World news
Robert Bales is a dead man walking
I’ll cut to the chase: it is my firm belief that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales – the soldier accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians – will face a court martial for murder, be found guilty on all counts and expeditiously executed afterward. I hope to God I’m wrong, but the political tarot cards in this particular case all point to the appeasement of a howling mob of raghead barbarians in a landlocked cesspool that claims to be the sovereign nation of Afghanistan.
A horrific act
To be sure, it was a horrific act: for reasons known only to himself and almighty God, Robert Bales murdered 16 people – men, women and children – in what appears to be ice-cold blood.
Bales is a 38-year-old staff sergeant, husband, father of two young children and a veteran who was in the midst of his fourth tour in a war zone. He was featured in a brief article in a September 2011 military newsletter detailing Blackhorse Company’s efforts to establish relationships with Afghan village residents.
[…]
The sergeant’s family says they saw no signs of aggression or anger. “They were totally shocked” by accounts of the massacre, Browne said. “He’s never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He’s in general very mild-mannered.”
Browne, who said he has met with the family and talked with the suspect, cited a need to protect family members in declining to release the soldier’s name.
It would not surprise me in the least if Bales’ wife and children have already been marked for death by stateside jihadists. Already, proper precautions have been taken to ensure their safety and they have been moved to a secure location.
Robert Bales’ history
The soldier, said to have received sniper training, is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based at Lewis-McChord and has been dispatched to Iraq three times since 2003, military officials say.
Three times is the charm, as they say. Obviously, the military brass were sufficiently pleased with his performance to send him back into hell not once but twice.
During the suspect’s time in Iraq, Browne said, the soldier was injured twice. A battle-related injury required surgery to remove part of one foot, the lawyer said.
Strike one: Robert Bales is maimed in combat – but returns to active duty.
But Browne and government officials differ in their portrayal of a second injury, to the soldier’s head, in a vehicle accident.
A government official said this week that the accident was not related to combat. But Browne said the man suffered a concussion in an accident caused by an improvised explosive device.
Uh huh. In other words, he was either on patrol or off-duty IN A COMBAT ZONE when injured by an IED. Does it really matter that the injury was not sustained in the course of a fire-fight?
[…]
When he returned to the Seattle area, the staff sergeant at first thought he would not be required to join his unit when it shipped out for Afghanistan, the lawyer said. His family thought he was done fighting and was counting on him staying home. Until orders came dispatching him to Afghanistan, he was training to be a military recruiter, Browne said.
“He wasn’t thrilled about going on another deployment,” Browne said. “He was told he wasn’t going back, and then he was told he was going.”
Once more he was shipped off to a cesspool where our military is obliged to fight with a collective arm tied behind its back according to rules apparently set forth by Lewis Carroll.
On Saturday, the day before the shooting spree, Browne said, the soldier saw his friend’s leg blown off. Browne said his client’s family provided him with that information, which has not been verified.
The other soldier’s “leg was blown off, and my client was standing next to him,” he said.
Browne said he did not know if his client had been suffering from PTSD, but said it could be an issue at trial if experts believe it’s relevant. Experts on PTSD said witnessing the injury of a fellow soldier and the suspect’s own previous injuries put him at risk.
Gee…ya think? I don’t have to be a Harvard-educated psychiatrist to figure out what happened: Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, injured not once but twice in the course of his service to our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered a profound break from reality and did the bidding of psychotic demons – an act for which he will likely be found guilty and possibly executed.
A contrasting case
Seal of the Department of the Army, formerly the Department of War. Image: US Department of Defense
In other news, nearly two and a half years after he slaughtered 13 people in what has become known in history as the Fort Hood Massacre, Maj. Nidal Hasan – the crypto-jihadist who screamed out “Allahu Akhbar!” as he gunned down unarmed men and women – has yet to be brought to trial. That he was a ticking time bomb of Islamic malevolence is now common knowledge, as is the fact that the U.S. military is obsessed with kid glove treatment of all things Muslim:
Immediately after the shootings, President Obama called Hasan’s actions “inexplicable” and suggested that he may have “cracked” under stress. The media followed suit, emphasizing the stress of treating soldiers emotionally scarred by war, and insinuating that Hasan had been unfairly picked on by his colleagues. One talking head said “we may never know if religion was a factor” in the killings. Another lamented that Hasan had failed to “reach out for help.” In reality, Hasan had long exhibited bizarre, menacing behavior that would have gotten him kicked out of the Army several times over if not for his protected status as a Muslim. The sympathetic disinformation was intended to hide Hasan’s actual purpose — to kill as many infidel American soldiers as possible for Allah.
