Posts Tagged ‘ shooting ’

Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment practice their shooting skills at a makeshift range on Camp Dwyer.

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Shooting Drills Help Marines Sharpen Skills

BAGHDAD — The U.S. will appeal a court decision dismissing manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday.Biden's announcement after a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani shows just how diplomatically sensitive the incident remains nearly three years later. A lawyer for one guard, noting that word of the intended appeal came in Iraq, accused the Obama administration of political expediency and said the U.S. was pursuing an innocent man, rather than justice.Blackwater security contractors were guarding U.S. diplomats when the guards opened fire in Nisoor Square, a crowded Baghdad intersection, on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.Biden expressed his “personal regret” for the shooting and said the Obama administration was disappointed by the dismissal. “A dismissal is not an acquittal,” he said.The U.S. rebuffed Iraqi demands that the U.S. contractors face trial in Iraqi courts. After a lengthy investigation, U.S. prosecutors charged five of the contractors with manslaughter and took a guilty plea from a sixth.But the case fell apart when a federal trial judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, said in a Dec. 31 ruling that the Justice Department mishandled evidence and violated the guards' constitutional rights. Prosecutors now face difficult odds getting an appeals court to reinstate the case.The dismissal outraged many Iraqis, who said it showed the Americans considered themselves above the law. The Iraqi government began collecting signatures for a class-action lawsuit from victims who were wounded or lost relatives.Lawyers for two of the Blackwater guards — Donald Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah, and Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tenn. — sharply criticized the U.S. government's planned appeal.”By announcing this decision in Iraq, through an elected official, the United States makes clear it has decided to do what is politically expedient, rather than what is just based on Judge Urbina's unshakable findings that the prosecutors engaged in gross misconduct and intentionally violated Mr. Ball's constitutional rights,” attorney Steven McCool, who represents Ball, said in a statement. “In the end, the United States has shown it will pursue an innocent man, rather than justice.”Attorney David Schertler, who represents Heard, said moving ahead with an appeal “appears to be based upon political considerations rather than a careful consideration of the legal merits of the case as it should be.”White House officials said the U.S. Justice Department decided on the appeal and that it was not intended to be announced during Biden's trip.Messages seeking comment from lawyers for the other three guards who fought the charges were not immediately returned Saturday.Those guards are Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, N.H.; Nick Slatten, a former Army sergeant from Sparta, Tenn.; and Paul Slough, an Army veteran from Keller, Texas.The sixth guard, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, pleaded guilty to one count each of manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and aiding and abetting. It's not clear what Urbina's ruling means for him.Blackwater has said the guards were innocent, contending there were ambushed by insurgents. Prosecutors said the shooting was unprovoked.Court documents paint a murky picture of a case rife with conflicting evidence. Some witnesses say the Blackwater convoy was under fire; others say it wasn't. Some said the entire convoy fired into the intersection; others said only a few men opened fire.Even the government's key witnesses, three members of the Blackwater convoy, at times seemed to undercut the government's case.Since the shooting, the Myock, N.C.-based Blackwater has renamed itself Xe Services and overhauled its management. Iraq has pulled the company's license to operate in the country.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The man accused of killing one soldier and wounding another outside an Arkansas military recruiting center has asked a judge to change his plea to guilty, claiming ties to al-Qaida.Abdulhakim Muhammad’s attorney, Claiborne Ferguson, said Thursday night that his client sent a letter earlier this month to the judge in his case asking to change his plea to capital murder and attempted capital murder charges.Ferguson said he hadn’t discussed the request with his client before the letter was sent. Under Arkansas law prosecutors would have to agree and waive the death penalty before the judge could consider it, Ferguson said.Pvt. William Long of Conway was killed in the June 1 attack in Little Rock, and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula of Jacksonville was wounded.Muhammad has called the shootings justified retaliation for U.S. military action in the Middle East. He told The Associated Press in a telephone interview last year that he doesn’t believe he’s guilty.The New York Times, which first reported the letter on its Web site Thursday, said Muhammad described himself in the letter as a soldier in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and called the shooting “a Jihadi Attack.” The group has claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound American airliner.“I wasn’t insane or post traumatic, nor was I forced to do this act,” Muhammad claimed in the handwritten letter, the newspaper reported.Ferguson said he didn’t know how seriously to take Muhammad’s claims of terror ties and expressed frustration with his client sending the letter without consulting him beforehand.“He’s said lots of things. None of them seem to be real consistent with each other,” Ferguson said. “I’m a little irritated with it.”Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley did not immediately return a message left on his cell phone Thursday night, but prosecutors have said they plan to seek the death penalty in the case.Muhammad was arrested about eight miles from the recruiting center, on Interstate 630, shortly after the shootings. Police said they recovered Molotov cocktails, three guns and ammunition from his pickup truck. An internal law enforcement memo said Muhammad may have considered other targets, including military sites and Jewish organizations in the Southeast.A law enforcement official told the AP in June that Muhammad had been under investigation by an FBI-led terrorism task force since he returned to the United States from Yemen in 2008. Muhammad, who was born Carlos Bledsoe, had moved to Little Rock to work in his father’s Memphis-based tour bus company as it branched out.Muhammad, who has called the AP twice since his arrest, has claimed responsibility for the shooting and said it was justified because of what he called American-directed hostilities toward the Muslim world.Last week, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright Jr. ordered the state public defenders commission to pay some of the legal bills for Muhammad’s trial, which is scheduled to begin in June. Ferguson was hired by Muhammad’s family to represent him.

