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Soldier Accused of Killing Afghan Civilians to Testify Soldier Pleads Guilty in Killings Afghan Civilians
(about 3 hours later)
SEATTLE — Staff Sgt. Robert Bales of the Army, who is accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians last year, most of them women and children, is expected to offer on Wednesday his own account of the attack for the first time, under oath, as part of a guilty plea hearing that would remove the threat of the death penalty from his case. JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — Staff Sgt. Robert Bales of the Army pleaded guilty on Wednesday to killing 16 Afghan civilians last year, most of them women and children, in the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Sergeant Bales, 39, would instead face life in prison if the guilty plea is accepted by the military court at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, about an hour south of Seattle, where he was stationed. The plea, if accepted by the military court, would remove the threat of the death penalty from his case. And the hearing, which began just after 9 a.m. near Seattle, in a windowless military courtroom here on the base, was somber. Sargeant Bales, wearing a blue Army service uniform, rose from his seat at the defense table, raised his right hand and was sworn under oath.
The attacks, on two villages in a poor rural region, the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, were the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Under questioning by the presiding judge, Col. Jeffery Nance, Sargeant Bales — answering crisply using two or four words, “Yes, sir,” or “Yes, I do sir,” — said he understood that a guilty plea was irrevocable. One of his defense lawyers, Emma Scanlan, speaking on Sargeant Bales’s behalf, said that the guilty plea was to all the major charges, including premeditated murder, but that he would plead not guilty to a minor charge of impeding the investigation against him.
Villagers testified at a court hearing in November that a figure, cloaked in darkness with blindingly bright lights on his weapon, burst into their homes early on the morning of March 11, 2012, shooting, stabbing and burning bodies. Fellow soldiers told the court in the Article 32 hearing – the military’s version of a grand jury hearing that they had been drinking together earlier that night, against regulations, and that Sgt. Bales had later walked back into the camp, wearing a cape, his clothes spotted with blood. Sergeant Bales, 39, who was on his fourth combat deployment in 10 years — three tours in Iraq, and the final one in Afghanistan — at the time of the attack in March 2012, never took the witness stand in a pretrial hearing November.
But Sergeant Bales, who was on his fourth combat deployment in 10 years — three tours in Iraq, and the final one in Afghanistan — never took the witness stand. The attacks took place in two villages in a poor rural region the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province.
Villagers testified in a court hearing that a figure, cloaked in darkness with blindingly bright lights on his weapon, burst into their homes early on the morning of March 11, 2012, shooting, stabbing and burning bodies. Fellow soldiers told the court in the Article 32 hearing — the military’s version of a grand jury hearing — that they had been drinking together earlier that night, against regulations, and that Sargeant Bales had later walked back into the camp, wearing a cape, his clothes spotted with blood.