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Al Qaeda Group Claims Iraq TV Channel Bomb

29 Jul

CBSNews.com

Al-Arabiya Television Station Attack Killed Six; Terror Group Calls News Channel "Corrupt"

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Iraq news station attack highlights risk to journalists, say campaign groups

27 Jul

Journalism.co.uk

Car bomb killed four members of staff at Al-Arabiya satellite channel and two members of the public

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Barack Obama enlists Afghan war leaks in support of policy switch

27 Jul

www.guardian.co.uk
Material cataloguing blunders justifies decision to deploy 30,000 more US troops, US president says
Barack Obama today said the disclosures about the mishandling of the Afghanistan war contained in leaked US military documents justified his decision to embark on a new strategy.
Speaking on the White House lawn after a meeting with Congressional leaders to discuss funding for the war and other issues, the US president deplored the leak, saying he was concerned the information from the battleground could jeopardise the lives of US soldiers.
But he went on to say that the material, which catalogues a series of blunders, revealed the challenges that led him to announce late last year a change in strategy that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
The tens of thousands of documents were sent to the website Wikileaks and published in the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. They deal mainly with the conduct of the war during the Bush administration, which Obama has repeatedly accused of ignoring the Afghanistan war because of its focus on Iraq.
"For seven years, we failed to implement a strategy for this region," Obama said yesterday, of the period starting with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy," he said, adding that he had also sent one of the finest generals in the US, General David Petraeus.
He ended with a plea to the House of Representatives to join the Senate in passing a bill needed to provide funds for the Afghan war.
The leaks have put attention on Afghanistan at a time when the Obama administration would rather focus on the economy, the main issue among voters, and have put pressure on him to explain why he thinks his new strategy will stand any better chance of success than the old one.
Obama is also facing pressure to explain continued financial, military and other support for Pakistan, in spite of allegations in the leaked documents that elements in the Pakistan intelligence service are supporting the Taliban.
Members of Congress are becoming increasingly sceptical in public about the conduct of the war, and public support is falling. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published today, satisfaction with Obama's handling of the war has dropped to 33%, down from 38% in January and 47% in February last year.
Ewen MacAskill

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Blix: Hard for Iraq to declare non-existent WMDs

27 Jul

ITN
It was "very hard" for Iraq to declare weapons programmes that did not exist, a former UN weapons inspector has told the Iraq war inquiry.
Related Stories
- Six killed in suicide attack on Baghdad TV station
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31 killed in bombing attacks on Shi’ite pilgrims, Arab news station in Iraq

27 Jul

Boston Globe - Today's paper A to Z

BAGHDAD — Two car bombs targeting Shi’ite pilgrims during a religious festival in the holy city of Karbala killed 25 people yesterday, Iraqi police and hospital officials said. Sunni extremists are suspected.

Karbala - Car bomb - Iraq - Iraq War - Middle East

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War logs aren't just about bungling Bush | Simon Tisdall

