Specialist Sandoval, 22, from First Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Ala., was convicted of planting a coil of copper wire on the body of the man he killed near Iskandariya, a hostile Sunni Arab region south of Baghdad, on April 27 during an operation to locate and destroy an insurgent mortar team.Hum...
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Specialist Sandoval has admitted killing the man after his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to fire. The man, who was cutting grass in a field using a scythe when Specialist Sandoval killed him, had been considered by the sniper team’s leaders to be an insurgent attempting to disguise himself as a farmer after battling Iraqi Army soldiers minutes earlier.
Army prosecutors argued the killing was illegal because the man, aside from the rusty scythe, was unarmed at the time and was not demonstrating hostile intent or a hostile act when Specialist Sandoval killed him with one shot.
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Sergeant Hensley’s court martial, on murder charges related to those two killings and that of a third man on April 14, is scheduled to begin here in about three weeks.
[ cf U.S. Soldier Acquitted of Murder in Iraq ]
Now I am not as convinced that military.about.com is a patriotic organization??? But some folks may want to look at Military Orders: To Obey or Not to Obey? for the fun of the fact set that asserts that the lawful ordering of troops into a suicide mission remains acceptable in american law.
So Hum... Where is the great defense that congress was suppose to be providing the troops that would put them on par with the BlackWater Army, so that all an American Welfare Queen would have to do, was say that they either had an actual order they were following, or they believed they had a order, or they had the belief that someone had a belief that there should have been an order, OR that they knew someone who had a friend who had been near to someone who had known of an order or had at least imagined that an order might have been given, or that an order would have been given in an alternative reality space....
I mean, gosh, golly, gee whiz!!! We indemnify the BlackWater Army and send them out to kill the indigenous population, but not the American Welfare Queens....
Could it be that the BlackWater Army Command Structure has a far better negotiating team???