In March 2007, Bryan Howard pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice and to being an accessory after the fact. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison at Fort Leavenworth. With time reduction for good behavior and time already served, he was discharged from the Army and released on parole after 17 months. Today, he is working for his father’s heavy machinery rigging business in Huffman, Texas.
Because of gaps and inconsistencies in many of the soldiers’ confessions and all the participants’ ongoing revisions regarding the events of March 12, 2006, there remained some doubt about what, exactly, Jesse Spielman knew about what the others were planning that day and when he knew it. Contesting the bulk of the charges against him, including all felony charges, Spielman’s lawyers claimed that he did not know where the rogue patrol was going on March 12 and that he did not know what was going to happen once it arrived at the Janabi residence. The attorneys contended that no one explained anything about the murderous mission to Spielman, and that once at the house, he 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 (though his sentence was later reduced to 90 years). He too will be eligible for parole after 10 years, and every year after that.
Because Steven Green had been discharged from the Army in May 2006, his case proved to be a much more complicated undertaking that took nearly three years to bring to conclusion. As the Army began investigating Barker, Spielman, and Cortez, military prosecutors realized they had no jurisdiction over Green and notified the U.S. Attorneys’ Office that a suspected rapist and murderer was at large in the United States. The FBI arrested Green in July 2006 as the Justice Department declared it planned to prosecute him under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) of 2000 in the Federal District Court of Western Kentucky, the court district closest to Fort Campbell, Green’s last permanent residence in the United States.
The Justice Department was operating in uncharted territory. There is surprisingly little precedent on how to handle charges against a soldier accused of committing a crime on active duty overseas but who had returned to the United States, been discharged, and was living as a civilian before the crime was discovered. In fact, only one other former service member, ex-Marine sergeant Jose Luis Nazario, had been tried under MEJA. Accused of killing unarmed detainees in Fallujah in 2004, he was acquitted for lack of evidence by a civilian jury in August 2008. Unlike with the Nazario case, however, the Justice Department announced it was pursuing the death penalty against Green, making him the first former service member ever to face the possibility of execution in a civilian court for his conduct during war.
Public defenders Scott Wendelsdorf and Pat Bouldin brought on Darren Wolff, a former Marine lawyer now in private practice. As had Cortez’s and Barker’s lawyers, Green’s team concluded that the confession evidence was so strong that simply keeping their client alive would be a victory. In two motions to dismiss the case, they contested the constitutionality and jurisdiction of MEJA, arguing that the law was not designed for cases like Green’s and should not be applied to him. Indeed, MEJA was written to close a loophole that had enabled military contractors as well as spouses and dependents of service members to escape punishment for crimes committed abroad. Republican senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, who introduced MEJA to Congress, confirmed the law was intended to have a somewhat narrow focus. Said Sessions, “I don’t think any of us at the time the legislation passed were contemplating that a potential criminal act that occurred while a person was on active duty in combat would be tried in a civilian court.” Regardless, Thomas Russell, chief judge of the Western Kentucky District Court, rejected Green’s lawyers’ challenges to MEJA, and the case proceeded.
Green’s defense team twice offered to have Green plead guilty if the government would take the death penalty off the table, and twice the Justice Department declined. To this day, Wolff maintains that Justice’s push for death was a politically motivated appeasement to the Iraqi government and Iraqi public opinion. Noting that the Iraqi minister of human rights attended the first day of Green’s trial, and that Barker and Cortez never had to face the death penalty, Wolff said, “When it became obvious that this case was not about fairness or equity,” Justice’s rejection of Green’s pleas was “about appeasing the overseas communities who have been calling for Mr. Green’s execution.”
The defense attorneys also tried several times to have Green reinducted into the Army and tried by court-martial. In letters to Fort Campbell’s staff judge advocate, the secretary of the army, and the secretary of defense, they argued that a military court was the only appropriate venue for this case, but they also knew that the post–World War II Army was much less likely to execute a criminal than civilian courts were. (The last soldier put to death was Private John Bennett, for rape, in 1961.) The Army declined the offer to take Green back.
After ruling out an insanity defense, Wendelsdorf, Bouldin, and Wolff decided that their best hope before the jury was to emphasize what Bouldin called during the trial’s April 2009 opening statements “the context of the crime”: the horrible conditions that Bravo labored under, Green’s abysmal upbringing, the leadership failures that plagued every level of the 1-502nd, and the clear, repeated warning signs of Green’s murderous obsessions that his superiors routinely ignored.
During several dramatic and contentious weeks of testimony in a Paducah, Kentucky, courtroom, the defense ran, to the best of its ability, a trial within a trial against the Army’s negligence in allowing the atrocity to happen, while prosecutors, countering repeatedly that there was only one man on trial, focused on the heinousness and inexcusability of Green’s behavior.
Brought to Kentucky by the Justice Department, several members of the Janabi family, including Abu Muhammad, the children’s paternal grandmother, and sons Ahmed and Muhammad, testified during the trial, movingly describing the innocence of their kin and the barbarity that had been visited upon them.