26 Jul

www.guardian.co.uk
Obama may try to blame his predecessor, but the Afghanistan war logs make it clear that it's his war now
That the Afghan campaign lacks a clear strategy, has been politically misdirected and militarily under-resourced, and is essentially unwinnable as presently conceived is something the British public, like its counterparts in the US and western Europe, has increasingly suspected. Opinion polls in most Nato countries show strengthening opposition to the western alliance's longest ever war.
The war logs, an official accounting of murderous missions, tragic incompetence and abject failure from 2004-2009, put factual flesh on the bare bones of these negative perceptions. Their publication may further undermine public support just as the campaign supposedly reaches a "critical" juncture following June's record casualties and the sacking of General Stanley McChrystal.
The White House's defence – that this serial bungling occurred on George Bush's watch – appears problematic. Since Barack Obama concluded a policy review last December and decided on a "surge" of 30,000 additional troops, overall levels of violence have risen further while confusion about counterinsurgency strategy and the exit timetable has deepened.
"Obama has had several opportunities to reassess US goals and interests and in each instance he has chosen to escalate," said Richard Haass, a former senior Bush administration official and president of the council on foreign relations. "Today the counterinsurgency strategy that demanded all those troops is clearly not working." Afghanistan was now Obama's war, Haass said, and he was losing it. "It's time to scale down our ambitions and reduce and redirect what we do."
American and therefore British aims have already been pared down considerably. Less is heard these days about institution-building, transparent, corruption-free governance and grandiose infrastructure projects. Talk of "victory" over the Taliban has been replaced by furtive talk of talks. The war aims of the world's most powerful military alliance have now boiled down to three fingers-crossed wishes: create a relatively stable, self-governing state, ensure it no longer harbours al-Qaida, and then get the hell out of Dodge.
The appointment of the Iraq war hero, General David Petraeus, as McChrystal's replacement, has so far only compounded the confusion about how even these modest objectives can be reached. Though he will not say so in public, Petraeus, as head of US central command (Centcom), did not support Obama's July 2011 deadline for beginning US troop withdrawals.
At his congressional confirmation hearing, Petraeus indicated he favoured a troop-intensive strategy (as in Iraq) and would privately press for more time and a slower withdrawal schedule that will keep most of the troops in Afghanistan for longer. Petraeus is in the driving seat and Obama knows it. After twin fiascos over McChrystal and his predecessor, General David McKiernan (also fired by Obama), he is virtually unsackable. What he wants he will most probably get.
Trouble is, it's uncertain Petraeus knows himself when it comes to the specifics. He wants more emphasis on training up Afghan army and police to take over security responsibilities. But contradicting previous forecasts, Petraeus's aides say he does not believe the Afghans will be ready this year.
Petraeus wants to give more responsibility to friendly tribal leaders, as he did in Iraq's Sunni triangle; President Hamid Karzai opposes the idea, saying it will encourage warlordism. Petraeus says he wants to amend rules of engagement, giving US forces (who have been complaining they are hamstrung) a freer hand to call in air strikes and artillery when under fire. At the same time, he says he remains committed to minimising civilian casualties.
And Petraeus looks likely to pursue the expansion of the war into Pakistan's tribal areas, already subject to an increasing number of drone attacks and the occasional special forces incursion. The numbers of US troops based in Pakistan is small but growing. As strategists such as Haass put it, "Pakistan is much more important than Afghanistan". Losing nuclear-armed Pakistan to the jihadis is a recurring (if exaggerated) Pentagon nightmare.
All of these uncertainties, created, evolving or exacerbated on Obama's watch, are overshadowed by the greatest imponderable of all: when, how and if the US can bring itself to talk to the Taliban and its allies, as urged by Britain, Pakistan and other allies who believe a negotiated settlement is the only way out.
On this crucial subject, the Obama administration appears divided. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, insisted in Kabul this week that additional military pressure will turn the tide by year's end – Nato's stated target. But senior US officials and, for example Obama's regional envoy, Richard Holbrooke, appear more open to discussion. Meanwhile influential voices are lobbying for a leaner, slimmed down strategy.
"The next six months will be a crucial time for a thoughtful (but ground-based) reappraisal of our approach," said a senior former US government official. "We need to settle on the necessary but cost-effective level of effort for counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, capacity building, regional co-operation and restraint."
The war logs looked back over the last six years of the war. Looking forward, there seems little reason so far to be believe that lessons have been learned or that anything fundamental in the American approach has changed. But not to worry. Obama is having another policy review in December.
Simon Tisdall

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Attack kills 4 at Baghdad TV station

26 Jul

Jerusalem Post

Likely al-Qaeda bomber blows up minibus at Al Arabiya office in Iraq.

Read more over at www.jpost.com
WikiLeaks 'Afghan War Diary' Provides Ground-Level Account Of Afghanistan War

26 Jul

The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — Some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records posted online Sunday amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.
The online whistle-blower WikiLeaks posted the documents on its website Sunday. The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given early access to the documents.

