Life in Prison for American Soldier
 

What a piece of shit....


OINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. -- A U.S. soldier was sentenced Friday to life in prison without a chance of release for massacring 16 Afghan civilians last year, one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
A military jury announced the sentence hours after closing arguments ended, with prosecutors saying Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' own "stomach-churning" words proved he knew what he was doing when he carried out the pre-dawn attack in March 2012.
Bales, 40, pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty. He 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, 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.
Arguing Bales should not get parole, prosecutor Jay Morse showed jurors photos of a young girl who was killed as she screamed and cried. He showed surveillance video of Bales returning to his base with "the methodical, confident gait of a man who's accomplished his mission."
Defence attorney Emma Scanlan said no one can minimize the atrocities Bales committed but she urged jurors to consider his earlier military service and leave him with a "sliver of light" -- a sentence of life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
She read from letters sent by Bales' fellow soldiers, one who said that a decade of seeing his fellow soldiers killed and maimed left him in a darkness that "swallowed him whole."
Several survivors and family members of the victims who were flown to the U.S. testified this week, and one cursed Bales for attacking villagers as some slept and others screamed for mercy.
"If someone loses one child, you can imagine how devastated their life would be," said Haji Mohammad Wazir, who lost 11 family members, including his mother, wife and six of his seven children.
He was serving his fourth combat deployment last year when he left his outpost in Kandahar province in the middle of the night to attack the villages, shooting his victims and setting some of their bodies on fire with a kerosene lantern.
His attorneys have suggested that post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury may have played a role in the killings. But they offered no testimony from psychiatrists or other doctors.
If the defence can convince two of six jurors that Bales deserves leniency because he was a good soldier who simply "snapped," he would be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Bales' lawyers did their best to paint a sympathetic picture.
And Bales described the trouble he had readjusting to civilian life after his deployments to Iraq. He became angry all the time, he said. He began drinking heavily. He began to see a counsellor but quit because he didn't think it was working and he didn't want others to find him weak.
His rage worsened as he deployed to Afghanistan in late 2011.


Read more: http://www.cp24.com/world/life-in-pr...#ixzz2cp07IXcr

Seems he got what he deserved.

"was serving his fourth combat deployment" …..

My initial thoughts. The Army needs to re-evaluate the mental state of someone being ordered to that many tours of combat. OR, re-evaluate the mental state of someone volunteering for that many tours of combat.

say no more. it shouldn't surprise me, everyone is different, there are people still in that war today who don't see eye to eye.

imagine the dishonour however if the president of the united states had to defend himself at the hague, or any type of war crimes tribunal, or a trial in to crimes against humanity under the eye of any organisation with the jurisdiction. now that, that would be something i would like to see and be something to write home about.

They are all pieces of shit.

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." ~Einstein

george orwell must have hated albert einstein, i don't believe the two had any relationship whatsoever and we are going back a good sixty or seventy years.

i think they must have hated each other george orwell was a capitalist and he successfuly converted to communism but then became a capitalist again because he was fed up with the insanely socialist aspect of their politic.

albert einstein was i believe a jew, and lets be honest today jewry has somehow evolved from a religion in to government, corporatism and commercialism, part of zionism. zionists are not jews, zionists are nazi.

This is part of the major problem this country has right now. There is no reason that guy or anyone should do 4 tours. 1 or 2 at the max. Beyond that they should only deploy you to areas where you don't do combat and are used for supply support etc. The human brain can't take that kind of stress for that long without snapping.

Since we don't have a draft, but insist on getting into conflicts that last for 10 years we end up with a tiny group of people doing the fighting for years and years and it breaks them down.

This guy might have had other issues as well, but they need to put in place a rule that you only get 2 tours in combat and you are done. If we run out of soldiers to send we either need to end the conflict or start the draft.

Starting the draft will put a huge amount of pressure on our leaders to end the war.

He was indeed, and the "he" whom he describes in that quote is a Gentile. Especially the bits about heroism and loving your country.

Einstein also said "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." He should have directed that quote towards his own people.

It's getting harder to avoid angry people these days. I've had more encounters with angry assholes in the last 3 years than I've had in the previous 10 -- and I'm pretty good at avoiding trouble. Maybe they're war vets that have served one tour too many and it's starting to catch up with them.

Anyway, this guy should have 20 people with pellet guns shooting him all day every day until he dies.

A broken economy and perpetual state of war tends to make people less congenial.
They should end his life in the fastest and least expensive way possible.

pellets are super cheap.

Ordered? I have my doubts; not interested enough to investigate but my initial thoughts are that he is a merc or is requesting redeployment.

Did Einstein say that before or after the bomb?

Einstein had no problem with being a hypocrite considering he helped invent the atomic bomb. Whoever sent him out on 4th tour should join him in a dungeon. I read people knew he was unraveling.

Read your history, Einstein deeply regretted his part in the nuclear program. And he was wrong to regret it, he and other physicists knew the Nazis had their own nuclear weapons program and feared them having it first. The Nazis could have built nuclear bombs but time ran out on them, they knew how to do make them, but were busy working on other things and Hitler never diverted the top scientists to his own Manhattan Project.

Thats like Bales saying to Afghan dad, "Dude, I'm really really sorry I broke into your house, killed 11 family members and set them on fire yo."

Read YOUR history. By the time we dropped the bomb Germany had already surrendered.