One of four U.S. soldiers accused of raping a 14-year old Iraqi girl last spring and then killing her and her entire family pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the others in order to avoid the death penalty.
When the military judge presiding over the case asked Spc. James P. Barker why he did it, he responded: "I hate Iraqis, your honor. Thay can smile at you, then shoot you in your face without even thinking about it."
The rest of the assholes involved in this case have deferred entering a plea.
Barker and the other soldiers were drinking and playing cards while they manned a traffic checkpoint when Army Private Steve Green (apparantly a really intellegent guy) brought up the idea of raping the girl. The 4 defendents are are accused of raping the girl and burning her body to conceal their crimes, then killing the girls father, mother and 6-year-old sister. (why? we dont know...)
so yes, my fellow americans, don't forget to support our troops who are spreading our message to the world loud and fucking clear.
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3 comments:
this dude should have gotten death...
What a complete load of crap. This reminds me of one of those Vietnam vets trying to rationalize raping and murdering children by blaming the politicians in Washington. Bullshit! Such an argument holds no merit whatsoever. There is no excuses for raping and murdering Vietnamese children (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre), and there is no excuse for raping and murdering an entire Iraqi family, (and furthermore fuck all the pseudo-psychological rationalization bullshit about “following orders”, “brainwashing”, “mob-mentality”, etc., as if it somehow gets these criminals off of the hook, or even worse, legitimates what they do). Wake up, it doesn’t.
People don’t understand agency. The moral burden of an immoral action, such as rape and murder, can never be placed on something abstract and largely detached from the action itself, such as ideology. Rather, it is a simple fact that the moral burden of an immoral action is placed, squarely, on the agents who participate in the action. End of story. As if troops are exempt from a basic moral code simply because they are placed in an immoral situation. What a load of shit. If anything, it should be just the opposite.
The Bush administration is to blame for the conflict at large. No one will deny this. But blaming the architects of the war for the mistakes of the troops is like blaming the Holocaust solely on Hitler. Are you really prepared to say that every SS solider that ushered Jews into the gas chambers is exempt from our moral judgments? Only a fool is prepared to accept this.
And why are people so shocked when US troops are killed – as if the average Iraqi doesn’t understand cause and effect – as if they don’t understand who blew them back into the stone age in a weeks time … the US troops! If you invade a sovereign nation, expect that some of your troops will be killed (and yes, even dragged through the streets).
How different is the killing of civilians due to missile or bomb explosion to a soldier killing and raping innocent people. What we call collateral damage is something that is accepted in our society as a result of imperfect warfare.
So if you accept that war should take place, or if you concede that a war is taking place, then you must accept that their will be collateral damage. I don't think the Iraqi family that was killed by the soldier suffered anymore than the family who's house accidentally exploded killing all their children.
So do we prosecute the person who pressed the button to fire the missile, or the person who made the decision to fire that missile. No, I don't ever hear an argument about the grotesque behaviour of that person.
Now I'm not saying that a soldier who kills and rapes innocent people should not be punished. What I am saying though is that he can't be tried based on the same standards that we use towards criminals in our own society.
If a person living in Los Angeles, buys a gun, and then premediates his killing and raping of innocent people, this person poses a serious threat to our society and should be punished. I don't believe in capital punishment, but he should be behind bars for life or until adequately rehabilitated if we had a system that could do so.
Now a soldier who is generally young and uneducated, who is taken from his home, trained to kill, and then sent to a foreign country like Iraq, where his friends are killed, he's shot at, and is constantly living in fear, who then snaps in a moment of insanity and kills and rapes civilians, is no doubt a criminal. But would this person commit a crime of this nature if he was back home with his familly never given a gun, never trained to kill, and never put in a position where he feared for his life everyday.
I don't think so. So if our laws are designed to protect society, then killing or improsining, a person like this would not serve the purpose. Adequate punishment would be dishonorable discharge from the military, and a certain number of years of psychological rehabilitation in an institution, until trained professionals can determine whether this person can reenter society.
I must just weeks ago when I heard of a similiar story , I felt the perpetrator should die as well, but after more consideration I feel the arguments above are more than adequate to push the moral burden away from the person commiting the act to the person creating the ideology. In fact I don't believe we should punish SS soldiers who had been brainwashed into thinking that jews were a danger to society and therefore should be eliminated. Should we blame all jihadist for thinking that the west is a danger to Islam. If so then Isreal should continuosly kill Palestineans they suspect to be terrorists, and the US is fully legitimized in its effort to fight Islam. Based on your argumentation we shouldn't search for and solve the underlying problem regarding why a person would kill and rape civilians (which in this case is the immorality of modern war fare) but rather punish every individual who takes part in a immoral action.
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