Another Railroad in the Making: Nelson Recommended for Court-Martial

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. –A hearing officer recommended a court-martial for a Marine charged with murdering an Iraqi detainee captured during fierce house-to-house fighting in Fallujah, Iraq.

Lt. Col. Thomas McCann said in his findings Wednesday that there is sufficient evidence against Sgt. Jermaine A. Nelson to order him to trial.

Nelson, 26, is one of three Marines accused of shooting unarmed captives in November 2004 during some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Nelson has said he was following orders from his squad leader, Jose Nazario Jr., who is also charged.

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Nazario: Attorney Says Civilian Jury Not Fit to Hear Case on Combat Actions

Sgt Jose Nazario is at the center of another case I’m following.  He’s charged with manslaughter in the deaths of insurgents during the Battle of Fallujah.  I realize how insane that sounds, but that’s where we are now in this nation.  We charge our Marines for killing the enemy.

The case is one of the first to be brought under the new MEJA Act of 2000, the law that says the U.S. government can “reach out and touch” anyone connected to the military for alleged acts, long after their term of service is over.

Nazario, who was serving as a police officer before his life was rudely interrupted by the NCIS (sound familiar?), is represented by Kevin McDermott, who has a very valid argument.

Attorneys for Nazario requested the case be dismissed, asserting that the law under which he was charged does not apply to combat — and that it’s not the job of the civilian courts and juries to examine combat actions.

You think?  I’m going to go ahead and ask the question that should be on everyone’s minds here.  if the Constitution affords us the right to be tried by a jury of our peers, what should make up that jury?  Seems to me that unless you have a jury of combat veterans, it’s unfair to both the jury and the accused.  Where would you find a group of combat veterans to serve on a trial?  Could it be…the military?  What a novel concept.  but I digress.

Defense attorney Kevin McDermott said a jury of civilians would have greater difficulty understanding the rules of engagement and war.

“Do we have the fundamental fairness to go through this scenario for Sgt. Nazario to have the best possible process?” he asked.

Larson compared the case to how a civil jury learns about police rules of engagement for an excessive-force case. He then asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Behnke about future consequences of a civilian ruling, as excessive-force cases are designed to affect how a police department functions.

Take note of that.  “Excessive-force cases are designed to affect how a police department functions.”  Let’s take that one step further.  “Excessive-force cases are designed to affect how a military conducts war.”

What’s the point of a war?  What absolutely MUST happen in order for one side in a war to emerge victorious?  You have to kill the enemy, break his will to win, and demolish his ability to fight.  So, with that in mind, is there such a thing as excessive force in combat operations?  Was there such a thing on Iwo Jima?  Corregidor?  The Philippines?  Bastogne?

No…but in Iraq there apparently is.  And then people wonder why we’re still there, why the casualty numbers keep trickling upward, why we can’t seem to WIN.  I keep having this conversation with my boyfriend, who’s a three-tour infantry vet, and there are days that I think he and I are the only two people who get it.

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This Week on The Front Line: The Pendleton 8 Documents

Don’t miss the show–Saturday night at 9 pm Eastern on BlogTalkRadio.

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Marine Charged in Civilian Court For Actions During Battle of Fallujah

People can’t be charged as civilians for actions during combat while active duty, can they?

They can now. Say hello to MEJA.

With only mixed success prosecuting U.S. soldiers for alleged atrocities in Iraq, the U.S. government is now turning to a novel legal approach to try military veterans in U.S. civilian courts.

The first target is Jose L. Nazario, a former Marine named as the defendant in the case United States of America v. Jose Luis Nazario.

In August 2007, federal prosecutors filed the case in U.S. District Court in California, charging Nazario with two counts of voluntary manslaughter.

Nazario’s alleged crime is that while serving with the Marines during the November 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq, he shot to death two insurgent prisoners of war.

Sgt. Nazario left the military with an honorable discharge after eight years of service. The New York City native then moved to Riverside, Calif., with his family and became a police officer.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) brought the charges to the U.S. attorney for Central California last summer, claiming Nazario is beyond the jurisdiction of military law.

He was charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), a law passed by Congress in 2000 to give government prosecutors a mechanism for charging civilians and former service members for alleged criminal acts they committed while serving overseas.

Before MEJA, members of the armed forces were prosecuted under military law or not at all, and in many instances civilians who committed crimes in foreign lands were completely beyond the reach of American civilian jurisdiction.

I’ll be staying on top of this story as it progresses.

