Posted on 03/16/2012 3:53:49 PM PDT by Future Snake Eater
Senior US officials told the BBC the name of the suspect as he was heading back to the US to face charges. He is being flown to Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, from Kuwait. His lawyer, John Henry Browne, said on Thursday that the suspect was a 38-year-old man who had been injured twice while serving in Iraq. He also said the accused had witnessed his friend's leg blown off the day before the killings. That incident has not been confirmed by the US Army. The Taliban called off peace talks in the wake of Sunday's deadly rampage - in which men, women and children were shot and killed at close range. The US has stressed it remained committed to Afghan reconciliation. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also reacted angrily to the killings. He told the US it must pull back its troops from village areas and allow Afghan security forces to take the lead in an effort to reduce civilian deaths. On Friday he said the US was not fully co-operating with a probe into the killings.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Thank you for your service and Sgt Robert Bales. I pray for ALL our service people and their families. I am surprised there hasn’t been more service people snap under the conditions they are forced into.
I hope his wife and children have been whisked off to a very secure place. I had read earlier that he had a traumatic brain injury but had been declared fit to serve and deployed to Afghanistan in spite of it.
I hope his wife and children have been whisked off to a very secure place. I had read earlier that he had a traumatic brain injury but had been declared fit to serve and deployed to Afghanistan in spite of it.
That was in the first part...the heavy emphasis on "dreams" may possibly have been a substitution for PREMONITIONS....LOL
That’s the thing that is the goofiest. If he “snapped” he sure knew when and how to snap back into normal mode as if nothing had happened.
Know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the drone that flew into Iran and landed itself totally intact. I hadn’t followed all the explanations for that but at one point I know it was believed that the Iranians had figured out how to trick the GPS on the drone so that it THOUGHT it was landing in Afghanistan. That’s how they got it to come to them totally intact.
Seems like this guy went on a mission that miraculously landed him right back there on base, intact, turning himself in, asking for a lawyer, and expecting everything to be OK.
Bizarre. Like he was programmed just like that drone. (And we’ve had quite a few drones with “issues” lately...)
Of course, we have no clue what really happened, or even if one-tenth of what’s been put out is accurate. Anything could be true. But what’s been put out so far is just plain bizarre and raises LOTS of questions in my mind.
Our nations troops have literally been deployed into combat since Desert Storm almost non stop. During this time both congress and sitting presidents gutted the military. These guys are seeing far more repeated carnage over a longer period of time than any other time frame in our history.
The human mind is capable of only so much carnage before undesirable results surface. One of the first is PTSD. You can not get over PTSD in weeks, months, or in some cases a few years. No pill can really stop it as it is a decompressing of sorts of looking at events and putting them where they belong. Re-injury during this process compounds it. That is true no matter what circumstances lead up too PTSD.
If the reports of his injury are accurate the foot injury should have and in previous times in fact would have ended his career. Those safeguards were there for reasons more than besides how far a man could march.
If he snapped I can understand it. He should not have been pushed too that point. I have also been hearing for years that some in combat have been given antidepressants too deal with the stresses. IF that is policy it needs to end now as it can get people killed. The last thing needed on the battlefield is someone tripping. By tripping I mean hallucinating and such medications can induce this in some persons.
I'll give him a huge benefit of the doubt as too what happened and be thankful it wasn't me or my own facing what that man has. Your knowledge of his as well of what we have been told of his record says he is a fine soldier. We may never know what really happened and he may never even know why it happened. And it could have been a case of he knew or highly suspected a target was living there. The cowards just don't come out and fight a battle. Homes are their nest and civilians won't give the thugs up. How many times does a reasonable man let them attack their units and retreat? Once would be my answer. Prayers for him and his family.
Thank you for your information and perspective. I will keep Sgt. Bales and his family in my prayers.
In fact, Bush after 911, allow in more Muslims than the previous two decades.
Nice huh
Thanks Bush!
We will see if this non commissioned officer will receive the same punishment as Major Nidal Milik Hasan.
Now that he’s been ID’d, I’d imagine his family will be in danger, due to the fact your government has allowed in tens of thousands of Muslims.
In fact, Bush after 911, allow in more Muslims than the previous two decades.
Thanks Mr. Boosh.
The New York Times found and used another photograph of him on the internet: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/world/asia/afghan-shooting-suspect-identified-as-army-staff-sgt-robert-bales.html
There's also a photo of him in training at Fort Irwin taken by the 28th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment which has been used in the media, and there are probably others as well. In other words, his photo is already out there. However, Capt. “FSE,” except that the ranks on the uniforms are outdated, your photo is better than the one the New York Times found, which means Free Republic got the best photo out there of SSG Bales. Take that as a compliment.
Hopefully Army Public Affairs will soon release an official DA photo of him in his Class A uniform so all these other photos recede into the background.
2 posted on Friday, March 16, 2012 5:57:57 PM by JoanneSD: “Fort Leavenworth, I dont think the guy who massacured 13 at Fort Hood, including a pregnant lady, went to Leavenworth.. in fact have not heard much about the muslim, Pray for this soldier and his family.”
Maximum security can be important for the protection of the inmate. Not only can he not get out, nobody can get to him, either.
At this early date, much will be speculation. I do not want to second-guess Army decisions on protecting SSG Bales and his family — keeping this under wraps for nearly a week must have been extraordinarily difficult.
Again, thanks to Future Snake Eater and others on this thread for their service. None of us yet know what happened with SSG Bales, but I suspect in the next few weeks and months many of us on Free Republic will be grateful for the often-maligned work of defense attorneys, and for the presumption of being innocent until proven guilty, and for America being a country of laws and not of men.
I've covered a fair number of courts-martial as well as more civilian court cases than I can count. People who are accused deserve a fair trial and while no system is perfect, I'm confident about the court martial system in ways I am not about the civilian courts with grossly overworked prosecutors and courts which churn people through at far higher numbers than the military.
Thanks for the info.
Thank you for sharing what you know about Bales. I showed this to my husband (retired Army), and he just kept saying “Yep. Yep.” What you’ve said is exactly what we already thought. The anonymous soldier has been in my prayers. Now that his name is out there, I think Bales will be in my prayers for a long time.
Well, I don’t know about all that, butterdezillion. I just wondered if this could be typical from someone suffering from PTSD....I don’t know, but others on this thread who have served might have more insight than I would.
I don’t think we have the full story. This story doesn’t make sense. I just can’t imagine someone just walking off post in a war-zone all on his own, walking past sentries unchallenged, etc. Too many things just don’t seem to add up.
God bless you for your Service!
Alan
Hopefully if they’ll do they’ll let us know how this fits the PTSD profile.
Another thing that doesn’t add up is that they did a head count and were only missing one person but several witnesses said they saw 2 people at the scene of the crimes. Who was the other person, if not somebody from on base?
And them seeing anybody is, by itself, goofy because of the rampage being done in the wee hours of the morning. Why were people awake and outside to observe what was going on in their neighbor’s house at 3AM?
Makes me think of the Haditha scene where the little girl said they were all waiting for the IED to go off. Somebody had wondered if the Afghans had set up this soldier somehow. There would still be the question of why he turned himself in though.
The stories just don’t make sense.
ping...
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