Breaking: U.S. Soldier Who Massacred Afghan Villagers Sentenced to Life W/out Possibility of Parole

[Hissyspit]

Source: Associated Press

JURY: LIFE IN PRISON FOR AFGHANISTAN MASSACRE

By GENE JOHNSON
— Aug. 23 2:19 PM ED

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. (AP) — A military jury has sentenced a U.S. soldier who massacred 16 Afghan civilians last year to life in prison without a chance of parole.

The decision came Friday in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales who pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty for one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Bales took the witness stand Thursday and apologized for the pre-dawn attack in March 2012, describing it as an act of cowardice.

Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., was serving his fourth combat deployment when he left his outpost at Camp Belambay, in Kandahar province, in the middle of the night to attack two villages.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-soldier-apologizes-massacre-16-afghans

[NickB79]

1. Good. He shot and killed a 2-yr old child

Baby killers get no remorse from me.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I have no problem with that sentence.

[TBF]

3. I can't disagree with the sentence itself - BUT

I would plead for better mental health services in the military. I haven't read details about this case but just looking at this story makes me wonder what happened with this guy. He's got kids of his own. Something snapped there & someone didn't catch it. Very, very sad all around.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

4. It was his FOURTH freakin combat deployment.

That right there is a huge scandal. Obviously he had reached some sort of breaking point. We should have been out of Afghanistan loong before any such thing would have even been possible.

[FiveGoodMen]

7. Yup. A tragedy all around.

The crime shouldn't be excused, but it also shouldn't have -- and probably wouldn't have -- happened without the terrible stop-loss policy.

One deployment in a war is plenty.

(NOT TO MENTION... we should never have started that war!)

[lastlib]

5. Now we just need to get the Commander-in-Thief that started those damn wars.

I just hope I get to live in the world that puts that bass-turd and his cronies in the slammer. (I refer, of course, to George W. Bush and his PNACer buds.)

[derby378]

6. For now, I'll be happy if he has to share a cell with Hasan (n/t)

[yurbud]

8. yep. Military justice does the opposite of a mob prosecution. They catch the little fish and

instead of making a deal to get the bigger fish, they just call it a day.

Come to think of it, that's how the civilian Justice Department is working now too.

There's no crime of the financial elite and the politicians doing their bidding too big to ignore.

And no crime of those against the financial elite too small to ignore.

[Marrah_G]

9. Good

But there is way more justice that needs to be done, that will never be done. He was deployed to many times into a very bad place. The military itself carries much of the blame for this. These young kids can easily snap under so much mental and emotional stress. The military knows this, yet continually puts these young men into the same situations over and over again with little to no mental health screening. Soldiers who complain about needing help mentally or emotionally while deployed in combat situations are ignored or told they have to wait until they get home to receive help.

Many people won't agree, but this could have been my son, your son.... the mind can only take so much. The innocent villagers are the ones who paid the price.