The White House condemned the document disclosure, saying it "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk."
The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what U.S. officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.
Among those listed as being killed by the secretive unit was Shah Agha, described by the Guardian as an intelligence officer for an IED cell, who was killed with four other men in June 2009. Another was a Libyan fighter, Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaida military commander. Al-Libi was said to be based across the border in Mir Ali, Pakistan, and was running al-Qaida training camps in North Waziristan, a region along the Afghan border where U.S. officials have said numerous senior al-Qaida leaders were believed to be hiding.
The operation against al-Libi, in June 2007, resulted in a death tally that one U.S. military document said include six enemy fighters and seven noncombatants – all children.
The Guardian reported that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are on a "kill or capture" list, known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List. It was from this list that Task Force 373 selected its targets.
The New York Times said the documents – including classified cables and assessments between military officers and diplomats – also describe U.S. fears that ally Pakistan's intelligence service was actually aiding the Afghan insurgency.
According to the Times, the documents suggest Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders."
The Guardian, however, interpreted the documents differently, saying they "fail to provide a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between the Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.
In a statement released Sunday, White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones lauded a deeper partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan, saying, "Counterterrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al-Qaida's leadership." Still, he called on Pakistan to continue its "strategic shift against insurgent groups."
Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani said the documents "do not reflect the current on-ground realities." The United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan are "jointly endeavoring to defeat al-Qaida and its Taliban allies militarily and politically," he added.
Der Spiegel, meanwhile, reported that the records show Afghan security officers as helpless victims of Taliban attacks.
The magazine said the documents show a growing threat in the north, where German troops are stationed.
The classified documents are largely what's called "raw intelligence" – reports from junior officers in the field that analysts use to advise policymakers, rather than any high-level government documents that state U.S. government policy.
While the documents provide a glimpse of a world the public rarely sees, the overall picture they portray is already familiar to most Americans. U.S. officials have already publicly denounced Pakistani officials' cooperation with some insurgents, like the Haqqani network in Pakistan's tribal areas.
The success of U.S. special operating forces teams at taking out Taliban targets has been publicly lauded by U.S. military and intelligence officials. And just-resigned Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was leading the Afghan war effort, made protecting Afghan civilians one of the hallmarks of his command, complaining that too many Afghans had been accidentally killed by Western firepower.
WikiLeaks said the leaked documents "do not generally cover top-secret operations." The site also reported that it had "delayed the release of some 15,000 reports" as part of what it called "a harm minimization process demanded by our source," but said it may release the other documents after further review.
Jones, the White House adviser, took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of President George W. Bush.
That was before "President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qaida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," Jones said.
But Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."
A different U.S. official said the Obama administration had already told Pakistani and Afghan officials what to expect from the document release, in order to head off some of the more embarrassing revelations.
Another U.S. official said it may take days to comb through all the documents to see what they mean to the U.S. war effort and determine their potential damage to national security. That official added that the U.S. isn't certain who leaked the documents.
Another official said teams of analysts started examining the documents the moment they were disclosed online.
All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity to comment on the release of classified material.
U.S. government agencies have been bracing for the release of thousands more classified documents since the leak of a classified helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That leak was blamed on a U.S. Army intelligence analyst working in Iraq.
Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., was arrested in Iraq and charged earlier this month with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data, after a former hacker turned him in. Manning had bragged to the hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to the website Wikileaks.org.
Lamo turned Manning in to U.S. authorities, saying he couldn't live with the thought that those released documents might get someone killed.
___
Associated Press writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.
More on Pakistan

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Afghanistan war logs: How the IED became Taliban's weapon of choice

