Pre-meditated murder for Sgt. Mayo:
A U.S. Army sergeant pleaded guilty to murder Monday in the deaths of four Iraqi prisoners in 2007, telling a military court that the slayings were “in the best interest of my soldiers.”
Sgt. First Class Joseph P. Mayo, 27, was sentenced to 35 years in prison and became the fourth soldier convicted in the killing of four Iraqi men in Baghdad in the spring of 2007. The prisoners were each shot in back of the head while handcuffed and blindfolded, then dumped into a canal, according to testimony at the U.S. Army’s Rose Barracks Courthouse in Vilseck, Germany.
Take a wild guess who else served with them in that unit. Here is a hint- they would never run over a dog, because that would just be wrong.
Such a tragic waste of life. The men they killed and their own lives, just gone.
Comrade General Stuck
That’s a long time to make little rocks out of big ones. Sounds like it was well earned. But then I obviously hate America.
Wonder how long till Malkin puts up her "Free Mayo" donation widget?
scarpy
wait, I don’t get it. who else served with them?
Comrade General Stuck
@scarpy:
Damn you Beauchamp!
Balconesfault
War screws with men’s minds. That’s what the Winter Soldier hearings were all about, and that’s what this is all about. You spend enough time being scared for your own life, while watching or hearing about friends getting killed, and you get a very short fuse.
The true blame is all those hacks who argued early on that the dogs of war could be contained and controlled. Are we really so stupid as a people to keep believing that crap over and over and over?
shortstop
Sickening. And so were the people — allegedly liberal bloggers who just can’t seem to stop circling the wagons to protect fellow military members even when they’re dirty — who defended these guys.
The Other Steve
Damn you, Scott Beauchamp!
Ash
Four men, executed, and he only gets 35 years????
TenguPhule
If they serve more then 5 years of their sentences before getting out, color me surprised.
ThymeZoneThePlumber
I never saw combat. I was 4F. They took one look at my medical situation and chased me away with a stick.
But anyway, I can truly understand how war could snap people. I don’t presume to judge those people. I wasn’t there.
But I do think the sentence is necessary, and tragic. The rules have to be in place, and they have to be enforced, it seems to me.
Mike S
One of the reasons I like John Cole so much is because of his views on torture and other attrocities committed by our soldiers. They aren’t knee jerk defences. They aren’t knee jerk accusations. They are reasoned responses to horrid things.
As a matter of fact, it may be the only issue that John is actually reasoned about ;)
I first found Balloon-Juice when Abu Ghraib broke. John was rightly livid. One reason was because it was a huge black mark on the military. John’s ex-army and I have a lot of friends both active and retired military. I shared John’s outrage.
This was when John was still a wingnut, and Michael Moore was fat. The site was filled with wingnuts like Darrell and somewhat less wingnutty people like Stormy70, who I was quite fond of. Soon after dougj started to get his spoof on.
The vast majority of the wingnuts left so that their cultish sensibilities wouldn’t be hurt anymore. The only one I miss is stormy. But it has been interesting to watch the way that John has changed over the years.
ThymeZoneThePlumber
@Mike S:
"We should light up Palestine. All the good (people) have left."
Stormy, circa 2005.
I am not sure that Stormy ever posted sober.
Libby
Every time I think about what that blithering Outrage Corps did to Beauchamp, I get so angry I could spit nails. I’ll bet money not one of them will either mention this conviction or own up that they were wrong about Beauchamp. And far as I know, he’s still sitting in the sandbox fighting their war, while they sit on their lazy Cheeto-chomping asses and contemplate their next faux outrage.
Mike S
One of the reasons that war should always be a last resort option is because of that. Of course people will snap. I’m surprised that more people don’t. How do you spend every single moment worried about being killed, endure the necessarry belief that your enemy is inhuman and think about what will happen to your loved ones at home and still stay in control?
I am always amazed at how so many of my friends who have fought in wars, from Korea to Iraq and Afghanistan, have as much humanity inside of them. The soldiers that commit crimes should be held to account, with the right amount of compassion for them.
But the ones who have strived to do what is right, who have done what they can to be helpful to the civilian populations, should be praised as well.
Mike S
@ThymeZoneThePlumber:
She and I had some ver thoughtful conversations. Ine that stands out in my mind was what we should do about our policy of "the enemy of my enemy…"
While people like Darrell spewed hatred, and dougj spoofed it, there were many times that she tried tostay above that. And truth be told, I am sure that my history on the blogasphere could be just as brutally nutpicked.
