Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 29- The Mahmudiyah Murders

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

On this episode Joe is joined by Riley Dosh, a recent graduate of West Point, to talk about one of the most heinous crimes of the Iraq War, the rape and murder of Abeer Al-Janabi by US Soldiers. Support the show and get bonus episodes and merch! http://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Follow the show @lions_by Follow Joe @jkass99 Follow Riley @ms_riley_guprz

Hey everybody, this episode is brought to you by Lift Big Eat Big's new workout program, The Phalanx Method. Coach, powerlifter, strongman, and historian Brandon Morrison took a unique approach in his creation to this three-block, six-month-long effort. Using ancient sources and modern techniques, he was able to recreate the training of one of history's most destructive military forces, the Phalanx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days a week inx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days

a week in the gym and it's brutal. I've competed in powerlifting, CrossFit, and spent way too much time doing brutal army PT. And this is the hardest thing I've ever done before. And you can do it at a commercial gym or like me from your garage. He also includes little historical tidbits every week to keep you interested and to keep you hooked. If you want to challenge yourself or just try something new, go to www.liftbigeatbig.com and enter the promo code donkey to get 15% off the phalanx method. Are you ready to become a warrior of oak and bronze? The long road leading to the house of Abir Qasim al-Janabi, the 14-year-old Iraqi girl that former American soldier Stephen Dale Green raped and killed one afternoon in 2006. He set her body on fire to destroy the evidence and murdered her parents and her six-year-old sister.

This is now all that's left of her house. As punishment, Green will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole. But for al-Janabi's neighbors, that fate is hardly harsh enough. We would have been proud had he been sentenced to death because honor is very precious and dear to us Iraqi women. The verdict is unjust. He must be sentenced to death as an example for the American soldiers who do such things. We have not seen any good from them ever since they have arrived here, only assault on Iraqi people. The sentence is not enough for him. He should be brought here and put to death here, in the place where he committed his crime. But Green was sentenced

thousands of kilometers away, in this courtroom in the southern U.S. state of Kentucky. The jurors who convicted him are said to have deliberated for 10 hours on whether he should get the death sentence or life in prison. The jury heard how Green got drunk before going to Al-Janabi's home with three other soldiers. Ahead of the sentencing, Green's lawyer argued that the crimes might not have taken place had Green not been traumatized by all that he had witnessed during his long deployment in Iraq. The case may now be closed in the United States, but for Iraqis living in al-Janabi's neighborhood, the wounds remain open. Paul Wardell, Al Jazeera. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe,

and with me today is Riley Dosh. She's a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the first openly transgender person to graduate from the school. So thank you for joining me today is Riley Dosh. She's a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the first openly transgender person to graduate from the school. So thank you for joining me today. Hi, Joe. So how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good, actually. Yeah, that's good because we're about to talk about some horribly depressing shit. Yes, we are.

We normally do. So before we get into what we're going to talk about today, we're going to be talking about the Mamoudia incident, also known as the Abir al-Janabi rape and murder. Before we get into that, we have to acknowledge our main source for the episode, and that is the book Blackhearts, One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death by Jim Frederick. It is a magnificent book if you feel like just absolutely hating the United States military. Yeah, it is. It, it talks about some pretty crazy things.

Yeah. And it's, what's weird about the book and we'll absolutely talk about this more later is like, if you've ever spun, spent time around soldiers or anybody in the military, you can pick out one character from the book that you know, you worked with like someone who could definitely could have been that

person. There are some absolute care characters in that book that, yeah, you absolutely know who they are. And there's so many different ones, including some really terrible ones too, especially because this was kind of a terrible unit. Yeah.

I thought i was in the worst unit in the united states army and i now know that is categorically false yeah it there's always someone worse and there's always something better yeah yeah the grass is always greener and simultaneously covered in shit yep that sounds about right um uh so this episode we're gonna to do something a little different. Normally, myself and Nick or myself and a guest will talk at length about one thing or one part of history. And that's pretty much it. We don't really discuss it in an open-air manner. And that's what we're going to be doing this time.

What I'm going to do is talk about the crimes in depth. So if anybody is listening is squeamish or is made seriously uncomfortable by violence and trigger warning for any rape victims out there, we will be talking about the rape of a 14 year old girl. I understand these things are unsettling, but in order for this to be explained the way it should be, censorship isn't going to get us anywhere. Censoring history doesn't teach history, and I am an unfortunate byproduct of that. So and at the end, I'm going to explain the crimes in detail. Like I said, at the end, we're going to talk about who and what is to blame for what happened and what exactly has been done differently. All right. So are you ready?

Oh, I am so sad already. So our story brings us to Mahmoudiyah, Iraq in March of 2006 to a small, unmanaged group of soldiers from 1st Platoon, Brevo Company, 1st Battalion, and 502nd Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. So these guys were left alone in a remote combat outpost, or TCP, also known as a traffic control point. This outpost, which we will talk about in depth a little bit later, was a remote farmhouse far away from the rest of the soldiers' unit. This is not entirely out of the ordinary, actually. I have lived in situations like this myself with one major difference that we will talk about. That is leadership, which they didn't have much of. No, it was led by a specialist.

Yeah. And as someone who used to be a specialist team leader, I got really pissed off about Cortez. And I was like, you know, you made us all look bad, Cortez. Everyone's like, oh, don't put the specialist in charge of anything. You'll fuck it up. And then it's like, now they have a whole statue of that they can build. Right. Yeah.

So the real kicker here. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, you leave a specialist in charge. And apparently a war crime happens. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, every time without interruption. The real kicker

here is that people put up the outposts, and then the people they put in charge of those people they put in the outposts. Normally, a team or a squad of soldiers would be led in an outpost like this by a mid or low-ranking non-commissioned officer, sergeant, or corporal.

And in this occasion, it was left to a specialist, Paul Cortez. Paul Cortez was a jumpy little dude who had already had multiple mental and emotional breakdowns, the last of which was only a few days before he was put in charge of this detail. And the book actually notes that somebody saw him break down into tears while eating his cereal in the morning. So, yeah, as any normal functioning adult does. And I'm not not discounting any kind of mental issues he was dealing with at the time.

I'm just saying he certainly should not have been in charge. Right. Yeah. And I will go so far to say, in my opinion, uh, I know you have a different one, which is good. Uh, it's makes for better conversation. Um, nothing happens from here on out.

