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October 04, 2005
“I have an uneasy suspicion that it relates to the nationality of the victim.”
Surprise, surprise. When and if U.S. soldiers are tried for crimes against people of Iraq, the sentences are unusually lenient, if not outright dismissed, according to analysis by Dayton Daily News:
n analysis by the Dayton Daily News of previously undisclosed records from the Army Court-Martial Management Information System database found that 226 U.S. soldiers were charged with offenses between the first deployments in March 2003 and Jan. 1, 2005.Of the 1,038 separate charges, fewer than one in 10 involved crimes against Iraqis. Virtually all of the rest involved crimes against other soldiers, property drug or alcohol offenses, and violations of military rules, the Daily News said.
Charges involving Iraqi victims were three times more likely to be dismissed or withdrawn by the Army than cases in which the victims were fellow soldiers or civilian military employees — 44 percent compared with 15 percent, the newspaper said.
The Daily News also said that despite evidence and convictions in some cases in which the victims were Iraqis, only a small percentage resulted in punishments approaching those routinely imposed for such crimes by civilian justice systems.
The newspaper cited one case in which two U.S. soldiers were convicted of robbing an Iraqi shopkeeper. One soldier was sentenced to five months' confinement and the other to one month.
The median sentence imposed for all types of robbery in the United States, with or without the use of firearms, is five years.
“I've been surprised at some of the lenient sentences,” said Gary Solis, a former military judge and prosecutor who teaches military law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “I have an uneasy suspicion that it relates to the nationality of the victim.”
Meanwhile, Lynndie England reveals that she knew much worse was going on in Abu Ghraib:
But [Lynndie] England, appearing on NBC's "Dateline" program, said the pictures did not convey the full extent of the abuse that took place in the cell block."I know worse things were happening over there," admitted the 22-year-old convict.
She said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block's shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee.
"They had the shower on to muffle it, but it wasn't helping," she recalled. "They never screamed like that when we were humiliating. But this guy was like screaming bloody murder. I mean it still haunts me I can still hear it just like it happened yesterday."
Really, where is the outrage? What more needs to happen?
Posted by zeynep at October 4, 2005 07:18 PM
Comments
Re; Lyndie England and the torture. "What more needs to happen?" Well, I guess if some of those who were tortured were WHITE, then we'd have a case. After all, "I have an uneasy suspicion that it relates to the nationality of the victim.”
Posted by: sen. bob at October 10, 2005 07:15 AM