Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs’ big talk about killing Afghan civilians and getting away with it made him stand out when he joined a new platoon at an Army base in southern Afghanistan a year ago, according to written statements from his comrades. Some of his Stryker platoon mates from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., told investigators they didn’t know what to make of him. They thought he must be kidding. Now Gibbs is at the center of an Army war crimes investigation that netted 11 of his comrades from the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They await their own trials for misdeeds they allegedly committed under Gibbs’ direction. Five soldiers, including Gibbs, are charged with murder.

Here’s a look at the charges Gibbs faces, and how his platoon mates described the incidents behind them. The information comes from sworn statements obtained by The News Tribune, as well as Army charge sheets, documents written by defense attorneys and testimony in court.

Huuuuuuuum, that seems strikingly similar to The Olympian.

The News Tribune reports:

Col. Thomas Molloy found that Spc. Jeremy Morlock should be held accountable for any actions he might have committed. Molloy noted that Morlock was viewed by fellow soldiers “as an effective, reliable, engaged team leader,” rather than the picture painted by defense attorneys of a prescription drug-impaired soldier who was bullied by his squad leader.

The defense appears to be focused on two issues: fear of the squad leader and intimidation by him, and the issue of drugs, especially in regard to the supposed confession (some of which has been released to the public. See my post about unauthorized releases.)

Army Times has reported that,

They could face the death penalty if convicted.

Is there any information that the Army will in fact seek a death penalty referral? I had understood, perhaps wrongly, that the Army policy is to disclose that at the time of the Article 32, UCMJ, hearing and ask the IO to address that aspect of the disposition.

Interesting court order (thanks Oh For Goodness Sake) in a civilian case involving a retired Navy officer. Here are links to 10 U. S. Code Sec. 771, 772.

A U.S. soldier accused of killing civilians in Afghanistan should face a court-martial on murder and other charges, an Army officer has recommended. The recommendation, included in a document obtained by CNN, comes after prosecutors laid out their evidence against Spc. Jeremy Morlock in a hearing last week. Morlock is one of five members of the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade who have been accused of premeditated murder in a series of incidents between January and May. The recommendation goes to the brigade’s commander. It was contained in a document that summarized last week’s hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an Army-Air Force installation outside Tacoma, Washington.

Who released the IO report?

Base officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, which has not been publicly released.

You will recollect that we have the recent unauthorized (?) release of the Article 32, UCMJ, report in the Coast Guard boating tragedy.

I got to the Wired piece through this from congressmatters.com blog.

When bad news breaks it has become almost routine for those at the top to disavow all knowledge and let the hammer come down on those well down in the hierarchy. The pattern showed up again twice this week, and is now so common as to be almost standardized. Ackerman’s piece sounds a similar warning. Although command responsibility has not existed in practice for the military for quite a while (the aftermath of Abu Ghraib was perfectly consistent with how military higher-ups evaded blame for the Tiger Force and My Lai atrocities decades earlier), there is now enough of a history for an attentive observer like Ackerman to outline just how the probable cover up will proceed, which is a remarkable development. Maybe the public has become so weary (via) of America’s endless, pointless conflicts that even war crimes can, when massaged with some rote denials, pass by with barely a ripple.

Media access.

Has the Army introduced an issue into the Stryker Brigade cases going to Article 32, UCMJ, hearing over the next few weeks. The New York Times reports. The hearings will be at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. “The case against Specialist Morlock is the first of the five to move to what the military calls an Article 32 hearing, in which the Army determines formal charges.”

A top Army official has ordered that images of dead or wounded “casualties or detainees” may not be made public during hearings involving an American soldier accused of murdering three Afghan civilians during a deployment to Afghanistan this year. “I have determined that the risk of potential prejudice to the substantive rights of the accused, as well as negative impact on the reputation of the armed forces, associated with the potential public dissemination of these images outweighs minimal hardship upon the accused as a result of this order,” wrote Colonel Huggins.

The memorandum does not appear to address the media issue. See this post for a discussion of media access to Article 32, UCMJ, hearings in the MAJ Hasan murder case at Fort Hood. As the NYT reports,

Questions have been raised over the Army’s handling of the cases.

Spc. Jeremy Morlock, a 22-year-old Army soldier from Wasilla, Alaska, will face charges in connection with the murders of three Afghan civilians and other crimes at a hearing scheduled Monday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

And here’s a Foreign Policy note.

As the case unfolds, Mr. Patterson gives the reader a tutorial in military justice as well as the complexities of PTSD. He also makes clear his stand against the war through testimonies from personnel involved with McCarran in Iraq. The tension rises throughout the court-martial: Will the judge allow PTSD as a defense? Will the jury believe how the war changed not just McCarran, but the man he killed?

Haven’t read it and probably won’t until it’s free. Hollywood did for me watching fictional movies about military justice (remember all the issues in A Few Good Men, and of course JAG, and Navy NCIS [how sweet that a show about NCIS should be called Navy Navy Criminal Investigative Service])

Despite the federal court ruling in California, it would be unwise for active duty servicemembers who are gay to assume the military will immediately change its policy.

The Frontiersman reports (this is Ramrod Five related):

In addition to murder, Morlock is also now charged with using an illegal drug, hashish, and with beating a civilian “on the body with his hands and feet, threatening to kill him if he spoke about hashish use within the platoon,” the amended charging document says.