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Back Up After the Hacking Attacks

At about 1800 hours yesterday, ER was hacked. (For photos of the damage, click here.) It looks like a Jordanian Muslim group, right? All the points are in place: The broken English, references to Allah and infidels and the rest of it. But let’s take a closer look at the attack.

a) The wp-posts database was not fully deleted. But two years’ worth of posts were wiped out. Why is this significant? I began writing about the Pendleton 8 two years ago this month.

b) The user database was deleted.

c) Backups were deleted.

d) Tag and category database tables were deleted, while everything else was left alone.

What’s the point of all of this? The hacker deleted everything on my site having to do with the Pendleton 8 case. Every tag, every category, every post, everything. Don’t believe me? Do a search.

I had most of the site (sans the two years’ of articles, of course) back up last night but this morning they hit me again, this time taking more posts and altering my actual Wordpress files to redirect my site to one of my subdomains.

Long story short is, we fought back and forth for control of the site all morning. I finally deleted it all and rolled back my WP version. That seems to have stopped the attacks (someone needs to look into WP 2.5’s security holes). I’m working to get stuff back online from hosting company backups. Will update as I can.

Oh, and to the parties who put so much time and work into making sure my Pendleton 8 material was vaporized–Never fear. It’s going back up. In fact, by Saturday’s episode of The Front Line, there will be an entire archive of case material, including the NCIS work product from their “investigation,” statements, reports, photos of the body after the incident, and even documentation showing the Iraqi witnesses and “family” members to be terrorists–NOT innocent Iraqis who had just lost a loved one. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he’s been making sure I have the information I need to get out the truth about this case.

As for the other things we’ve been known for over the last few years, such as Brother Against Brother, the Ilario Pantano case, and even the Israeli-Lebanon War coverage…it’s gone. Backups were destroyed. If you have anything on your blog that you maybe posted at some point from ER, please let me know. I’d love to recreate what I can.

Regardless of who is responsible for the total loss of four years worth of writing, you can be assured of one thing: I will not stop writing. I will not stop exposing Islam as the piece of trash, pedophilia-loving, goat-f***ing, baby-cutting, insane world domination bulls*** that it is. I will not stop exposing the current military justice system as the broken, ridiculous, corrupt, farce of an idea that IT is.

As my friend Ilario says…”Molon Labe!” You want my weapons?

Come and get them.

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Pendleton 8 Exposed: Autopsy and Pathology Report

As promised, here are the first of many documents to come in the Pendleton 8 case. This is the autopsy of a dead Iraqi that even the report admits is only “believed to be” Awad. You’ll see handwritten notes throughout the report, and these are the notes of Sgt Larry Hutchins himself.

What makes this document so incredible is that there is no proof that the man autopsied is even the man the Marines killed that night. In fact, there is some evidence to show that the government autopsied someone who was NOT Awad, and then used that autopsy in their railroad job of the Pendleton 8. To cover their tracks, the NCIS claims they did DNA research on the man and the DNA “matches.” What they don’t tell you is that the “match” was only between the man autopsied and the man exhumed from a gravesite that may or may not have been Awad’s. The only thing the NCIS “proved” was that the man pulled out of the ground was the man they autopsied–not that they autopsied Awad.

Am I saying that the government may have literally grabbed a random Iraqi corpse and used it in a murder case against American Marines? Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. By the time you’re done reading all of this, you’ll be saying it too.

We’ll be talking about this autopsy report and other documents tonight at 8 pm Central on The Front Line. You’ll be able to call in with questions and comments as well. Don’t miss it.

I will also be publishing a walkthrough of the report soon. Stay tuned.

Download the Autopsy Report and Pathology Report (25 MB and 35 MB, PDF format)

The Pendleton 8: Exposed
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

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Haditha Engineered by Al-Qaeda

I am trying as hard as I can to not scream “We TOLD you people!” but it refuses to stay under wraps. So…

We told you so. In fact, we told you on 22 June 2006–over a year and a half ago–that the Haditha incident was nothing more than al-Qaeda setting up our Marines, and the media/politicans were falling for it. Now a new report shows that we were right all along. Our Marines aren’t “cold-blooded killers,” they’re heroes who did the best they could in the middle of trying to keep themselves alive while fighting a war that our own country won’t let them win.

But don’t believe us. Read the PDF report.

The report - apparently overlooked by a Washington press corps awash in leaked Bargewell documents and secret Naval Criminal Investigative Service reports - shows that Marine Corps intelligence operatives were advised of the scheme to demonize the Marines by an informant named Muhannad Hassan Hamadi. The informant was snared by 3/1 Marines on December 11 2005 and decided to cooperate.