25 Jul

www.guardian.co.uk
Improvised explosive devices – homemade bombs – are the conflict's biggest killer of troops and civilians
It begins with a relative trickle in the east of Afghanistan in 2004. Five years later it is the Taliban's favoured weapon across the country and the biggest killer of coalition soldiers by a large margin.
But the IED – improvised explosive device – not only strikes foreign troops on ground patrols and in road convoys, it is also an indiscriminate terror weapon killing and injuring thousands of civilians.
The unprecedented mass of data in the leaked war logs presents the most comprehensive picture yet of successful violence by the Taliban. The soaring number of attacks by these increasingly powerful homemade bombs can clearly be seen to be focused in the southern and eastern provinces.
In 2004, according to the logs, there were 308 makeshift bombs; last year there were 7,155. Taliban fighters in total planted more than 16,000 IEDs in those five years.
On 22 June last year, in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, the US military log says: "A little boy picked up the IED and it exploded in his hands killing him. The IED blast caused people to gather around the little boy, then a motorcycle drive up and detonated his suicide IED motorcycle." The end result was reported to be nine civilians killed and 42 wounded.
On 7 October 2009, six locals were going to Sarobi in eastern Afghanistan to buy cattle "when they struck an IED, instantly killing three of the occupants. A 70-year-old male suffered a gaping head, a 40-year-old suffered an eye injury and [a] 20-year-old had his ear drums blown out".
The logs suggest that Taliban insurgents have killed or injured at least 7,000 Afghan civilians in IED attacks between 2004 and 2009. The number has increased tenfold over that time. Civilian casualties rose even after Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader, ordered insurgents to avoid killing bystanders.
In May last year, he said suicide bombers should only attack "high and important targets". "A brave son of Islam should not be used for lower and useless targets. The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties." He called on his fighters to win over the Afghan people.
Yet in August, 429 civilians were killed or wounded by IEDs, the highest recorded in the logs. Investigators working for the UN said in January that the Taliban were responsible for more civilian deaths than the US-led military coalition. They criticise the Taliban for "indiscriminately" killing civilians by detonating IEDs in crowded markets or on busy roads.
Taliban fighters appear to have been prepared to blow up large numbers of people in order to assassinate a single target, such as a high-ranking government official or police chief.
For example, in February 2008, a suicide bomber caused havoc at a dog-fighting meet near Kandahar, killing or injuring more than 100 civilians, in a successful quest to assassinate one tribal leader. Another attack in September 2007 claimed around 70 civilian casualties near markets in Helmand province.
"It appears to be a suicide attack intended to target a police chief, Aram Attulah. The explosion killed this police chief and 10 of his security detail," reads the log.
IED attacks this year will be higher than ever, according to the latest Pentagon figures. The numbers are rising even though the US military has spent $17bn struggling to neutralise IEDs in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Since 2006 the Taliban can be seen to have changed tactics. The insurgents began to rely more on IEDs than confrontational gun battles. Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the director of the Pentagon agency in charge of countering IEDs, admitted in March: "I don't think you can defeat the IED as a weapon system. It is too easy to use."
The IEDs are built in a variety of ways with the aim of inducing permanent anxiety among troops and the populace. Some are detonated remotely by a transmitter such as a mobile phone or hand-held radio, while others are ignited by thin wires attached to switches such as washing machine timers. Others are "victim-operated" – they go off when the unsuspecting soldier or civilian steps on a trip wire or a pressure plate.
The insurgents load bombs into lorries and crash them into targets. The logs are replete with accounts of suicide-bombers ("PBIEDs", or person-borne IEDs, according to the US army jargon) who strap bombs to their bodies. A typical example occurred on 7 May 2009 in the town of Gereshk in Helmand when a "PBIED …crashed his motorcycle into a patrol, as he got to his feet he detonated himself".
Horse-drawn carts have been also used to explode the bombs next to patrolling soldiers.
The highest number of IED attacks occurred on three consecutive days – 18-20 August last year – when the country voted for a new president. The Taliban had vowed to disrupt the election and planted between 33 and 37 IEDs on each of the three days, killing or wounding at least 100 in the coalition and among their Afghan allies. Several attacks were made on polling stations and staff.
According to the logs, the Americans have located and disabled more bombs than have exploded, yet they have so far been unable to halt the attacks.
The logs record that 8,582 of the Taliban's IEDs were found and cleared, but 7,553 successfully exploded.
Rob Evans

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The blackest hearts: War crimes in Iraq

