Soldier grins and confesses to rape

[ECH1969]

Fort Campbell, Kentucky: One of four US soldiers accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl last spring showed little remorse and even smiled during a confession to charges he conspired to kill her and her family.

Even before the hearing on Wednesday to announce a plea agreement, James P. Barker, 23, slapped hands with other soldiers and grinned as he smoked a cigarette in the rain. A bailiff scolded him.

And when he described for the judge the assault in his own words, he gave vivid details of the rape with a deadpan delivery.

"That's pretty much all I have to say," Barker muttered with a shrug after describing raping the screaming girl. Barker agreed to plead guilty to the charges to avoid the death penalty, his civilian attorney David Sheldon said.

http://www.gulfnews.com/world/U.S.A/10083150.html

[Donnachaidh]

1. is the death penalty on the table?

I'd like to see his head on a pike.

[Warpy]

6. I want to see him stripped of his "weapon."

Otherwise, he'll rape other prisoners.

[ECH1969]

8. He won't be having fun in jail

[MADem]

16. No...Barker agreed to plead guilty to the charges to avoid the death penalty

Sociopath. So much for recruiting standards....

[ECH1969]

20. I agree

[slackmaster]

26. No, he got 90 years

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2972997

[Marnieworld]

2. This inhuman brutality is just fruit of the poison tree of the war

These soldiers need to be punished of course but you can't completely extract them from the crime of the war in the first place. These kids need to be working in retail or a movie theater like I did at that age. Who knows who they would be if they weren't put in that circumstance? Many of them still believe that Saddam orchestrated 9/11 fa chrissakes. They were made to believe that Iraqis were less than human and therefore behaved that way.

It's all so predictable that it becomes even sicker and more tragic.

Just in case no one gets what I'm saying. This guy quoted sounds like a monster and deserves to be punished to the fullest extent imaginable. But who or what creates the monsters?

[Mythsaje]

3. Isn't it comforting to know

that we're being served by such upstanding young men as this? :sarcasm:

They REALLY need to run psych profiles on these people before putting weapons in their hands. But, of course, that would pretty much eliminate any chance of maintaining a large standing army and destroy the imperial pretensions of the PTBs, wouldn't it?

[bpeale]

4. this is what happens when the military lowers its standards

[Mythsaje]

5. I'm not sure their standards are all that high to begin with...n/t

[bpeale]

7. i disagree. i was in the military.

[sarge43]

11. The civilian world was responsible for him for minimum the first

seventeen years of his life. That's three to five times longer than the army was and during his most formative years, too. Yes, this is a monster, but the military did not make this monster; it turned it loose. The monster was made in the civilian world.

The military does not make men out of boys nor does it make monsters out of men. If a boy becomes a man or the man a monster, both were created long before either inked a DDFm 4.

[Mythsaje]

15. Of course not...

You can't blame the military for it. He was probably a psycho BEFORE he joined the military. He should have been screened out.

[bpeale]

24. yes

the monster was made in the civilian world, but lowering the standards allowed him to slip past all testing cautions and then do something like this. there is testing designed to weed out undesirables like this.

[sarge43]

28. It's one of the things that happens when war is fought on the cheap.

It's also what happens when a war goes on and on. By the very nature of the process, standards are continually lowered. I hate to say it, but if this horror continues, this or something very much like it will occur again.

[ECH1969]

12. when?

[bpeale]

23. 1976-1984 US Army

[Mythsaje]

14. I think some psychos have always managed to slip by...

I don't think the screening process is nearly good enough.

[sarge43]

17. No argument. Some do. As some wind up in the teaching and

medical professions.

And I'll fault the army for not bagging this psycho before turning him loose in a combat zone. That's throwing a lit match into a dynamite shed.

[Mythsaje]

21. Indeed...

This guy sounds like a psychopath--while it's possible to miss some mental disorders in an average screening process, most psychopaths send some pretty clear signals unless they have a specific reason to disguise them. I'm not sure this guy went through ANY real screening process.

[ECH1969]

29. Yes

[ECH1969]

36. when?

[bpeale]

25. this really sounds like bashing of all troops not just this one

the MAJORITY of troops are upstanding citizens who ALL passed through the same testing procedures and they are designed to weed people of this ilk out. during my 9 years in service, i never met anyone that i would have termed a psycho ... all were upstanding professionals. when you lower the acceptance standards for military service (like they have had to because no one will enlist), these are the kinds of people that get accepted unless psychosis is visible during testing. people like this are good at hiding it if they want to be able to get somewhere with a gun in their hand. but do not lump all military people together as psychos because testing is not as good as YOU think it should be. the service has had to accept people because of lower standards that they never would have accepted before. 99.99% are not psychos. don't make it sound like they are because of one psycho. i really resent the implications in this thread.

