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arch 22, 2007, 11:33AM Huffman soldier sentenced in Iraq atrocities By CINDY HORSWELL Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle TOOLS Email Get section feed Print Subscribe NOW FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Pfc. Bryan Howard of Huffman, the youngest of five soldiers accused of participating in one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq war, reacted with solemn resignation when told Wednesday he would be dishonorably discharged and sentenced to 27 months confinement. Howard, now 19, had his hopes initially lifted when the military court agreed to greatly reduce the charges against him in connection to the rape of a 14-year-old girl and the killing of her and her family on March 12, 2006. After the court determined Howard's involvement was limited to overhearing his friends discuss committing the crime and then lying to protect them, the murder and rape charges were dismissed. He was left with two lesser charges of obstruction of justice and accessory after the fact that carried a possible maximum penalty of 15 years. In his plea agreement, however, he had admitted his guilt to these charges and would testify against the others. He also was demoted to private. He and his parents, Kathy and Lynn Howard, had held out hope that the military judge, Col. Stephen Henley, might permit Howard to remain in the service and fulfill his dream of becoming a U.S. Army Ranger. His parents had signed a waiver to allow him to join at age 17 and he enlisted immediately after graduating from Huffman High School in northeast Harris County. He was sent to Iraq after boot camp, and the crime occurred a little more than four months later. Request for clemency After the sentence was announced Wednesday at the military courthouse, Howard looked sadly at his parents seated behind him. He then glanced at a photo of his girlfriend, who has steadfastly supported him through the ordeal, then tucked it into his pocket. His attorney, Capt. Ryan Rosauer, said he would make a request for clemency from the commander general, who can reduce sentences. "The real story is that Bryan Howard's level of involvement was not all that much ... not like the others in this case," said Rosauer. Two of the other four, Sgt. Paul Cortez and Spc. James Barker, have pleaded guilty to the rape and murders and been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pfc. Jesse Spielman, accused of being present at the crime scene but not participating in the rape or murders, is scheduled for a military hearing on April 2. Last soldier to be tried The last one to be tried will be former Pvt. Steve Green, who had complained to military mental health officials that he was having thoughts of killing "all Iraqis" three months before the crime. He was discharged from the service because of a "personality disorder" before military authorities discovered the crime, and will be the only one tried in civilian court. According to testimony in other trials, Green was the "ring leader" and the lone executioner of the teenage girl, her parents and 5-year-old sister. In arguments over how Howard should be sentenced, his attorneys pointed to his youth and inexperience. "He had just gotten out of high school. This was the first time he had not been in the safety of his home," said Howard's other defense attorney, Megan Shaw. But while acknowledging the crimes Howard committed "were very different from the rest," the prosecutor, Maj. Alexander Pickands, said, "We cannot let the accused be seen as merely a victim, a loyal squad man." Referring to the family, he said, "There were four real victims that day." Pickands noted that Howard spent his high school years in JROTC and had risen to a top leadership position there. "He wasn't just a brand- new, fresh-faced kid. He had training from those ROTC instructors. He knew right from wrong. His mission was to protect the innocent." Pickands asked the court to let this case set an example for other young soldiers who "come into a war that tests their very souls," so that they don't misconstrue when to be loyal. Defendant's apology In a statement to the court, Howard apologized for his actions that brought discredit to the U.S. Army, his family and the Iraqi people. "If I could go back, I would not have let it happen in the first place. I definitely would have told somebody," Howard said. Howard also told how he first became linked to the crime. He said he overheard the other soldiers discussing a plan to rape the Iraqi girl. "I was in another room. About two feet away," Howard said. He said he was unsure if anyone was aware what he had heard. The five soldiers had been guarding a checkpoint about 20 miles south of Baghdad, known as the "triangle of death" because of frequent attacks on soldiers there. Howard remained at the checkpoint, but the other soldiers, donning black masks, crept through backyards to the Iraqi home where the crime took place. Blood on their clothing In his statement on Wednesday, Howard said the other four soldiers were gone about 15 minutes and then returned "all hyper and in a hectic state." He admitted seeing some blood on their clothing. Howard described watching them strip off their clothes and get gasoline to burn them. He knew someone was also told to throw the murder weapon into a canal. His part in the conspiracy was cemented when he said he agreed to Sgt. Cortez's request to keep silent. Three months later, on June 23, his battalion commander, Col. Thomas Kunk, asked Howard if U.S. soldiers, rather than insurgents, had been responsible for the family's deaths. Howard said he lied, denying any knowledge about who did the crime. He only told the commander, "Green is probably crazy enough to do it." Howard's request for clemency will be filed in about 30 days, his lawyers said. cindy.horswell@chron.com

