Rape, killings described in accused soldier's account

By Seattle Times news services

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. soldier charged in the rape and slaying of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family in March confessed to army investigators how he and his comrades hatched the plot during a morning of drinking liquor, playing cards and hitting golf balls.

After the alleged attack, the soldiers ate grilled chicken wings, according to testimony at a military hearing Monday in Baghdad.

Spc. James Barker, 23, provided the admission in an interview and sworn statement, Army investigator Special Agent Benjamin Bierce testified.

The testimony came on the second day of a hearing to determine whether the soldiers should stand trial in the rape-slaying, among the worst in a series of cases of alleged misconduct by U.S. service members.

According to Bierce, Barker wrote in his sworn testimony that he and three other soldiers had been playing rummy and drinking Iraqi moonshine mixed with an energy drink on the day of the alleged attack.

The four then donned black masks and entered the 14-year-old girl's home in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, a few hundred yards from where the soldiers were staffing a vehicle checkpoint, Bierce said.

Pvt. Steven Green, 21, led the father, Qassim Hamza; mother, Fikhriya Taha; and sister, Hadeel Qassim Hamza, 5, into the bedroom and closed the door, while the teenage girl remained in the living room with the others, Barker's statement said.

Sgt. Paul Cortez, 23, and Barker took turns sexually assaulting the teen, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, according to Barker's statement.

Another investigator, Gary Griesmyer, quoted Cortez as telling him that the girl was weeping and speaking in Arabic and that Barker told her to "shut up."

Suddenly, the group heard gunshots, and Green came out of the bedroom holding an AK-47 rifle and said words to the effect of: " 'They're all dead. I just killed them,' " Bierce testified.

Green then raped the girl while Cortez held her down, Barker's statement said. Green picked up the AK-47 and shot the girl several times, Bierce said, quoting Barker's statement.

Barker said he poured fuel from a kerosene lamp on the girl's body but did not say who set it on fire.

Pfc. Jesse Spielman, 21, was inside the house while the alleged attack occurred and Pfc. Bryan Howard, 19, was keeping watch elsewhere, according to Barker's statement to investigators.

After the March 12 killings, the soldiers went back to their checkpoint, where Barker grilled chicken wings, Bierce testified.

The testimony came in the Article 32 military proceeding, similar to a civilian grand jury, to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to begin a court-martial.

Any sign of leniency toward the soldiers in the case could strain U.S. relations with Iraq's new government, whose prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has called for an independent investigation.

Before the attack, Green repeatedly said he wanted to kill some Iraqis, Bierce testified. Green, according to Barker's statement, was the ringleader in planning the attack and killing the family, Bierce said.

Green, who was honorably discharged in May because of a "personality disorder," was arrested in North Carolina in June. He will be tried in federal civil court. He has pleaded not guilty to rape and murder charges in federal court in Kentucky.

Pfc. Justin Watt, the whistle-blowing soldier who disclosed the attack during a counseling session, testified Monday that he first heard about the alleged attack from Sgt. Anthony Yribe. His suspicions, he added, were later confirmed by Howard.

"If you have the power to make something right, you should do it. Investigation is not my job. But if something went down — something terrible like that — then it's my obligation to come forward," Watt said.

Watt said that life for some of the soldiers in the B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, amounted to a "suck fest" while they staffed a military post in nearby Yusufiyah. Some had gone a month without showering and lived in a "dilapidated, abandoned water-treatment facility," he testified.

At one point two soldiers from the unit were killed at a checkpoint when an Iraqi man came up as if he wanted to shake hands and shot them, Watt said.

"I watched two guys I cared a lot about die right in front of me," he said, adding: "I was going to get a memorial tattoo of all the guys [killed], but there's not enough room on my arm."

Watt also said he believed Green was responsible for killing the family and had heard him say: "I want to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis."

Watt added that he was worried for his own safety when he learned about the alleged attack.

"It's like this: I find out that guys in my squad, guys I trusted with my life, are allegedly responsible for one of the most brutal rapes-murders I've ever seen. And everyone has a weapon and grenades," he testified.

The U.S. military has charged four soldiers from the unit — Barker, Cortez, Howard and Spielman — with rape and murder. Yribe was charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement for allegedly failing to report the incident.

During the hearing, Special Agent Michael Hood, a polygraph administrator, testified that Spielman passed the lie-detector test when he said he did not kill or have sex with anyone in the house.

Army investigators said the alleged attack took about 20 minutes and the soldiers used an AK-47 taken from the family's home for the killings. Defense attorneys appear to be building the case that the harsh conditions in Iraq and combat stress played a role in the attack.