[Mythsaje]

34. Well, of course.

There are only a few bad apples committing war crimes in Iraq. It's not systemic.

Just like Vietnam.

Just like Nazi Germany.

Yep. Just a few bad apples. Checkpoint shootings, Pat Tillman, village massacres, Abu Graib, THIS incident.

Hey, maybe it's just me, but if you throw people into the meat-grinder again and again and again, you damn well better make sure only the most sane folks make the grade. I DON'T think the military standards are high enough. PERIOD. Particularly among the ones most likely to see the most action.

The alcohol consumption rate among a lot of the soldiers and sailors I've known was off the chart. Far too many wouldn't know nuance or subtlety if it crawled up and bit them. While I'm sure there are a LOT of stable soldiers, I still say the number of those who go around the bend is too high. You take kids just out of high school, throw them through basic training, a few months in AIT, and then through a meat-grinder, and it's gonna fuck them up.

ESPECIALLY if you don't really give a rat's ass if they're particularly stable in the first place. Any warm body that can hold a gun and piss standing up can be sent into the sausage maker and a lot of the ones that come out are fucked up for life. It took my father over thirty years to get over some of the worst of what vietnam did to him. And some of it he never will.

These kids are not trained to act as police. Hell, even the police over here aren't really tested well enough ahead of time to do the job. As recent events have proven yet again.

If real psychos are slipping through the cracks in our military, it's because no one is LOOKING hard enough. "Don't ask, don't tell" apparently applies to psychopaths too.

Or do you honestly think that some of the generals running this fiasco aren't as fucking nuts in their own way as this guy? The sane ones bailed out early. They're not only not testing them adequately beforehand, they're also not testing them AFTER traumatic experiences, or, if they are, not bothering to do anything about it if they come up a few bricks short of a load.

Do I think that everyone in the military is crazy? No. But when it has been made sufficiently clear that the mental health of our soldiers and vets is in no way a priority for the people in charge, I definitely see it as a problem.

[AndyA]

9. The men that did this horrendous act are a disgrace to America,

the human race, and to their God. There is no excuse for this. None.

We have no business being over there in the first place. This is torture. Who was it that said America doesn't torture?

[JeremyWestenn]

10. Disgusting.

There goes more of our image. I hope that man gets hit by a truck...

- Jeremy

[ECH1969]

22. yup

[Auntie Bush]

35. DITTO! And Welcome!

:hi:

[sinkingfeeling]

13. I would like to ask his lawyer what good it would have done had there been

20 times the number of soldiers at that checkpoint.

"The United States Army did not staff, did not put enough soldiers on the checkpoints," Sheldon said. "It's very important that the public knows that this type of thing can happen again if the Army doesn't take measures to put enough troops on the front line in the war against terrorism, the war in Iraq."

These guys planned it. Changed their clothers. Climbed through backyards as they left the checkpoint to attack this Iraqi family.

[ECH1969]

18. The freepers probably think they were just youngins having fun

[Bad Penny]

19. Here's a pic of the little creep

[AnnieBW]

27. Oh yeah, he's a real big man!

Raping 14-year-old girls makes you so much more of a man. :sarcasm: I hope his actions come back to him threefold - with his cellmate!

[zbdent]

30. Wouldn't surprise me if this turd's "religion" forbade him from performing

"beastiality" ... but he did anyway, according to his own private "beliefs" ... those that state that, despite appearing human, the thing that he raped was "sub-human" ...

[Withywindle]

31. He's the subhuman here!

And I don't buy that "fog of war" excuse either. This was planned and premeditated. That excuse is an insult to all the soldiers who don't rape and murder civilians, which is most of them. And there are plenty of rapists and murderers in countries that aren't at war. The responsibility is the same.

[Disturbed]

32. "because of one psycho"

In this case there are three others. Also, there are more cases of US Troop atrocities pending. I suspect that there are a few thousand Sociopaths &/or Psychopaths in the US Military. These people were that way before entering Military Service in my view. Being in the Military does not turn one into a Sociopath/Psychopath. It may provide an outlet for criminal behavior that may allow that behavior to gotten away with in some cases due to the Fog of War. We will never know how many of similar incidents will never be discovered, will we?

[zbdent]

33. Also probably of the same group

who thinks that John Kerry was insulting the troops ...

[lateo]

37. Hopefully he will enjoy...

his time in PMITA prison.