Please visit the Winnick family's website HERE.
FREE Sgt Winnick!!!
The administration is going to let him hang...
This is just BS! These guys put their lives on the line to defend their country and their comrades, and they in turn get this JAG BS! No wonder things got so screwed up in Iraq and in Afghanistan!
Unless Capt King has been told to do otherwise (by some scumbag up the chain, like Sec. Winter, for example) he should dispose of this pretty quickly. I predict with great confidence that there will be no charges.
Sgt. Winnick has the presumption of innocence. If they don't know there wasn't a bomb in the truck they can't can't court-martial him, IMO. Charges should be dropped!
Has it gotten to the point where every Service member must second guess himself in every life and death situation and then "preserve the crime scene"?
Shooting the man crawling towards the cell phone was perfectly justified as cellphones are often used as detonators and if the truck contained explosives that would have been it.
Remember all of those muslim-arab "students" that were buying up the prepaid cell phones a while back? They have 2 uses: use it to make one call only and it's virtually untraceable and then you can use it as a detonator.
bttt
War is War. If your men are in danger you take the appropriate action. When I got home from Iraq, my wife saw the Rules of Engagement I was given when you could fire only if fired on. She was pissed!!!
Pardon me, but if I'm not mistaken, this is the same freaken billet as jackfatassmurtha in his legendary capacity to Vietman circa 1967.
Huh? Some guy had Osama bin Laden in the sights of his UAV, but decided to call the slow reaction team at HQs to get permission. Six years, a trillion dollars and 3,000 dead American heroes later and we still don't have Osama. I am as critical of the strategic direction of this war as anyone on this forum, but that is about getting the strategy right. Once you decide to have a war and bring in marines, folks are going to get hurt. If you don't like it then don't have a war. And if you want to have able bodied fighting men for the next war, don't prosecute the guys who you told to go fight this war for fighting a war.
Like I said, this administration made its choice when it decided to have this war. Anyone who thinks Bush is such a wonderful guy needs to think about this and Haditha and things like that. Bush and his good 'ol boys and gals cannot have it both ways. If you don't like people getting hurt because of snap decisions in the heat of battle, don't have the battle. Iraq was a war at a time and place of Bushes choosing. No one forced it on him. He didn't have to have it.
And there is no wonder some poor boot on the ground is confused about the ROEs. This whole administration has twisted itself in a pretzel over trying to figure out what the ROEs are. The rule seems to be not to shoot bad guys who might not be bad guys but they are looking like bad guys.