The court martial of Major Hasan that was scheduled for March 5 of this year has been postponed for reasons that are unclear to me, as I can find very little useful information via Google. Not that it matters: if and when he is court martialed, Hasan will be sentenced to life in prison, where he will be well fed and supplied with Qurans and prayers rugs to his evil heart’s content.
This article appeared first at Bulldog Pundit.
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I’d like to hope that the actions which have taken place so far demonstrate that the principles of fair American justice are being applied.
There’s no doubt that this man committed horrible acts, and my heart goes out to the families of the victims. Sadly, not even the execution of Sergeant Bales could or would reverse any damage – it would only add another death to the toll of this tragedy.
What’s clear is that he has not been handed off from the American justice system to the Afghan one, and he now has a lawyer representing him. What matters at this time is determining why this incident happened, and if Bales committed the act while in a state of mental impairment. He has a good enough prior record to question whether PTSD or something similar had affected him to the point of a reality break, and if that is established, he needs treatment.
For the families of the victims, treating the killer of their loved ones with patience and possible therapy may seem to hurtful to bear, but the greater good in this is that if Sgt. Bales is truly a good man damaged to the point of performing such an act, we need to us this incident and a careful, objective diagnosis of the man to identify the other Sgt. Bales that may be out there – good men (or women) who have served their country faithfully but who have been damaged in the process. If this helps us to profile these people, remove them from active duty and get them help, many other lives will be saved compared to taking this one for revenge.
I only hope that people don’t belittle or dismiss what the victims’ families may feel about this. Our culture is not theirs, and these were civilians, not enemies. They need our sympathy and support all the more.
[…] the rank-and-file seem to think. On the other hand, writer Gene Hoyas asks why the Army is moving so fast in Robert Bales’ case, while it has barely moved an inch in […]
There are perfectly sound operational reasons for getting Bales tried and dealt with as fast as possible. If the Army can’t show that justice has been done it will be used by the enemy to influence ordinary Afghans. The reputation of US troops among typical Afghans is fairly poor already due to various cultural issues and things like this massacre are a gift to the Taliban. Dealing with Hasan, however, has absolutely no operational implications for the 90,000 US troops currently deployed with ISAF and the best thing to do is let him fade from the news then quietly try him later.
The sad fact is that while I wouldn’t like to see a clearly damaged man like Bales being executed when what he really needs is help, his own actions have made it necessary to sacrifice him in the interests of his former colleagues. The sooner he’s tried and punished the better.
Mr.Gene Hoyas,
I appreciated your terse and excellent commentary. You make the concise point of the Obama Administration’s double standard. But, be that as it may, I am not surprised, since Barack Hussein Obama has made it clear in a number of ways that he is not a patriotic American beholden to the US Constitution, but a misfit White House occupier who, untowardly, favors Muslims and the Islamic Culture.
Oh – by the way – what ever happened to the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 massacre (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), where some 3000 American innocents were murdered? What’s his status?
Although I seldom access wikipedia, I just did a quick search. The page says that it is outdated, but did say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is charged with terrorism / conspiracy and is awaiting prosecution. Here’s a portion of the article:
……He was captured on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistan, and transferred to U.S. custody. In March 2007, he confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various foiled attacks. He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission and faces the death penalty if convicted…….
link to en.wikipedia.org
Mr. Hoyas – I have no doubt that your “take” on soldier Robert Bale’s fate is a likely scenario, while Muslim, Hassan and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s fate will continue (for sometime) to be in limbo.
The point you’re missing, of course, is that Bale’s fate has a direct effect on the security of 132,000 ISAF troops and needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, ideally without muck-slinging loudmouths saying anything that will further inflame Afghan public opinion.
You may not think Afghan public opinion is important, but if you were in a FOB in Kandahar the willingness of the locals to tell you where IEDs had been placed might be of some interest to you.