24 Jul

www.guardian.co.uk
In March 2006, four US soldiers, strung out after months in the deadly battleground south of Baghdad, hatched a plan: to carry out one of the worst war crimes ever committed in Iraq
On 12 March 2006, Abu Muhammad heard a knock on his door. He lived in a village just outside Yusufiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and warily he headed towards the window – since the invasion, you never knew who it might be. It was a neighbour of his cousin and her husband, who lived in a nearby hamlet. "You must come," the man said. "Something has happened at your cousin's house, something terrible."
Pulling into the driveway, Abu Muhammad saw his cousin's 11- and nine-year-old boys wailing. They had just returned home from school. Smoke was billowing from one of the windows.
Abu Muhammad circled the house, looking in the windows. His cousin Fakhriah, her husband Qassim and their six-year-old daughter Hadeel had all been shot. Their daughter Abeer, 14, was naked from the waist down. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone.
"Come," Abu Muhammad said to the boys. "Come with me." He dropped them with his wife and drove to a nearby traffic control point, TCP1.
Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen was in charge of TCP1 that day. He sent Sergeant Tony Yribe to check it out. At just 22, Yribe looked like an action hero and was on his second tour in Iraq. As usual, he noted, there were not enough men to mount a proper patrol. Ideally, they shouldn't be manoeuvring with less than a squad, nine or 10 men. But that almost never happened. Here in the so-called Triangle of Death, three-, four- and five-man patrols were standard. Allen told him to pick up two men on his way, from TCP2. "And be sure to bring a camera. Battalion is going to want pictures."
It was late afternoon. 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, and all of 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, had been in theatre for nearly six months. The same to go. It felt like an eternity – with an eternity yet to come.
Yribe arrived at TCP2. Specialist Paul Cortez and Private First Class Jesse Spielman were ready to go. At 23, Cortez was acting squad leader, a job many thought beyond him. He had a reputation as an immature loudmouth with a nasty streak, and he was in charge of a motley group of six soldiers down at TCP2, some of whom had been on their own at this spartan, unfortified outpost for 12 days straight. They were pretty ragged and strung out.
Specialist James Barker, 23, was next in seniority, a soldier renowned for being a smart aleck and mischief-maker. Spielman, 21, was quiet and unassuming; Private First Class Steven Green, also 21, never stopped talking.
Some Iraqi army soldiers were already at the house. It was grisly. Yribe started taking pictures and directed the other soldiers to look for evidence, but Cortez started dry heaving. He looked green and pale, and was drenched with sweat.
"Jesus, just go outside," Yribe told Cortez. Spielman was cool and efficient, but the burnt girl's remains were so disgusting they just left her where she was. As the men moved a mattress, something small and green skittered across the ground. It was a spent shotgun shell. That's odd, Yribe thought, Iraqis don't really use shotguns.
In mid-2006, three years after the toppling of Saddam's regime, the 330 square mile region south of Baghdad that encompassed the Triangle of Death had become one of the deadliest locales in the country. It was a battleground of the incipient civil war between Sunnis and Shias, and a way station for terrorists of every allegiance, ferrying men, weapons and money into the capital.
Just two years later, the region had been effectively pacified, patrolled by 30,000 men (including Iraqi forces) who experienced about two attacks a week. Back then, however, it was occupied by just 1,000 US soldiers, who coped with more than 100 attacks each week against them and Iraqi civilians. With far fewer troops and resources than they needed, the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment – a light battalion of around 700 men – was flung out there with orders, essentially, to save the day. During their year-long deployment, 21 men were killed, with scores more wounded badly enough to be evacuated home. Seven of those who died came from the same group of around 35 men: 1st Platoon.
In December 2005, Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson and Sergeant Kenith Casica of 1st Platoon were shot dead at TCP2 by a lone Iraqi who had given them information in the past. "That's when things started to turn," says Staff Sergeant Chris Payne, leader of 1st Platoon's 2nd Squad. A few days later, two more men of 1st Platoon were killed by an IED (improvised explosive device).
The feeling that death was certain was becoming pervasive in 1st Platoon, and spreading like a panic. More and more men started to believe they simply weren't going home. Some say drinking was becoming fairly common. There were plenty of interpreters who were happy to procure bottles of whiskey or gin, or even pills or hash, for any soldier who wanted them.
