Old Hickory's Weblog

The incidents are far from the only ones in which American forces killed Iraqis. But serious criminal charges in such cases have been rare until now. In many earlier cases, the killings have been found to be justifiable, and the soldiers or marines in question have often been handled through administrative or nonjudicial processes.

The last soldier to be executed was John A. Bennett, hanged in 1961 after being convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl. ...

This guy from the Lexington Institute seems to be trying to minimize such crimes:

"This is a war in which soldiers and civilians are constantly mingling, and they often don't understand each other," said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. "The enemy has a conscious strategy of demoralizing U.S. forces by disorienting and confusing them. Against that backdrop, the number of alleged atrocities is quite low compared with other conflicts in the past."

In Vietnam, a much longer conflict, 95 American soldiers and 27 marines were convicted of killing noncombatants. ...

In the heaviest penalty yet issued in the Iraq war, Sgt. Michael P. Williams was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of premeditated murder last year in the killing of two Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The sentence was later reduced to 25 years.

Steve Gilliard (Slow motion collapse 07/09/06) reminds us that these cases are reflections of serious strains being placed on the Army, that's likely to leave long-term organizational damage:

We're watching the Army collapse in front of our faces.  Taking 40 year old grunts, people in Cat IV, people who cannot function in a high stress combat environment and shouldn't be asked to.  Well, this is what happens[.]  Years of combat, untreated PTSD, emotional issues at home caused by deployment.

The whole dirty story will come out, how Rummy ruined the Army out of indifference.  But it may be men like Green [the ex-soldier accused in the rape-murder at Mahmoudiyah] who pay at  the end of a needle[.]

This report, also from Sunday, add some detail to what was widely suspected already in the Mahmoudiyah rape-murder case:  Two dead soldiers, eight more to go, vow avengers of Iraqi girl's rape by Akeel Hussein in Mahmoudiyah and Colin Freeman London Telegraph 07/09/06. 

The American soldiers accused of raping an Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family may have provoked an insurgent revenge plot in which two of their comrades were abducted and beheaded last month, it has been claimed.

Pte Kristian Menchaca, 23, and Pte Thomas Tucker, 25, were snatched from a checkpoint near the town of Yusufiyah on June 16 in what was thought at the time to be random terrorist retaliation for the killing of the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike two days earlier.

Now, however, residents of the neighbouring town of Mahmoudiyah have told The Sunday Telegraph that their kidnap was carried out to avenge the attack on a local girl Abeer Qassim Hamza, 15, and her family. They claim that insurgents have vowed to kidnap and kill another eight American troops to exact a 10-to-one revenge for the rape and murder of the girl. ...

US army officials have already begun a separate inquiry into possible links between the two cases, although they insist at this stage that it is purely "speculation". However, locals in Mahmoudiyah, a Sunni market town in the heart of the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, say relatives of the dead girl's family with contacts to insurgent groups asked them to take a "blood for blood" revenge.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05