Pantano's war: Marine details Iraq shooting

Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano currently faces a charge of premeditated murder, which may be punishable by death upon conviction, for shooting two alleged Iraqi insurgents.

Editor’s note: A U.S. Marine shot and killed two Iraqi men last April after his unit stopped their vehicle fleeing a house near the Iraqi city of Mahmudiyah. Was it self-defense, as the Marine claims, or an execution, as accusations suggest? This two-part series examines the incident that led to premeditated murder charges against 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, of Wilmington.

During their deployment to Iraq, 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano and other Marines in Easy Company’s 3rd Platoon received words of guidance passed down by a high-ranking supervisor.

James Mattis, the tough-talking commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, gave his Marines five themes to live and fight by. One of those themes has come back to haunt Lt. Pantano, who repeated the phrase no less than three times to an investigator probing his April 15, 2004, shooting of two alleged Iraqi insurgents.

Those same words – “No better friend, no worse enemy” – also were on a sign placed, allegedly by Lt. Pantano, on top of the car where the two bodies were left after the shooting.

Lt. Pantano currently faces a charge of premeditated murder, which may be punishable by death upon conviction. A hearing – likely to begin in April – will be held before a military judge to determine if that charge and others are warranted.

The case has sparked a firestorm of diatribe on talk shows and angry words in print. The nagging question among the general population is, first, how can the military charge a Marine for killing the enemy, and second, how dare they do so?

The Marine Corps remains mum, although the Star-News obtained some insight from ranking military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Official documents allege that Lt. Pantano shot the two men in the back while – under his orders – they searched the car they were using to flee a house the Marines had raided.

Some Marine Corps officials maintain the shooting was an “execution.” Lt. Pantano’s attorneys will argue it was the result of a Marine defending himself against the enemy in a time of war. Gen. Mattis’ precepts, on which enlisted men and officers were repeatedly quizzed, were:

Whether those precepts conflict with the Rules of Engagement in effect for the area near the Iraqi city of Mahmudiyah on April 15, 2004, remains to be seen. But the question is likely to come up when formal charges against Lt. Pantano are presented next month.

When that hearing convenes, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to rely heavily on a statement Lt. Pantano made to an investigator in June, two months after the incident.

The statement gives the most detailed account to date of what happened on April 15 after Lt. Pantano’s platoon was dispatched to a bridge that the day before had taken mortar fire. It was not far from Camp Mahmudiyah, where the unit was based, and Lt. Pantano was told that a nearby house was the suspected lair of insurgents responsible.

After a meeting on the bridge, one of three 13-man squads walked toward the house, which was enclosed by a wire fence, according to accounts from a former rifleman.

Following up behind the rifle squad was Lt. Pantano, along with a radio operator, Sgt. Daniel Coburn, and a Navy medical corpsman, George A. Gobles. Marines who were at the house have since related concerns that the entire operation could have been an insurgent setup, and there were fears of an ambush.

With the Marines 500 to 600 feet from the house, two men attempted to flee in a white, four-door sedan.

The car was disabled by rifle fire. Sgt. Coburn, Corpsman Gobles and Lt. Pantano headed for the car while the rifle squad entered the house, where they were met by two screaming women and crying children. The civilians were taken to a place of safety.

Inside the house, Sgt. Judd Word and his riflemen found mortar aiming stakes, rifles, ammunition and bomb-making equipment, and they radioed Lt. Pantano.

Outside the house, according to reports, the two men emerged from the car with their hands raised.

They were ordered to the ground, and Corpsman Gobles searched the car for weapons under Lt. Pantano’s order. According to Lt. Pantano’s attorney, nuts, bolts and cans – commonly used to make bombs – were found in the trunk of the car.

After learning that there were weapons in the house, Lt. Pantano ordered Corpsman Gobles to handcuff the men, identified as Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil. The pair, believed to have resided in the insurgent-infested town of Latifiyah, resisted but were eventually subdued.

Shortly after that, reports state, Lt. Pantano ordered that the plastic flexicuffs binding the prisoners be cut, and he ordered them to search their own car. He expressed a concern that there could be booby-traps.

Sgt. Coburn and Corpsman Gobles were ordered to take positions facing away from the car, and Lt. Pantano stood approximately 10 feet from it.

