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US Soldiers ‘Killed Afghan Civilians for Sport and Collected Fingers as Trophies’
- Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies. -
by Chris McGreal in by the Guardian/UK
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
![[Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. (Photograph: Public Domain)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/Stryker-soldiers-who-alle-004_0.jpg "Stryker-soldiers-who-alle-004.jpg")
Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. (Photograph: Public Domain)According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army’s criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to “toss a grenade at someone and kill them”.
One soldier said he believed Gibbs was “feeling out the platoon”.
Investigators said Gibbs, 25, hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a “kill team”. While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians. According to the charge sheet, the first target was Gul Mudin, who was killed “by means of throwing a fragmentary grenade at him and shooting him with a rifle”, when the patrol entered the village of La Mohammed Kalay in January.
Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field when Mudin emerged and stopped on the other side of a wall from the soldiers. Gibbs allegedly handed Morlock a grenade who armed it and dropped it over the wall next to the Afghan and dived for cover. Holmes, 19, then allegedly fired over the wall.
Later in the day, Morlock is alleged to have told Holmes that the killing was for fun and threatened him if he told anyone.
The second victim, Marach Agha, was shot and killed the following month. Gibbs is alleged to have shot him and placed a Kalashnikov next to the body to justify the killing. In May Mullah Adadhdad was killed after being shot and attacked with a grenade.
The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies.
Five soldiers – Gibbs, Morlock, Holmes, Michael Wagnon and Adam Winfield – are accused of murder and aggravated assault among other charges. All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.
The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.
The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.
Two days later members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of “snitching”, gave him a beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. The soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the “kill team”.
Following the arrest of the original five accused in June, seven other soldiers were charged last month with attempting to cover up the killings and violent assault on the soldier who reported the smoking of hashish. The charges will be considered by a military grand jury later this month which will decide if there is enough evidence for a court martial.
Army investigators say Morlock has admitted his involvement in the killings and given details about the role of others including Gibbs. But his lawyer, Michael Waddington, is seeking to have that confession suppressed because he says his client was interviewed while under the influence of prescription drugs taken for battlefield injuries and that he was also suffering from traumatic brain injury.
“Our position is that his statements were incoherent, and taken while he was under a cocktail of drugs that shouldn’t have been mixed,” Waddington told the Seattle Times.
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Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=48377
Posted by Yanira Farray on Sep 9 2010, With 0 Reads, Filed under AfPak, WarZone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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[...] US Soldiers 'Killed Afghan Civilians for Sport and Collected … [...]
Give some immature boys in a uniform with guns and you have a disaster waiting in the wings. Someone in their US Army chain of command during training never told these jokers about what not to do to innocent unarmed civilians.
Their commanders who allowed this to happen should be on the carpet also.
What once began as mere games created by independent programmers has become a carefully targeted behavioral conditioning device along the lines of TV programming. I’m talking about first-person military shooter games. I believe actions such as these are facilitated thorugh hours of relentless simulated combat intended to dehumanize and condition the subject psyche. It’s a subject not frequently identified and discussed until recently as a certain title which enables a player to act in the role of the Taliban has been attacked by the likes of Fox News and banned from military PXs. If there was no mental conditioning at work in the course of computer gaming there should’t be a problem…
I’m not one to stick up for those bastards as some might do. I hope they string them up on a gallows. They make it look like all troopers do that shit. I’m not saying that it does not go on in other wars, as it does. Hang em IMO SEEVIEW
I believe it was David Grossman, Ph.D who talked about the 1 or 2% of soldiers who are sociopaths with little or no feeling of empathy or compassion. Combine them with the violent video games, some military behavioral manipulation to be stoic and rationalize immoral actions, and you have this incident of murder by a cluster of these sick individuals. As the military uses more and more sophisticated psychological training techniques (ie. Positive Thinking, Rational Emotive thinking, Emotional Resilience, Stoicism,Cognitive Behavioral Processing) to numb out and rationalize wars of choice rather then self-defense, we will have more of these kinds of incidents and those soldiers who are not sociopaths will end up with a hell of a case of PTSD after all their brain waves have been scrambled. This scrambling of their brains to be able to kill with rationalizations is being promoted and taught by prestigious Psychologists and others with money from the Pentagon to their Universities and Teaching Hospitals. Anyway enough here for you to look further into so at least one knows what is happening to be able to know what to support or not.
Life is made to appear cheap, these days, with so much seemingly casual killing. Legal associations, for example, on and on.
A civil rights lawyer has been harassed since 2002:
“Lynne Stewart received a 28-month sentence in October 2006. Her lawyers appealed, and she was out on bail until November 17, 2009, when her bail was revoked after the Second Circuit ruled on her and the government’s appeals.”
“In a new and vicious attack on Lynne Stewart, on July 15, Federal District Judge John G. Koeltl re-sentenced the disbarred civil liberties attorney to 10 years in prison on trumped-up charges of assisting terrorism.”
Worse than Germany.
The accused soldiers would not be there except for the perpetual lies about terrorism; the basis for the accusations against Ms. Steward should not exist. Who is to blame, then?
Some stupid red neck believes the lie. So he is innocent, in a way. Judge John G. Koeltl knows better, but sends someone to prison anyway. This is worse than the acts of the accused soldiers.
This is happening all up and down the judiciary. Sickness abounds. Who is guilty of what? Can you punish these solders in this atmosphere? Only as scapegoats.
Charging soldiers with murder in the middle of a war zone is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500!
The Nuremberg Principles, that WE crafted to judge other such soldiers of heinous crimes against humanity, say differently.
Not a war zone. A bully/occupation zone. “War” sells better on TV, like terrorist versus resistance.
Sorry, guy’s…that was an obscure reference to the scene in the movie Apocalypse Now when Capt. Willard was pondering Col. Kurtz’ litany of accomplishments/charges.
The horror…the horror…