Posted on 07/14/2012 7:53:57 AM PDT by darkwing104
Staff Sargent Robert Bales was charged with 16 counts of premeditated murder of Afghanistan civilians. SSG Bales will attend an Article 32 hearing scheduled for 17 September at an undisclosed location. SGT Bales will be accompanied by his defense team and the hearing will be also attended by the Army prosecution team and the investigating officer. This hearing will formally announce a decision for a trial based upon the investigating offer’s recommendations of the sufficiency of the charges against SSG Bales warrants a court-martial.
Article 32
An Article 32 hearing is required by the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice where an investigating officer determines the evidence supports the charges filed against the defendant. If the investigating officers believe the charges are warranted than the case can be brought. In this particular case there will be a trial before a general court martial. This hearing does not determine guilt or innocence. In the civilian court this is similar to the preliminary hearing (evidentiary hearing) where a judge determines if the prosecutor has sufficient evidence for a trial.
Investigating Officer
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
Prayers up for this warrior and his family and friends. I hope he has the best civilian lawyer.
This soldier is a child loving family man, stellar performer with excellent character references. He's being railroaded.
“He’s being railroaded” Would not be at all surprised. This CinC and his minions are reprehensible.
“This soldier is a child loving family man, stellar performer with excellent character references. He’s being railroaded.”
And you know this how?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2860095/posts
Start with reply #1.
SSG Bales doesn’t need a court martial, he needs medical and psycholgical help.
I blame the Pentagon and EVERYONE from Panetta up to zero for this man being returned to combat after a brain injury during a prior deployment.
You don’t need a PHD from Oxford to figure that out, you just have to be slightly more intelligent than broccoli!!
I agree he needs help, however diagnosing concussion and brain damage is the opposite of easy. Even if he has an obvious pathology, alcohol changes everything. That is, it affects most of the numerous brain chemicals into what amounts to a “52 card pick-up”.
Nothing is quite so unnerving as real mental illness. Often it seems like they are logical and rational, but they are absolutely not.
Out of a thousand cases like his, maybe a few dozen develop a psychiatric problem unique to that injury. In the short term. Many more, in their later years will develop Parkinson’s disease, or become “punchy” like old boxers.
And doctors often can’t tell who will and who will not until they do.
An anonymous poster on FR claims to have served with him, says he’s great so case closed? Got it. Did I mention I hung out with the Easter Bunny and Elvis last week?
Well, I’m not the Easter Bunny or Elvis, but I’m hardly anonymous since I was quoted in literally thousands of newspaper articles when this story broke.
Bales absolutely is a great guy and a great Soldier. I don’t know what happened in Afghanistan, but I can tell you that the story that was released made no sense at all. I hope the truth does finally come out and that he isn’t railroaded.
That “anonymous poster” happens to be my son, pal; he was a PL in Iraq for 15 months and was awarded the Bronze Star. Take what he said as gospel.
“I can tell you that the story that was released made no sense at all.”
Which part? As per an article from Foxnews:
“Bales faces 16 counts of premeditated murder; six of attempted murder; seven of assault; one of possessing steroids; one of using steroids; one of destroying a laptop computer; one of burning bodies; and one of using alcohol.”
Steroids, PTSD, weapons and alcohol are a bad mix.
Happy Easter. Tell Elvis I said hello.
Alot can happen to a man in five years since the Captain last saw him. And when it involves men and combat, such change is a certainty.
Any of it, especially the target selection and the logistics of him moving to and from the FOB.
None of it makes sense. If you’ve spent any time on a FOB, you’d know it doesn’t make any sense.
“the logistics of him moving to and from the FOB.”
Probably the same method Bowie Bergdhal took - he simply walked off.
“In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment? Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems. Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/americas-last-prisoner-of-war-20120607
Yes and no. I agree that concusion can be difficult, but brain injury, such as SSG Bales has been described as having, might actually be easier to diagnose. X-rays and MRIs can tell a doctor a great deal about an injury.
To the best of my knowledge, the type and extent of his brain injury has not been revealed. Nonetheless, back in "the olden days", had someone been diagnosed with a brain injury, it would have meant either a medical discharge or the individual would not have been deployed. Today, with a sharply reduced military that has been deployed again and again and again, there simply isn't the manpower available to either medically discharge Bales or keep him home.
All things being equal, it remains, in my mind, that the practices of the "olden days" should still be used today. Even if Bales had ben allowed to remain in the Army but not deploy, he would not be charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 Afghani civilians would still be alive.
The nature of a brain injury, as you noted in your post, is that the individual becomes unpredictable in the best of circumstances. Sending that same individual back to a stresful, presure-cooker environment such as a battle zone is is nothing short of madness.
That story doesn’t even come close to what was put out as the official story for what happened with Bales.
But, like I said, I wasn’t there, and I don’t know what happened. Neither do you. You feel free to speculate wildly, but there’s a LOT of explaining left to do.
Brain injuries, even with X-Ray and MRI, are still terribly hard to diagnose, if for no other reason than individual variation between brains can be enormous.
I saw my first real jaw dropping example of this in an old NOVA episode, of a girl with water on the brain as a fetus, who eventually had a shunt inserted in her neck to balance spinal fluid pressure. But by that time her brain had been compacted to about 1 cm of tissue on the inside of her skull. All the rest of her brain area was just fluid.
At the time the episode was filmed, she was graduating from high school, with the only indication she had almost no brain being a slight limp, limited use of one arm, and a small speech impediment. Astounding.
Two different soldiers may have almost identical injuries, yet one is ruined and the other just shrugs it off. A neurologist can initially only diagnose by “capability and impediment” in physical movement and cognition, how the soldier feels subjectively, intellectual capacity and memory, and things like that.
Definitely overlapping with PTSD and other mental and physical conditions.
This is why neurologists get the big bucks.
Deciding who stays on the battlefield and who goes home must be incredibly difficult. Based on what his peers said, this SSG was totally asymptomatic before going on his rampage.
Only now will he possibly get the medical microscope he needs. He cannot walk the streets until they either find something and fix it, or determine it can’t be fixed.
I briefly spoke to Bob Bales when he telecomed with his wife a week or so before the incident. He was hunkering down due to the riots over the Koran burnings, you know, the ones where whole Afghani towns were ablaze and they were killing people over murders. He was doing fine then.
Someone went to 2 separate villages 5 miles apart in a one hour time span and killed all those people. The villagers themselves said it was a group of men; more than one. Now the DoD will not let Bales’s legal team go to Afghanistan to interview those same villagers. There are a whole host of strange and disparate reports that have come out, and I can tell you most of them were made up by the media. Bob himself does not remember what happened at all.
Yet the Pentagon lawyers want us all to believe this one guy did all that within an hour, and that he was $hit-faced drunk when he did it? And yet we cannot get a single Afghani to testify or at least speak to the defense?
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