If Cortez is put in charge of pretty much any other group of soldiers, um, that isn't what he had. Um, he, he was incompetent and mentally unstable. That, that part's inarguable,

but if he had like a functioning team of soldiers under him, none of that would have mattered. Instead of the soldiers he had was one private Stephen Green. And a little side note here. The book goes, the book Blackhearts pretty much goes out of its way to pin everything that happened on steven green um i am in the camp of saying that's about 80 true and um mostly because he's a fucking lunatic um green even before he became a rapist and a murderer was a fucking crazy person

um and this is even before all the high casualties and incredibly low morale that was happening within the unit um which is a huge part of the book um they were taking incredible amounts of casualties almost every day um on multiple occasions green uh watch people he considered his best friends die through explosive devices or gunshots only feed away from him. But even before that, his mind was already completely damaged. He would walk around loudly using racial and ethnic slurs in front of everybody until people would tell him to shut the fuck up, which is not something a normal person does. Like he would just walk around talking about the KKK, all brown people need to die, except obviously he wouldn't use those words. He wasn't a normal functioning adult in the first place. And he and many other people in his unit routinely visit the Iraqi locals. He'd stop bathing and changing his clothes. And he would

routinely tell anybody who would listen to him that all he wanted to do was kill Iraqis and that Iraqis weren't people. Not a good way for the story to start. Yeah. Complete psychopath. And as Joe said. You probably know someone. In some of these units. There's always someone just fucking crazy.

And as we said though. It takes more than just green. But it takes some. He's about 60% guilty of it. It takes a village. Yeah. It's such a dark twist to that. But yeah, they were all sorts of bad.

And while the book definitely kind of put it on green, and I think it's largely because the court case put it on to green. Right. They were all, like everyone involved basically was messed up either by Iraq or by their upbringing. Yeah. And I didn't really go too far into green's background because this whole episode could have been a few pages of writing I would have had to have done. But he's from a small town. He was an incredibly racist individual.

He didn't take care of himself. I mean, as someone who used to have to sit through these quarterly classes all the time, he has pretty much all the hallmarks of someone that you need to send to mental health, and that's before people start dying. And what's really strange is nobody seemed to have a problem with it until he started

killing puppies and talking about it. And he openly tried to fight his platoon sergeant. And there's another time he was his brigade commander. Yeah, I think his sergeant major, too. He just straight up yelled in his face and stuff about it. Yeah. And, you know, it's weird because everyone's like well what's so wrong with wanting to kill iraqi is like this is why this whole episode is why people with

this type of mentality are horribly toxic right and it's weird is it like you get those you know tough guy social media types who are like that's the kind of attitude we want in our soldiers and and then like a couple of comment comments down like why don't we just nuke them right and then that just leads to someone else who's actually serious about it yeah yeah and then eventually uh yeah somebody who absolutely feels that way for real will end up in uniform um so thankfully uh after all this he was forced to go to a mental health provider uh they call it combat stress um and i can tell you from first-hand experience uh combat stress is bullshit i wrote about it in my book um but also i have other uh first-hand accounts of just like at

canterbury airfield if when you go back there um and uh like refit go to the doctor or whatever maybe they have like a combat stress room and one of the things in it is like instead of giving you treatment they just have you pet a dog i mean i really like dogs i mean but i yeah i right i don't know how well that will affect like heal these horrible to witness but i mean yeah i mean my dog is my child and if i'm upset like i like to hold my dog but like if i just watched my friend get blown apart my dog isn't gonna help me i'm probably gonna need to talk to a therapist um or psychotherapist somebody uh anyway uh green green went and uh so and when he went, he had to fill out a questionnaire. It asked him what his hobbies were, how he felt about the locals, things like that.

So when he was asked what his hobbies were, he said, killing Iraqis. And when he was asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how much he hated Iraqis, he said 11. When they asked him about what he dreamt about when he slept he said that he did not sleep much but when he did he dreamt about killing Iraqis he also freely told the provider about throwing a puppy off of a cliff because it would have been fun I know and he did that too like

he straight up killed some puppy that they found yeah not at all red flag of course but no and like the provider noted that he didn't seem to make the connection of why he should feel bad about killing a puppy um which is a troubling sign yeah just a little bit and uh so for treatment he was given sleeping pills um and that was pretty common for everybody at the time is like you go to combat

stress because everybody see you're finally breaking down and then they just give you sleeping pills and I can attest that that's exactly what they did to me again I can't remember exactly what it was called but they would give narcotic sleep sleeping pills to people in combat zones not a good mix oh um so in another incident uh so it's an incident that i didn't i didn't talk about in full but it was like really crazy for me in the book was when the three guy there's a three guys sitting at a traffic control point and uh an iraqi guy who they knew personally and been informant simply simply walked up to them like they were friends and pulled a handgun out and started shooting people and um i believe it killed two of them

and then he ended up getting shot in the head um so green was one of the first soldiers that showed up to that scene and uh saw the dead iraqi on the ground who who had been shot in the head with a 240 bravo machine gun so there wasn't much left of his head, but there was some teeth and Green picked some up and put them in his pocket. Yeah, it's just so weird. Yeah, this is not like and a lot of people I saw. I don't know a ton of people read this book, but I know a lot of people who know of this case.

I know a lot of especially people who know more about the Haditha case. And the two, the two aren't a lot alike because motivations were different and pretty much implications or everything was different from that aspect. But the amount of violence

is almost the same. And they're within months of each other. Yeah. And then in this, not necessarily the same area, but like the same ballpark of an area.

And, you know, you have people try to explain these away. Like this is the same ballpark of an area and um you know you have people try to explain these away like this is the sign like well what do you think is going to happen when people are put in combat situations and um now i i feel like the haditha massacre is the more natural evolution of a stress broken human mind in combat um because there's no sexual aspect to it they didn't try to like burn any bodies they just shot people um and like the uh was it frederickson um or frederick points out that there's a a very good study i believe from back in 1950 that shows um from about one week out of when you're, um, under constant combat

stress, your, your brain just stops working correctly. And, uh, these, you know, these guys have been here months, um, and with the intention of keeping them there for a year. Um, but what isn't noted, uh, that you'll start collecting body parts. That's something serial killers do. Um, yeah. And not just collecting body parts, but collecting like killers do um yeah and not just collecting body parts but collecting like right after your best friend just got shot and like all right i'm gonna

pick up some teeth because that's a normal thing yeah yeah one of the soldiers i think you shot and another thing that made it so much worse uh so i think the guy that got shot in the base of the spine during the incident was well i think that was his best friend um and then his the command uh well lieutenant colonel i forget his first name lieutenant colonel kunk um blamed the soldiers for their own deaths right so yeah because he wasn't wearing a helmet wasn't wearing a helmet but a helmet would not have stopped a shot to the base of the neck. No, and neither would your body armor at all. So to round out Cortez's team, there was a specialist, James Baker,

who I think is the other really, really bad person in this situation. I'll actually say this. PFC Jesse Spielman is also one of the worst. Oh, yeah. For a reason that I definitely talked about here in about two paragraphs. Now, I said earlier that these guys were left out at the TCP. And they were dropped out there, not checked on by anybody for over a month.

