No Prison Time For Army Reservist (Prisoner Abuse)

[brooklynite]

An Ohio reservist convicted of abusing an Afghan prisoner who later died won't be going to prison.

A military jury in Fort Bliss ordered PFC Willie V. Brand to be demoted Thursday.

...snip...

Brand was convicted Wednesday of assault, maltreatment, maiming and making a false official statement in connection with an attack on a detainee known as Dilawar in 2002 at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

...snip...

Prosecutors wanted the 27-year-old reservist sent to prison for 10 years and given a dishonorable discharge, but the defense asked the jury to give Brand a bad-conduct discharge and let him return to his financially struggling family.

http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/1778632.html

[sui generis]

1. wow, while the conscientious objector gets 15 months in prison

nice to know this is a country of such deep moral values

Now, IF it was Willie V Brand who had been maimed and genitortured and turned into a human christmas tree and the nice French dude who did it merely got demoted, I'll bet poor crippled Mr. Brand's "struggling" family and supporters would be screaming for blood.

(waves plastic flag, barfs)

[indepat]

2. The sentence certainly affirms this Administrations' deep moral values

IMHO.

[goodboy]

11. well said, sui. (nt)

[Benhurst]

3. Won't you people ever get it? There is no way we can

bring freedom to the little people in Iraq unless we can torture and kill them at will. Jeez.

Get on the team, Team Dubya!



edited :spank: to remove typo

[saigon68]

4. Great message to the criminal troops out there

Kill a "RAG HEAD" get discharged.

[HadItUpToHere]

7. Great message for the occupied as well-

there is no justice in the U.S.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[HadItUpToHere]

6. Well after all...

it's not like he did something serious, like killing a white guy or something.

i wonder if the "fix" is in for our boys 'over there'?

[Judi Lynn]

8. What they did to Dilawar, in case it has been forgotten....

Dilawar, tortured to death on December 10 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver and farmer who weighed 122 pounds and was described by his interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive.

When beaten, he repeatedly cried "Allah!" The outcry appears to have amused U.S. military personnel, as the act of striking him in order to provoke a scream of "Allah!" eventually "became a kind of running joke," according to one of the MP's. "People kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

The Times reported that:

On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
"A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.
It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

[Solly Mack]

9. that's fucked up

just plain wrong

[Cocoa]

10. media is drooling over the BTK details

but one word about the gruesome details of Dilawar's death?

Tons of anger at no death penalty for BTK, but what about this guy getting no time at all?