Afghans’ killer soldier gets life in prison

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash.: An American soldier was sentenced on Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing 16 Afghan civilians on their family compounds in a nighttime rampage last year.
Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a veteran of four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has admitted to slaughtering the villagers, mostly women and children, in attacks on their family compounds in Kandahar province in March 2012.
Bales pleaded guilty to the killings in June in a deal that spared him the death penalty.
The jury of six military personnel deliberated less than two hours before deciding Bales should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both sides made closing arguments Friday morning at the conclusion of sentencing proceedings at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma in Washington state.
“He wiped out generations and he ruined lives forever,” said prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Jay Morse. “He should be known by one official title from this day until the day he dies: inmate.”
Army prosecutors have said Bales acted alone and with premeditation when, armed with a pistol, a rifle and a grenade launcher, he left his outpost twice during the night, returning in the middle of his rampage to tell a fellow soldier, “I just shot up some people.”
The killings marked the worst case of civilian deaths blamed on a U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War and further eroded strained U.S.-Afghan relations after more than a decade of conflict in Afghanistan.
Defense attorneys have said Bales carried out the killings after suffering a breakdown under the pressure of the last of his four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury even before shipping off to Kandahar province.include the possibility of parole.

Prosecutor Jay Morse said Bales should not get parole. He showed photos of a young girl who was killed as she screamed and cried. He showed surveillance video of Bales returning to his base with “the methodical, confident gait of a man who’s accomplished his mission.”
Defense attorney Emma Scanlan said no one can minimize the atrocities Bales committed, but she urged jurors to consider his earlier military service and leave him with a “sliver of light” — a sentence of life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
She read from letters sent by Bales’ fellow soldiers, one who said that a decade of seeing his fellow soldiers killed and maimed left him in a darkness that “swallowed him whole.” Bales apologized for the first time Thursday for his “act of cowardice” in an attempt for leniency. He said he’d bring back the victims “in a heartbeat” if he could.

Several survivors and family members of the victims who were flown to the US testified this week, and one cursed Bales for attacking villagers as some slept and others screamed for mercy.
“If someone loses one child, you can imagine how devastated their life would be,” said Haji Mohammad Wazir, who lost 11 family members, including his mother, wife and six of his seven children.
Bales pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty. He was not able to explain to a judge why he did what he did.
He was serving his fourth combat deployment last year when he left his outpost in Kandahar province in the middle of the night to attack the villages, shooting his victims and setting some of their bodies on fire with a kerosene lantern.
His attorneys have suggested that post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury may have played a role in the killings. But they offered no testimony from psychiatrists or other doctors.
If the defense can convince two of six jurors that Bales deserves leniency because he was a good soldier who simply “snapped,” he would be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Bales’ lawyers did their best to paint a sympathetic picture.
And Bales described the trouble he had readjusting to civilian life after his deployments to Iraq. He became angry all the time, he said. He began drinking heavily. He began to see a counselor but quit because he didn’t think it was working and he didn’t want others to find him weak. His rage worsened as he deployed to Afghanistan in late 2011.