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FALLS CHURCH, Va. — In the wake of a mass shooting at an Army post in which a military psychiatrist is charged, the service’s top doctor acknowledged his service needs to improve how it manages medical officers, including using more candor in reviewing their officers’ performance.But Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Army’s surgeon general, said there is no evidence his staff “could have predicted” that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, “could have become a mass murderer.”In the 12 years that Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was trained and promoted to major, he may not have been “an ideal clinician, not an ideal professional soldier,” Schoomaker said. But, Schoomaker said, there were no clues of potential violence.“I don’t see anywhere in there [a recently released Pentagon review of the shootings] , and no one has ever intimated that we should have been able to see from what we saw that this man would have become the alleged mass murderer that he is or is accused of being,” Schoomaker said in an interview at his office this week.Hasan is accused of opening fire Nov. 5 at a Fort Hood soldier readiness center, killing 12 soldiers and one civilian, and wounding 43. He faces murder charges in a military court.Hasan had previously been ranked outstanding in officer performance, despite a shoddy record of medical performance and inappropriate discussion of his Muslim faith at work, according to government documents quoted by The Associated Press.Medical supervisors were not made aware that Hasan was e-mailing a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen, something uncovered by U.S. terrorism investigators in the months prior to the shooting.Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released the findings of an independent review of the shooting conducted by former Army secretary Togo West and retired admiral Vern Clark. It recommends reviewing officer standards used by medical supervisors in Hasan’s case.“Some signs were clearly missed [in Hasan’s case]; other ignored,” the review concludes, urging that officers who supervised Hasan be held accountable. Gates directed Army Secretary John McHugh to act on the recommendations.On Thursday, McHugh appointed Gen. Carter Ham, who worked on the independent review, to investigate its conclusions and recommend any disciplinary actions necessary.Schoomaker’s remarks came during a wide-ranging interview about military medicine. He said that because of murder charges against Hasan and an ongoing Army review, he could not discuss Hasan’s case in detail and could not address whether Hasan should have been promoted.The controversy surrounding his staff’s handling of Hasan has hurt the medical department’s image as it tries to hire 519 more mental health specialists to deal with the growing demands of combat stress, Schoomaker said.Morale has slumped, he said, particularly among Army behavioral health workers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where Hasan did his residency and fellowship from 2003 to 2009.“The same system that delivered this alleged shooter has trained and career-developed professionally as officers, as well as clinicians, thousands of dedicated and really highly proficient practitioners,” Schoomaker said.

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A Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan’s medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.

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Hasan’s Superiors Ignored own Worries

A federal judge cited repeated government missteps in dismissing all charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in a case that inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed the case against the guards accused of the shooting in a crowded Baghdad intersection in 2007.

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Judge Dismisses Blackwater Case

DALLAS — Declining to single out just one, the Dallas Morning News named “the heroes” of Fort Hood its Texan of the Year.The recognition comes less than two months after a shooting spree at one of the nation’s largest military posts left 13 dead and 29 wounded. An Army psychiatrist has been charged in the deaths.The heroes include civilian police officers Sgt. Kimberly Munley and Sgt. Mark Todd, who shot the gunman and ended the shooting spree, and a number of soldiers who helped others when they themselves were wounded.But the list of heroes at Fort Hood “goes far beyond the casualties and responders involved in the Nov.

More: Dallas newspaper recognizes Fort Hood heroes

BALTIMORE — Baltimore police say an active-duty soldier was shot to death Sunday in the city while on the way home from grocery shopping with his wife.Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says 22-year-old Clifford Williams was on leave from service in Afghanistan.Guglielmi says officers got a call about a shooting shortly before midnight Sunday and found Williams outside his vehicle. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.Police have no suspects or motive in the slaying and have yet to determine exactly where the shooting took place. Guglielmi says investigators believe a single gunman approached Williams’ vehicle and shot him through the driver’s side window.

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FORT WORTH, Texas — An Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people during an attack on his Texas post will likely plead not guilty to the charges against him and may use an insanity defense at his military trial, his attorney said today.John Galligan, the civilian attorney for Maj. Nidal Hasan, said he is considering an insanity defense among other options, but that it’s too early to determine his defense strategy.“Based on the evidence thus far, his mental status must be raised,” Galligan told The Associated Press by phone from his office near Fort Hood. “Anybody who allegedly engages in conduct that is completely contradictory to his lifestyle and military career — an insanity defense has to be considered.”Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shooting at Fort Hood, and military officials have said they may file more charges.

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Atty: Hood suspect may use insanity defense

WASHINGTON — The government intercepted at least 18 e-mails between the man accused of fatally killing 13 people at Fort Hood and a radical Muslim cleric.

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More e-mails between Hasan, cleric may exist