Defense attorneys have questioned whether the seriousness of the charges is forcing the military to rush through the hearing and quicken a court-martial despite an ongoing investigation.

"It's unbelievable to me, and that's why we're concerned about our client getting a fair trial," said Craig Carlson, whose firm is representing Spielman in the hearing. "They're doing it unjustly and illegally."

Material from the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press is included in this report.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Weekend Edition
July 8 / 9, 2006

The Rape of Iraq

Deep Sexing the News

By LUCINDA MARSHALL

The picture in the paper of the young soldier being led away in handcuffs bore an eerie resemblance to the pictures of Lynndie England at her trial. Both young, scared and perhaps not truly sure of what they had done wrong. Like England, who suffered from learning disabilities and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome before entering the military, Private Steven Green, charged with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of 3 members of her family, suffers from "anti-social personality disorder" which the military cited as the reason for his discharge earlier this year.

We will no doubt once again be assured that this was an isolated incident, a few low-ranking soldiers run amok. But it will be no more true now than it was at Abu Ghraib. The rape and murder of civilians has been a systemic tool of war since the dawn of time. It is simply not believable that we have been in Iraq this long without other incidents of rape and cold-blooded murder of civilians taking place. And in fact that has been documented by human rights organizations, NGOs and independent media.

But despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

Many of the companies that make the news accessible are also heavily invested in the pornography industry, a form of media that makes much, much more money than does hawking the news. Knowing this, it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a good porn plot occurs, the media doesn't hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. Violent sex sells even better.

Like Abu Ghraib, the brutal rape and murder of 15 year old Abeer Qasim Hamza was just such a story. Young soldiers, the supposed keepers of integrity and courage, defenders of our rights and values, in a premeditated act of sex and violence against a young, helpless girl who had earlier refused their taunts and advances at a checkpoint. The scene could just as easily been a script of a reality porn flick. In this sense, this story bears a resemblance to the coverage of cases such as the murder of Lacey Peterson as well as the Duke University rape allegations. Virile young men having their way in a manner that crosses the line of what is offensive in sufficiently obscene ways to be titillating and very marketable stories.

None of this is lost on news producers who are completely aware that their product is distributed in many cases by the same companies that profit so handsomely from pornography, companies such as Time Warner, Comcast and DirecTV, all of whom have invested heavily in the pornography industry.

The pervasiveness of this connection impacts how the media frames the story, even to the extent of editing the facts to fit the story. In an Op Ed piece about the Duke rape allegations, David Brooks waxed poetic about the reputation of the Duke Lacrosse team-their good grades and community service; that the alleged victim was an honor student and a military veteran was conveniently omitted from his piece. To have included that information would have damaged the media portrayal of the alleged victim as being deserving of whatever may have happened that night by virtue of her 'behavior'. Not quite as blatant as Rush Limbaugh's portrayal of her as a "ho", but the intent is the same.

Similarly, the Associated Press ran an article on July 2 by Bassen Mroue that offered this astounding take on the context in which the rape and murder of Abeer Qasim Hamza took place,

"Iraq is a conservative, strongly religious society where many women are sheltered from contacts with males who are not family members."

Mrouc conveniently leaves out any reference to the fact that prior to the U. S. invasion, women in Iraq enjoyed far more freedoms than in most Arab countries and that religious restrictions on women's lives have increased dramatically since Saddam Hussein's ouster.

The omissive wording in the 'news' report is no accident. What it effectively does is redefine why this story is an atrocity in a way that objectifies the victim as a pawn of war to be defended or destroyed; in the eyes of the perpetrators of this act, her attack was a de facto victory in the war on "terror".

Another recent incident in Iraq illustrates the extent to which the acceptability of misogynist violence in Iraq belies the Bush Administration rhetoric of bettering the lives of Iraqi women. In a video that has circulated widely, U.S. Marine Corporal Joshua Belile performs a song he wrote, "The Rape of Hadji Girl" which tells about a Marine using a young Iraqi girl as a shield, the last stanza says that the men who were shooting at him should have known, "They were f*cking with a Marine."

As Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff points out on her Women's Space Blog:

"Abeer Qasim Hamza made the fatal error of refusing the "advances" of Marines. She had to have known, said they, that she was hot. She had to have known, said they, what she was doing, sashaying through that checkpoint every day. And she turned them down. Ignored them. Rejected them. Acted like she was scared. Who the hell did she think she was? What. They were there all the way from the United States to defend her and her family, and she thought she could get away with that kind of bullshit?

After they raped her and killed her family, they blamed it on "insurgents." And in their minds, that wasn't really a lie. In fact, to men under male heterosupremacy, beautiful women who refuse their advances are always "insurgents"."

