I pit humanity. How can 4 people, randomly thrown together, all agree to something so monstruous.
I feel ashamed.
I remember when this story first broke. It made me sick then, and still does now. The knowledge that one guy is going away forever, and the others might be executed, doesn’t really make me feel much better. 
This was a terrible incident and I hope that the perpetrators receive the maximum sentences appropriate (and that the U.S. has the good sense to make sure that the Iraqi people and the rest of the Middle East recognize that we do not tolerate such actions).
That said, why are you so suddenly outraged when this event is over a half year old and was widely reported and discussed when it happened?
I’m glad one of them finally admitted to it. I heard so many people apply the “soldiers are sacred” rule to these guys; unable to believe that an American Soldier could ever get his crazy self past the screeners and other big wigs and actually be a dangerous person on the battlefront. :rolleyes:
I wonder what’ll happen to them…
Welcome to the club.
I don’t know, but they manage to do so even in our policed, well regulated societies in peace time, so it’s no surprise some would do it in an occupied country in war time, where the likehood to be caught is way lower. At least there are only four of them (Dont be mistaken, I’m sure there has been much more instances we’ll never know about). Compare that to Rwanda, for instance.
Unless you’re called Greene, Cortez, Spielman or Barker and are posting from a cell, I don’t think you should.
We had a couple of threads on this story back when it first broke, Gozu, but thanks for the update.
Now that one of them has agreed to talk, I wonder if the rest of them will make deals to save their own lives. I hope all of them end up turning big rocks into little rocks for the next 60 or 70 years.
We don’t know that they did; remember that until found guilty, the presumption of innocence must hold. It could be that Mr Green is spinning a tale to save his own skin.
Aljazeera is rather more informative about the original event.
I agree. With good behavior, we might eventually see fit to give them a hammer.
I was under the impression that the witnesses had already laid out the details and it was just a matter of someone actually admitting to it. Of course he’s innocent until proven guilty. That doesn’t mean we can’t form an opinion based on the evidence we’ve seen.
Barker is the one who made the deal, not Green, although Green has reportedly also talked.
The evidence in this case seems pretty strong, especially when there are apparently multiple confessions.
[bolding mine]
It needs to hold in the courtroom. The people who are having this discussion are free to reach their own conclusions as to the likeliest truth from sources that are already available. I think that, as a whole, the SDMB community can be trusted to own up to having been mistaken, if future events show that to be the case.
But I strongly suggest that any Dopers who are in a position in which they may find themselves empaneled in the jury be v-e-e-e-r-r-r-r-r-y cautious about reading and posting to this thread.
We wouldn’t want to play an enabling part in a miscarriage of justice, would we?
I believe there was also another witness who was part of the same unit, but not involved in the crimes, who was the first to go to the authorities after hearing the suspects talk about it. Wasn’t this the same case where some other guys from the unit were killed by insurgents as part of a possible reprisal?
Unless this was a similar case yes. I recall speculation at the time that it was the reprisals that motivated the whistleblower.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but it could be argued (and has been, but I don’t have a cite) that war creates an amoral world, dehumanizing the participants to the point where they’ll do just about anything. It’s also highly likely that the military is attractive to stupid assholes.
The problem with ANY of these “news stories” is that you have to take them on faith that they actually report the facts.
There was a recent court case reported in the news, where a 9 year old boy was to be circumcised for “repeated infections” but his father sought to legally block it. If you believed the newspaper reports, the boy begged the mother for help, and the horrible father wanted him to suffer. If you went to the actual trial, however (and an acquaintance of mine did) the facts were very very different: the child had no problems except after his step-brother messed with him; the child did not want the surgery; the main doctor who “recommended” the surgery didn’t bother to show up at court to defend his recommendations, and the other 2 who recommended it, had done so despite having never seen anything but a normal healthy intact child. So much for the news reports. The judge appears to have ensured that justice was served. You’d never have known it, from the papers.
I myself, in my wild college days, attended an anti-abortion protest. I was the lone picketer; everybody else was blocking the doors. Some locals came by and saw what was happening, and went home to get their Burmese Pythons to scare us with. I worked at a pet shop in those days, and spent 10 or 15 very enjoyable moments admiring the snakes, after which the guys went up the hill to scare the protesters. Also, a fire engine went racing up the hill to a building a couple of blocks away. By the time the news reports hit the TV and newspapers, the protest group I was with had brought the snakes to scare pregnant women away from exercising their right to free choice, and we’d called in a bomb scare, requiring a firetruck to come. Oh. They also had a woman (well past the legal stage of pregnancy in Washington State to abort, and also beyond the stage that clinic offers services to) climb a ladder into a window to get inside, which made a great photo op for the papers. Ladder to Choice or something stupid like that. It was so, so blatantly false.
I’ve had a hard time believing the truth of anything I see in the papers for a great many years.
I don’t know what happened with those soldiers. I hope the truth comes out in trial. But
I’d bet good money that it won’t come out in the newspapers. Truth isn’t what they’re best at.
Wow Chotii, you seek to deny basic, routine health care to both women and men.
At least you’re consistent. :mad:
a) the abortion protest was over 20 years ago. I still disagree with abortion as a form of birth control, but I haven’t participated in a protest in…over 20 years.
b) I believe firmly that baby boys, and 9 year old boys, and every other boy, has as much a right not to have his genitals altered…as girls do.
Be all the mad you want at me. It doesn’t change the fact that newspapers lie.
You do realize, don’t you, that you made the same mistake you said the news reporters did? You saw a woman who looked too far along in pregnancy to abort, but you don’t know that she wasn’t carrying twins, or that her fetus wasn’t dead or non-viable. The journalists saw a protest, some snakes, and a fire truck in close proximity, and made a similar leap to the conclusion that the protesters had caused all of those to happen.
Okay, I lied. That protest was in either 1989 or 1990. I have not participated in one since. I’ll be accurate and say "I have not participated in a protest in…over 15 years. There.
Now what did this have to do with whether newspaper reports about those soldiers are true, accurate, or have any basis whatsoever in reality?
Yes. But that’s the problem. They leaped to conclusions and REPORTED THEM AS FACTS. The greater Seattle area all KNEW by evening that those horrible anti-choicers had tried to scare poor pregnant women to death with snakes. I bet those two guys from Capitol Hill, the two who owned the snakes, laughed their butts off when they saw the news report.
But if you’d asked anybody who saw the news, they’d have just KNOWN what the facts were.
Except that they’d have been wrong.
That’s not reporting, that’s something else entirely. And it, and hundreds or thousands of other similar falsehoods - including recently disclosed photoshopping of photos, re-captionings of photos, and staging of events for photographers in the middle east - make it awfully tough to know what the truth is.
The newspapers claim 4 soldiers raped a 14 year old girl and killed her family. Maybe they did - and if they did, and a military court finds them guilty, I hope they’re punished to the extent of the law. And maybe they didn’t. Maybe it was done by insurgents, but somebody in their squad is trying to commit Frag By Cop. We can’t possibly be sure. The medium is too fraught with lies and inaccuracies to know that, until the court case is over. And I’m not even sure, then. 