Specialist James Barker has entered a plea of guilty to charges that he raped and murdered Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, and murdered her parents and five-year-old sister.
Barker was one of nine members of the 1st Platoon, B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, serving in Iraq. Six have been charged in connection with the March 10, 2006 crimes against al-Janabi and her family. The remaining three men are dead. One was killed in a June 16 ambush, two more were taken prisoner in that ambush and then killed and mutilated by their captors. An Iraqi group called the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council has claimed these men were executed to revenge the rape and murder of al-Janabi, and the murder of her family.
The deaths of al-Janabi and her family were originally blamed by the American occupying forces on Iraqi "insurgents." Only after the retaliatory killings of the three platoon members did a fellow soldier, during a counseling session, reveal that the al-Janabi atrocity had been the work of the United States military.
Abeer Qassim al-Janabi was an attractive young woman. She feared the unwanted attentions forced upon her by the soldiers of the 1st Platoon, who manned a checkpoint in the village of Mahmudiyah that she was required to pass through daily.
Al-Janabi confided her fears to her mother, Fakhriyah, who shared them. Al-Janabi's mother worried that the soldiers might come for her daughter at home, and so thought to place her with neighbors. But neighbors "tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," recalls neighbor Omar Janabi. "I told her, 'the Americans would not do such a thing.'"
The next day, Al-Janabi and her family were dead.
Steven Green, a private first-class in the 1st Platoon, was bored and frustrated in Iraq. Like the man who sent him to Iraq, George W. Bush, Green hailed from Midland, Texas. The mother of one of Green's classmates says Green "was disruptive in his house. I don't know if he killed small cats or anything, but that's the kind of kid he was." If Green did kill small cats, he shares that disrespect for life manifested at an early age by George W. Bush. And, like George W. Bush, Green accumulated, as a youth, multiple misdemeanor convictions.
Shortly after serving time for his third misdemeanor conviction, the 20-year-old Green had enlisted. Usually the United States armed forces will not accept such an inveterate jailbird, but the military, starved of recruits, had recently relaxed its standards. And so Green was issued a "moral waiver," which, according to a Fort Knox recruiter, is granted after the Army considers the "actuality of the person, the totality of their life."
In February of 2004, a month before the slaugher of al-Janabi and her family, Green told a reporter that "I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
"The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.'"
Green had been in Iraq for but four months, but he was fed up with the place. "I gotta be here for a year and there ain't shit I can do about it," he complained. "I just want to go home alive. I don't give a fuck about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care." He described Iraqis as "cool," but admitted "I wouldn't really care if all these guys got waxed."
On March 10, 2006, Green and Spec. Barker, together with fellow 1st Platoon members Private Jesse Spielman, Private Bryan Howard, and Sergeant Paul Cortez, golfed and played cards. They drank whiskey, which they had purchased from Iraqi soldiers. According to Barker, the 1st Platoon got drunk just about every day. "It was a way with coping with the deployment," he told the court, "and to get a buzz."
They talked, as they drank; they drank, as they talked. Green suggested that it was long past time that the platoon take revenge. You couldn't trust these people. They didn't appreciate anything that was done for them. Look what had happened: a soldier had been killed by his own Iraqi informant! It was time, long past time, for payback. The platoon should get their own back. Wax some of these people. And Green, Green had the perfect target, all picked out.
They had all seen her, coming through the checkpoint. They had even, some of them, been by her house. They knew where she was. There was even a hole in the wire, allowing easy access. She had it coming to her. Sure she did. All of them, all of them had it coming to them.
And so, eventually, they all decided to saunter on over to al-Janabi's house.
"[Green] brought it up to me and asked me what I thought about it," Barker told the court. "By the time we started changing clothes, it was more or less a nonverbal agreement that we were going to go along with what we were discussing."
They donned dark clothing, to mask themselves, though it was full daylight. One platoon-mate, Howard, was left at the checkpoint, to man the radio.
Armed with M4 rifles and a shotgun, the four members of the 1st Platoon reached al-Janabi's house. They accessed the home through a chain-link fence on the property that had been cut on a previous patrol. Al-Janabi's father and sister were outside the house in a car: they were forced at gunpoint into the home. With one soldier, Pvt. Spielman, guarding the door, the other three entered. Green grabbed the family's AK-47, and with it herded al-Janabi's mother, father, and sister into a bedroom. At some point, he killed them.