Sounds like a porn plot doesn't it? Let's lead with that angle.

Atrocities are a fact of all wars, even ours
It's not just evil empires whose soldiers go amok

Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, August 13, 2006

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The allegations sound like reports of war crimes committed by someone else's soldiers: men in black ski masks enter a house, where three of them take turns raping a 14-year-old girl. They then kill her, her parents, and her 5-year-old sister.

It is the kind of atrocity Americans associate with the Nazis, Serbian paramilitary commandos in Kosovo, perhaps Russian troops in Chechnya -- not U.S. soldiers.

"One doesn't expect the American troops to behave the same way, because there are notions that higher morals prevail in the U.S. armed forces," said Robert Rotberg, an expert on conflict and conflict resolution at Harvard University.

But as a military tribunal in Baghdad is deciding whether five American soldiers must stand trial in connection with the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her parents and sister in March, military experts and historians warn that it will become increasingly difficult for American troops fighting against an elusive enemy in Iraq to maintain military discipline under the intense pressures of war. Wartime atrocities, they say, occur in most wars and are committed by most, if not all, occupying troops -- even by such a high-tech, well-trained military as the United States'.

"Combat is about stress, and criminal behavior toward civilians is a classic combat stress symptom," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington military think tank. "If you get enough soldiers into enough combat, some of them are going to murder civilians."

Recent allegations of atrocities by American troops -- which include the investigations into whether U.S. servicemen shot in cold blood 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November, shot an unarmed Iraqi man in February, executed a civilian in April and three prisoners in May -- "aren't surprising at all," said Andrew Wiest, professor of military history at the University of Southern Mississippi. "The fact that we maybe weren't expecting them is surprising."

In fact, historical accounts of past wars spell out a grisly pattern of atrocities against civilians. British troops executed and raped civilians during the Revolutionary War, according to U.S. historian David Hackett Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Washington Crossing"; Red Army soldiers raped an estimated 100,000 Berlin women between 1945 and 1948, as described by the British historian Antony Beevor's "Berlin: The Downfall 1945." During the Korean War, U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered their troops to kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield. And last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published details of a once-secret Pentagon archive that describes 320 alleged incidents of American atrocities against Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians -- not including the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops killed more than 300 Vietnamese civilians in the course of three hours, and which became a turning point in Americans' perception of the Vietnam War.

Since the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military has abandoned the draft, raised its recruiting standards, tightened its rules of conduct in war zones -- outlawing, for example, alcohol consumption or sex during deployments -- and introduced mandatory courses on warrior ethics in Army and Navy colleges.

Even so, "It's difficult to get through to cadets, officers and (enlisted) men the importance of targeting only enemy combatants, taking prisoners and not just shooting anybody," said Mark Grimsley, professor of American military history at the Ohio State University who has spoken at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point and who runs the blog WarHistorian.org. "Some officers are very concerned about these things, and do a good job of training their men. Others are more slipshod about it."

U.S. servicemen allegedly involved in the deaths of Iraqis include a major, three captains, a first lieutenant, and several noncommissioned officers. Soldiers who are alleged to have executed three Iraqi prisoners in May say a U.S. Army colonel had instructed them to kill all fighting-age men.

Since the war began in 2003, at least 14 U.S. servicemen have been convicted in criminal cases stemming from deaths of Iraqis, and at least six other cases, involving 27 servicemen, are pending investigation. Compared with other counterinsurgencies, "there might be fewer (such incidents) than I might expect," said Wiest.

But the longer the U.S. forces remain in the country, the higher the likelihood of new crimes against civilians, warned Raymond Scurfield, a sociologist who served as an Army social worker in Vietnam and who has written about the psychological effects of war on veterans.

"Anybody can maintain discipline for a short period of time," he said. "It's the protracted, repeated stuff that becomes very difficult. As the war is prolonged and becomes nastier, as (American servicemen) are put into very difficult situations, as the civilian populace doesn't come out friendly and aid Americans -- all those dynamics are going to make such incidents happen more frequently."

Winslow Wheeler, an expert at the Center for Defense Information, said atrocities stem from the abusive attitude of most American servicemen toward Iraqis, which was evident from the beginning of the war, when Lt. Peter Katzfrey of the 299 Engineer Battalion, 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit summed up the rules of engagement in an interview with the Chronicle as "shoot to kill. No questions asked."

The difference between "trigger-happy American soldiers who would shoot at vehicles from checkpoints" and the deliberate rape and murder of the Iraqi family "is in degree, but not in nature," Wheeler argued. "Both actions reflect contempt both toward a country and the civilians in it."