Print This Story E-mail This Story Read more of Marjorie Cohn's columns For background, see: Marjorie Cohn | Bush on Trial for Crimes against Humanity • Marjorie Cohn | Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration • Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths By Marjorie Cohn t r u t h o u t | Report Monday 30 January 2006 In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq. Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark. The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said. Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep." "And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore." For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights. Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said. "It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message. "There were countless such situations all over the theater of operations - Iraq and Kuwait - because female soldiers didn't have a voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as a general I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues." Karpinski was the highest officer reprimanded for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, although the details of interrogations were carefully hidden from her. Demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, Karpinski feels she was chosen as a scapegoat because she was a female. Sexual assault in the US military has become a hot topic in the last few years, "not just because of the high number of rapes and other assaults, but also because of the tendency to cover up assaults and to harass or retaliate against women who report assaults," according to Kathy Gilberd, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Military Law Task Force. This problem has become so acute that the Army has set up its own sexual assault web site. In February 2004, Rumsfeld directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to undertake a 90-day review of sexual assault policies. "Sexual assault will not be tolerated in the Department of Defense," Rumsfeld declared. The 99-page report was issued in April 2004. It affirmed, "The chain of command is responsible for ensuring that policies and practices regarding crime prevention and security are in place for the safety of service members." The rates of reported alleged sexual assault were 69.1 and 70.0 per 100,000 uniformed service members in 2002 and 2003. Yet those rates were not directly comparable to rates reported by the Department of Justice, due to substantial differences in the definition of sexual assault. Notably, the report found that low sociocultural power (i.e., age, education, race/ethnicity, marital status) and low organizational power (i.e., pay grade and years of active duty service) were associated with an increased likelihood of both sexual assault and sexual harassment. The Department of Defense announced a new policy on sexual assault prevention and response on January 3, 2005. It was a reaction to media reports and public outrage about sexual assaults against women in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing sexual assaults and cover-ups at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Gilberd said. As a result, Congress demanded that the military review the problem, and the Defense Authorization Act of 2005 required a new policy be put in place by January 1. The policy is a series of very brief "directive-type memoranda" for the Secretaries of the military services from the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. "Overall, the policy emphasizes that sexual assault harms military readiness, that education about sexual assault policy needs to be increased and repeated, and that improvements in response to sexual assaults are necessary to make victims more willing to report assaults," Gilberd notes. "Unfortunately," she added "analysis of the issues is shallow, and the plans for addressing them are limited." Commands can reject the complaints if they decide they aren't credible, and there is limited protection against retaliation against the women who come forward, according to Gilberd. "People who report assaults still face command disbelief, illegal efforts to protect the assaulters, informal harassment from assaulters, their friends or the command itself," she said. But most shameful is Sanchez's cover-up of the dehydration deaths of women that occurred in Iraq. Sanchez is no stranger to outrageous military orders. He was heavily involved in the torture scandal that surfaced at Abu Ghraib. Sanchez approved the use of unmuzzled dogs and the insertion of prisoners head-first into sleeping bags after which they are tied with an electrical cord and their are mouths covered. At least one person died as the result of the sleeping bag technique. Karpinski charges that Sanchez attempted to hide the torture after the hideous photographs became public. Sanchez reportedly plans to retire soon, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune earlier this month. But Rumsfeld recently considered elevating the 3-star general to a 4-star. The Tribune also reported that Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the Army's chief spokesman, said in an email message, "The Army leaders do have confidence in LTG Sanchez."