2006 Independence Day News Update
A former soldier discharged because of a "personality disorder" was accused in federal court Monday of executing an Iraqi family so he and other troops could rape and murder a young woman they had been eyeing at a traffic checkpoint.
Steven D. Green, a skinny, 21-year-old former private, was led into court wearing baggy shorts, flip-flops and a Johnny Cash T-shirt. He spoke only to confirm his identity and stared as a federal magistrate ordered him held without bond on murder and rape charges that carry a possible death penalty.
Green became the first person identified in the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, horrific deaths discovered in a burned house near Mahmoudiya in March that military officials initially blamed on insurgents. According to a 10-page federal affidavit, Green and three other soldiers from the Fort Campbell, Ky.-based 101st Airborne Division had talked about raping the young woman, whom they first saw while working at the checkpoint. On the day of the attack, the document said, Green and other soldiers drank alcohol and changed out of their uniforms to avoid detection before going to the woman's house. Green covered his face with a brown T-shirt.
Once there, the affidavit said, Green took three members of the family - an adult male and female, and a girl estimated to be 5 years old - into a bedroom, after which shots were heard from inside. "Green came to the bedroom door and told everyone, 'I just killed them. All are dead,'" the affidavit said. The affidavit is based on interviews conducted by the FBI and military investigators with three unidentified soldiers assigned to Green's platoon. Two of the soldiers said they witnessed another soldier and Green rape the woman. "After the rape, (the soldier) witnessed Green shoot the woman in the head two to three times," the affidavit said.
One of the three soldiers interviewed said he was left behind to mind the radio at the traffic checkpoint. That soldier said Green and three others returned from the woman's house "with blood on their clothes, which they burned. Immediately after this, they each told (the soldier) that this is never to be discussed again."
An official familiar with details of the investigation in Iraq has told The Associated Press that a flammable liquid was used to burn the rape victim's body in an attempted cover-up. The affidavit noted that prosecutors have photos taken by Army investigators in Iraq of all four bodies found inside a burned house and a photo of a burned body of "what appears to be a woman with blankets thrown over her upper torso."
Green, who was arrested Friday in the town of Marion northwest of Charlotte, is being prosecuted in federal, rather than military court because he is no longer in the Army. According to the affidavit, his 11-month-stint ended "before this incident came to light" when he was given an honorable discharge "due to a personality disorder."
No other soldier has been charged in the case, said Maj. Joseph Breasseale, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. However, military officials have said four Army soldiers have had their weapons taken away and were being confined to their base near Mahmoudiya. According to the affidavit, Green was arrested while traveling back to Fort Campbell after attending a funeral for one of the mutilated soldiers in Arlington, Va. Court officials said Green will have a preliminary hearing and a detention hearing on July 10 in Charlotte, and will then be brought to Louisville to stand trial.
Palestinian militants holding an Israeli soldier angrily said Tuesday they would not release any information about the serviceman's condition after Israel ignored a deadline to begin releasing Palestinian prisoners. But as diplomatic efforts continued, the militants said they would not kill the soldier.
The militants implied Monday to kill Cpl. Gilad Shalit if their demands weren't met. Israel, however, rejected the ultimatum and insisted it would not negotiate with the militants. After a 6 a.m. deadline passed, a spokesman for the shadowy Army of Islam said the groups holding Shalit "have decided to freeze all contacts and close the files of this soldier." "We will not give any information that will give the occupation good news or reassurance," said the spokesman, Abu Muthana. But, he added, "We will not kill the soldier, if he is still alive."
The previously unknown Army of Islam was among three groups claiming to have abducted Shalit, 19. Two other groups, the military wing of the ruling Hamas party and the Hamas-linked Popular Resistance Committees, also claimed responsibility. Since the abduction, the militants have called on Israel to release hundreds of prisoners in exchange for information about Shalit. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rejected any negotiations with the militants. Despite the tough public line, Israeli officials have privately said they would consider other options to get the soldier back. Israel has released prisoners before in lopsided exchanges for captured citizens or the dead bodies of soldiers killed in battle.
The White House and European Union have urged the militants to release Shalit, while also calling on Israel to show restraint. "It is the responsibility of Hamas to return the Israeli soldier. That's how all this got started. We have also been encouraging Israel from the very beginning to practice restraint and continue to do so," White House press secretary Tony Snow said. Many Palestinians say they do not wish Shalit to be harmed, but they back the demand to free some of the 9,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
A subway train accelerated, shuddered and flipped off the tracks Monday in the Mediterranean port of Valencia, killing at least 41 passengers and injuring 47 in one of Spain's worst rail accidents, officials and witnesses said.