Or sorry, for nearly a month. They had originally expected their platoon sergeant a platoon sergeant is a high-ranking non-commissioned officer in charge of the soldier's care and his command a guy named first sergeant sorry sergeant first class finlayson um and it was his job or at least as everybody thought it was his job to uh check in on them at least once a week, but he never did. And this is actually directly from Black Arts. It says, quote, Finlayson was reliable. I'll give him that much, said Specialist James Barker, one of the soldiers stationed at TCP2 with Cortez.

We knew he would never, ever come out and check with us, so we did whatever we wanted. That's a problem. Now, I've seen soldiers go off the rails when they're left unattended um obviously but if you have psychotic people in your unit and you leave them out there with with cargo pockets full of sleeping pills and booze um because uh and my next part that i pulled uh is awesome book, but it goes into how much drinking and drug use was rampant within the ranks. Now, as somebody who was planning to be an officer,

for you, what do you think is a reason that you see rampant alcohol and drug abuse within ranks? I mean, I understand that I'm not defending alcohol and drug use, but I understand like, that's what a lot of soldiers are going to get themselves into when they're not being checked and things like that. Right. And I'm,

and they were drunk during the incident in particular. Yes. Um, and probably even on drugs too, to be perfectly honest. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised either. And I mean,

there were also points though during the story when the soldiers were found drunk or on drugs and stuff, and they're like, hey, this person's clearly on drugs, we should go do something about it, and then nothing pretty much happens. Yeah, it's such, you know, of course

when I was downrange, I would have loved to have had a drink like anyone else. And it was incredibly easy to get our hands on it's literally everywhere i know everybody has these ideas in their head about how iraq and afghanistan is but you can talk there's there's someone on every corner you can talk to him like hey i want some whiskey and give him some money and they will give you whiskey like everybody has it um same with drugs uh the the main thing that stops people from doing it is fear of being caught and punished exactly um and there was no fear of that uh because it was pretty obvious that nobody was going to be punished for it right because not only was there no checks but even if there were checks

they didn't get punished for it basically so that's definitely one that and i'll talk about that later but that's definitely one of the i'll talk about that later but that's definitely one of the biggest things i attribute to this yeah um so finlayson justified his absenteeism as a reflection of the degree of trust he suddenly had in his men um which it should be noted even though he he's only been in charge for about a month now at this point he took over uh he called them quote a fucking bucket of shit. So he did not have that much faith in his men all of a sudden. No, he absolutely didn't.

So once they knew they were alone, Cortez lost what little control he had over his men, which was nothing really at all. Drinking and drug use became incredibly common throughout Bravo Company, and at the outpost is no different. Quote, the vast majority of the Joes were drinking, Green acknowledged. Most of the NCOs, of course. The NCOs were all like us, about 20, 22 years old, though. By February, March, I was doing some type of intoxicant every day. A lot of Valiums and a lot of these pink pills, they were giving me some kind of hallucinations. A lot of other guys were taking those too.

The Iraqi army guys would sell them to us. That's what Green said was happening at the outpost. And I know a lot of people, especially back at this time, the military was terrible. I know they're probably still bad about now.

About giving out pretty much any narcotic painkiller for anything. Like, oh, rolled your ankle, have an oxy. Like and they would give insane pill counts like, oh, you you need two weeks of medicine, but we're going to give you 80 pills. So, yeah, there's there's got to be a ton of medicine floating through this unit. Right. Especially in such like a disorganized environment as it was back then. Especially in such a disorganized environment as it was back then. Yeah. The main difference between this outpost, which is known as TCP2,

was that there was no one to wrangle these guys in, which would have happened at a bigger base. So at one point, totally shit-faced, they captured several suspected Iraqi insurgents and began to drunkenly beat the shit out of them. They were caught mid-beating by a squad leader named sergeant tony you're what how do you present your ebay uh your ribby i think your ribby yeah so i i'm guilty of having a bad pronunciation habit but i listened to the audiobook for this and they pronounce his name your reeb so like i went into this all fucked up. So Tony Uribe, who they call to take the detainees away.

This is what happened next. He said, what the fuck are you doing, Cortez? You need to get a grip. What said Cortez slurring? You guys are way out of line. What if somebody, anybody other than me and Babs, who's a guy named babino um who came to your to your call you'd be fucked where's your brain you need to get these guys back and you need to get your stupid asses back to tcp2 so cortez and his men are stumbling drunk through the middle of a street

in iraq beating their detainees is what's happening here yeah and getting detainees drunk and like that's not even legitimate and the squad they're is saying, well, what if no one else, what if someone else found you? It's like, well, no, you are the person that found him. You're supposed to do this. Like, that's your job. And so a lot of this deals with being just way too comfortable with subordinates. And I think that's definitely the case with Cortez because he was just straight up just really good friends with his subordinates. And so he wasn't able to tell them,

hey, this is a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. And no point did Cortez ever say, this is all crazy illegal. We shouldn't do it. Well, he did for about five seconds and changed his mind, which we're about to get to. So Cortez, when confronted by his squad leader, simply said, fuck you, mother, as he was swaying back and forth in the street. Whoa, whoa there, dude. Who do you think you're talking to? Uribe responded. You're a fucking dick, Cortez slurred.

Every time Uribe turned around, one of the other soldiers would shout at the Iraqis and punch them again. Fucking motherfucker. You probably helped kill Nelson and Kausika, Spielman yelled as he tried to stomp on one of their heads. At this point, Uribe realized everything was spiraling out of control, and he said, bro, you just need to stop it, all right? He repeated it, Cortez. You're drunk. You don't know what the fuck's going on. I'm trying to make it so you don't get busted here, okay?

Which is not what Nencio is supposed to be doing in this situation. doing in this situation um there's also a brand new soldier there named uh private nicholas lake who according to platoon rules had uh had did not quite earn the right to beat suspects yet uh he was there guarding the women and children oh you know just the right to beat people's and it kind of goes into just like how messed up this situation is like the environment that they're living in we're like yeah beating people is a privilege like beat people because you get to be in the unit for so long kind of thing yeah i forget exactly what the rules were i think it was like you had to see combat before you could beat somebody or something like that um whatever it is is fucking insane but at one point um

one of the soldiers screams that all we ought to just kill all these motherfuckers. And he begins butt-stroking one of the Iraqi detainees in the face and head with his rifle. And it's then where Uribe actually thinks he just watched them beat somebody to death. But instead, he just walks away. He still doesn't do anything. He manages to wrangle the detainees and herd the drunk soldiers back into the truck. The whole time Cortez was upset

and emotional that Uribe was not being cooler about the whole thing saying he would have expected him to have his back. Spielman was an emotional drunk telling Babineau how much he loved him and how Babineau had always been there for him. Instead of reporting this or doing anything, maybe taking Cortez away, taking the whole team with him, Uribe and Babineau got the guys from third squad and got back in their trucks and left

and just left everybody that was drunk and emotional right there in the middle of the streets. Uribe didn't report anything that he saw uh which would become a common occurrence for him and he also could have stopped everything from happening i mean imagine this timeline if uh uribe went back to like or a captain or maybe more people and more vehicles like holy shit look what i just saw like this what this would have ended right here yeah and the fact that they expected him to do this and he and the fact that he did not retaliate against his subordinates or tell them hey you can't actually do this and then actually punish them just kind of means that that was acceptable to them and they were so lost at that point that anything just was not bad enough.

