Justice for Abeer Hazma and her family
May. 8th, 2009 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdhttp://uk.reuters.com/article/usTopNews/idUKTRE5468HP20090507?sp=true
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (Reuters) - A former U.S. soldier was convicted on Thursday of raping an Iraqi girl and killing her and her family near Baghdad in 2006 and now faces a possible death sentence.
The federal court jury that delivered guilty verdicts on all 16 counts against former Private 1st Class Steven Green will decide his fate in the trial's death penalty phase beginning on Monday.
...
Green, 19 at the time of the crime, was described as the trigger-man in the group of five men, who donned black "ninja" outfits and raped Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, 14, and shot to death her and her father, mother and 6-year-old sister.
Of the others:
Spc. James Barker was sentenced to 90 years and must serve 20 before being eligible for parole.
Sgt. Paul E. Cortez was sentenced to 100 years and will be eligible in 10.
Pfc. Jesse Spielman, 110 years, eligible in 10.
Pfc. Brian Howard, dishonorable discharge and 27 months imprisonment for obstruction of justice and being an accessory after the fact.
I took this case very personally. Except for the mother's age, the family was an exact parallel to mine. Every time I read about it, it was Bun's face I saw peering shyly from a hijab. It was Dollface, age 6, I saw dead on the floor. It was Jonner and Obi coming home from school to find our corpses, Bun naked and burned. I had nightmares like I've never had for reading of any atrocity.
And I demanded of the virulant defenders of the war, "If you're doing this there, how long before you're doing it HERE? How long is it before it's MY family you kill?"
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (Reuters) - A former U.S. soldier was convicted on Thursday of raping an Iraqi girl and killing her and her family near Baghdad in 2006 and now faces a possible death sentence.
The federal court jury that delivered guilty verdicts on all 16 counts against former Private 1st Class Steven Green will decide his fate in the trial's death penalty phase beginning on Monday.
...
Green, 19 at the time of the crime, was described as the trigger-man in the group of five men, who donned black "ninja" outfits and raped Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, 14, and shot to death her and her father, mother and 6-year-old sister.
Of the others:
Spc. James Barker was sentenced to 90 years and must serve 20 before being eligible for parole.
Sgt. Paul E. Cortez was sentenced to 100 years and will be eligible in 10.
Pfc. Jesse Spielman, 110 years, eligible in 10.
Pfc. Brian Howard, dishonorable discharge and 27 months imprisonment for obstruction of justice and being an accessory after the fact.
I took this case very personally. Except for the mother's age, the family was an exact parallel to mine. Every time I read about it, it was Bun's face I saw peering shyly from a hijab. It was Dollface, age 6, I saw dead on the floor. It was Jonner and Obi coming home from school to find our corpses, Bun naked and burned. I had nightmares like I've never had for reading of any atrocity.
And I demanded of the virulant defenders of the war, "If you're doing this there, how long before you're doing it HERE? How long is it before it's MY family you kill?"
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-09 05:36 am (UTC)Stories like this are where I fail in my attempts to be a truly good lefty, opposing the death penalty and everything. Gods help me, but not for him, I don't. My id is particularly horrible - it wants him raped, shot in the face, and his body set on fire. (But even my evil id doesn't want his whole family killed - they're innocent after all. So even my worst side is ... better, I guess?)
Even people whose ids believe that Iraqi lives are less important (not mine, thank the Gods) should hate this shitstain: there were several US soldiers in that region--who had nothing to do with this particular crime against humanity--who were killed by friends of this family in retribution. Their blood is on Green's hands as well.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-09 05:50 am (UTC)How quickly "We're fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here" became "We're raiding houses and raping children and torturing innocents over there....etc." Except they do do it over here too. And what chills my blood more than anything about the right wing is...that imaginative leap you can't help making in your nightmares, where you see your own faces and those of your own children in this terrible place, which you desperately wish was a bigger leap than it is...
they can't and don't make it. At all. They can't and won't empathize. There is always an excuse for why someone else's suffering doesn't matter as much, why it's always OK to make excuses for American Christian Republican straight white boys who do terrible things to people labelled "other". OH, but he had PTSD, you see. As if war survivors who were civilians who had the war come to them; rape survivors; child abuse survivors; gay-bashing survivors--all these other PTSD sufferers that people like them glibly create every day--don't have it just as bad.
But fighting the "war on terror" "over there" is just fine (doesn't even matter if you have the WRONG FUCKING COUNTRY), because brown people being killed is better than white people being killed, right?