Meanwhile, while Barker restrained her, Cortez raped al-Janabi. Then, while Cortez restrained her, Barker raped al-Janabi.
Barker told the court this:
"Cortez pushed her to the ground. I went towards the top of her and kind of held her hands down while Cortez proceeded to lift her dress up," he said. "Around that time I heard shots coming from a room next door."
In the rape room:
she was "struggling, crying and screaming out . . . . "
"That's pretty much all I have to say," Barker muttered with a shrug after describing raping the screaming girl.
Barker did manage to add that Green, having emerged from the killing room, raped al-Janabi, as Cortez restrained her. According to Barker, Green then:
got up and shot her in the head.
Barker said he then went to the kitchen to get a kerosene lamp and poured the oil on the lower half of the girl's body. He said Spielman had the cigarette lighter, but added he didn't know who actually set the girl's body and clothes on fire.
He said Green had opened a propane tank in the kitchen with the intention of blowing up the house.
When the men returned to the checkpoint, they removed their bloody clothes, and burned them. The purloined AK-47 was thrown into a canal.
Barker told the court that he decided to rape and kill al-Janabi and her family because "I hated Iraqis, your honor. They can smile at you, then shoot you in your face without even thinking about it."
Barker had more jubilantly described his feelings in a May 29 note on a friend's MySpace page, in which he said: "I miss you so much, all the fun times, i wish it could still be that easy, but hay now i get to shoot at people all day, lol."
Similarly, Barker's platoon-mate, the door-guarder Pvt. Spielman, had, on his own MySpace page, listed his interests as "Shooting stuff, meeting people, My car and workin on it."
The cover-up began immediately:
Janabi said U.S. soldiers controlled the scene of the killings for several hours on March 11, telling neighbors that insurgents were responsible. The bodies of the victims were taken to Mahmudiyah hospital by March 12, according to Janabi and an official at the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
On March 13, a man identifying himself as a relative claimed the bodies for burial, the hospital official said. An hour after the man left with the bodies, U.S. soldiers came to the hospital and asked about the bodies, the hospital official said.
The next day, the hospital official said, soldiers scoured the area, trying to find the funeral for the family.
"But they did not find it, simply because the relatives did not do it, because the death includes the rape of one of the family members, which is something shameful in our tradition," the hospital official said.
"The family kept the news a secret, fearing the disgrace," he said. "They thought it was done by militias, not U.S. forces."
But other Iraqis knew this was not the work of militias. And so, in June of 2006, three members of the 1st Platoon were ambushed and assaulted, it is believed at the same checkpoint through which Abeer Qassim al-Janabi had once been forced to pass.
Specialist David J. Babineau was shot and killed at the checkpoint. Private First-Class Kristian Menchaca and Private-First Class Thomas L. Tucker were subdued and dragged away.
Menchaca was later found with his throat slit, so badly beaten as to be unrecognizable. Tucker had been beheaded.
A group called the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council posted a video on the Internet displaying the disfigured bodies of the slain soldiers and stating that the men were seized and executed to avenge the rape and homicides of al-Janabi and her family.
Spokesliars for the occupying army originally lied that there was no connection between the rape and slaughter of al-Janabi and her family, and the deaths of these three members of the same platoon that had perpetrated the al-Janabi atrocity.
The occupying forces offered "grief counseling" to surviving members of the 1st Platoon. It was during these counseling sessions that the truth of what had happened to Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and her family emerged.
In the meantime, Private First-Class Steven Green had been discharged from the military, back in May, due to "a personality disorder."
An Army official said yesterday that Green's discharge for a personality disorder does not necessarily indicate a mental disorder. Such a notation can be used to document willful disobedience or a personality that does not mesh well with military life.
And, in late June, shortly before he was charged with the crime that will place him in prison for the rest of his life, Specialist James Barker had placed a note on the MySpace.com Web page of his former platoon-mate Kristian Menchaca, now dead: throat slit: face beaten to jelly.
"R.I.P," it read. "We ran a muk."
In early July, one member of al-Janabi's family refused to talk to a reporter interested in the story. There was no point to it, he said.
Reached by telephone Saturday at his home in Iskandariyah, south of Mahmudiyah, a member of the extended family would not discuss the incident.
"What is the benefit of publishing this story?" said Abeer's uncle, Bassem. "People will read about this crime. And they will forget about it the next day."
Judging by the defensive reaction last evening here at the Great Pumpkin, he is right. People, even of the emergent compassionate Democratic left, just don't want to know.
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