Green was reacting particularly badly. He had always been a loudmouth, racist and misogynist. An evaluation form filled out by the Combat Stress team around that time is a horror show of ailments and dysfunctions. Green told them he was a victim of mental and physical childhood abuse by his mother and brother, he was an adolescent drug and alcohol abuser, and had been arrested several times. Now, he said, he was having suicidal and homicidal thoughts. One entry states, "Interests: None other than killing Iraqis."
By this point, extreme hatred of Iraqis had become common in the platoon and was openly discussed. They became more aggressive: suspects were beaten, house searches got more violent, drinking became more open and was not limited to the ranks. The men were at a far lower ebb than even those meant to monitor them realised.
During patrols, Green often volunteered to kill. "I was always saying, 'Any time you all are ready, you all are the ones in charge of me. Any time you all say the word, 'Go', it's on," he recalled.
Just after 4pm on 5 March, 21-year-old Specialist Ethan Biggers was shot in the head. He had been the entire company's little brother; he and his fiancee were expecting their first child.
On 12 March, Green was pulling pre-dawn guard in the gun truck at TCP2. He'd been up for 18 hours. "When I'm on guard next time," he told Cortez and Barker, "I'm going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we'll just say they were running the TCP."
"Don't do that!" Cortez said. "Don't do it while I'm here. I'm supposed to be running this shit."
Barker agreed. "I've got a better idea," he said. "We've all killed Hadjis, but I've been here twice and I still never fucked one of these bitches."
Cortez's interest was piqued. They talked about it semi-seriously, as they did other things throughout the rest of the morning.
Barker had already picked the target. There was a house, not far away, where there was only one male and three females during the day – a husband, wife and two daughters. One was young, but the other was pretty hot, at least for a Hadji chick. Witnesses were a problem, though; they knew they couldn't leave anyone alive. Barker asked Green if he was willing to take care of that, even if women and kids were involved. "Absolutely," Green said. "It don't make any difference to me."
They refined their plan and, over several hours, went back and forth on whether or not to do it. Barker was pushing hard, and Green was game, but finally Cortez said, "No, fuck it, this is crazy. Fuck this. There is no way we are doing this shit."
At around noon, with a new wave of boredom taking hold, the three of them, with Spielman, sat down outside to play Uno and drink whiskey. The men got drunker and drunker, and eventually Cortez declared, "Fuck it, we are going to do this." He outlined the mission and divvied up the duty assignments just like a legitimate patrol. He and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family, Spielman would pull guard and 18-year-old Private First Class Bryan Howard, a recent arrival, would stay back and man the radio.
Spielman, who had not heard of the plan until then, did not bat an eye. "I'd be down with that."
Cortez went out to the truck to check on Private Seth Scheller, who was the only one on guard. Scheller was also new.
Cortez briefed Howard. He said they knew of an Iraqi girl who lived nearby, and they were going to go and fuck her. To Howard, it was the most insane thing he'd ever heard. He didn't believe it, nor that they were leaving him and Scheller alone. Cortez gave him the radio and told him to call if any patrols or Humvees came through. The men, armed and disguised, headed out the back of the TCP.
Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi was not from the Yusufiyah area. After the 1991 Gulf war, when UN sanctions made life even tougher, he and his wife Fakhriah had moved to be closer to her family and to look for work. A daughter, Abeer, was born in August 1991; soon after came two sons, Muhammad and Ahmed, and another daughter, Hadeel.
When the US invaded, local people were hopeful, but soon the area began to fall apart from neglect and violence. The locals felt persecuted. The US patrols were brutish. Qassim's brother-in-law was gunned down in cold blood by the Americans in Iskandariyah in early 2005, said his sister. Other family members got hauled off to jail for no reason, with no indication of when they'd come home.
Fakhriah was particularly worried about Abeer. Now 14, her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers would give her the thumbs up and say, "Very good, very nice." By early March, the harassment was getting so bad that Abu Muhammad told the family to leave Abeer with him; there were more people at his house and it was less secluded. But Abeer stayed there only one night, on 9 or 10 March. With his protection, Qassim assured Abu Muhammad, they'd be fine.
Sneaking up on the house, the soldiers corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family's AK-47 and Green had confirmed it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and living room, while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room, pushed her down, and Barker pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.