Yeah, they're like, well, we got away with this. Fuck, what else can we do? And that's not a good precedent to set. Which, I mean, and we'll get into this later, but that's kind of what happened because he finds out about it. He's about it because like he gets upset about it. But that's the part that blew my mind yeah yeah that part let i actually that part in the book i had to put the book down and like go have a drink uh so uh back at tcp2 green began to openly talk about

wanting to murder iraqi civilians uh cortez laughed him off saying quote don't do that right now i'm in charge i don't want to get in trouble um that's when barker began to get an idea and this is where i begin to understand that barker might be a bad guy um right barker said i've gotten a better idea we've all killed we've all killed hajis but we've been here twice i've never fucked one of these bitches cortez interest was peaked they talked about it the three of them, semi-seriously, but somewhat distractingly, as other things throughout the morning. Like, they were going about normal duties while just talking about finding an Iraqi woman to have sex with. Which means rape. They're not going to have anybody to find consensual sex with them.

Sometimes Barker and Cortez would confer privately. Sometimes Green and Barker would. privately. Sometimes Green and Parker would. But sometimes all three of them would talk together in a group. But Barker wasn't kidding. This is not like a semi-joking conversation like before. And he already had a target picked out. This is like...

Now, I'm not going to say everybody sits around and bored on an outpost and talks about wanting to go out and fucking turn into, you know, Vikings and rape and pillage a small village. But he had a plan. Like, he'd been thinking about this for a very long time.

He had a house picked out, not far from TCP2 that would be the ideal target. He knew that only one male lived there and three women. Barker thought one of the girls was, quote, pretty hot for a haji chick and they should go over there right now. Barker knew they couldn't leave and he asked Green if he'd be okay with killing them all. Green answered, absolutely. That was when the rest of the soldiers began planning for real. They weren't joking anymore.

Barker knew where the family kept their AK-47, a weapon that they would use in order to conceal who they really were. And this isn't anything weird. Every house in Iraq was allowed to have one AK-47, and I believe two magazines of ammunition. And they had been to this house multiple times. They actually knew American soldiers

liked their daughter to the point that they didn't let her go outside anymore. Out of this group, Cortez was the only unsure one telling them that they were insane so the two dropped it like they were just talking about killing and raping entire family and just kidding and instead just went back to playing cards and drinking um as they got drunker and drunker finally cortez stood up and said quote fuck this if we're gonna do that i'm gonna fuck the bitch first, let's go do this.

Uh, then they began divvying up duties and jobs. Like they're going on a regular patrol out in the city. Um, they would be leaving private Howard behind to man the radio in case anybody decided to come to TCP two and they had given them enough time to run. Here's the true. Now I'm going to say true evil, which doesn't really mesh well with history because history has different

shades of evil, but this is pretty fucking bad. Um, and this is when Spielman, who, if you've noticed, I haven't been talking about, cause he wasn't there for any of these conversations.

He just walked up, uh, while they were planning out the operation to go murder and rape this entire family. Um, he didn't know anything about it. Uh, but when he asked them what's going

on they told him he didn't even blink and just joined in like that's insane yeah the i i tend to think that spielman is kind of has the mentality of green he's just very quiet about it yeah because that's not something you just get told about like yeah yeah sounds like a great idea like that yeah normal people don't do that yeah this isn't like going to the bar they're like oh we're just gonna like go murder and rape people oh yeah right like that's not how a normal brain functions it's that's not it's not a normal person and i think he's maybe he's better at being a fucking sociopath than green because this whole time Green's falling apart emotionally,

not washing himself, not changing his clothes, starting to fight with random people. Nobody says shit about Spielman until now. So remember, they're trying to conceal who they are. So they're like, well, let's change out of our uniforms. They're going to change into what they call the ninja suit. It's the black poly pro silky type uniform and um but green refuses uh because it's the only uniform he has and uh so they all say fuck it and they just cover their faces with t-shirts

um they told howard uh without any uncommon uh like doubts like they didn't mince their words and they told Howard what they're about to do. They just told him we're going to go fuck an Iraqi chick and then escaped out the back of the TCP

and brought daylight. The house is only a couple hundred yards away and it did not take them long to get to the El Janabi home. When they found the youngest of the family, Hadil,

and the father, Kasim, outside, they forced them inside at gunpoint. Once inside, they cleared the house and forced the entire family into one room. Having secured the family's AK-47, that was when Cortez

grabbed 14-year-old Abir Aljanabi and marched her out of the room. Green stood watch over the rest of the family while the soldiers left for the girl. Barker pinned Abir down while Cortez raped her. The book goes out of its way to mention that his dick wouldn't work, but he raped her anyway. In the bedroom, the family could hear the screams of a beer and began to attempt to push past Green. He brought his stolen rifle up only for it to jam, so he switched to a shotgun he brought with him and proceeded to kill the entire family at point-blank range.

By this point, Barker and Cortez had switched, and he was raping the poor girl. Green left the bedroom and pushed Barker out of the way, and he raped a beer as well. Afterwards, he stuffed a pillow over her face and shot her in the head with the AK-47 that he had fixed. They then dumped kerosene all over her body and set it on a fire before running back to the TCP.

Once they got back, they grilled some chicken wings while destroying evidence of their crime and began to drink and talk about how awesome it was. Shortly afterwards, Iraqi troops were alerted to the fire, which had spread throughout the home, and called U.S. soldiers for help. One of the soldiers who responded was Sergeant Uribe. When he went to TCP2 afterwards and then described to Green what he had shown up and seen and taken pictures of for an investigation,

Green immediately admitted that he did it. He said, quote, I did. When Uribe didn't believe him, Green went through all the details of the crime, omitting, of course, that he had any help. He said he did it all by himself. He told Green to shut the fuck up and I didn't have time for his bullshit today. So the one that Green made without any kind of pressure. Yeah, I did it.

