Afghan Children killer, Sgt Bales, was not a psychopath

[Awesome]

Something fishy, this child killer was not a murdering psychopath before and suddenly he ends up going on a killer rampage?

This article is quite telling:

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales Delivered to Forth Leavenworth Prison - ABC News

The U.S. soldier accused of going on a rampage and killing 16 Afghan civilians in their homes, identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, arrived today at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Bales, 38, a husband and father of two, was serving on his fourth combat deployment in 10 years, the first three in Iraq. He was on his first tour in Afghanistan, where he'd been since December.

The combat veteran is accused of leaving his remote base Camp Belambay in the middle of the night Sunday and walking about a mile to an Afghan village where he broke into homes and killed 16 civilians, mostly women and children.

The slaughter has enraged Afghans and Bales was brought to the military detention facility at Fort Leavenworth about 11 p.m. ET.

The plane carrying Bales from Kuwait landed at Kansas City International Airport about 10 p.m. ET under tight security, the Associated Press reported.

Bales is expected to be charged with 16 counts of murder, charges that could bring the death penalty. Those charges could be filed as early as Saturday.

Pentagon officials said that Bales' being brought back to the U.S. does not necessarily mean that his military court procedings will be held in the U.S., holding out the possibility that they could be held in Afghanistan. The Afghan government is demanding that Bales be tried in Afghanistan.

Bales' alleged murderous rage is in stark contrast to what he said after a fierce battle in Zarqa, Iraq, in 2007.

"I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us," he told Fort Lewis' Northwest Guardian.

"I think that's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm's way like that," Bales said at the time.

Bales was first deployed in November 2003 when his unit spent a year in Mosul, Iraq.

In June 2006 he and his unit were sent back to Iraq and their year-long deployment was given a three month extension until September 2007. During that time, he saw duty in Mosul in the north, Bagdad when the city was pressed by militants, and then to Baquba where his unit took major casualties.

His final Iraq deployment was from September 2009 to September 2010 in Diyala province, which was also a hotbed of insurgent activity.

In December 2011, he was ordered to Afghanistan.

Kassie Holland, a neighbor in Lake Tapp, Wash., where Bales lived, told the Associated Press that him playing with his two kids.

"My reaction is that I'm shocked," she said. "I can't believe it was him. There were no signs... He always had a good attitude about being in the service. He was never really angry about it. When I heard him talk, he said, it seemed like, yeah, that's my job. That's what I do. He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it."

The Army's Criminal Investigative Command is conducting the investigation into the shooting rampage and will forward their results to the military chain of command.

John Henry Browne, Bales' lawyer in Seattle, told The Associated Press Thursday that the soldier had witnessed his friend's leg blown off the day before the massacre.

Bales reportedly spent his entire 11-year career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and lived not too far from the base. Originally from the Midwest, he was deployed with the Second Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in December.

Browne said that he was highly decorated and had once been nominated for a Bronze Star though he did not receive it. He also lost part of a foot because of a combat injury.

"He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's in general very mild-mannered," Browne told the AP.

Bales reportedly left Camp Belambay, where he was stationed to protect Special Operation Forces creating local militias, in the middle of the night wearing night-vision goggles, according to a source. The shooting occurred at 3 a.m. in three houses in two villages in the Panjway district of southern Kandahar province.

In the first village, more than a mile south of the base, he allegedly killed four people in the first house. In the second house, he allegedly killed 11 family members -- four girls, four boys and three adults.

According to a member of the Afghan investigation team and ABC News' interviews, he then walked back to another village past his base and killed one more person. He reportedly returned to the base on his own and turned himself in calmly.

An official told ABC News that the soldier had suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He reportedly went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News. But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.

On Thursday, Browne said that Bales' marriage was "fabulous."

Afghan political leaders have called for the shooter to be tried publicly in Afghan courts, but U.S. military officials say the case will be handled in U.S. military courts. A U.S. military official says Afghan officials were made aware of the transfer before it occurred.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

He should be brought in front of the media and give his side of the story on what happened.

 

[twilight]

In fact those Americans are so arrogant and saw others as animals .... they are savage ....

 

[Jango]

This guy is as bad as that Kony person, and all the other loonies in this world.

 

[Gandhi G in da house]

Has any one seen this guy ?

 

[Jungibaaz]

Taken back to the US.

He will be called a a 'rogue' soldier, who doesn't represent the US army as a whole (fair enough).
But did he have accomplices? Something tells me that there is no way he could have done it on his own.

How did he leave his base as night? How did he round up and kill so many people with no resistance? How did he manage to gather the resources, time and effort to go and burn them? Why was there no immediate response from others at his base? What about the villagers who claim that it was more then one person?

Questions that wont make it to the American populous^^^

 

[foxhound]

If this guy/murderer was mentally ill and presumed a psychopath by the US/Media - then why the hell did he not kill anyone in within his vicinity? why did he not kill his fellow US soldiers? he quite clearly chose to target afghan civilians? He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So again why did he kill Afghans?.....bloody sick evil terrorist haramey/b**stard.....it was a calculated killinh/murder of women/children.......he needs to be executed without a doubt! plus I don't think he was alone in this massacre......???

ref:Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre - Robert Fisk - Commentators - The Independent

Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre

Robert Fisk Saturday 17 March 2012

1 / 1‘Apparently deranged’: the Afghan house where a US soldier massacred 16 civiliansAP

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the "experts" when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the "deranged" bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn't know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have "disappeared" 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that's what it's about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that's too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

 

[Pukhtoon]

Has any one seen this guy ?

CliCk on the link

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...y-charged-saturday-afghanistan-142930090.html

 

[anon45]

A brave hero fallen from grace, may he find peace.

 

[mdcp]

Its not one man show must be many people involved, they just nominated one to avoid humiliation, and still they took him, lol Afghans they dont respect u like they repects their animals, wake up wake up

Innocent children, ladies and elders got killed
It should have been 10 days official mourning in afghanistan and may be atleast on day in usa just on humanitarian basis even but who cares
Even If Ahmed Shah Masood was alive he wouldnt have slept

 

[Icewolf]

He wasn't a psychopath... He just watched too much FOX news and got brainwashed.

 

[Fanling Monk]

The US has a record of not punishing Americans, soldiers or contractors, for killing Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Most of them get off scot-free and none have been severely punished.

Let's see what's her excuse this time for Sgt Bales.

 

[muslim282]

What else did we expect.
Vietnaam, Iraq were all examples prior to afghanistan.
Rape, murder, torture, abduction, sham military trials. Uncle SAM in his full glory.

This SOB should have been Hung publicly in afghanistan, his body burned and scattered, so nobody knew where this dog fell.
Urinating on dead people.
Burning the Koran.
Now Genocide in afghan villages (in the midst of night, like a coward).

Afghans and muslims in general need to wake up.

 

[Mav3rick]

Personally I think that he had some bad luck and got caught for some reason. Executions like these must be routine for these US soldiers posted in Afghanistan!

 

[killerx]

this guy should be executed asap

 

[haviZsultan]

The Afghans are demanding two things here:
1) An inquiry into this case and an investigation if more than one person was involved in the attack.
2) The American murderer to be tried in an Afghan court for the crimes he has committed.

The Americans are unwilling to offer any of the two. He should be executed and punished for his crimes. However he will not be. We have seen such examples before. Soldiers responsible for war crimes in the US military are rarely punished.

Its even becoming a problem in our army when we go after the taliban. We end up causing collateral damage and sometimes killing innocents. That has to be stopped somehow. Troops need to be better equiped and trained to deal with civilians and to make them feel they are there for them.