“As the sergeant and the corpsman served as my guardian angels, I told the two Iraqis via hand signals to search the car and to pull apart the seats,” Lt. Pantano said in his statement, given after he was advised of his rights against self-incrimination. “They were talking the whole time … I told them several times to be quiet by saying ‘stop’ in Arabic. They continued to talk.”

One of the men was searching the front seat, leaning in from the driver’s side, while the other man was searching the rear driver’s side.

In the statement, Lt. Pantano said he could not see their hands and that they had their backs to him.

“After another time of telling them to be quiet, they quickly pivoted their bodies toward each other. They did this simultaneously, while speaking in muffled Arabic. I thought they were attacking me and I decided to fire my M-16A4 service rifle in self-defense,” Lt. Pantano’s statement reads. “I believed that they were attacking me, and I felt I was within the rules of engagement to fire.”

Lt. Pantano said in the statement he set his weapon to fire three-round bursts; his magazine held anywhere from 25 to 30 rounds of ammunition.

“I hit the men with my rounds and continued to fire until my first magazine was empty. I then changed magazines and continued to fire until the second magazine was empty … I had made a decision that when I was firing I was going to send a message to these Iraqis and others that when we say, ‘no better friend, no worse enemy,’ we mean it. I had fired both magazines into the men, hitting them with about 80 percent of my rounds.”

Mr. Kareem and Mr. Hanjil were moving for a while after he started to fire, Lt. Pantano said, but he was not sure if that was because of muscle contractions or bullet impact.

“I simply knew that I had told my platoon that if we were engaged in a gunfight, we would send a strong message that we were not going to be attacked. Again, I believed that by firing the number of rounds that I did, I was sending a message that we were ‘no better friend, no worse enemy.’»”

The phrase, Marines have said, means that they can be a good friend to the Iraqi people but, if attacked, can be a formidable foe.

The platoon received a call to respond to an improvised explosive device and began to move out, Lt. Pantano said.

“I decided to leave the two bodies as they were, face down into the car, with their upper torsos inside the car and their lower bodies outside of the car, feet, knees, etc., on the ground. I believed this would send a message to the local people that again, we were no better friend and no worse enemy.”

He changed his mind, however, and asked another officer to order the Red Crescent for body pickup.

The sign left atop the car was removed by Lt. Pantano, according to his lawyer, Charles Gittins. But photographs of the bodies with the sign above them were taken at the scene by Marines, copies of which may end up being used as evidence at the hearing.

Another statement, that of Corpsman Gobles, verifies information supplied by Lt. Pantano but conflicts in some key areas. Taken two days before Lt. Pantano’s, the corpsman’s written statement describes the men as running away from Lt. Pantano when they were shot.

Military officials say that statement has been amended; the defense has expressed concerns that the corpsman has been “browbeaten” by investigators.

Attorney Gittins disputes the contention in the charge sheet filed against Lt. Pantano that the men were shot in the back. The bodies were not forensically investigated, he said, and cannot be exhumed because they are buried in an insurgent camp area.

While details of the incident – including the repeated “no better friend, no worse enemy” references in Lt. Pantano’s account – may relate to how prosecutors are viewing his state of mind at the time of the shooting, Mr. Gittins maintains it is irrelevant.

He did not use the slogan or even make the sign up until after the men were dead, Mr. Gittins notes.

“After he had been placed in a position to have to use deadly force,” Mr. Gittins said. “The sign is indicative of a young lieutenant who just had the stuff scared out of him, using Gen. Mattis’ words as a little bravado under the stress of the moment. And he took it down on his own after thinking about it. The sign doesn’t have anything to do with the exercise of self-defense.”

A suggestion in the charges that Lt. Pantano ordered Corpsman Gobles and Sgt. Coburn to “look away” from him and the car – the order to take sentry positions facing outward – does not hold water, Mr. Gittins said.

“He didn’t tell them where to look,” the attorney said. He ordered them to take up positions to provide security. They knew what that meant and acted accordingly.”   RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

At the preliminary hearing, Mr. Gittins is expected to attempt to discredit Sgt. Coburn, who is believed to have first voiced complaints about how Lt. Pantano handled the shooting. He declined to be interviewed but said, when reached at his Jacksonville home, that he holds no grudge against Lt. Pantano. Members of the platoon differ on that point.

What Mr. Gittins does expect to do at the hearing is raise questions about the rules Lt. Pantano and other Marines were operating under at the time of the incident. Called Rules of Engagement, they are similar to use-of-force guidelines followed by police officers.

