“Congratulations gents, we just got away with murder”

THIS READS like the stuff of cheap airport fiction novels, but it’s actually from testimony in the ongoing courts martial of several US marines for committing murder in Iraq. What it boils down to is as follows: Several marines went on a “hunt” for a known insurgent named Saleh Gowad with the intention of killing him. He had previously been captured and released several times and they decided to do something about it.

Failing to find him, they then randomly seized a disabled ex-policeman – Hashim Awad - from his home as he slept and then proceeded to setup an elaborate infra-red spoof to fool the overhead spy drones into thinking a legitimate battle had ensued in order to cover up his murder.

This ‘spoofing’ included wrapping a marine around the already bound body of Awad so as to fool the drone into thinking a single infra-red image was recorded and setting up a fake scene where one marine pretended to be the insurgent ‘planting a bomb’ while the rest of the squad watched from close by. The recorded thermal imagery from the aircraft seemed to show troops watching an insurgent digging by the road, perhaps to place a bomb.

Then it get’s really convoluted… Once they were satisfied that the drone passes had recorded what they needed it to see, they dragged this innocent civilian into the bomb crater, took a stolen AK47 rifle and fired off a few shots, leaving the spent shells on the ground as ‘evidence’ of the firefight and then they shot the still-bound Awad several times and setup the remainder of the scene to resemble a quick but deadly firefight. They even left a shovel in the crater to make it look like Awad was digging in the ground to plant a roadside bomb when the squad came upon him.

Thing is, the thermal imagery actually backed up their claims and NCIS investigators would have let them get away with it, if not for the surprise confession of a Navy medic involved in the incident. Once he ‘fessed up, others started singing their songs too in the hopes of getting some deals from the prosecutors. Until that point the murder was completely covered up.

“Congratulations gents, we just got away with murder,” Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III is reported as saying to his squad once the deed was done, and they almost did.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing how easy it seems to be to cover up what’s going on in Iraq these days. You can grab the full story over at Wired if you’re interested.