Antiwar.com Blog

As AntiWar.com’s Justin Raimondo asked, “A nation at war with itself — who will win that one?“

A U-S Army staff sergeant has been charged
with killing his two commanders last week at a base outside Baghdad.

The military says it’s believed to be the first case of an American soldier in Iraq accused of killing his superiors.

It was first believed that the June seventh deaths of Captain Phillip Esposito and First Lieutenant Louis Allen resulted from
“indirect fire” from a mortar round.

But the military now believes they died from an explosive device, possibly a grenade.

Sergeant Alberto Martinez has been charged with two counts of premeditated murder, according to a statement issued in Baghdad.

The so-called “fragging” incident happened near Tikrit.

Fragging is a term used to refer to soldiers killing their superiors.

Report by the AP

UPDATE: More detail from KRT:

TIKRIT, Iraq – (KRT) – A 37-year-old staff sergeant was charged in the deaths of two of his superior officers in the first alleged case of its kind in Iraq.

The stunning announcement Thursday of the court-martial came amid continued violence in Iraq against U.S. and Iraqi security forces. Eight Iraqi police were killed in a car bombing on the airport road in Baghdad, and the U.S. military reported the death of five Marines and a sailor in violence in western Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez of the 42nd Infantry Division was charged Wednesday with two counts of premeditated murder for the June 7 attack that killed Capt. Phillip T. Esposito, 30, and Lt. Louis E. Allen, 34.

Martinez, a National Guardsman from Troy, N.Y., was a soldier in the division’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company. Esposito and Allen were that unit’s top two commanders.

U.S. military officials refused to comment on reports that Martinez was facing disciplinary action that could have motivated him to act.

“We don’t have an idea as to any motive at this time,” said Maj. Patrick Swan, a spokesman for the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Swan said that charges against additional soldiers could not be ruled out.

Martinez was being held late Thursday under military confinement in Kuwait and has been provided an attorney from the U.S. Army Trial Defense Service. Swan could not say whether the soldier had turned himself in or whether he had been implicated in the attack by evidence found after an extensive investigation.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had been looking into the deaths of Esposito and Allen for more than a week. The two officers died about 10 p.m. on June 7 inside a former palace that has been converted to barracks for U.S. soldiers on the lush grounds of one of Saddam Hussein’s former compounds in Tikrit.

It was initially believed the men died from injuries in a mortar attack, but forensic evidence soon ruled that out. Within days, the Army announced the officers’ deaths were being investigated as crimes.

In an interview earlier this month in the San Francisco Chronicle, Milton Friedman speaks on many issues (enough to madden some of our readers).

Buried in the interview is a gem:

Progress in his goal of rolling back the role of government, he said, is “being greatly threatened, unfortunately, by this notion that the U.S. has a mission to promote democracy around the world,” a big Bush objective.

“War is a friend of the state,” Friedman said. It is always expensive, requiring higher taxes, and, “In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do.”

News-wise, this week sure is starting out with a bang — and, hey, Monday isn’t even over yet!

No, I don’t mean the Jackson verdict. It looks like there’s going to be breaking news on the Bolton nomination around 10:30 tomorrow morning. Stay tuned …

The minute I heard about the recent bombings in Iran, I immediately thought: Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the kooky Marxoid cult that some neoconservatives want to help them effect “regime change” in Tehran. And sure enough, it looks like my instincts were right on target. But, hey, wait-a-minute, weren’t they all supposed to be corraled in “Camp Ashraf,” their base where U.S. guards stand watch over them? Hmmmm…. who let the dogs out?

On the Huffington Post blog, Eugene Volokh, the “libertarian” lawyer who infamously made the case for torture, is all over poor old Paul Findley for citing an apparently nonexistent quote from Condi Rice admitting that we have an “Israel-centric” foreign policy. I jump into the fray to point out that apparently some people — including Larry Franklin, whose sealed indictment on 6 counts of espionage on behalf of Israel was made public today– think it isn’t Israel-centric enough.

God, but I’m having an indecent amount of fun over at the Huff-blog!

Congratulations to Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer, whose series of articles for The American Prospect got an airing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. The idea was to debunk Rep. Curt Weldon’s wacko book retailing a whole new set of neocon-generated lies designed to get us into war with Iran. Naturally, Weldon denied everything: Laura catches him in more than a couple of lies here.

Sources of Neoconservative Thought: Leo Strauss, Leon Trotsky — and Francis Ford Coppola? Arthur Silber has the story….

The White House calls for democracy in Lebanon have not produced the results they were hoping for. In yesterday’s third round of voting, neocon poster boy Walid Jumblatt was trounced by a Syrian-alligned coaltion led by former general Michel Aoun.

Even more of a surprise was the sweep by Hezbollah in the eastern Bekaa Valley where the group labeled by Bush as “terrorists” won all 10 seats. Hezbollah has so far won 33 seats out of the 128-seat parliament, the largest of any single group.

Hezbollah was not expected to win anywhere near this many seats, but was helped by recent pronouncements of the White House. Knight Ridder reports:

Samia Hajj, a 43-year-old Shiite Muslim housewife, said she isn’t traditionally a supporter of either Hezbollah or its recent ally, the more secular Amal party. However, recent U.S. admonitions for Hezbollah to lay down its arms infuriated her, she said, and drove her to vote for the Hezbollah-Amal list as a means of resisting outside influence.

“We are not against America, but we aren’t terrorists and we don’t like being called terrorists,” Hajj said. “When the United States talks like that, it makes us think they are going to interfere here like they did in Iraq. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Billmon, writing in his brilliant weblong, Whiskey Bar:

“If the symbol of the Roman state was a statue of a she wolf suckling the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, then I think America should have one of a sow, suckling every defense contractor, hack politician and PR operative in Washington.”

It’s a hair-raising and perceptively-written story about the Pentagon’s growing budget for strategic information — or “psywar” operations. It is a scary, trenchant look into the bowels of George W. Bush’s America, and well worth a read.

That’s right: conservatives are now apologizing for espionage. The arrest of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin is just the beginning of the dramatic court case that will expose Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. as a fifth column in the service of a foreign power — with the neoconservatives leading the chorus that this is a case of “persecution.”

Bollocks.

Read all about how leading American “conservatives” have positioned themselves as apologists for espionage in my latest post on the Huff-blog.