Troubling. These wars need to end.
I’m torn about posting this, but I think we need to tear down the holy righteous image of the U.S. occupations.
Army ‘Kill Team’ Leader Wanted a Necklace of Fingers
Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs didn’t just stock up on bootleg DVDs and mess-hall snacks, like a typical deployed soldier. During his deployment to Kandahar, Gibbs kept a water bottle with two wads of cloth wedged into it. Wrapped in the cloth were fingers that he chopped off two corpses. One of his fellow soldiers said Gibbs wanted enough for a necklace.
That’s according to Army investigation documents leaked to the Washington Post. Gibbs, 25, is the alleged ringleader of the “Kill Team,” a rogue execution unit from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division that’s on trial for the murder of three Afghan civilians and may have killed a fourth. His fellow Kill Team members say that Gibbs’ impunity didn’t just extend to Afghans: he threatened to murder the mother of a soldier who didn’t keep his mouth shut.
Even though the team didn’t mind documenting its kills — some kept photographs — the documents suggest that Gibbs took it much further, possessing a certain comfort with mutilation. Investigators found bone fragments the water bottle where he kept his severed fingers, and he also kept teeth. Evidently, he thought little of removing parts of dead bodies: Gibbs told soldiers that it would be funny to include them in care packages, just to mess with people. He got away with that and more in Iraq, he told his friends, and the tattoos of skulls and pistols on his calf were testaments to the body count he racked up. (The Post reports that the Army is now also investigating Gibbs’ earlier Iraq tour.)
Tapes describe U.S. servicemen killing for sport in Afghanistan
Tapes obtained by CNN of interrogations of a group of U.S. servicemen charged with unprovoked killings of Afghan civilians describe gruesome scenes of cold-blooded murder.
“So we met this guy by his compound, so Gibbs walked him out, set him in place, was like standing here,” says Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, detailing how, on patrol earlier this year and under the command of his sergeant, Calvin R. Gibbs, he and others took an Afghan man from his home and killed him.
“So, he was fully cooperating?” the military investigator asks on the tapes in a May 2010 interview.
“Yeah,” Morlock responds.
Investigator: “Was he armed?”
Morlock: “No, not that we were aware of.”
(Read more from edition.cnn.com)
The CNN site has a video. It mentions that the Pentagon has ordered all attorneys in the case to return all photos which soldiers took of dead people.