Right. And when during the planning phase they were green just volunteered like yeah if we get in trouble just say i did solo like he was just willing to take that blame and then he was so willing to take that blame he wanted to be like i guess proud of it maybe and he just straight up says like yeah like he would have gotten away with it to be perfectly honest and yeah i have no doubt this would have gone anywhere uh if green just kept his mouth shut like i know there's a whistleblower involved and we're going to talk about him but like if if green never you know sold himself out

and in turn selling everybody else out like they'd be free and yeah that's why I consider just so messed up and scary about the whole thing they actually had a saying because at the time there was so much violence I think they said there's like a hundred murders a day throughout the Baghdad area from sectarian violence and like when you know you Rebe was at was asked about it he didn't think anything was strange at all about the scene. And the Iraqis said the only thing that was strange that somebody raped somebody. Like that was if they had just gone in and murked an entire family, it would have been a wouldn't even have measured in anybody's radar. It was unusual.

And the shotgun shell. Iraqis generally don't use shotguns. They don't have them. It's kind of an American thing. Don't use shotguns. They don't have them. It's kind of an American thing. And that was like the only evidence, physical evidence on the scene that pointed to a Westerner doing it because like military contractors had shotguns as well.

And there's a ton of them in the area. But yeah, there's no way that they were going to find out who did this without Green admitting to it. So you would hope that Uribe would report this, right? Of course not. A few days later, he had confronted Green again, demanding more details, at which point Green once again told him things that only someone who had responded to the crime, which Green did not, or committed the crime, would have known. Still, Uribe didn't do anything.

Instead, he told Green, quote, I'm done with you. You're dead to me. Get out of the army or I'll get you out myself. That was his response to all this. Like, well, you're too bad to be. Can't deal with you. Like, it's mind blowing. I think that's something that kind of goes throughout this entire ordeal is a lot of people were upset that dishonor was being

brought to their unit or the army or something and completely forgetting the fact that like four people were murdered and a girl was raped right because they just it's just so normal if they're normalized to it that even if they're the perpetrators of it and stuff, they've seen so much violence by their own hands that it's, yeah, I, that part. And as strange as green did just that, uh,

he went to mental health again, uh, was almost immediately diagnosed as a sociopath. Um, which is like an immediate discharge thing in the, in the army at the time. Apparently, um,

he, for, for like the first time and everything else he was completely open with uh mental health about how he felt like even before when he was talking about i just want to kill iraqis that's all i want to do he he kind of said it like jokingly uh like with a smirk uh because take the whole thing seriously this time he just poured his heart out obviously he left the details of his crime um out of it and um he was diagnosed immediately uh so only 11 days after committing a uh so uh when you go in to talk to these people you have to do an intake uh because before he talked to us this time he actually talked to a like a licensed therapist

um and before he went to talk to a licensed therapist uh he had to do an intake form uh which again asked him a series of questions um and they use those questions in combination with their uh interview with them to come up with like a threat level and if you um are like a super high risk to yourself, like you're talking about killing yourself, hurting yourself, whatever, they can like take your weapons away. Same if you're having homicidal tendencies, which is ironic that this didn't happen to green before. But so 11 days after committing a quadruple murder and a gang rape with his study and his survey, they rated his current potential for harming others as low. Yeah, way to go, Army Medicine.

Yeah, and I understand the difficulty that the psychiatrists have to go through because you have to evaluate hundreds of people a day even, sometimes, and you don't really expect any particular soldier to commit war

crimes and stuff. And you know that if you even like put their threat level up a little bit, that's just gonna be a major red flag for them for the rest of their career. And so for sure, I understand it's kind of, it's hard to predict sometimes these things, but actually after the fact, you kind of realize the red flags, but there's so much wrong.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. Um, it's, you know, and I understand the impact of mental health in the military. I actually know somebody who, uh, went in and received mental health treatment, uh, probably a decade ago. Uh, and recently they wanted to become a recruiter. And what stopped them from becoming a recruiter was their mental health record. So, yeah, it's almost 2019 now

and still back-ass word on all of that. So I can see why the mental health professionals would give hesitation before throwing a flag on someone. But with his record talking about killing others, you really missed the ship there, guys. Right. They're definitely not being honest about the actual threat level, they think. Yeah. Or maybe it's just something that somebody said they had to do and nobody ever took it seriously. I don't know. I'm not a mental health professional.

I'll never claim to even pretend to be one. And so this all probably would have ended there. Again, Yuribia wasn't going to tell anybody about it. Nobody else knew about Green's involvement other than the other people that were involved. than the other people that were involved um there was like we said before there's nothing connecting anybody to these crimes because the fire and afterwards everybody's just cleans the whole thing up and that's when uribe told one private justin watt everything he knew um this actually trust uh troubled poor watt so badly he became uh he kind of became unglued uh he stopped sleeping uh he became emotional he started crying all the time and so finally he uh went to mental health about

it and uh now if you go to mental health uh just like i'm sure it's the same way here in the states and like i know somebody was raped and murdered. Like, you have to tell the cops. And that's kind of what happened eventually. So Watt became a whistleblower and his psychotherapist immediately requested that he was CID. That was that amount of effort was shit canned. I will attempted to be shit canned by Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, their commanding officer. He actually attempted to charge Watt with filing a false report. His

rationale was Watt wasn't there, there's no evidence, so how the fuck would Watt know? He must be lying. So, finally, the gears of law began to turn, and Green, civilian, having been discharged for mental health reasons was arrested in north carolina in 2006 he'd be the first person ever

charged under the military extra extraterritorial judicial yeah jurisdiction act fuck me a law originally signed to reigning military contractors um it was uh law passed in order to be able to charge civilians for crimes that were committed overseas. He was charged with the rape and murder of Jabir al-Janabi and the murders of six-year-old Hadil, her father, Kasim, and her mother, Farrikaya. Cortez, Spielman, and Barker were charged with the same thing. Howard was charged with obstruction of justice for destroying evidence. And Uribe was charged with failing to report Green's confession, dereliction of duty, and obstruction of justice. Here's where things kind of get strange.

Green was a civilian, so he went to federal court and he pled not guilty. He was sentenced to five life terms, none with the possibility of parole. five life terms, none with the possibility of parole. His argument effectively was I was crazy. Look, I'm even diagnosed with it, but it didn't work.

Barker flipped on everybody else to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to 90 years. After her sentencing, Barker was seen laughing and smoking outside with a court bailiff. Cortez pled guilty to escape the death penalty and was sentenced to 100 years.

