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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Army ‘Kill Team’ Member: ‘We All Said Yes’ to Slaying Afghan Civilian Army ‘Kill Team’ Member: ‘We All Said Yes’ to Slaying Afghan Civilian * By Spencer Ackerman * October 5, 2010 * 12:01 am In the latest video to emerge from the Army’s investigation into a rogue “Kill Team” in Afghanistan, Specialist Adam Winfield, one of the five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division charged with murdering Afghan civilians, tells an investigator how he took part in an execution in a Kandahar village. Army Times obtained a video from Winfield in which the young soldier says that Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, the alleged ringleader of the rogue soldiers, himself used the term “Kill Team” to describe the gang-like activities it plotted. Initially, Winfield says, Gibbs thought he was too “weak” to join up. That’s corroborated by a third alleged Kill Team member charged with murder, Specialist Justin Morlock, who claims Gibbs talked about killing Winfield — one of many revelations in a separate leak from the case obtained by the New York Times that includes hand-drawn maps of the crime scenes and statements from several soldiers involved. Winfield’s sworn statement, also acquired by the Times, indicates that the specialist was aware the Kill Team didn’t trust him. Two soldiers told him Gibbs “was going to kill me if I rated [sic] him out over the murders.” Unbeknownst to the Kill Team, Morlock had already told his father what was happening. Still, on an unspecified night probably in May 2010, as the team rolled through a village ready to kill someone, Winfield went along with the plot. “We got to a compound where we had previously found an IED [improvised explosive device],” Winfield tells his investigator in the video. At an adjoining compound, “they picked that guy out,” he says, an Afghan who “didn’t have any animosity towards us.” Gibbs asked, “Is this the guy… You wanna do him?” And that was how, according to Winfield, the team framed an Afghan for planting roadside bombs. “Everybody understood what [Gibbs] was talking about,” Winfield says. “We all said yes.” Twenty meters outside, the specialist continues, the team placed the Afghan in a ditch on his knees. In a move orchestrated to make the unarmed man look like he threatened the soldiers, Winfield says he shot the man while Gibbs exploded a grenade. Then Gibbs shot the man twice with his rifle for good measure, leaving a Russian-model unexploded grenade behind on the corpse. The cover story, Winfield says, was that he and Morlock discovered the Afghan man was about to throw the grenade, so they killed him in self-defense. Statements in the investigation acquired by the Times suggest that the team didn’t spend a lot of time making sure their cover stories checked out. On a February mission through an Afghan village, Staff Sergeant Kris Sprague noticed something was wrong with Gibbs’ account of an Afghan whom soldiers shot after he attempted to kill Gibbs with an AK-47. While Gibbs said the Afghan’s rifle jammed, Sprague test-fired it and it worked perfectly well. Sprague drew investigators the following map of the scene at the village, which he identifies as Keri Khely: The documents that the Times obtain include several other maps sketched by soldiers of the crime scenes, as well as diagrams of Gibbs’s bunk where he allegedly kept severed fingers from his kills as trophies. Winfield told investigators that another alleged Kill Team member, Private First Class Andrew Holmes, also kept a finger from a corpse in a Ziplock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever,” Winfield says, per the Times. The paper has much more about the Kill Team, including an account from a victim’s relatives in Kandahar and a profile of Gibbs featuring childhood friends and acquaintances whose recollections of him don’t match the dark portrait that’s appeared in the media. In February, Winfield exchanged Facebook messages with his father, a retired Marine, informing him about the murders. Christopher Winfield tried in vain to blow the whistle, telling Army officials at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, his son’s home station, about the Kill Team’s actions. An official at the base “told me that unless Adam comes forward over there that there was nothing he could do until Adam got back to Fort Lewis,” Christopher Winfield said in a sworn statement that leaked weeks ago. But the Kill Team long harbored doubts about Winfield. Morlock told investigators that Gibbs outlined two scenarios for killing him. In one, Gibbs would drop a weight on his neck at the base gym. If not, according to the Times’s leak, he would kill Winfield in the motor pool with a tow bar. Two more Afghans died, allegedly at the hands of the Kill Team, after Winfield’s father alerted the Army. The incident for which is charged occurred in May, several months after the father and son discussed the team. When the unit returned to the U.S. in June, Winfield was arrested and charged with the other alleged members. The Kill Team had a way of dealing with snitches. A private who ultimately stepped forward to investigators, Private First Class Justin Stoner, received a beating for reporting the team’s hash use. Leaked video of a different interrogation shows a soldier in the Team recounting how Gibbs boasted he would kill Stoner’s mother and cripple him. Stoner drew the following diagram, obtained by the Times, of the May 3rd incident in which the Kill Team attacked him: Military officials have postponed a pre-trial hearing at Lewis-McChord initially scheduled for Tuesday for another soldier, Staff Sergeant David Bram, who’s accused of choking Stoner in retaliation. While the hearing may be delayed, it looks like the leaks from the Army’s inquiry are bound to continue. Winfield’s video is the third to surface, to say nothing of the cascade of leaked statements to investigators. All of that calls into question whether the soldiers accused of one of the worst crimes in the U.S.’s nine years of war in Afghanistan can actually receive a fair trial. Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/army-kill-team-member-we-all-said-yes-to-slaying-afghan-civilian/#ixzz11b9jRd17
Poster Comment: it seems like a re-run of how some low level soldiers were thrown in jail from the Abu Ghraib controversy. I know some soldiers are bad apples and in some cases they need to be punished. But I generally have a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who are sent into a bad situation to do bad things. The real crime IMHO is in waging the war in the first place and that decision was made by people in Washington, not these grunts. Once that big decision is made the entire military hierarchy scrambles to support it and this means a certain culture of war is encouraged.
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#1. To: Red Jones (#0)
You are exactly correct; sorrowfully, Man has not attained sufficient cerebral, moral development to prevent his being led to follow the bidding of evil people. It is one of the many failings of us mortals, but it is not necessary.
"The 'uniter' has brought the entire world together - to despise and deride us." lod
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