Regional authorities and a witness said the train was going too fast and one of its wheels broke into pieces, derailing the first car, which overturned. Victims were strewn in the tunnel. Officials did not say if the second car derailed. Rescue workers hustled bloodied, sooty survivors from the tunnel. Anguished relatives cried out in grief and drew each other close as they waited outside the local morgue. The accident brought back memories of the 2004 terrorist attack on Madrid commuter trains that killed 191 people. Authorities ruled out terrorism but have not determined the cause of the crash.
Some 12 hours before he blew himself up on the London underground, Shehzad Tanweer was playing cricket until late evening in a park in northern England.
"He appeared perfectly normal to those around him," said a government report on the London attacks of July 2005, in which four young, apparently unremarkable British Muslim men killed 52 people in Western Europe's first suicide bombings. Tanweer's last cricket game is one small detail that hints at the enormity of the challenge facing European security services one year later: how to spot the "homegrown" militant who betrays no outward sign of hostile or erratic behavior.
As the British government report made clear, there is no single type of militant personality. Some recruits have been poor, but some affluent; some ill-educated but others from prestigious schools; some with criminal records but others "clean"; some single but others with partners and children. "All the cliches that we have about the poor, the radical upbringing at home, they're just blown out of the window. There is no ultimate type of characteristic, there is no cliched person who would become a terrorist," said Sebestyen Gorka, professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.
According to Gorka, it makes more sense for security services to focus on certain types of group behavior than to look for individual characteristics of potential terrorists. "Usually you see people who are friends together, who are colleagues together or who are related, people who know each other first before they become extremists and who join the terrorist organizations as a group," he said. "If you find a group of people together who really do hang out together, who eat together, who go to the same cleric for example, that is a unit that is easier to pick up in terms of surveillance ... It's easier to pick up a large blip that is suspect than one individual who is suspect."
For Waldmann, a key stage in radicalization is the point at which the militant travels abroad and creates both physical and symbolic distance from home. "When they suddenly decide to go to Yemen or Pakistan, it's not just important for possible training, like learning to use weapons, it's a symbolic cut-off," he said. "To carry out a terrorist attack on a country, you have to really hate it, you have to totally reject it. I have the impression that this distancing (through travel) is important ... You suddenly see things through a different lens."
In the case of the London bombings, two of the plotters visited Pakistan between November 2004 and February 2005, and the group maintained contact with one or more individuals there in the run-up to the July 7 attacks. The extent of possible al Qaeda direction from Pakistan is one of many unknowns that investigators have yet to determine.
Mexico faced weeks and possibly months of uncertainty after the leftist presidential candidate called for a recount of election results that showed him trailing his conservative rival by 1 percentage point.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stopped short of calling Sunday's vote a fraud, nor did he call on his followers to take the streets. But he said there were many irregularities, including up 3 million missing votes - claims that could take months to clear up. Electoral officials said a preliminary count gave Felipe Calderon an advantage of about 400,000 votes over Lopez Obrador, but they refused to declare a winner until an official count begins Wednesday. That process usually takes about a week, but it can be delayed by challenges. Even if a winner is declared, those results can be challenged in court.
Both candidates, however, immediately proclaimed victory.
"We have a commitment to the citizens to defend the will of millions of Mexicans," Lopez Obrador told supporters at his campaign headquarters. "We are going to employ whatever legal means." The former Mexico City mayor said officials had estimated a voter turnout of at least 41 million, yet preliminary tallies by Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute only showed about 38 million ballots cast. Jesus Ortega, Lopez Obrador's campaign manager said that "in some cases, we are going to demand the opening of ballot packages and vote-by-vote recounts."
Calderon, backed by President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, spoke like a president-elect, promising to build a conciliatory government. "My intention is to talk with everyone," he said in a television interview Monday night. "Mexico needs everyone." He praised Robert Madrazo, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for his "mature, responsible attitude" in conceding defeat Monday. Preliminary results showed Madrazo running a distant third in a blow to his party, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years until Fox's 2000 election.
Members of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party said there were indications that the preliminary count may have been manipulated to favor Calderon's party. The Federal Electoral Institute did not respond to the allegation. Lopez Obrador claimed various irregularities that included badly reported results and the double-counting of votes. He also asked how it was possible that his party won 155 of 300 electoral districts without winning the presidency Many had predicted violent street protests if the vote was too close to call, but that possibility appeared to diminish after Lopez Obrador did not call for demonstrations. Many of his supporters revere him with near-messianic devotion.
