Meet an American tragedy from the war in Iraq and one guy who said no

[Bucky]

Petty Officer 3rd Class Melson J. Bacos

Bacos testifies that Marines enforce own justice

CAMP PENDLETON – Frustrated by the repeated release of a suspected terrorist in Hamdaniya, Iraq, a Camp Pendleton squad decided to enforce its own brand of justice on the town with an execution...

Bacos, a Navy Corpsman, and seven Marines are accused of killing Hashim Ibrahim Awad on April 26...

“I know what we did was wrong,” Bacos testified, his voice barely audible. “At that moment, I asked to let him go. I felt I couldn't stop them. They were going to do what they were going to do.”

Cpl. Marshall Magincalda labeled him as being weak and told him to stop protesting, Bacos said. The execution took place moments afterward, he recounted.

“I witnessed Sgt. (Lawrence) Hutchins dead check the man and fire three rounds into the man's head,” Bacos testified. “Then Cpl. (Trent) Thomas fired seven to 10 rounds into the man's head.”

This is a tough one to read. Inadequately trained and inadequately armored and tossed into the Iraqi meat grinder to complete an impossible mission that no one in the neighborhood supports, our troops have to face overwhelming odds and chaos while fighting the same Baathist bandits that Bush assured them were part of the world terrorism conspiracy that was supposedly out to destroy our way of life. So then a guy they feel sure is a terrorist gets out of prison and they're certain he's gonna kill again.

So they make a plan and head to his home to murder him. Only the suspected terrorist's household gets alerted somehow, so...

The group approached a house where the insurgent was believed to be hiding, but when someone inside woke up, it instead went to another home and grabbed Awad.

Bacos said the squad members had intended to get someone else if they didn't capture the insurgent, then stage a firefight to make it appear they had found an Iraqi planting a roadside bomb.

Read the story. They pumped shot after shot into the corpse's skull, then pressed the corpse's fingerprints onto gun's trigger and onto a shovel to make it look like Awad was going to plant a roadside bomb.

I think about the tens of thousands of ground troops put in this same situation in tour after tour and I guess I'm thankful that incidents like this aren't happening more often than they are--but you can be damn sure they're happening more often than we're hearing about it. Maybe not this blatent, maybe not this premeditated, but this sort of personal vendetta does happen when you militarily occupy a hostile country.

This may be the worst of the lot, but it's not a unique case. Their morals and their morale all cracked under the same strain that every infantry unit in the occupation is going thru. This is what the Republican Congress voted for. The Marines should be punished, but the Republicans should be blamed. This is what I opposed the war for--not because I knew this in particular would happen, but because I knew it was in the range of possibilities.

[boston bean]

1. How very sad. I don't know what to say, except that they need

to go to jail if they did this.

But I do feel for them as well. The stress and the inadequate support and the overall lackadaisical command structure to keep this shit from happening has failed everyone involved.

[noamnety]

2. The shovel thing is not abnormal

The BBC interviewed one of the IVAW guys in the spring during the gulf march as part of a segment that ran in the UK.

"Keep shovels on your truck, or an AK (rifle). If you see anybody out here at night, shoot him, and if they weren't doing anything, throw a shovel off (like) they were digging an IED or whatever... Shoot him, throw a shovel off, there you go."

-Jody Casey, U.S. Iraqi war veteran, describing his training instructions from other U.S. soldiers upon his arrival in Iraq (BBC airdate: March 29, 2006)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4850000/newsid_4859400/bb_wm_4859458.stm (That portion begins at about 17:15 into the segment.)