In court, he swore he had no idea that Green was going to kill the family, which is patently false, as everybody else's testimony said otherwise. The whole time, he was like a sobbing, wet, emotional mess. Spielman pled guilty and was sentenced to 110 years howard pled

guilty and was sentenced to 27 months uh you really uh pled guilty to all of his charges and was uh given a discharge yeah now here's the charge yeah as same with howard um now here's the kicker because they were sentenced under all of the soldiers uh still on active duty who were sentenced will be eligible for parole in about 10 years so uh they actually first came up for parole in 2015 um and they were all shot down but they still came up for parole uh green was fucked and he knew it having life without and he uh expended a lot of effort trying to get his case transferred to the military justice system so he could have a parole possibility

because he was in federal penitentiary rather than Leavenworth. It failed because I don't think any court cases have ever been transferred that way and I don't think there's any kind of law saying that you can do that. He was also attacked

on multiple occasions by other inmates for being a rapist. Poor baby. Oh no. Yeah, and he had to be placed in protective custody for his own safety where he's under 23 hour a day lockdown and has no contact with anybody else because they'll just try to kill him.

In 2014, Green seeing no other way out, killed himself in a cell via hanging with a bed sheet i'm sure we all mourn the loss yeah you know and actually going into this uh i knew that uh i knew how it ended to an extent like i knew uh everybody was in prison for it and that's like the one i don't know how to word this the one war crime where we can be like finally the u.s army did the right thing i didn't know green killed himself until i started researching this i was like oh i guess it does kind of have a happy ending yeah it's not mentioned

it's not mentioned in the book i think that's because he killed himself after the book had come out yeah i think the book came out in like 10 or 11 and he killed himself 2014 he actually did a um uh interview from his cell in uh kentucky whatever uh federal prisons there in kentucky and uh he was like an unemotional crazy person as always but all he wanted to talk about is how terrible his prison sentence was. They're like, so if you could say anything to the family these days, what would it be? He's like, oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry about all that. Anyway, if you notice, I'm not allowed out of my cell.

I'm like, wow, you're still a piece of shit. Yeah, he said the – not only during Iraq, but even afterwards, during his appeals and stuff, he's like, yeah, I don't think of Iraqis as humans. It's like, you're not going to win your appeal, buddy. It's just not going to happen. And let's say even if he did, or let's say he didn't talk to Uribe and get booted for being nuts. When he talked about his time, like those few months that he was free before he got picked up for the crime, he was just driving around loaded down with guns and getting drunk and high constantly. So it was really only a matter of time before he killed somebody else.

Killed a fifth person, raped another person, I don't know. So we talked about having this episode or doing this episode, it feels like for months now. And there's a reason why is because you have a really interesting perspective on, or at least you got an interesting perspective while you were at West Point. You want to go into that a little bit? Yeah. So during your senior year at west point you take an

officership class mx 400 and at least during my semester and as i believe a few years before me as well we did basically a semester-long case study on this one particular thing we read the book we talked about it every single day we went over everything about it and then during that year they all into west point just about everyone in the chain of command the brigade commander colonel conk the battalion commander all the way down to platoon leadership and including sergeant uribe um and so now that i have the opportunity to like talk to some of these people in particular sergeant uribe and that but then also interestingly enough i had a captain at West Point who was,

he was the platoon leader for the replacement to the replacement of this unit. So that, I mean, in the same area. So he was literally the platoon leader in that same, like, TCP, that same area. It was staffed by a company instead of a platoon. But 2008, he was he was there right after the event and stuff so he knew a lot of people involved and stuff too and um you were saying before that this took uh quite a few years to to put together because uh colonel kunk uh which i'll stop calling him Lieutenant Colonel Kunk now because he got promoted.

He knew that everybody at the academy would fucking hate his guts, right? Oh, yeah, I know. He knew we'd all crucify him. That's not my words even. He knew that he'd be crucified. And he was. A lot of cadets were just like, why were you such a shitbag like we don't talk about much so far in the episode but he was an absolutely toxic toxic battalion commander and the book really he did so many bad things not only to the unit but then also just the battalion as well and that rippled

downward through the chain command and so the whole chain command was just completely fucked yeah i've never seen or heard of anything quite like the plans that he had laid out um like having i mean we were under man to the point that like we had three people in a vehicle but like we still had a whole squad on patrols and and his battle plan called for three people at a time going out on their own to another position to stay in guard for 12 hours. People weren't sleeping for days at a time in incredibly dangerous positions. dangerous positions. And I don't think they ever talked about a casualty, whether it be killed or

wounded, that Kunk could not find a way on the soldiers. Right. And that was a pretty big aspect about not only the platoon's psychology, but just the whole leadership environment, because every single time somebody would be killed,

the platoon would be at the memorial service and Colonel Kunk would come down and he'd just start shit-talking the entire platoon. You guys let this happen. This is your fault and stuff. And that's not what you want to hear when your best friend just got shot. So, yeah, he did not inspire

much confidence. No. And he also... also i mean this kind of goes without saying but uh he obviously um thought so little of his soldiers like i've i've had some bad commanders over the years but nothing quite even compares to this. Like that's so, it's almost like if you were to sketch a terrible commander for like, I don't know, I made for TV movie, you would make him cause he's so bad and almost like accidentally evil that he

shouldn't really exist. Yeah. And the problem is that in such a paradoxical paradoxical way on paper he appears to be a really great commander because he had taken all these assignments and he had done them mediocrely successfully but the problem is that every single time he did it like his entire command just hated him and for most part he's like a paper pusher he didn't really do a whole lot of combat deployments and stuff until that point and he just appeared good on paper because he took a lot of casualties but he was able to move forward and they couldn't necessarily attribute

the casualties to him so yeah that's he got end up getting promoted to colonel and you know what what did he have to say at west point i'm curious i mean i know you know that first i think it's the first like two chapters of the book um you hear uh the author talk about well whenever i talk to anybody about kunk uh you know all the other higher ranking officers have nothing but nice. But literally everybody who ever worked for him wants to fucking drag him behind a truck. Yeah. Like, what did he have to say? Well, so much of the people that came to West Point were that everyone, everyone that platoon, everyone that chain command, they just hate each other. Basically, they all blame each other for it.

Colonel Cunt, basically, he blamed his lower chain command. He was basically saying that he did things right. He did things by the book. He sent out reasonable expectations, reasonable commands and things like that. And he put a lot of the blame on the company commanders and stuff and saying, well, they just weren't falling out. They could have been smarter about it and stuff. they just weren't falling out they could have been smarter about and stuff and you know what maybe they could have been

maybe but it's pretty clear that is the way he pushed out those commands and the way he reacted to criticism made it completely ineffectual even if they were reasonable reasonable commands which i probably don't think they were but i haven't actually seen them right and he responded to criticism by just outright verbal and mental abuse if i right it was called the cunt gun the company commander's called it where he was just like he had like a few company commanders that he liked but the rest of them he just they would say he just turned the cunt gun on him and just fucking nuke that person for stupid things even but just like tear him apart about how such a terrible person they were how they shouldn't be leading their companies and stuff and that does not inspire confidence whatsoever in any command decision you do so right and i and i know on like

more than one occasion people brought complaints to him and like he just wouldn't didn't want to hear him and i know on another occasion um i believe is when the platoon leader said my platoon is combat ineffective um from whether it be casualties or just like massive amounts of of um mental um, mental instability. Um, like I, I know I said earlier, people were like breaking down into like tears while eating cereal. Um, people would randomly snap and have angry outbursts at one another.