The attack was carried out by multiple cells of local Wahabi extremists and well-paid local gunmen from Al Asa’ib al-Iraq [the Clans of the People of Iraq] that were led by Al Qaeda foreign fighters, the summary claims. Their case was bolstered by Marine signal intercepts revealing that the al Qaeda fighters planned to videotape the attacks and exploit the resulting carnage for propaganda purposes…

During the November Haditha battle, the insurgents secreted themselves among local civilians to guarantee pursuing Marines would catch innocent civilians in the ensuing crossfire. On January 6, 2006 six insurgents who tried to do the same thing at another location in Haditha were turned in to Coalition authorities before they could mount a similar assault, the report says…

The captured insurgents revealed the attack was planned in Albu Hyatt, a nearby town where numerous Marines have been killed and wounded since the beginning of the war. The two main elements of the attack were the IED-initiated ambush on Route Chestnut and two IED ambushes planned along the so-called River Road that parallels the Euphrates River about 1.5 kilometers north of the Chestnut location.

The prisoners claimed the multi-pronged assault on the Marines was intended to garner local support by discrediting the Marines among the civilian population. If the coordinated attack had gone off as planned all three IED ambushes would have been sprung on the patrolling Marines almost simultaneously, the prisoners said. The insurgents plan depended on the Marines aggressively responding to the assaults to create as much carnage as possible.

As the Jawa Report says, “Help in spreading the propaganda from Democrats, notably Jack Murtha, and a compliant mainstream press was a bonus for the terrorists.” How dumb do YOU feel, Murtha?

Bryan Preston at Hot Air has some interesting questions of his own.

This document is one among many that are related in some way to the case, but it cuts against Murtha’s entire body of statements on Haditha. It suggests, and with some credibility, that Haditha was an enemy op that went well if not according to plan. If Murtha knew of this report, but accused the Marines of murder “in cold blood” anyway, then he had to have been aware of the possibility that he was assisting an enemy op against our troops. If he didn’t know of this report, then his informants inside the Corps were not telling him the whole story. He still should not have been out front accusing the Marines of murder, but he may have been misled by his source or sources. Which raises the question, who were his sources and why would they plant an incomplete accounting of the case with Rep. Murtha?

So what now?  Will SSGT Frank Wuterich be cleared?  How about the rest of the Haditha Marines?  Still waiting on Murtha’s apology.  I’m guessing it’ll be a long time coming.  Sort of like John Kerry’s Form 180.

We need to keep the pressure on.  This is long past “travesty,” or even “tragedy.”  It’s a circus, and it’s disgusting.   Shame on everyone who’s ever touched this case and not seen the truth–or ignored it.  Then again, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.  Remember the Pendleton 8?  How about the Iron Triangle case?  Ilario Pantano? Roger Maynulet? Daniel King?  That’s what I thought.

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Haditha: Small Victory, But Still BS

A bittersweet victory for not only SGT Frank Wuterich, but all of us who have been working on these cases for so long.

CAMP PENDLETON — A Marine Corps official has recommended that murder charges be dismissed against a Camp Pendleton squad leader accused in the deaths of 17 civilians killed in the Iraqi city of Haditha two years ago.

The official, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, said in a recommendation obtained by the North County Times that rather than face murder charges, squad leader Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich should be tried for the lesser offense of negligent homicide in the deaths of five children and two women.

Ware recommended 10 other murder charges against Wuterich be dismissed.

“I believe after reviewing all the evidence that no trier of fact can conclude Staff Sgt. Wuterich formed the criminal intent to kill,” Ware wrote in reference to the women and children. “When a Marine fails to exercise due care and civilians die, the charge of negligent homicide, and not murder, is appropriate.”

Ware’s report, issued to prosecutors and defense attorneys this week, found the evidence against Wuterich contradictory. Ware’s role as the case’s investigating officer is akin to that of a judge presiding over a pretrial hearing.

“The case against Staff Sgt. Wuterich is simply not strong enough to conclude he committed murder beyond a reasonable doubt,” Ware wrote. “Almost all witnesses have an obvious bias or prejudice.” [emphasis mine]

Michelle Malkin is asking where Murtha is. I’m going to take a wild guess and say hamming it up with some bribe money somewhere.

I disagree with Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive on the appropriateness of negligent homicide charges, as I don’t believe any of the Marines involved should be charged with a thing. However, I do believe that Tim McGirk should be strung up. I believe that John Murtha should be strung up. And every NCIS agent who worked this case should be strung up. They lied, they destroyed evidence, they made up statements, they used tactics that no self-respecting liberal would ever allow against some terrorist virgin-seeker to have–after shooting American Marines, women, or children, mind you.

This whole debacle is disgusting, and I’d like to spend five minutes in a padded, soundproof room with any of those pieces of trash that dared do this to the ones who defend us.

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