Comrade General Stuck
Yes, sometimes combat stressed soldiers snap and do bad things that are understandably human, even if criminal. This however, was cold blooded murder. You just don’t execute bound prisoners. Not much sympathy deserved, and this coming from a vet.
aimai
I am really torn. I think this sentence was the right thing for us as a country, and the right punishment for the execution of those prisoners, but I feel horrible that we put our soldiers in the position of feeling so desperate, so afraid, so angry, and so unmonitored and unmoored that this seemed like a logical and moral thing for the time and place. I mean, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the bombing of shock and awe, or the "lighting up" of civilians and families in their cars. I can’t help but feel that it was wrong to make an example of one guy, or one set of guys, and let the rest of the upper level chain of command go scot free.
aimai
Xecky Gilchrist
@Mike S: One of the reasons that war should always be a last resort option is because of that.
Exactly.
Nikki
I agree wholeheartedly with aimai. The ones who commanded are going to skate scot free and the lower levels pay the price for the horrible decisions that were made.
Shygetz
Yes, war is hell, and yes, it makes decent people to heinous things, but come on. There is no reason to believe that the military takes on people with a higher inherent morality than the norm. I’ve known and worked with multiple military and ex-military people, and by and large I’ve found their "average" inherent character to be unremarkable, although the training often does leave a mark. There are unimpeachably moral people, and yes, there are borderline sociopaths.
I weep for the soldier who is forced to gun down a 14-year old insurgent in self-defense, or accidentally shoots an unarmed woman in the heat of a raid. Any guy who claims that shooting bound and blindfolded people in the head is in the best interests of the troops was almost certainly of questionable moral character to begin with. I won’t lose any fluids over Sgt. Mayo.
Amanda in the South Bay
Maybe the Army needs to think twice about promoting 27 (well, probably younger when he was actually promoted) year olds to the senior NCO ranks.
Bubblegum Tate
Up next: Confederate Yankee re-enacts the trial in his sandbox using GI Joes! "Prosecuting attorney Destro rests, your honor."
MNPundit
@Comrade General Stuck: I don’t know, if the enemy are advancing really quick and look to over whelm you, you might have to. You don’t went them freeing the prisoners to shoot at you again, but to take them with you slows you down enough to get captured.
But that’s a very specific circumstance.
Fern
So do people not know when they enlist that they are going to be asked to do the unspeakable? And if they do know, why do they enlist?
I know that sounds like a stupid question, but I mean it sincerely.
someguy
Who’d have thought Beauchamp was telling the truth all along. I guess our guys do all come back all fucked up and maybe there’s thousands more cases like this we aren’t aware of yet.
Doesn’t explain how somebody like Bush got the way he did but it does explain the skyrocketing murder, rape and suicide rates in the military. We need to bring ’em all home from both of Bush’s wars. Yesterday if possible.
Ash
@Fern: @Fern: Don’t most people enlist thinking they’re never actually going into combat?
Fern
@Ash:
I have no idea. I have met very few people in my life with military backgrounds, and don’t know any of them well.
Linkmeister
@Ash, speaking for myself, of the 80-or-so non-career guys I served with at a Naval Comm Station in Japan between 1972-1974, nearly all had enlisted into the Navy solely to avoid being drafted into the Army and heading for Vietnam.
I had a high draft number and enlisted into the Navy because I wasn’t going anywhere but down in college and had a family tradition of the USN.
Comrade General Stuck
@Fern:
Because they’re 18, and they don’t know what they want.
also
They get confused every day.
Ash
Yeah, I don’t really know anyone personally who is in any branch of the military, but I just remember so many guys from high school enlisting because of 1) the benefits, and/or 2) they had no other real options.
John Cole
I’d like to echo what others said. There is a difference between things that happen in the heat of the moment and calmly deciding to march people off to a remote area and executing them.
Also, the reason I get so upset about this sort of thing, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and all the rest of this crap is because not only is it wrong and illegal and immoral, but because it makes things less safe for our guys in uniform. Those four men that they murdered had families. Wonder whether their families were more or less likely to support an insurgency after their kids were executed.
Every time they do shit like this, they get more soldiers killed. The notion that the insurgents were drawn to action by what someone wrote in the TNR is absurd- they are pissed off by what is happening in their back yard, not what is happening in a magazine on the other side of the world that they will never see.
Jon H
"Don’t most people enlist thinking they’re never actually going into combat?"
Not recently, I shouldn’t think.
