perhaps the yellow helmet thing is a standard on military firing ranges? Dunno.
The ‘stripper fail’ video linked in the thumbnail below this video is pretty good too, though I think she’s actually a belly dancer.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Many years from now on some distant day Karl Rove dies and is sent down to Hell. The Devil rubs his claws with glee: “I’ve been waiting for you. Before I take you to your punishment, there’s somebody I’d like you to meet”.
He grabs Rove by the nose and flies through the darkness of the nether pit, eventually coming to rest on the shore of a dark lake. After a few moments Rove’s vision adjusts and he sees a horrible sight. A lake of boiling excrement, at least a mile wide. With a shock, he recognizes George W. Bush, standing 20 yards or so from shore, immersed hip deep in the fetid stew.
“Hey, there turd blossom!” shouts Bush, “What took you so long? Welcome to Club Med!”.
Bush is grinning from ear-to-ear, his famous smirk recognizable even through the murk and fumes.
“..bbbut sir,” stammers Rove, “how can you be still be grinning. What an awful fate! Why are you so happy?” he asks.
Bush grins even wider, and says:
“I’m standing on Dick Cheney’s shoulders”.
Jim Henley
We appear to be talking about more than four guys doing the massacring: “each soldier and members of his unit.” So it’s not four bad apples out of 150; it’s four they’re thinking about charging.
I have to wonder if Beauchamp himself knew or suspected the murders and chose to write about the lesser atrocities as preliminary processing. He might have been working his way up to confronting the fact of massacre, in his own conscience at least. Or maybe it was during the Beauchamp “investigation” that the massacre allegations came to light.
RSA
I’ll just skip to the punchline of one: “All right, everyone, coffee break’s over! Back on your heads!”
TenguPhule
There’s your problem right there.
TenguPhule
The Grand Panjandrum
That is how it begins. Junior and mid level NCOs, young Officers willing to instigate war crimes and you have a festering cauldron of poison waiting for very bad things to happen. The other unit members were watching the example set by their immediate leadership. BANG! Some of the other kids are going to be swayed and you have a deadly serious problem. Only young men (and women) with the strongest of moral fiber will not participate in, and speak out against to prevent these sorts of crimes. This is the failure of leadership at the small unit level.
Most officers NCOs are fine people. But it only takes one or two to infest an entire company or platoon size unit with a mindset that allows some very bad things to happen.
It really is a goddamned shame. Millions of men and women serve honorably but that service is tarnished by a few rotten motherfuckers who should be hanged.
John Cole
Woah, woah, woah. Let’s slow shit down here.
These guys, as it is right now, are not guilty of anything. They are accused of something, and it is going through the process as laid out to determine whether or not they are guilt.
As irritating as it is to listen to the wingnuts on the right exonerate folks of everything without knowing the facts, folks on the left being willing to assume guilt before the facts are laid out might be more so.
The Other Steve
HAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!!!
HumboldtBlue
May i ask if you are from Humboldt County, CA?
I am.
Tsulagi
Might? But yeah, I’d go with that.
JWW
John,
It was your opening blog comments. You mock. The slime that makes up your primary readers look at these comments as ammo to justify anything that will serve as their picture of an “Unjust” war. You feed the fire for personal gain.