US soldier found guilty in Afghan thrill-killings

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) — A U.S. Army sol­dier accused of exhort­ing his bored under­lings to slaugh­ter three civil­ians for sport was con­victed of mur­der, con­spir­acy and other charges Thurs­day in one of the most grue­some war crimes cases to emerge from the Afghan war.

Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., was the high­est rank­ing of five sol­diers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men dur­ing patrols in Kan­da­har province early last year. At his seven-day court mar­tial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seat­tle, the 26-year-old acknowl­edged cut­ting fin­gers off corpses and yank­ing out a victim’s tooth to keep as war tro­phies, “like keep­ing the antlers off a deer you’d shoot.”

But he insisted he wasn’t involved in the first or third killings, and in the sec­ond he merely returned fire.

Pros­e­cu­tors said Gibbs and his co-defendants knew the vic­tims posed no dan­ger, but dropped weapons by their dead bod­ies to make them appear to have been combatants.

Three of the co-defendants pleaded guilty, and two of them tes­ti­fied against him, por­tray­ing him as an impos­ing, blood­thirsty leader. Gibbs’ lawyer insisted they con­spired to blame him for what they had done and told the five jurors the case rep­re­sented “the ulti­mate betrayal of an infantryman.”

The jury delib­er­ated for about four hours before con­vict­ing him. He faces, at min­i­mum, life with parole, and at max­i­mum life with­out it. The sen­tenc­ing hear­ing began imme­di­ately after the ver­dict was announced.

The inves­ti­ga­tion into the 5th Stryker Brigade unit exposed wide­spread mis­con­duct — a pla­toon that was “out of con­trol,” in the words of a pros­e­cu­tor, Maj. Robert Stelle. The wrong­do­ing included hash-smoking, the col­lec­tion of illicit weapons, the muti­la­tion and pho­tog­ra­phy of Afghan remains, and the gang-beating of a sol­dier who reported the drug use.

In all, 12 sol­diers were charged; all but 2 have now been convicted.

The probe also raised ques­tions about the brigade’s per­mis­sive lead­er­ship cul­ture and the Army’s mech­a­nisms for report­ing misconduct.

After the first killing, one sol­dier, then-Spc. Adam Win­field, alerted his par­ents and told them more killings were planned, but his father’s call to a sergeant at Lewis-McChord relay­ing the warn­ing went unheeded. Win­field later pleaded guilty to invol­un­tary manslaugh­ter in the last killing, say­ing he took part because he believed Gibbs would kill him if he didn’t.

The case against Gibbs relied heav­ily on tes­ti­mony from for­mer Spc. Jeremy Mor­lock, of Wasilla, Alaska, who is serv­ing 24 years after admit­ting his involve­ment in all three killings.

Accord­ing to Mor­lock, Gibbs gave him an “off-the-books” grenade to use in the first killing — a teenager in a field — in Jan­u­ary 2010; killed the sec­ond vic­tim and tossed an AK-47 at his feet to make him appear to have been an enemy fighter the next month; and threw a grenade at the third vic­tim, in May, as he ordered Mor­lock and Win­field to shoot.

Mor­lock and oth­ers told inves­ti­ga­tors that soon after Gibbs joined the unit in 2010, he began talk­ing about how easy it would be to kill civil­ians, and dis­cussed sce­nar­ios where they might carry out such murders.

Asked why sol­diers might have agreed to go along with it, Mor­lock tes­ti­fied that the brigade had trained for deploy­ment to Iraq before hav­ing their orders shifted at the last minute to Afghanistan.

The infantry­men wanted action and fire­fights, he tes­ti­fied, but instead they found them­selves car­ry­ing out a more human­i­tar­ian counter-insurgency strat­egy that involved meet­ings and handshaking.

Another sol­dier, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens, who at the time was a close friend of Gibbs, told inves­ti­ga­tors that in March 2010, he and oth­ers fol­lowed orders from Gibbs to fire on two unarmed farm­ers in a field; no one was injured. Gibbs claimed one was car­ry­ing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, but that was obvi­ously false, Stevens said.

Stevens also tes­ti­fied that Gibbs bragged to him about the sec­ond killing, admit­ting he planted an AK-47 on the victim’s body because he sus­pected the man on involve­ment with the Tal­iban, accord­ing to a report on the tes­ti­mony in The News Tri­bune news­pa­per of Tacoma.

But dur­ing the trial, Gibbs insisted he came under fire.

“I was engaged by an enemy com­bat­ant,” he said. “Luck­ily his weapon appeared to mal­func­tion and I didn’t die.”

Gibbs tes­ti­fied that he wasn’t proud about hav­ing removed fin­gers from the bod­ies of the vic­tims, but said he tried to dis­as­so­ci­ate the corpses from the humans they had been as a means of com­ing to terms with the things sol­diers are asked to do in battle.

The mus­cu­lar 6-foot-4 staff sergeant also tes­ti­fied that he did it because other sol­diers wanted the tro­phies, and he agreed in part because he didn’t want his sub­or­di­nates to think he was a wimp.

Gibbs ini­tially faced 16 charges, but one was dropped dur­ing the trial.

Posted by AP News on Nov 10 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.