Khilafah.com

Al-Arabiya

CHICAGO (AFP)

Jury selection is set to start Monday in the case of an American soldier facing the death penalty for being the alleged ringleader in the rape and killing of a young Iraqi girl and her entire family in a town south of Baghdad in 2006

Under the cover of darkness and warfare, five U.S. soldiers broke into an Iraqi home to rape the young girl, murder her family and set the house alight to cover their crime.

The alleged ringleader -- a soldier discharged for a "personality disorder" before the slaying was discovered -- faces the death penalty in a trial set to begin with jury selection Monday.

Four other soldiers have already been sentenced in the March 2006 atrocity and the details which emerged during their court martials are disturbing.
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Wanted to "kill some Iraqis"

The plan was allegedly devised over whiskey and a game of cards at a traffic check point in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

Specialist Steven Green told his friends he "wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis," said Specialist James Barker, who received a life sentence for his role in the crime.

The soldiers changed into black outfits and masks so they would look like insurgents and headed for the house of a 14-year-old girl they had seen walking through the village.

They had decided the girl would make an easy target for their plan to "have sex with an Iraqi female" because her father was the only man in the house, said Sergeant Paul Cortez, who also received a life sentence.

Cortez testified that he raped Abeer Kassem Hamza al-Janabi while Barker pinned the sobbing girl to the floor.

The men switched positions and then heard about four or five shots from a bedroom where Green had taken the girl's father, mother and six-year-old sister, Cortez said.

Green shot the girl when he was finished raping her and the soldiers set the home on fire by tossing a lighter onto a Kerosene-soaked blanket covering her naked body, the other soldiers said.

They then went back to their checkpoint about 200 meters (nearly 219 years) away and grilled chicken wings.
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A difficult case
" There's no offer on the table right now so we have to go forward and attempt to save this guy's life "
Defense attorney Darren Wolff

The allegations came to light a few months later when stress counselors talked to the squad after an incident in which two soldiers were abducted at a checkpoint and later brutally murdered.

"It's going to be a difficult case to defend," said Darren Wolff, one of Green's court-appointed defense attorneys.

"There's no offer on the table right now so we have to go forward and attempt to save this guy's life," Wolff said in a telephone interview.

Green faces 17 criminal counts -- including rape, murder and obstruction of justice -- in civilian court because he was discharged from the army before the allegations came to light.

He was arrested by the FBI at his grandmother's house in North Carolina and told the agents "You probably think I'm a monster" and that "George Bush and Dick Cheney ought to be the ones that are arrested," court records show.

Green's lawyers failed to get the case transferred to a military tribunal where they say he would have been judged by a jury which understood the situation in Iraq. They also withdrew plans to mount an insanity defense.

While Wolff would not comment on Green's mental state, he said the army "bears a tremendous amount of responsibility" for what happened.

Private Jesse Spielman also received a life sentence for raping Janabi and participating in the murders while Private Bryan Howard was sentenced to 27 months in jail for acting as a lookout.

Spielman, Barker and Cortez will be eligible for parole in ten years under military rules.

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