The jury of nine women and three men found Green guilty of all counts of conspiracy, rape, and murder, but they hung, six against six, on the issue of whether to sentence him to death. A jury unable to reach unanimity on the question of execution triggered an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole. In a comprehensive posttrial questionnaire, many of the jurors demonstrated sympathy for many of the mitigating factors the defense had introduced, and half of the twelve agreed with the statement “This case should have been tried in the military justice system.”
One week after the trial, the Janabis were allowed to address the court and Green during a preliminary sentencing hearing in Louisville. Though the session lasted only a few hours, it was an electric, raucous, and dramatic event as they voiced their displeasure that Green would not be executed. When given the chance to address Green directly, one of the sons, Muhammad, glared menacingly at the man who had killed four of his family members but declined to say anything to him.
Hajia, the children’s grandmother, wailed and shouted, as a court interpreter translated, “This man has no mercy in his heart, he does not have honor, and yet you let him breathe air until he dies naturally? He is a stigma on the United States. He is a stigma on the whole world. He is a bastard, and a criminal and a dog!”
Ululating and keening, she abruptly left the witness stand and attempted to approach Green at the defense table. “Show him to me!” she shouted. “Show him to me, I want to see him!” A couple of federal marshals attempted to block her path and grab her by the arms, but she would not be deterred. Ultimately, she had to be wrestled to the floor by nearly a dozen court officials, who then virtually carried her, still screaming, back to the gallery.
The mother’s cousin, Abu Muhammad, spoke last, praising his slain family members and criticizing 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.”
/> Atrocities are committed in every war. They are a seemingly ineradicable by-product of the barbaric yet quintessentially human institution of organized, leader-mandated, group-on-group killing. But why do some fighting men give in to the final inhumanity of combat—raping and murdering the innocent—while others who experience the same loss, suffer the same hardship and feel the same hatred resist the temptation to defile the defenseless, abandon their honor, debase themselves, and shame their kin and country? Why did Achilles desecrate Hector’s corpse when some other Greek and Trojan heroes maintained their dignity and their integrity in the waning days of the Iliad ? Homer himself offers no satisfying answers. Since then, historians, psychologists, generals, and judges have investigated the causes of uncountable war crimes by fallen fighters far less august than Achilles with the same unsatisfying results. Why are some men mentally equipped to handle the harrowing rigors of war at its worst yet others are unable to endure? Why did James Barker, Paul Cortez, Steven Green, and Jesse Spielman do what they did on March 12, 2006? In their trials, neither Barker, Cortez, nor Spielman could articulate an answer to that seemingly simple, straightforward question.
“I have been in jail for five months, and I ask myself that every day,” Cortez told the prosecutor when asked why he even went to the Janabi house. “I still don’t have no answer.”
And do such men feel any remorse? Barker, Cortez, and Spielman have all said that they do, apologizing in court to the Janabis and Iraq in general as well as to their own families, their comrades in arms, the Army, and America for both the wanton destruction they inflicted and the disgrace they brought on themselves and so many others. Of course, only they know how sincere their words of contrition really were.
At the end of his preliminary sentencing hearing, after the Janabis had spoken, Green was given the opportunity to make a statement himself. Since he had not taken the stand during his own trial or testified at any of the other coconspirators’ courts-martial, this was the first public statement he had ever made.
Reading from a sheet of paper, Green emphasized, “What I am about to say is completely my own. No one told me what to say. No one wrote this for me. Not my lawyers, not the government, not anybody.” He addressed the family, saying, “I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and I am sorry for the pain my actions, and the actions of my codefendants, have caused you and your family. I imagine it is a pain that I cannot fully comprehend or appreciate. 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. As inadequate as this apology is, it is all I can give you. I know you wish I was dead, and I do not hold that against you. If I was in your place, I am convinced beyond any doubt that I would feel the same way…. I know that if I live one more year or fifty 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. But in the end, whether in one year or fifty, I will die. And when I die I will be in God’s hands, in the Kingdom of God, where there will be justice, and whatever I deserve, I will get. On the day of judgment, God will repay everyone according to his works, and affliction and distress will come upon every human being who does evil. I know that I have done evil, and I fear that the wrath of the Lord will come upon me on that day. But, I hope that you and your family at least can find some comfort in God’s justice.”
Steven Green is currently serving five consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
POSTSCRIPT
Chaz Allen: Allen is a squad leader in the 75th Cavalry Regiment, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
James Barker: Barker is serving a 90-year prison sentence at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He will be eligible for parole in 2016.
Phil Blaisdell: Blaisdell deployed to Iraq as Platoon Sergeant of the 1-502nd’s Scout Platoon in the fall of 2007. Promoted to First Sergeant in December 2007, he finished his tour as the First Sergeant of a 2-502nd company in Haswah, Iraq (just south of Lutufiyah). He is currently a company First Sergeant at the U.S. Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Jared Bordwell: Promoted to Major in March 2008, Bordwell deployed to Iraq with a Ranger battalion from October 2008 to February 2009. He is currently attending the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth.