Ash
Not recently of course, but this guy was 27, probably enlisted around 2000, or maybe even 2001? And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people who enlisted in ’01 (or shortly after) weren’t exactly thinking straight……
MoeLarryAndJesus
TenguPhule writes: "If they serve more then 5 years of their sentences before getting out, color me surprised."
You’re quite right to be skeptical. Rusty Calley got some house arrest during which he was let out to go shopping and take in some movies. The military takes care of its own and doesn’t give a ripe damn about dead foreigners. This was another show trial.
Any notion that these killers will be doing "hard time" is also a joke.
Dennis-SGMM
@Fern:
Nothing in my life and nothing in my military training prepared me for the deeply atavistic reaction that took place when actual enemies with actual weapons were trying their best to kill me. The only thing that surprised me was how natural it felt to want to kill them.
People talk about how everything changes when you see your first child. For me, at least, having people actually trying to shoot my ass off was another of those "everything changes" moments. That may in part explain why people returning from combat find it difficult to talk to those they left behind.
Comrade General Stuck/ Obama Cultist
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
He was house arrested in a small white frame house alone in the middle of a large field. I was doing jump school at FT Benning at the time and the house was about half a mile away from our training grounds. It was always surrounded by MP cars and several times a day, someone would come out get in an MP car and they all would drive away, then return a while later. We didn’t know what was happening, but he didn’t stay put like a real jail.
cmorenc
One of the scariest moments in my life to think about in retrospect was the day in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War when a marine officer in the marine recruiting office in Raleigh, NC came *this* close to persuading me to sign up to the Corps, with the reassurance I would be selected into OCS (officer’s candidate school). I was momentarily at a malcontented, struggling moment in college, and was still among the gung-ho supporters of the war, and this seemed (at the time) to be a Patriotic, worthwhile, ultra-manly thing to do for three years and then come back in better frame of mind to resume school. YES that is actually the way my small-town, naive mind still thought about the situation, both in the big-picture and personal frames of things.
I actually had the form filled out, pen in hand to sign, when a still, but firm inner voice cautioned "why don’t you sleep on this overnight before signing the paper". Fortunately, I had the gumption to resist the recruiter’s persuasive pressure to go ahead and sign, and I went home that night, and felt sensible enough the next day to not return to the recruiting office, then or ever.
In retrospect, I would have become prime fodder to come back home maimed, dead, or else get bogged down in the sort of nightmarish mix of combat and paranoid encounters with Vietnamese civilians in which you never knew which ones were innocents just trying to stay alive themselves and which were VC intent on exacting painful malice on you at first chance…and perhaps wind up sliding down the same sort of path into psycho/sociopathic behavior we’re talking about here in this thread.
It’s easy to judge in retrospect and from afar that such behavior as we’re speaking of here in this thread is murder which needs to be punished appropriately, or else there is no justice or right or morality or integrity in this country or this world. In some people, doubtless the circumstances only serve to liberate dominant impulses that were only controlled at home out of necessity to appear an acceptable person in hometown society. However, for a great many others, it is the psychotic situation inherent in war that drove them from sane to psycho mad.
Cpl. Cam
@Amanda in the South Bay: This has always been the practice. You can’t enlist 18 year olds and and not have some of them make it to senior NCO positions within a decade.
Dennis-SGMM
@Cpl. Cam:
Don’t know how it is now but, I was an E-5 after two years of a four year hitch. For those not familiar with the military, E-5 is when you can start giving orders that must be obeyed by those junior to you.
shortstop
No doubt. But for those many of us who pointed out during the Beauchamp thing that it’s not "insulting our boys" and "blaming the U.S. military first" to observe that war drives many people to do some pretty shitty things which damage them as well as their victims, this denouement is a reminder of all the crap we had to take from liberal (no one expected better of conservatives) ex-military screaming about our "disrespecting" the good soldiers by even mentioning that war is hell.
Fucking tools.
Shane
That’s a very specific circumstance the other way, imho. If you couldn’t get the somewhere secure enough to prevent recapture, they’re not your prisoners and tough luck, they get to go free. Especially since some of you are about to be captured in turn, right next to either your current prisoners, or their executed corpses.
McDuff
Whether or not their lives were wasted really depends on whether they were the kind of sadistic, authoritarian fucks who would get off on this kind of bullshit whether they were in the army or not (in which case, good riddance), or whether they were drawn from the pool of otherwise decent human beings who couldn’t take the stresses of military life and got their morals broken by the system.