In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. The woman made a run for the door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the floor. The man became unhinged. Green turned his own AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. Panicking, as the man advanced on him, Green switched to his shotgun. The first shot blasted the top of the man's head off. Then Green turned to the little girl, who was running for a corner. This time the AK worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground.
Spielman came in, saw the carnage and was furious. Green explained the AK had jammed and Spielman began searching for shotgun casings.
As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, "They're all dead. I killed them all." Cortez held Abeer down and Green raped her. Then Cortez pushed a pillow over her face, still pinning her arms with his knees. Green grabbed the AK, pointed the gun at the pillow, and fired one shot, killing Abeer.
The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went to the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire.
The four men ran back the way they had come. When they arrived at the TCP, they were out of breath, manic, animated. They began talking rapid-fire about how great that was, how well done. They all agreed that was awesome, that was cool.
Several hours later, Yribe was still mulling over what he had seen. You don't see a lot of girls that little murdered in Iraq, he thought to himself. And the burning of the other girl's body – that was strange, too: burning was a huge desecration. Then there was the shotgun shell. The shotgun is almost exclusively an American weapon.
As Yribe approached TCP2 to drop off Spielman and Cortez, Green was waiting in the street. He pulled Yribe aside. "I did that shit," he said.
"What?" Yribe said.
"I killed them," Green repeated. Barker was standing next to Green, but didn't say a word.
Caught off guard, Yribe dismissed it as more of Green's crazy talk. It was insane. How could a scrawny guy slip away from a TCP by himself in the middle of the day and rape and murder a family? But Green kept insisting. Yribe told him to shut up, he didn't have time for his bullshit right now.
The next day, Cortez went to Yribe in tears. He said he was so shaken up by what he had seen in the house, he needed to go to Combat Stress.
While Yribe covered for Cortez, he found Green. He'd been thinking over what Green had told him the day before and it was bothering him. "Now," he demanded, "tell me everything, every detail."
Green started to talk. Again, Barker was there and, again, he did not say a word. The thing that really convinced Yribe was not what Green was saying but how he was saying it. Ordinarily, Green was manic and boastful. Right now, however, Green was serious, sober, matter-of-fact.
When Green was finished, Yribe told him, "I am done with you. You are dead to me. You get yourself out of this army, or I will get you out myself."
Yribe decided not to say anything and, as there were no witnesses, the bodies had been removed so quickly and so many soldiers had tramped over the house, there was no usable physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings. Without conclusive evidence, it was instantly a cold case, like tens of thousands of murders in Iraq that year.
On 20 March, Green went to Combat Stress and, over a few days, was diagnosed with a pre-existing antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others, habitual lying and disregard for the safety of self or others. The diagnosis carried immediate expulsion from the army. Back in the US, on 16 May, he was honourably discharged and returned to society.
On 16 June, three more of 1st Platoon's men – Private First Class Thomas Tucker, Specialist David Babineau and Private First Class Kristian Menchaca were attacked on guard. Babineau was killed, the others captured. Three days later they were found, murdered, burnt and mutilated. When Yribe heard, he lost it. "It drives me crazy," he said to Private First Class Justin Watt, "that all the good men die and the shitbag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers."
"Murderers?" Watt asked.
Yribe told Watt about the day at the checkpoint and how Green had confessed to him. Watt couldn't believe what he was hearing, and didn't believe Green could have acted alone. "Just forget I said anything," Yribe said. But Watt couldn't forget. He began obsessively mulling it over.
Around lunchtime on 19 June, Watt ran into Howard and Private First Class Justin Cross. As they were talking, Watt remembered both guys had been a part of the group at TCP2 that day back in March. They discussed all the messed-up stuff they had seen, and Watt brought up the girl who got burnt. Convinced Watt knew the whole story, Howard filled in many of the missing pieces.
That night, Watt recounted it all to Yribe, but again he said he didn't see what good was going to come from digging it up. For a while, Watt did try to forget. But he kept coming back to the father. He imagined the powerlessness, the impotence, of having armed men break into your house and there being nothing you could do to protect your family. Watt ran it over in his mind again and again. He resolved that he couldn't just let this pass.