Fergus: Re: Your March 21, 2012 at 5:54 pm comment:
I witness no viable argument to your contention that our troops are in that greater of danger than they were before these alleged cold-blooded murderers. Why? Because of the history of these foreigners and their Muslim Culture. They are already predisposed to rage and revenge because Americans are occupying their soil.
But, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that our American presence needs to continue. The sooner we can be out of Afghanistan, the better. It’s only a pipe dream to believe that the US can nation build some sort of democracy in that Muslim Culture.
“I witness no viable argument to your contention that our troops are in that greater of danger than they were before these alleged cold-blooded murderers. Why?”
Oh, I know why: because you have no idea of what Afghanistan is like, that’s why. The threat from the insurgents is unchanged; they will still place IEDs and ambush patrols. What will now change in that area, and to a lesser extent in all areas populated by that particular Pashtun tribe, is that villagers will no longer tell ISAF troops where IEDs have been dug in. They will no longer leave notes behind after meetings with ISAF civil affairs teams that give details of where insurgents are sheltering in their villages. They will no longer send text messages to ISAF warning of planned ambushes. And they won’t start doing those things again until they feel that justice has been done.
“The sooner we can be out of Afghanistan, the better.”
Absolutely wrong. We could have left in December 2001. We can leave when the insurgency has been beaten down enough for the Afghan government to survive. What we definitely can’t do is leave now.
“the US can nation build some sort of democracy”
ISAF is a 46-nation coalition under NATO command. It’s not a US mission.
Fergus: Re: Your March 21, 2012 at 9:57 pm comment:
Thank you for accenting my contention. That Muslim culture will never change.
As to the US pulling out because it is a multi-nation endeavor: That’s no viable assertion. Let’s face it. Foreign presence is there because the US in the first place desired it.
There is no logical reason to stay and prop up a government that resents us. It’s time the US understands, it is being played.
However, having stated the aforementioned, it is my belief that Obama doesn’t care. I think he wants our America to be so thinly spread out throughout the world that America will suffer greatly for it. Just remember, he married a woman who was only proud of America because voters were snake charmed by her lying husband.
“Thank you for accenting my contention. That Muslim culture will never change.”
I have no idea what you’re on about. We’re not talking about muslim culture, we’re talking about Pashtun culture. Pashtuns are muslims, but they no more share a culture with, say, Arabs or Turks than I do with an atheist from Japan or Botswana.
As for muslim culture never changing, to the extent that there’s even such a thing as a “muslim” culture it changes all the time, just like every other culture does. It simply hasn’t do so in very productive directions for the last few centuries.
“There is no logical reason to stay and prop up a government that resents us.”
Oh, the government doesn’t resent you; whatever it may say in public the government loves you because you installed it, you protect it and you pay for it. It’s a large part of the ordinary people who resent you, for a number of reasons. The biggest one is simply that they don’t like foreign soldiers. Other ones are civilian casualties caused by poor intelligence gathering, koran burnings (which I appreciate are the work of idiots and not a deliberate policy) and the well-publicised cases of cretins sending thousands of Dari and Pashto bibles to US troops so they can hand them out to the locals.
“Foreign presence is there because the US in the first place desired it.”
Ha ha. No.
The fact is that pulling out of Afghanistan now would be a disaster. It could have been done immediately after the 2001 operation or in 2002, because the insurgency hadn’t got started. It can be done after the insurgency has been cut down enough for the Afghans to deal with it themselves. But it can’t be done now, because that would simply leave a fully functioning insurgency that’s strong enough to take Afghanistan and probably take (nuclear-armed) Pakistan as well. It will also reinforce the belief that Mujahiddeen can defeat a superpower or – even worse – an alliance of the entire West.
If the USA walks away from Afghanistan without finishing the job it’s the beginning of the end for you as a superpower. And to get the job done Robert Bales has to be publicly punished.
This is a revolting post.
Is this site claiming that the murder of 16 people is excusable because they are “raghead barbarians in a landlocked cesspool”? Ask yourself: What Would Jesus Do?
There is nothing, *nothing*, that justifies this murder spree. I’m from a civilised country, so I wouldn’t want to see Bales face the death penalty, but the idea that he might escape justice is anathema to me.
I have no idea why you published this article, Terry. I’d love to hear your excuse.
I imagine that Jesus, given the place and time where he lived, would feel a lot more cultural affinity with those “raghead barbarians” (who, let’s not forget, revere him as the second-greatest prophet in Islam) than he would with modern Americans.