Of course, the society that sent them off to war is shamed by their actions whether they were murderers before they went or not. From our point of view it makes no difference. Either we sent sociopaths into battle and are shamed that way, or we broke decent young men and made them indecent and are shamed that way instead. It only serves to reiterate why we should view the sending of soldiers on military adventures as the absolute last refuge. Necessary it may sometimes be, but may your chosen deity have mercy on whatever dried husk remains of your soul if you do this to people when it is not necessary.
Of course, that shame explains why the war-mongering types who guffawed about the jolly holiday our boys were jaunting off on must keep spinning ever still deeper excuses why none of this is their fault, really, honest. The idea that they could actually take responsibility for their actions, especially at this late stage in the game, must be truly terrifying for them. Poor babies.
jcricket
The real problem is the traitorous media for reporting on obviously justifiable actions to begin with. Along with their enemy-enabling photos of flag draped coffins and tally of the war dead. And don’t even get me started on the communists who talk about that whole gulag archipeligo nonsense.
If only the rest of the media was more like a Ari Fleischer-led WH press conference we’d be in a better place.
Shygetz
I come from a dying manufacturing town in the South. The military is a big draw to a lot of 18 y/o because it is the only real option for a secure career with benefits that many of them see in their future. There is also a large number of military families there (mostly Navy), which often prods kids into military careers; it’s what they’re used to. Finally, a lot of people with promising educational futures but no job see it as their only way to a decent college. And no, most don’t think it will turn them into monsters. And, let’s be honest here…most of them are not turned into monsters.
mvr
@Mike S:
FWIW, John’s last two sentence paragraph captures my reaction to the story and also explains why I find his mode of blogging congenial to my sensibilities. It is neither uncritical nor insensitive.
wilfred
@McDuff:
This article discusses what will become an even worse situation as the economy deteriorates. Many of the worst were already criminals when they went in the service.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f1e_1215962277
ThymeZoneThePlumber
@Mike S:
I will agree that she meant well. And cared about what she posted. I didn’t agree with much of it, but she wasn’t a butthead like Darrell.
rachel
@cmorenc: You made the right decision. My uncle enlisted in the Marines back then. Three purple hearts and I can’t imagine what all else later, he came home to divorce from his high school sweetheart and slow suicide by alcohol–the second starting before the first.
timb
@MoeLarryAndJesus: Calley was a special case because he was a cause celebe amongst the G. Gordon Liddy/evil sect. Since they controlled the White House, they made life easy on Calley. Hell, Nixon wanted to pardon him and was urged to do so by the American right/pre-wingnut blogger types….Jesus, I could just see Ace or Michelle doing a "Compean and Ramos" dance on Calley’s behalf: "the media made it up," "he’s a hero," etc
This guy is not a celebrity of the Right. He will do his time, like any other murderer.
Just remember, these are the same people who welcomed MacArthur back after his firing and lauded him for presiding over the greatest military blunder in American history, which he then wanted to make up for by nuking China. The crazy right: the ones who defended MacArthur and McCarthy and segregation and defended Calley and hoped for war with Iran and praised the brave invasion of Grenada (while a Marine barracks smoldered in Beirut) and believed Bill Clinton murdered people in Mena, Arkansas….
…those people will always be here.
RememberNovember
I had a training brother at my kung fu school who was in Gulf 1. He wasn’t right in the head ten years after. I bumped into him recently and he’s doing ok now, but physical ills had seeped into his system over time. Mentally he seemed more on track, which was good to see. Classic GWS- Gulf War Syndrome.
Paul in KY
Speaking as a former USAF officer, all the soldiers convicted of 1st degree murder should be executed by firing squad. The members of the firing squad are made up from the codemned men’s own battalion.
The rest of the battalion are mustered out to watch the executions. That is a direct way of teaching the remaining troops that the kind of conduct those men engaged in will not be tolerated.
You absolutely cannot tolerate those actions from persons carrying around firearms, in a nation where we have to ‘win the hearts & minds’.
brantl
When it comes right down to it, selfish self-interest (it was about the oil, folks) is never a good reason to go to war. And you don’t get to go to war over any kind of hegemoniacal issues, either. It’s funny how all of us can’t abide a neighbor that does nothing besides fight with his/her neighbors, but if you try to extend this metaphor to nations/countries, and people think that nations/countries are somehow blameless when they behave this way.
If the U.S. were one of your neighbors on your block, they would be the one that has a garage full of guns, drives the car that burns oil a quart-per-mile, burns trash in his backyard, and leaves garbage all over his curb, and picks fruit off the trees in your backyard and has never asked permission. And shoots your cat because the cat MAY HAVE crapped in his yard, he thinks.
Now, what kind of an asshole is that?