Um, everybody was on sleeping pills and I think it was a Lieutenant or, or a first Sergeant was like, my company's done. Like there's, they just can't, they just can't do this anymore. And,

um, his response was, that's not your job to find out when they're combat effective. That's my job. Right. And he wasn't there. Yeah. It's not like he's coming down.

And whenever he did come down and actually visit things, which he didn't do all that often, apparently, but when he did, he would just find something terrible to just rip them apart for. And I, so his excuse was, I did everything right. Everybody else did everything wrong, which is kind of what I expected. I'm curious how Finlinson still defends his decision never to check on Cortez.

Yeah, Finlinson, I mean, he kind of just goes with the, because Finlinson was not one of these people that appeared to West Point. And he was very much of the, kind of as you said, that he trusted his people. So he thought that was the good way to do platoon leadership was you trust your subordinates and stuff. And that's one of the things West Point was trying to hit into us, that that's how you don't do platoon leadership. I mean, you trust, but you check. You check and verify your platoon. Because you can't just trust them

and just walk away, because then you're not actually doing anything. You're not a leader. But he also blamed... So the reason that they were out at the TCPs for two or three times the normal length that they were supposed to be out there was because he was doing

these community outreach programs, which to his credit were actually probably a good plan that actually probably helped things however his plan meant that they had to stay out there and so he credited his absence with he was out there doing all these things it's like okay yes you can do that but it caused him to be absent from his command and because of that no he like never visited any of the tcps ever and so because there's no expectation of him showing up this this shit happens yeah i mean like well we can start getting hammered in broad daylight and popping pills. It's not like Finlayson's going to show up and check on us. Exactly. What really interested me is that you got to sit down and talk effectively one-on-one with

Sergeant Uribe and Uribe. And that's really interesting to me because the book, I think, Because the book, I think, tries to put him in a sympathetic light. And I'm not a huge fan of that. So what was your impression when you talked to him personally? So one of the things, he very much was like, yeah, I fucked up. He was kind of open about that fact. And I think you kind of have to be at that point. But one of the things that he tried to make clear was that every unit has a steven green every unit has this like fucked up psychopath kid that just

doesn't understand morality and i don't think that's necessarily true but there's certainly a lot of people like that i think yeah i would agree with that but he especially blamed a lot of the things on barker i believe because he's he said that before they deployed barker was always the problem child of the platoon he always was getting in trouble like actual he fucking stabbed his wife in the in the knife are you fucking serious serious? I am dead serious. There was domestic assault cases against him. There was all sorts of stuff wrong with him. And so Uribe was saying that at Platoon Gifts Together,

it was Barker that he would tell, don't go near him. Don't interact with him. He's the fucked up one. And so that was kind of his case, was that, yeah, the fucked up one and so that was kind of his case was that yeah i fucked up but barker is the one that you need to uh be aware of like the type of the types that are psychotic but they're not loud about it yeah that was that's one of the more interesting things and i think we

talked about this before uh we started recording was was like I locked on to Green almost immediately, reading the book, probably like everybody else, because he was so outwardly insane, pretty much from the get go. He's the loudest, most obscene asshole in the room. And he's doing incredibly outright fucked up things like clacking teeth uh throwing puppies off the roof crazy shit man and like it's don't hear it and maybe the author glazed over didn't report it or maybe nobody felt like telling him about the domestic assault cases about uh from barker uh what also surprises me is that he was still in the army after he stabbed his wife yeah and i think that i mean green obviously showed red flags enough that and i feel like would be red flag enough to discharge him

barker too but i think that was very much a product of the environment that they were in, where this is just pre-surge. The army has been now in Iraq for like two, three years and so they were hurting for recruits. And so they didn't want to discharge people and so there's a lot of

waivers given for enlistment and keeping people in the army and stuff. I think Green was one of those. waivers given for enlistment and keeping people in the army and stuff. I think Green was one of those. Green had what I think they would call a morality waiver because he was busted for selling dope or something like that.

Actually, I can attest to this personally. Late 2005-2006 is when I joined the army and showing my age and all. I joined when I was 17. I actually was arrested when I was 15, only a couple years earlier, for a large amount of vandalism that didn't bother the Army. Once I joined my recruiting class,

there's people like, you could have felonies. They just couldn't be, I don't think they could be involving a firearm at the time. You could have class C nonviolent felonies on your end and be enlisted. It was an interesting time for sure.

And mental health was, I mean, especially in 2006, if you were already in, but if you were a new recruit, they did not give a shit about your mental health. Yeah, and the psychiatrists they talk about in the book kind of show that it's like, yeah, I dream about killing Iraqis and stuff. But, well, so long as the guy still is soldiering, I guess he's fine. Yeah, he hasn't killed anybody yet, except like he totally did. Yeah, he hasn't killed anybody yet, except he totally did.

So who else was at the West Point talk? I mean, they all fucking hated each other, and it took forever to get them all together. Who else was there to talk? So the platoon leader, tim norton was there i think the company commander goodwin was there and the brigade commander ebel i mean the brigade commander to be perfectly honest didn't have a whole lot to say because he's a brigade commander he doesn't really have that much detail to give he was the platoon leader uh it it should be noted that during this time period he was out on his uh mid-deployment leave so he was not actually present in the time oh right that's right right so that's another reason that i kind of lay a lot of the blame on fendlinson because

not only is your now your platoon leaders out and you're still not checking like which by the way i should mention that fendlinson also got promoted of course he did yep but lieutenant norton was an interesting one who he also got promoted although i don't really blame him for a whole lot of things because he was also like two or three weeks new to the the tune as well oh yeah he he's the most innocent one out of if anybody could be innocent like you can't one you can't do anything in three weeks and he wasn't even there um that that platoon was absolutely finlandson's problem uh and then he did nothing to fix it um and the brigade commander is interesting because i fully believe that he didn't know anything that was going on because he had Kunk reporting to him. And, you know, maybe this is unfair to Kunk if that's even a possibility,

but I could definitely see him as the guy who doesn't tell his brigade commander anything. Right. And they talked a little bit about that in the book where like one of the company commanders reported up that he's read on all sorts of manpower issues and they got reported up to through battalion and he was visiting brigade headquarters and he saw his own report and his own report showed green uh not steven green but green on all personnel and so there was some whether it was kunk himself or someone on staff but somewhere between its company level and the brigade level stuff was being hidden i think yeah and that very much whether it was kunk himself it doesn't really matter because it was kind of his command environment that allowed that shit to happen I think oh yeah and you know

even though Kunk tries to explain away a lot of stuff that doesn't explain away his when he tried to destroy Justin Green or sorry Justin Green

Justin Watt the whistleblower right not like if you give him the benefit Justin Green or sorry, Justin Green, Justin Watt, the whistleblower. Right. Not like if you give him the benefit of the doubt, like, well, he was attempting all these very bold missions. Like, oh, yeah, there is that asterisk of where someone did come forward to tell you something was incredibly wrong. And not only did you attempt to have him prosecuted, you got his psychotherapist fired, which he did. And he also nearly got Watt killed. Yeah. I'm assuming he didn't talk about any of that.