On 23 June, Watt spoke to his immediate superiors. Over the next two days, the matter reached the highest levels. The soldiers involved were interviewed and, with varying degrees of vehemence and evasiveness, each claimed to have no knowledge of the crime. But over the next five days, and over multiple interrogation sessions, Barker, Cortez and Spielman all broke down and confessed, corroborating Howard's narrative, though each resisted fully implicating himself.
The US army paid the Janabi family $30,000 for the murders of Qassim, Fakhriah, Abeer and Hadeel. Nine months into a year-long deployment, 1st Platoon's war was effectively over.
Back in the US, Green was arrested by the FBI. The crime was making news, and al-Qaida was exploiting the outrage for maximum propaganda. On 10 July, the Mujahideen Shura Council issued a five-minute video showing the mutilated corpses of Tucker and Menchaca. Its audio includes clips of Osama bin Laden's and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's speeches, as well as the message that the video was being presented as "revenge for our sister who was dishonoured by a soldier of the same brigade".
Although there was virtually no usable forensic evidence, the army's cases against Barker and Cortez were particularly strong, based on their confessions, and both offered to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit rape and murder and other charges if the army agreed not to pursue the death penalty. The army accepted, and sentenced Barker and Cortez to 90 years and 100 years at the military's maximum security prison. They will be eligible for parole in 20 and 10 years respectively.
In March 2007, Howard pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice and being an accessory after the fact. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison, and was released on parole after 17.
Spielman's lawyers claimed he did not know where the rogue patrol was going on 12 March and, once at the house, was too surprised and scared to do anything about it. A military panel did not believe these claims of innocence, found him guilty of all charges and sentenced him to life in prison. His sentence was later reduced to 90 years; he, too, will be eligible for parole after 10 years.
Because Green had been discharged, his case proved to be much more complicated. The Justice Department announced it was pursuing the death penalty, making him the first former service member ever to face the possibility of execution in a civilian court for his conduct during war. His defence team twice offered to have him plead guilty if the government would take the death penalty off the table; twice the Justice Department declined. To this day, his defence attorney maintains that this was a politically motivated appeasement to the Iraqi government and public opinion. His attorneys also tried several times to have Green reinducted into the army and tried by court martial. The army declined the offers.
After ruling out an insanity defence, Green's attorneys decided their best hope was to focus on the horrible conditions under which Bravo worked, Green's abysmal upbringing, the leadership failures that plagued every level of the 1-502nd and the warning signs of his murderous obsessions that his superiors routinely ignored. During several dramatic weeks of testimony, the defence ran a trial within a trial against the army's negligence in allowing the atrocity to happen, while prosecutors emphasised the heinousness of Green's behaviour.
The jury of nine women and three men found Green guilty of all counts of conspiracy, rape and murder, but hung, six against six, on the issue of whether to sentence him to death, triggering an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole.
Relatives of the murdered family, including Abu Muhammad, had testified during the trial, and afterwards were allowed to address the court. Abu Muhammad spoke last, praising his slain family members and criticising the jury's reluctance to execute Green. He concluded by turning to Green and saying, "Abeer will follow you and chase you in your nightmares. May God damn you."
Then Green was given the opportunity to make his first public statement. He addressed the family, saying, "I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and for the pain my actions, and the actions of my co-defendants, have caused you and your family… I helped to destroy a family and end the lives of four fellow human beings, and I wish that I could take that back, but I cannot… I know if I live one more year or 50 more years that they will be years that Fakhriah, Qassim, Abeer and Hadeel won't have. And even though I did not learn their names until long after their deaths, they are never far from my mind… I know I have done evil, and I fear the wrath of the Lord will come upon me. But I hope you and your family at least can find some comfort in God's justice."
Green is currently serving five consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
• This is an edited extract from Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness In Iraq's Triangle Of Death, by Jim Frederick, published on 6 August by Macmillan at £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99 (including UK p&p), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
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