Paul Cortez: Cortez is serving a 100-year prison sentence at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. He will be eligible for parole in 2016.
John Diem: Diem worked on the 1-502nd’s headquarters staff during the battalion’s deployment to Baghdad in 2007–2008. Promoted to Staff Sergeant in December 2008, he is today a squad leader in the 1-502nd’s Bravo Company at Fort Campbell.
Bill Dougherty: Promoted to Major in March 2008, Dougherty attended CGSC in 2009. He is currently working toward a master’s degree in military studies at the School for Advanced Military Studies, also at Fort Leavenworth.
Todd Ebel: Ebel commanded Task Force Ramadi, a 140-member task force from all four branches of the military that provided a variety of support services to coalition forces in Anbar province in 2008. He is now director of the School for Command Preparation at CGSC.
Anthony Edwards: In 2008 and 2009, Edwards was Brigade Command Sergeant Major for the 205th Infantry Brigade at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, a National Guard and Army Reserve training center.
Jeff Fenlason: Fenlason is the 101st Airborne Division’s Small Arms Master Gunner, a position he has held since January 2007, including a deployment to Afghanistan from March 2008 to January 2009. He was promoted to Master Sergeant in January 2009.
Rob Gallagher: Promoted to First Sergeant in June 2009, Gallagher is a company First Sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division’s 506th Infantry Regiment at Fort Campbell.
Jeremy Gebhardt: Gebhardt has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple occasions since 2007. Promoted to Master Sergeant in 2008, he is an operational specialist in the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a unit that identifies critical threats and enemy vulnerabilities through first-hand observation.
John Goodwin: Goodwin is currently a battalion operations officer at Fort Carson, Colorado.
Steven Green: Green is serving five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Justin Habash: Honorably discharged from the Army as a Captain in June 2007, Habash is working toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Bryan Howard: Sentenced to 27 months in prison in March 2007, Howard was released on parole after 17 months for good behavior and the time he had spent in pretrial confinement. Today he works as a heavy machinery rigger in Huffman, Texas.
Tom Kunk: Kunk served as Rear Detachment Commander for the 101st Airborne Division when most of the division rotated back to Iraq during 2007–2008. He was promoted to Colonel in July 2009 and is today the chief of current operations in the Army’s Operations, Planning, and Training office at the Pentagon.
Dennis Largent: Largent was promoted to Sergeant Major in February 2007. He is currently deployed to northern Iraq as Operations Sergeant Major with a 1st Armor Division brigade out of Fort Bliss, Texas.
Eric Lauzier: Diagnosed with PTSD and suffering from a deployment-related back injury, Lauzier was medically retired from the Army in December 2008. Living in West Virginia, he is studying to become an MRI and radiology technician.
Phil Miller: Promoted to Sergeant First Class in October 2008, Miller is a Ranger instructor in Dahlonega, Georgia.
Tim Norton: Honorably discharged from the Army in June 2008 as a First Lieutenant, Norton is an insurance claims adjuster in the Boston area and an agricultural investor with Lonnie Hayes, his Charlie Company platoon sergeant, who retired from the Army and is a farmer in southern Illinois.
Chris Payne: Payne deployed to Iraq with the 3-187th Infantry R
egiment, 101st Airborne Division in the fall of 2007. A member of a counter-IED advisory team, he was badly injured by an IED blast in November 2007 during a foot patrol just across the Euphrates from the Yusufiyah Thermal Power Plant. He lost his left leg above the knee, and several reconstructive surgeries were required to restore 50 percent use of his left arm. He was promoted to Sergeant First Class in September 2009 and was medically retired from the Army the same month. He is living in Tennessee and working toward his bachelor’s degree with the intention of becoming a pharmacist.
Rob Salome: Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in August 2009, Salome is the Army attaché to Vice President Joseph Biden.
Matt Shoaf: Promoted to Captain in July 2006, Shoaf served as Chalie Company commander from November 2006 to March 2007. Currently stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he has decided to leave the Army and will begin a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2010.
Jesse Spielman: Spielman is serving a 90-year prison sentence at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. He will be eligible for parole in 2016.
Shawn Umbrell: Umbrell was promoted to Major in November 2007 and deployed to Iraq in early 2008 with a Ranger battalion. He attended CGSC in 2009 and is currently deployed in Afghanistan with the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, out of Fort Lewis, Washington.
Justin Watt: Diagnosed with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and an IED-related stomach injury, Watt was medically retired from the Army as a Specialist in December 2007. Today he is partner in a custom-built PC assembly and service business in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Fred Wintrich: Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in October 2007, Wintrich served as 2nd Brigade’s Executive Officer during its 2007–2008 deployment to Baghdad. He is currently Garrison Executive Officer at Fort Campbell.
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Page 39