Here is a link to a New York Times article which is part of its Women in the News section and focuses on the judge.

In her 86-page opinion, she called the law, passed by Congress in 1993, an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and Fifth Amendment guarantees of substantive due process.

CAAFLog reports that Sgt Quintanilla was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday.

Sgt Quintanilla was convicted in 1996 of the premeditated murder of his squadron’s executive officer, the attempted premeditated murder of his squadron’s commanding officer, and the attempted premeditated murder of a gunnery sergeant. In 2005, the Navy-Marine Corps Court set aside the findings and sentence. 60 M.J. 852. In 2006, CAAF reversed the portion of NMCCA’s opinion setting aside the findings, but affirmed the portion setting aside the sentence. 63 M.J. 29.

The crimes and trial occurred before life without parole was a permissible sentence.

CAAF action in United States v. Trigueros, a discovery case. CAAF denied a petition. See posting about the case here.

News-Press reports: (related to Ramrod Five Article 32s)

The parents of a U.S. soldier from Cape Coral who, with other troops, is accused of killing Afghan civilians say they have evidence their son is innocent. Christopher Winfield, the father of Army Spc. Adam Winfield, 22, says he tried five times to pass urgent Internet messages from his son to the Army. Troops in his unit had killed an Afghan civilian, planned more killings and threatened him to keep quiet about it.

See also this New York Times piece.

BOLO: The AP reports:

Four prisoners with links to al-Qaida being guarded by American troops escaped from a maximum-security prison in Baghdad and are still at large, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday. . . . U.S. troops found two detainees attempting to escape from the compound on Wednesday evening, the military said in a statement. When they conducted a sweep of the whole facility, they discovered that four other detainees were missing. This is not the first time that prisoners have broken out of American-run detention facilities in Iraq; 11 Iraqis broke out of the U.S.’s Camp Bucca in April 2005 although many were later recaptured. A month earlier U.S. officials there discovered a 600-foot tunnel leading out of Camp Bucca. In 2006, five detainees escaped from the Fort Suse Theater internment facility near Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad; they were later apprehended by Kurdish security officials.

Are you being stalked – by the police? That’s becoming the fourth amendment issue de jour. I posted about x, and here is a piece in the Washington Times that sets the issue up nicely. There is a great deal of attention paid to stalkers who take advantage of technology to victimize people for fun or hate – behavior characterized as creepy.

A dissenting judge in that case wrote that the police behavior was “creepy and un-American.”

Twelve American soldiers face trial over an secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies. Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven other soldiers are accused of covering up the killings as well as a violent assault on a new recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians. Following the arrest of the original five accused in June, seven other soldiers were charged last month with attempting to cover up the killings, blocking the investigation and violent assault on the soldier who reported the smoking of hashish. The 74 charges against the 12 soldiers include accusations of illegal drug and alcohol use.

KLEWTv reports:

At least two of the five Army soldiers charged in the deaths of three Afghan civilians had kept body parts taken from Afghan corpses, according to new documents released by the Army on Wednesday.

Last December, Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs began joking with other Soldiers about how easy it would be to “toss a grenade” at Afghan civilians and kill them, according to statements made by fellow platoon members to military investigators. . . . The Seattle Times has reviewed court documents — filed by a defense attorney with a U.S. Army magistrate — that summarize some of the evidence in the case. The Times also has interviewed attorneys for three of the defendants. The documents give new insight into how the murder plot may have evolved, but they give few clues about motives.

The Seattle Times has this report.

In one of the most serious war-crimes cases to emerge from the Afghanistan war, five soldiers from a Stryker infantry brigade based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord are now charged with murder for their alleged roles in killing three Afghan civilians.

Here is an official press release from JBLM.

Five soldiers from the same Washington state-based unit have now been implicated in the killing of three Afghan civilians, an Army spokeswoman said Monday. The Army said Friday that Spc. Jeremy Morlock had been charged with three counts of premeditated murder and one count of assault. On Monday, Lt. Col. Tamara Parker, a Joint Base Lewis-McChord spokeswoman, said “there is enough evidence to say that five may be charged,” although Morlock is the only one charged so far. A second soldier is being held in confinement in Kuwait, and the others three remain with their unit in Afghanistan, she said.

Seattle Times has this:

An Army spokeswoman said Saturday the murder charges against a Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier accused of killing three Afghan civilians could lead the military to examine its screening of soldiers.

The screening issue may relate to this Fox News piece.

Morlock, who entered the military in June 2006 and was first deployed last July, has a criminal record. The Seattle Times reported that Morlock’s wife sought a domestic-violence protective order against him two years ago in a case that was resolved. Last year, he was charged with assault and disorderly conduct and was reportedly found guilty of the latter charge. Morlock also was charged with leaving the scene of an accident involving an injury or death when he was 15, the newspaper reported.

If recollection serves he joined at a time when waivers were more easily gotten for past civilian offenses. But the military, largely due to good recruiting numbers, have stopped moral waivers.

Here is the kirotv.com initial:

Ten Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers deployed in Afghanistan are at the center of a criminal investigation. Ten soldiers of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division are accused of deliberately killing three Afghan civilians, using illegal drugs and conducting other illicit activities such as conspiracy and assault. CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr broke the story and said the assault may have happened after one of the soldiers told his commander of the incident. “Turned it into his commanders and may have been assaulted by other troops, beaten up we are told for blowing the whistle on all of this” Starr said.