Mexico has a single voter registry, a uniform photo identity card for voters and a national election law, he said, whereas "in the U.S., you have this crazy quilt of 50 state laws." Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute is also legally independent of the government, while in the U.S., partisan state officials tend to oversee the system, he said. Even if the vote challenges are resolved, no party was close to obtaining a majority in congressional elections, meaning the next president will have to reach out to his rivals.
Britain cannot defeat terrorism unless moderate Muslims do more to confront militancy in their own communities, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday.
Blair said the vast majority of Muslims abhorred terrorism and wanted to defeat it, but said they had to do more to counter what he described as the extremists' misplaced anger and grievances. Moderates, he said, must "stand up against the ideas of these people, not just their methods."
"If you want to defeat this extremism, you've got to defeat its ideas and you've got to defeat in part a completely false sense of grievance against the West," said Blair, testifying before a House of Commons committee. "The government has its role to play in this, but honestly, the government itself is not going to defeat this."
Shortly after the July 7 attacks on London last summer, Blair pledged that officials would work with Britain's 1.5 million Muslims to fight the militant ideologies that are seducing a minority of young people like the four who carried out the attacks. Nearly a year later, he said the efforts needed to be intensified. "The roots of this extremism lie in attitudes and ideas as much as organization, and I don't think there is an answer to this terrorism that is simply about police work or security," he said.
He said Britain should not send suspects to any country where it knows they will be tortured, but does not have to ensure absolutely that they will not be mistreated. "The idea that if I can't prove absolutely that they are going to come to no harm, I have to keep them here - why?" he said, adding that terror suspects have themselves taken a risk by breaking the rules of British society.
NASA managers hoped to make Discovery the most inspiring sight in the nation's skies as the space agency prepared for the first Fourth of July launch in history.
The launch attempt came after meetings Monday where NASA managers pondered whether a 5-inch long crack in the external fuel tank's foam, which caused a 3-inch piece of foam to pop out on the launch pad, posed a threat to the shuttle during liftoff. The patch of foam fell off an area that covers an expandable bracket holding a liquid oxygen feed line against the huge external tank. NASA engineers believe ice built up in that area from condensation caused by rain Sunday.
If Discovery gets off the ground Tuesday, it would be the first manned launch by the United States on the nation's birthday, the first launch in almost a year, and only the second launch since the Columbia disaster killed seven astronauts in 2003. < NASA scrubbed launch plans Saturday and Sunday because of weather.
Powerline on Zarqawi's connection to Iraqi officials
Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. ~Louis D. Brandeis
Steven D. Green, a skinny, 21-year-old former private, was led into court wearing baggy shorts, flip-flops and a Johnny Cash T-shirt. He spoke only to confirm his identity and stared as a federal magistrate ordered him held without bond on murder and rape charges that carry a possible death penalty.
Green became the first person identified in the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, horrific deaths discovered in a burned house near Mahmoudiya in March that military officials initially blamed on insurgents. According to a 10-page federal affidavit, Green and three other soldiers from the Fort Campbell, Ky.-based 101st Airborne Division had talked about raping the young woman, whom they first saw while working at the checkpoint. On the day of the attack, the document said, Green and other soldiers drank alcohol and changed out of their uniforms to avoid detection before going to the woman's house. Green covered his face with a brown T-shirt.
Once there, the affidavit said, Green took three members of the family - an adult male and female, and a girl estimated to be 5 years old - into a bedroom, after which shots were heard from inside. "Green came to the bedroom door and told everyone, 'I just killed them. All are dead,'" the affidavit said. The affidavit is based on interviews conducted by the FBI and military investigators with three unidentified soldiers assigned to Green's platoon. Two of the soldiers said they witnessed another soldier and Green rape the woman. "After the rape, (the soldier) witnessed Green shoot the woman in the head two to three times," the affidavit said.
One of the three soldiers interviewed said he was left behind to mind the radio at the traffic checkpoint. That soldier said Green and three others returned from the woman's house "with blood on their clothes, which they burned. Immediately after this, they each told (the soldier) that this is never to be discussed again."
An official familiar with details of the investigation in Iraq has told The Associated Press that a flammable liquid was used to burn the rape victim's body in an attempted cover-up. The affidavit noted that prosecutors have photos taken by Army investigators in Iraq of all four bodies found inside a burned house and a photo of a burned body of "what appears to be a woman with blankets thrown over her upper torso."
Green, who was arrested Friday in the town of Marion northwest of Charlotte, is being prosecuted in federal, rather than military court because he is no longer in the Army. According to the affidavit, his 11-month-stint ended "before this incident came to light" when he was given an honorable discharge "due to a personality disorder."