The Pashtuns, by the way, consider themselves to be decended from one of the lost tribes of Israel.
I haven’t had time to “vet” the claims of the Pashtuns. But I remind you that Muslims consider Jesus a Prophet—only. A time will come when they all stand before Him for judgment.
MUSLIM: But I was a sincere Muslim!
JESUS: Tragically, you were sincerely wrong.
“I haven’t had time to “vet” the claims of the Pashtuns.”
I wouldn’t bother if I was you. It’s blatant nonsense. They’re Persians, not Semites.
“I remind you that Muslims consider Jesus a Prophet—only.”
Oh, you don’t need to remind me of that; I dare say I know a lot more about islam than you do. However the muslim position on Jesus is a lot closer to yours than it is to mine: I consider him a man who may not even have existed or, more likely, may be a composite of several real people. I don’t believe in prophets any more than I believe in gods.
To be fair to Terry he didn’t write this. His own article on the subject is a lot more moderate in tone and while I think it’s misguided it’s honestly misguided, rather than being crudely racist like this one is.
rpeh: Re: Your March 21, 2012 at 5:47 pm comment:
I’m surprised at your comment – that part where you say:
“…..but the idea that he might escape justice is anathema to me.”
rpeh – I don’t know where you would gather the idea, which you seem to have grasped, but I did not gain any impression that the author of this commentary or those who have thus commented, have expressed any argument that would desire the alleged murderer to go unpunished.
My point was that although I’m not calling for the death penalty, I don’t expect him to go unpunished: I could have phrased it much better.
You ignored, however, the main point of my post, which was to condemn the disgusting racism of this post. Terry should not have posted this here.
“…a howling mob of raghead barbarians in a landlocked cesspool that claims to be the sovereign nation of Afghanistan.”
What a wonderful way to describe those who had loved ones and neighbors cut down in the middle of the night for nothing more than living in Afghanistan. Don’t they deserve justice as well?
It would appear as if the author of this article sees Afghans as something other than fellow human beings, based purely on his own petty prejudices.
He also seems to imply that massacring them is not a bad thing. Seems the author is just another Nazi.
And the site’s owner allows himself to be tainted by this filth, no doubt claiming that freedom of speech, yada yada yada.
As I’ve said many time, with the RIGHT to free speech, comes the RESPONSIBILITIES associated with that free speech. But go ahead – entrench the idea that this site is populated by racists and bigots.
What gets me is the willingness to use an incident like this to score petty political points. There are all sorts of reasons to publicly and rapidly deal with Bales, none of which apply to Hasan. The problem with people like Hoyas is they can’t grasp the fact that the world is a big, complex place and can’t be handled just by nitpicking legal arguments.
Thanks to Bales’ actions, ISAF soldiers are going to die who would otherwise have come home to their families. The only way to minimise those deaths is to rapidly neutralise the grievances of the ordinary Afghans, and that means an expedited trial followed by a punishment that is seen as appropriate by the families of his victims.
Hasan, on the other hand, is a liability. Despicable as he is, a prominent trial and punishment would be seized on and distorted into evidence of anti-muslim prejudice. Best if everyone just forgets about him and then, a couple of years from now, he can fall down the stairs and quietly break his neck. Job jobbed.
This is not an issue of pro-muslim prejudice by the Obama administration; it’s a complex issue of Realpolitik that’s way beyond the level of US party political squabbling.
“I hope to God I’m wrong”
Why do you hope you’re wrong? Are you happy to see ISAF troops die unnecessarily just so political hacks and greedy lawyers can caper around bleating about a prolonged farce of a court martial? Does your hatred of Obama wipe away your concern for US and allied soldiers?
“our military is obliged to fight with a collective arm tied behind its back according to rules apparently set forth by Lewis Carroll.”
I have no words to describe how inane this comment is. Do you have ANY idea what the ISAF Rules of Engagement actually are? There is no obstacle at all to using weapons against identified insurgents or anyone who’s attacking ISAF troops, Afghan national security forces or civilians. What the ROE does is prevent indiscriminate or disproportionate fire that risks the lives of noncombatants. And that isn’t just a PR move; it’s required by the laws of armed conflict, a non-negotiable aspect of international law.