The nature of the conflict, in which elusive insurgents in civilian clothes kill Americans and Iraqis by roadside bombs, makes it harder for American troops to discern civilians from enemy combatants. The stress of an incessantly increasing threat amid an escalating sectarian conflict is taking a psychological toll on U.S. forces, some of whom are now completing their third deployment in Iraq in three years.

"It's a very frustrating form of warfare, you always have to be on your guard, you don't know where the attack will come from," said Anthony Dworkin, director of the Crimes of War Project in Washington.

The war's increasing toll on the troops' psyche coincides with the military's need to fill the ranks, which has pushed the Army to lower recruiting standards in autumn that had been set to ensure the quality of the force.

"When you look at the circumstances of whom we send and what we expect them to do, it's surprising we don't have more of those cases," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst at Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. Former Pfc. Steven Green, who allegedly organized the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl and the killing of her family, was discharged from the Army because he suffered from anti-social personality disorder.

Of about 40,000 soldiers discharged from the Army in 2005, 1,038 were dismissed because of personality disorders, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, spokesman for the Army's personnel department.

The only way to keep future atrocities to the minimum is by "constant reinforcement that the moral universe still applies in war," said Grimsley.

"If soldiers aren't diligently trained to understand the kinds of frustrations and stresses that tend to generate atrocities and aren't conditioned to avoid them ... the frustrations can take hold and you can wind up going off and doing something like what occurred in Haditha."

Two dead soldiers, eight more to go, vow avengers of Iraqi girl's rape

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.

	Private Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker were beheaded

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.

Last Monday Steven Green, 21, a former private recently discharged from the US Army, appeared in an American federal court on murder and rape charges relating to her death. At least four other soldiers still based in Iraq are also under investigation.

Prosecutors alleged that Green and others entered the home of a family of civilians, where he killed the girl's parents and young sister, raped the teenager along with another soldier then shot her in the head. The bodies were found burnt in an apparent cover-up attempt last March. US commanders initially thought the killings were the work of insurgents.

The case, potentially the most serious by far of the various abuse charges facing American troops in Iraq, was investigated only after another soldier - shaken by the deaths of Menchaca and Tucker - revealed in a counselling session that US troops might have been involved.

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.

Because of the sensitivities in Arab society about reporting sexual crimes, they were unwilling to press either the US army or the Iraqi police to deal with the case through the courts.

	Steven Green was charged with rape and murder

Saba Shukr, 44, a Sunni sheikh at al-Aziz mosque in Mahmoudiyah, said: "We knew about this crime but the mujahideen brought revenge when they kidnapped two American soldiers in Yusufiyah. They are still waiting to kidnap and kill another eight soldiers, as the price of the death of the girl should be the death of 10 Americans. "I am sure about this. The mujahideen promised us revenge."

One of the family's neighbours, Abu Hazem, 51, said: "We went to visit the cousin of the family who lived about half a mile away to tell them the news. He said, 'Please keep it secret and we will take revenge on the Americans the quiet way'."

Military officials initially thought the abduction of the soldiers in Yusufiyah, about five miles from Mahmoudiyah, was an opportunist strike carried out when the troops became separated from their unit during an insurgents' ambush. Their bodies were found dumped three days later, showing signs of torture. However, the complexity of the ambush - and the level of preparedness required to have manpower to take them away alive - suggests that the kidnap was planned.

Residents of Mahmoudiyah claim that they had long been alarmed by the way some US troops took an interest in their womenfolk. They said that Abeer, who lived in an isolated farmhouse less than a mile from a US checkpoint, had caught the attention of the troops as she did daily chores in the garden.

"She had been told by her parents not to go to school any more because of poor security," said her neighbour Mr Hazem. "She spent most of her time at home cleaning and in the garden so the American forces saw her many times. She was a beautiful girl, and my wife told me that the Americans kept watching her. When I told her father, though, he said it was no problem and that she was just a small girl."

Capt Ehsan Abdul Rahman, a police officer, said: "I told Abeer's cousin that there should be a proper investigation but he did not want media attention."

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, has promised "a transparent investigation", anxious that the case should not be exploited for propaganda. In Mahmoudiyah, however, that battle seems already lost. Relatives of Abeer have denounced the Americans on Arabic satellite channels, including several known to be sympathetic to the insurgents' cause.

Izzat Humadi, 29, a local taxi driver, said: "They started to bother us by winking at our women and we thought that something bad would happen. Now it has. The mujahideen will get more revenge for us and this small girl. We await the capture of another eight American soldiers."

• A US military report on the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha last year has concluded that American Marine officers failed to respond properly to allegations that US troops were involved.