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US Sergeant Charged With Murder Of Officers In Iraq

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US Sergeant Charged With Murder Of Officers In Iraq

06.18.05 (12:06 pm) [edit]

Lies-lies and more lies. Of course, the Pentagon will not provide any more information.

US sergeant charged with murder of officers in Iraq

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
The Independent
18 June 2005

A US Army sergeant has been charged with murdering two officers in the first alleged case of 'fragging' since the start of the Iraq war.

Alberto Martinez, 37, is being held in a military jail in Kuwait after being charged with the premeditated killing of Cpt Phillip Esposito and Lt Louis Allen. The three men served with the 42nd Infantry Division, a reserve unit drawn from the New York National Guard.

A statement issued by the Pentagon said the officers were killed by a blast in Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, on 7 June. Initial inquiries suggested an enemy mortar blast was responsible, but further investigations found circumstances "inconsistent with a mortar attack". The Pentagon has declined to provide further details.

The case is the first of its kind involving US troops in Iraq, although in April another army sergeant was convicted of fragging (military slang for killing a senior officer). Hasan Akbar killed two officers in March 2003 by rolling grenades into their tent on the Kuwait border as they prepared for the invasion. He has been sentenced to death, the first US soldier convicted of murdering a colleague in war since Vietnam.

A neighbour of Sgt Martinez in Troy, New York, said he had just lost his home to a fire and moved to his childhood home. His mother had died in recent years, the neighbour said.

The bodies of the two dead men have been returned to their families. Lt Allen was buried in Milford, Pennsylvania, where he lived. Denis Petrilak, head teacher at the George Baker High School, where the officer had taught science for the past five years, said: "Today we're just focused on Lieutenant Allen."

Cpt Esposito's mother said her son's wife, Siobhan, and 18-month-old daughter, Madeline, deserved to know the details of his death. He had wanted to be a soldier since he was a boy, she said.

A family friend, Barry Lennihan, said he was a "very, very solid individual". He said Cpt Esposito had attended space camp as a boy and might have been an astronaut if not for imperfect eyesight.

Link

And this from one of our own good soldiers

By STAN GOFF
Counterpunch.org
06/15/05
I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

I thugged around in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.

In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about "loyalty."

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other people around the world. [...]

And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say more and more often now that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to "do your job," because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don't go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, "My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that 'the Geneva Convention doesn't exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.'" [...]

One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And "what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq." This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I'm telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.

They know that many of you know that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are busy every day at home undermi ning the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).

They know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know t hat they can't rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain of command any more either.

Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? What do they tell you?

"You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs together, as loyal buddies."

"You get out there and ransack people's houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry together, as buddies."

"You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don't know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, an d you have to live with that for the rest of your lives together, because you are loyal buddies."

"You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies."

That's the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn't take your place.

But let's look at the bigger picture here, and for that I'll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bullsh*t then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing fac tors was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force, because US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far. [...]

LINK

posted by: Brandi Spence (reply)
post date: 01.08.09 (6:38 pm)

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posted by: Eunice Herrera (reply)
post date: 01.10.09 (7:26 am)

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