“They were always changing the ROEs,” one Marine from Lt. Pantano’s platoon said. Another complained about the rules Marines were given to follow but said it was his duty to do so because he is a Marine.

“These guys are killing us …,” a Marine in current service said. “Out of hundreds detained by the battalion, only one was prosecuted in any kind of court system and the majority of the others were released within 72 hours or a couple of weeks or months. And then they kill us by the dozen … It is the higher leadership that doesn’t want to acknowledge that it is a war.”

The actual Rules of Engagement for the area where the platoon was working for April 15 are not available for public inspection because they are considered classified information, military spokesmen said.

One Marine officer said both a display of hostile intent and an outright hostile act were required for deadly force to be used. Additionally, as with all Rules of Engagement, deadly force may be used if the service member’s life is in danger.

Professor Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke University Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, is a former Air Force Judge Advocate General attorney who left the service as a full colonel. He has been following reports on the Pantano case.

He questions the lieutenant’s decision to have the two Iraqi men search their own car, which set in motion the chain of events leading to their deaths. Mr. Silliman made his comments after being read a copy of Lt. Pantano’s statement and focused on the Marine’s claim that he was 10 feet from the car the men were searching.

“Why would you stand so near to the vehicle that you risk being killed in an explosion?” Mr. Silliman said. “You blow the car up. You move away and blow it up.”

The professor suggests Marine officials are distressed about some aspect of the case that casts it beyond the pale, resulting in the premeditated murder charges. He is not surprised that some Marine officers consider the shooting an execution.

In most military cases where self-defense is claimed, Mr. Silliman maintained, a lesser charge would result.

“The Marines would have charged manslaughter and not premeditated murder,” he said. “There was a drastically different version of the facts that was out there somewhere.

“We are going to have to wait for the Article 32 hearing,” Mr. Silliman said, noting that if the case goes to a court-martial, capable minds will weigh testimony and evidence.

“It will be a very sophisticated jury, all of whom are senior in grade and all college graduates,” Mr. Silliman said. “They are also trained and disciplined enough to listen to the instructions of a military judge. Right now, everyone is trying to evaluate this case based on half the story, because it is the culture of the Marines and all the services that they do not want to talk about the evidence prior to an Article 32.”

In Wilmington, Lt. Pantano wades through a nonstop flow of e-mails from supporters who have read about his case, expressing regret that since being reassigned during the investigation he is no longer with his platoon. He was protecting those men as much as himself, he has maintained, when he made the decision to fire.

Friends of the Marine officer have said the “first, do no harm” maxim of Gen. Mattis should be applied to how the military handles its own, including Lt. Pantano.

What matters most to Lt. Pantano is that he kept his promise to mothers of his platoon that he would bring their sons back alive.

“I loved my Marines like my sons,” he said. “What parent wants to see their sons in danger? It is so sad.” &

Sgt. Coburn, who is believed to have first voiced complaints about how Lt. Pantano handled the shooting. He declined to be interviewed but said, when reached at his Jacksonville home, that he holds no grudge against Lt. Pantano. Members of the platoon differ on that point.

And there is the REAL crux of the matter.

My second guessing is that since weapons were found in the house, there were possibly booby traps in the car. The two were planning on how they were going to set it off, or at the very least,
take out some Americans on their sendoff to Paradise.

dJust look how the media/prosecutors are trying to make something out of his telling the other two to take up positions facing away from the car--like they were all supposed to stand there facing the same way and wait to be attacked.

vaudine

No wonder enlistments are down. Iraq is no picnic and has been controlled by politics about as much as Vietnam was, since the short war and fal of Baghdad.

If the Iraqnoids don't get you, our lawyers will." Yeah, you'll be looking for a few good men, and looking, and looking...

Lawyer layers in the military and the JAG joke. They are an army hired by liberals tp cover for their cowardice, treachery and bloody murdering terror thus they are friends with.

JAG PROTECTS SH!T.

8 posted on 03/10/2005 1:39:22 AM PST by JudgemAll (Condemn me, make me naked and kill me, or be silent for ever on my gun ownership and law enforcement)

9 posted on 03/10/2005 1:41:11 AM PST by JudgemAll (Condemn me, make me naked and kill me, or be silent for ever on my gun ownership and law enforcement)

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