No other soldier has been charged in the case, said Maj. Joseph Breasseale, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. However, military officials have said four Army soldiers have had their weapons taken away and were being confined to their base near Mahmoudiya. According to the affidavit, Green was arrested while traveling back to Fort Campbell after attending a funeral for one of the mutilated soldiers in Arlington, Va. Court officials said Green will have a preliminary hearing and a detention hearing on July 10 in Charlotte, and will then be brought to Louisville to stand trial.
Palestinian militants holding an Israeli soldier angrily said Tuesday they would not release any information about the serviceman's condition after Israel ignored a deadline to begin releasing Palestinian prisoners. But as diplomatic efforts continued, the militants said they would not kill the soldier.
The militants implied Monday to kill Cpl. Gilad Shalit if their demands weren't met. Israel, however, rejected the ultimatum and insisted it would not negotiate with the militants. After a 6 a.m. deadline passed, a spokesman for the shadowy Army of Islam said the groups holding Shalit "have decided to freeze all contacts and close the files of this soldier." "We will not give any information that will give the occupation good news or reassurance," said the spokesman, Abu Muthana. But, he added, "We will not kill the soldier, if he is still alive."
The previously unknown Army of Islam was among three groups claiming to have abducted Shalit, 19. Two other groups, the military wing of the ruling Hamas party and the Hamas-linked Popular Resistance Committees, also claimed responsibility. Since the abduction, the militants have called on Israel to release hundreds of prisoners in exchange for information about Shalit. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rejected any negotiations with the militants. Despite the tough public line, Israeli officials have privately said they would consider other options to get the soldier back. Israel has released prisoners before in lopsided exchanges for captured citizens or the dead bodies of soldiers killed in battle.
The White House and European Union have urged the militants to release Shalit, while also calling on Israel to show restraint. "It is the responsibility of Hamas to return the Israeli soldier. That's how all this got started. We have also been encouraging Israel from the very beginning to practice restraint and continue to do so," White House press secretary Tony Snow said. Many Palestinians say they do not wish Shalit to be harmed, but they back the demand to free some of the 9,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
A subway train accelerated, shuddered and flipped off the tracks Monday in the Mediterranean port of Valencia, killing at least 41 passengers and injuring 47 in one of Spain's worst rail accidents, officials and witnesses said.
Regional authorities and a witness said the train was going too fast and one of its wheels broke into pieces, derailing the first car, which overturned. Victims were strewn in the tunnel. Officials did not say if the second car derailed. Rescue workers hustled bloodied, sooty survivors from the tunnel. Anguished relatives cried out in grief and drew each other close as they waited outside the local morgue. The accident brought back memories of the 2004 terrorist attack on Madrid commuter trains that killed 191 people. Authorities ruled out terrorism but have not determined the cause of the crash.
Some 12 hours before he blew himself up on the London underground, Shehzad Tanweer was playing cricket until late evening in a park in northern England.
"He appeared perfectly normal to those around him," said a government report on the London attacks of July 2005, in which four young, apparently unremarkable British Muslim men killed 52 people in Western Europe's first suicide bombings. Tanweer's last cricket game is one small detail that hints at the enormity of the challenge facing European security services one year later: how to spot the "homegrown" militant who betrays no outward sign of hostile or erratic behavior.
As the British government report made clear, there is no single type of militant personality. Some recruits have been poor, but some affluent; some ill-educated but others from prestigious schools; some with criminal records but others "clean"; some single but others with partners and children. "All the cliches that we have about the poor, the radical upbringing at home, they're just blown out of the window. There is no ultimate type of characteristic, there is no cliched person who would become a terrorist," said Sebestyen Gorka, professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.
According to Gorka, it makes more sense for security services to focus on certain types of group behavior than to look for individual characteristics of potential terrorists. "Usually you see people who are friends together, who are colleagues together or who are related, people who know each other first before they become extremists and who join the terrorist organizations as a group," he said. "If you find a group of people together who really do hang out together, who eat together, who go to the same cleric for example, that is a unit that is easier to pick up in terms of surveillance ... It's easier to pick up a large blip that is suspect than one individual who is suspect."
For Waldmann, a key stage in radicalization is the point at which the militant travels abroad and creates both physical and symbolic distance from home. "When they suddenly decide to go to Yemen or Pakistan, it's not just important for possible training, like learning to use weapons, it's a symbolic cut-off," he said. "To carry out a terrorist attack on a country, you have to really hate it, you have to totally reject it. I have the impression that this distancing (through travel) is important ... You suddenly see things through a different lens."
In the case of the London bombings, two of the plotters visited Pakistan between November 2004 and February 2005, and the group maintained contact with one or more individuals there in the run-up to the July 7 attacks. The extent of possible al Qaeda direction from Pakistan is one of many unknowns that investigators have yet to determine.