No, no, he really didn't. He very much defended himself by saying like he was doing things that any battalion commander would, and that he was giving reasonable commands, and that Watt really was not a trustworthy person. Even though there's nothing in Watt's record to show that he would be untrustworthy. Yeah. He was a young soldier with almost no record whatsoever. I think part of it was that he saw Watt as

just trying to get out of it because Watt was new to it, new to the environment and stuff, and he probably just didn't think that Watt could handle it and was just making up a story to try to get away, just get transferred away. He probably would have succeeded if it uh wasn't for his psychotherapist and that was i believe the

same um uh the same woman who worked for the california prison system but uh she told him like no you need to get fucking legal advice, like over and over and over again. And finally he did. And the investigation began. And one of the things that stuck out to me is if I had a soldier or if anybody with a functioning brain had somebody who was was effectively becoming a whistleblower on their own unit, which is an incredibly taboo thing to do in the military. You wouldn't put them in the tent next door with all the people he's talking. He's going to talk to investigators about with weapons. And that's exactly what they did.

Right. Yeah, they left him there. And I mean, they eventually, eventually to their credit they did eventually uh separate him right because there were whole uh threats made against them from other people in the platoon oh yeah people were openly right which were like and which gets me is that some of those people that were like openly trying to retaliate against him believe the story too like they're like yeah green may have done that but you still should not have whistleblowed like you're fucking snitch yeah that's the part that

and and they weren't involved in it like i would get if like green or spielman or or any of these people were like well we gotta fucking kill him like i would get that like as a guttural primal response people attempt to kill their witnesses all the time or their accusers all the time. Not involved in the crime whatsoever. Right, like friends of the perpetrators and stuff, yeah. And, you know, that's it's interesting because this all somehow comes right back around to the incident that that that I have somehow accidentally become popular about. And that is reporting war crimes where it is hard. It is hard to come forward and get and get taken care of and get the reports put in to the point where like CID and the FBI starts to, starts to get involved. And that is what thankfully happened here.

Um, but yeah, the, the, the slight silver lining of this war crime, if there are silver linings, the war crimes is that they were actually charged. And that was not just like they charged like a company commander or something

or the platoon leader. No, they actually charged the soldiers involved with the incident. Yeah. And they went hard. Like in comparison to, you know, the Haditha killings where everybody walked away, a free man. Everybody here will hopefully die in prison. One of them already did.

Um, and yeah, it's, it's, what's surprising to me is, well, maybe it's not surprising, but, um, that the people who allowed it to happen did not get any trouble at all. Like there was not even a letter of reprimand for any of these people. Was there? Not that I'm aware of. I mean the, so Uribe and Howard both got dishonorable discharges. Right. Which, I mean, that, that really fucks you over outside of the military and things sure but i don't believe so i think i believe the platoon leader actually got a letter of reprimand

and the company commander also did as well and was it for the for this incident or for other things so it was for this incident and then also a following incident which was not a war crime at least on their part but in somewhat people probably not but it was later claimed to be retaliation for this oh right right this unit was hit again and not only were soldiers killed two were abducted uh taken alive, and were killed on propaganda video. Yeah, their bodies were rigged up as bombs and stuff. And because it was the same platoon, that's what caused the news story about this to come out.

So it's conjunction with both of those events, which is why the platoon leader and company commander both got letters reprimanded for. I'm glad you brought that up, because it's kind of gone down in popular memory that that was in response to the rapes and the murders. And it doesn't seem it seems like retroactively they made it in response. It seems like retroactively they made it in response. I think the attack, which I can remember, was it Christian Menchaca and one of the other soldiers' names is escaping me, who were captured. But when you look at their battle strategy

of leaving one Humvee with three dudes in it on a street corner for 24 hours, this was only a matter of time before it happened. Right. Taking soldiers alive is just a thing I'm sure the Al-Qaeda in Iraq

was just planning to do. Oh yeah, absolutely. And the area itself is a hotbed, so it was likely to happen in that area with the same unit just by statistical happenstance but it was after the things came out because there's a propaganda video about it and they're like yeah we caught these soldiers and things and then months later they released another version of it that said, yes, we did this because of the rape and killings. Even though they didn't come out first and say that.

Right. So it was like the investigation was made world news and stuff. Did they say that? So it probably was not related. But who's to say? Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to, you you know i went into this admittedly when i and when you recommended black hearts to me um thinking that this was going to uh be like another haditha incident where like you almost can go like in hadith, you can feasibly go all the way up to Mattis for possibly knowing

and not saying anything about it. And I don't think... I kind of expected that here, too, because this is huge, right? And then I read the book. And then I realized it would feasibly be very, very easy for someone to carry out horrific crimes if they're surrounded by horrific violence and get away with it. And I don't know how that's never dawned on me before.

Maybe I'm naive, but the book is outstanding. And if anybody's listening hasn't read it yet, I cannot recommend enough. It's probably the best recent military history books i've ever read um one easily one of the best on the global war on terror for sure um thank you so much for uh adding your firsthand account with talking to these guys um i definitely never would have had this opportunity myself. Yeah. I'm glad to talk about it as terrible of a situation as it is. You know,

it's, there's a reason we studied this at places like West Point where it's like, Hey, this is a, this is what war crimes look like. Let's not do this. So it's very important that, you know,

it gets talked about. It's known. Yeah. And an interesting's very important that, you know, it gets talked about. It's known. Yeah. And an interesting footnote. Um, nowadays, I guess what talks at West point of on ethics and stuff like that, uh,

which is good. Um, he definitely should. He knows a lot about it now. Yep. Um, but again, uh,

thank you so much for coming on. Do you have anything that you would like to plug like a Twitter or a Twitch or anything like that? or G-U-P-R-Z. I use that username for just about anything, including Twitch. So you can find me just about anywhere using that, but I'm primarily found on Twitter. Again, thank you so much.

And I would gladly have you on again whenever we can make this work after four months of planning or however long it was. Yeah, I don't know how many months it was, but it took a while, but we're here. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us and, uh, have a good one. Yeah, you too. Hi, this is Nate Bethea and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30 day trial membership.

Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download a title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.