Mahmoudiyah.
This is coolbert:
"GI gets 100 years for raping Iraqi girl, murders"
"Army sergeant admitted partaking in gang rape of Iraqi girl, family’s killing"
These are the type of headlines nobody likes to see.
Sergeant Paul Cortez has plea bargained, plead guilty, and received a one hundred year sentence for his role in the "Mahmoudiyah incident"!! As part of the bargain [?] will be eligible for parole in ten years!!??
[that is the sort of thing that always amazes me. The man receives a sentence of one hundred years and can BE RELEASED IN TEN!!??]
This was the infamous "incident" where a fourteen year old Iraqi girl was stalked, raped, and then killed, along with three other family members.
Five American soldiers are accused. Cortez is one of them. Has now admitted his guilt.
Private Steven Dale Green is the alleged ringleader and purported instigator.
Before finishing his enlistment, Green was discharged on the grounds of "an antisocial personality disorder".
Green is scheduled to go on trial shortly as a civilian.
Private Green DID have several teenage criminal convictions prior to his enlistment in the Army.
Convictions for:
Underage possession of alcohol.
Possession of marijuana for personal use.
Possession of drug paraphernalia.
It is suggested that Green was the type of person the military does not need. These convictions, misdemeanors, would have ordinarily precluded his enlistment. Due to the pressing need for “bodies”, Green was allowed in. This is seen as an unwarranted relaxation of standards to achieve enlistment “quotas”.
[it used to be the case, during the Cold War era, that persons with FELONY convictions would be given the option by the judge of going to prison or into the military. This was a terrible policy wisely done away with when the Army went all-volunteer. But that was for FELONIES! Green's violations were classified as misdemeanors.]
There are several things about the “Mahmoudiyah incident” that are really troubling.
There was obvious pre-meditation here. According to the allegations, the accused thought this crime out carefully. Wanted to do what they are alleged to have done, thought about it for some time, doing so with what legal circles refer to as malice aforethought!!
Wore masks to conceal their identity, AND LEFT THEIR POSTS TO COMMIT THE CRIME!!!
LEAVING YOUR POST DURING A PERIOD OF COMBAT, IN AN ACTUAL WAR ZONE OF ITSELF CAN BE AN OFFENSE THAT MERITS THE DEATH PENALTY!!!
THIS IS WHAT IS CALLED AN AGGRAVATED OFFENSE, EGREGIOUS!!
This is not some soldiers driven berserk in the “heat of battle” and “going wild”!
This Green is in really BIG TROUBLE. He faces conviction, the real likelihood of receiving the death penalty, AND ACTUALLY BEING EXECUTED!!
[American soldiers stationed in England during World War Two were executed by the U.S. Army for raping Englishwomen. Rape alone, during that period, of itself, warranted the sentence of death. Please recall this from a prior blog entry.]
This alleged crime [Mahmoudiyah incident] is much more serious. Rape, murder of a whole family, pre-meditation, and LEAVING YOUR POST TO DO SO!!
The rules and laws that soldiers must follow, BY NATURE are more stringent and harsh than those found in civilian life. What apparently happened at Mahmoudiyah is an example of why discipline of an exacting nature is NEEDED as a MUST in the military. YOU DO NOT want your soldiers running amok and creating havoc where it is not needed. War is NOT a free-for-all and anarchy.
coolbert.
1 Comments:
It is unclear to me, but it seems that these guys were tried in the US. I would have thought the appropriate place would have been in Iraq itself, especially in respect to the crimes committed. Maybe these guys shouldn't have been in the Army. But I was no angel and military service, in no small part, helped me straighten up and I am sure it has done so for countless others. But that is another blog comment post.
I would have tried these men in Iraq and held the trial in their compound or FOB or whatever, so that they very place they left would be their courtroom.
Now here is where many might take offense at my opinion, but remember, it is just an opinion. Their worst crime was to leave their post. Rape and murder is bad enough, but they left their posts in what by all accounts is a rough part of town (like all of Iraq, it seems), if you get my meaning. They have also helped the insurgency better than any car bomb or sniper shooting a GI. They have given the enemies of this nation a free propaganda tool to use in what has become a very media oriented war. To make it worse, is it propaganda if it is true? (This is better than an IED from Iran for the jihadis. They can use this to attract and motivate more men to fight ours. Who knows if this families relatives will aid the jihadis? I would!).
They could have left their comrades to possible surprise, attack and death (or in my opinion, the worst fate of all, capture by the jihadis). When you join the military you may have to depend on your fellow man for your life and limb, literally. Nobody I know has eyes in the back of their head and we all have to sleep. These guys decided that satisfying their own perverse desires was more important than their fellow soldiers. I cannot accept that, especially in a place were combat is a daily event. When they were convicted, they all should have been shot by a firing squad immediately after the verdict was rendered. That is what their comrades would have gotten if the enemy had captured them (If they were lucky. Most would have their heads sawed off during torture and then put on the internet).
I remember reading somewhere that in the Roman Army, men who had left their post or committed some other crime that endangered their comrades were beaten to death by the rest of the unit with clubs. Seems appropriate here as well.
1:19 PM
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