Mexico faced weeks and possibly months of uncertainty after the leftist presidential candidate called for a recount of election results that showed him trailing his conservative rival by 1 percentage point.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stopped short of calling Sunday's vote a fraud, nor did he call on his followers to take the streets. But he said there were many irregularities, including up 3 million missing votes - claims that could take months to clear up. Electoral officials said a preliminary count gave Felipe Calderon an advantage of about 400,000 votes over Lopez Obrador, but they refused to declare a winner until an official count begins Wednesday. That process usually takes about a week, but it can be delayed by challenges. Even if a winner is declared, those results can be challenged in court.
Both candidates, however, immediately proclaimed victory.
"We have a commitment to the citizens to defend the will of millions of Mexicans," Lopez Obrador told supporters at his campaign headquarters. "We are going to employ whatever legal means." The former Mexico City mayor said officials had estimated a voter turnout of at least 41 million, yet preliminary tallies by Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute only showed about 38 million ballots cast. Jesus Ortega, Lopez Obrador's campaign manager said that "in some cases, we are going to demand the opening of ballot packages and vote-by-vote recounts."
Calderon, backed by President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, spoke like a president-elect, promising to build a conciliatory government. "My intention is to talk with everyone," he said in a television interview Monday night. "Mexico needs everyone." He praised Robert Madrazo, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for his "mature, responsible attitude" in conceding defeat Monday. Preliminary results showed Madrazo running a distant third in a blow to his party, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years until Fox's 2000 election.
Members of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party said there were indications that the preliminary count may have been manipulated to favor Calderon's party. The Federal Electoral Institute did not respond to the allegation. Lopez Obrador claimed various irregularities that included badly reported results and the double-counting of votes. He also asked how it was possible that his party won 155 of 300 electoral districts without winning the presidency Many had predicted violent street protests if the vote was too close to call, but that possibility appeared to diminish after Lopez Obrador did not call for demonstrations. Many of his supporters revere him with near-messianic devotion.
Mexico has a single voter registry, a uniform photo identity card for voters and a national election law, he said, whereas "in the U.S., you have this crazy quilt of 50 state laws." Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute is also legally independent of the government, while in the U.S., partisan state officials tend to oversee the system, he said. Even if the vote challenges are resolved, no party was close to obtaining a majority in congressional elections, meaning the next president will have to reach out to his rivals.
Britain cannot defeat terrorism unless moderate Muslims do more to confront militancy in their own communities, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday.
Blair said the vast majority of Muslims abhorred terrorism and wanted to defeat it, but said they had to do more to counter what he described as the extremists' misplaced anger and grievances. Moderates, he said, must "stand up against the ideas of these people, not just their methods."
"If you want to defeat this extremism, you've got to defeat its ideas and you've got to defeat in part a completely false sense of grievance against the West," said Blair, testifying before a House of Commons committee. "The government has its role to play in this, but honestly, the government itself is not going to defeat this."
Shortly after the July 7 attacks on London last summer, Blair pledged that officials would work with Britain's 1.5 million Muslims to fight the militant ideologies that are seducing a minority of young people like the four who carried out the attacks. Nearly a year later, he said the efforts needed to be intensified. "The roots of this extremism lie in attitudes and ideas as much as organization, and I don't think there is an answer to this terrorism that is simply about police work or security," he said.
He said Britain should not send suspects to any country where it knows they will be tortured, but does not have to ensure absolutely that they will not be mistreated. "The idea that if I can't prove absolutely that they are going to come to no harm, I have to keep them here - why?" he said, adding that terror suspects have themselves taken a risk by breaking the rules of British society.
NASA managers hoped to make Discovery the most inspiring sight in the nation's skies as the space agency prepared for the first Fourth of July launch in history.
The launch attempt came after meetings Monday where NASA managers pondered whether a 5-inch long crack in the external fuel tank's foam, which caused a 3-inch piece of foam to pop out on the launch pad, posed a threat to the shuttle during liftoff. The patch of foam fell off an area that covers an expandable bracket holding a liquid oxygen feed line against the huge external tank. NASA engineers believe ice built up in that area from condensation caused by rain Sunday.
If Discovery gets off the ground Tuesday, it would be the first manned launch by the United States on the nation's birthday, the first launch in almost a year, and only the second launch since the Columbia disaster killed seven astronauts in 2003. < NASA scrubbed launch plans Saturday and Sunday because of weather.
Powerline on Zarqawi's connection to Iraqi officials
Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. ~Louis D. Brandeis