Many U.S. troops linked to crimes in Iraq war were recruited despite troubled pasts
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  1. #1

    Exclamation Many U.S. troops linked to crimes in Iraq war were recruited despite troubled pasts

    July 13, 2008
    Many U.S. troops linked to crimes in Iraq war were recruited despite troubled pasts
    By McClatchy Newspapers

    First in a four-part series.

    Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record documenting assaults on his wife in Colorado and Washington state and a drunken high-speed police chase in Maine for which he remains wanted.

    Before Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes stabbed an Iraqi private to death with a bayonet, he was hospitalized after threatening suicide in high school, accused of assault, disorderly conduct and trespassing, and, in the months leading up to deployment, was twice linked to drug use.

    Before Army Spc. Shane Carl Gonyon was convicted of stealing a pistol at Abu Ghraib prison, he was convicted twice on felony charges and arrested four times, once for allegedly giving a 13-year-old girl marijuana in exchange for oral sex. He enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon.

    During a yearlong examination, The Sacramento Bee studied the civilian and military backgrounds of hundreds of troops identified from recruiting documents and other military records, focusing on those who entered the services since the Iraq war began and those linked to in-service problems.

    Though not a representative sample, the 250 military personnel analyzed most closely for "Suspect Soldiers'' included 120 with questionable backgrounds, including felonies and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.

    Ruby, Holmes and Gonyon were among 70 with troubled pasts whom The Bee linked to incidents in Iraq.

    "These guys are out there carrying weapons, fighting on the streets with drugs in their pockets,'' said Tressie Cox, whose son, Lee Robert, had a history of drug and mental problems before he was charged with selling drugs in Iraq. "Shame on my son, but shame on all you people out there who are policing this and allowing this to continue to happen.''

    Those identified by The Bee are among the tens of thousands of military personnel recruited or retained as the armed services -- entering the sixth year of the Iraq war -- lowered educational, age and moral standards and granted a growing number of waivers to applicants whose backgrounds would otherwise have barred them from serving.

    The percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called "moral conduct'' waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent in 2003 to 11.2 percent in 2007. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service -- akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.

    "How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?'' asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.

    That soldier, Eli C. Gregory, was convicted in an attempted home invasion and of felony theft in Alabama, making him ineligible to legally possess a firearm there. Yet the military gave him a rifle and sent him to Iraq, where he was convicted by the Army of assault and battery on a fellow soldier and discharged.

    Gregory, who returned to Alabama after his court-martial, said during an interview that he still cannot legally possess a firearm in the United States.

    The military defended its recruiting policies, including granting more waivers for past conduct.

    "Standards in our society have changed over the years; we are a reflection of those changes,'' said Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command. "Considering offering a waiver to otherwise qualified recruits is the right thing to do for those Americans who want to answer the call to duty.''

    Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced a new system to categorize waivers by the severity of prior offenses to allow the services to analyze the link between waivers and future military behavior.

    * * *

    In December, the National Guard quit granting felony waivers. The Guard's chief recruiting officer, Col. Mike Jones, was quoted in the Army Times calling the previous policy "a risk,'' but he later told The Bee an increased number of applicants made the policy no longer necessary.

    Of the more than 120 soldiers and Marines with questionable pasts examined by The Bee, at least 18 had felony arrests or convictions or histories of mental illness. At least eight of the 18 later were connected to incidents in Iraq, and a ninth fatally shot himself while on guard duty in Kuwait.

    The military refused to disclose who required waivers to enter the military, citing privacy, but The Bee found that waivers were not required of all convicted felons.

    Gregory, the Alabama felon prohibited from possessing a firearm, said he was allowed to join without a waiver because he was convicted of stealing less than $500, so the Army didn't technically consider the crime a felony. The Army confirmed that it does not require waivers for some felonies in which the crime loss is less than $500, but a spokesman noted that a felony waiver is required for larger amounts.

    Gonyon had four felony arrests and two convictions, but he had only to lie to avoid rejection.

    Shortly after he was discharged from the Air Force in Wyoming for drunken driving in 1998, Gonyon was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of pointing a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol at a homeless man who had accused him of theft.

    The following year, he admitted to stealing more than $10,000 in equipment from an Air Force base, and months later, he was accused of providing marijuana to a 13-year-old girl in exchange for oral sex, triggering a felony charge that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanor child endangering.

    Nineteen days after he walked away from a federal prison, Gonyon applied for the Michigan National Guard, claiming he had worked at a wood supply company during the period when he actually was incarcerated. He was accepted the following month, in January 2003.

    Since Gonyon had previously served in the military, a complete background check was not required by the Guard. That practice also ended earlier this year, after a guardsman with a past felony conviction shot and killed four civilians.

    Gonyon wasn't confronted about his criminal record until 2006, after an incident at Abu Ghraib prison, where he processed detainees. In late March or early April 2006, Gonyon stole a 7 mm pistol from a translator. He was caught trying to mail it to the United States.

    "I deliberately concealed my arrest(s) and convictions,'' Gonyon told a court-martial panel, which convicted him of theft and other charges.

    * * *

    Military officials didn't publicly blame the war in Iraq, but some privately acknowledged it is why they accept individuals who previously would have been rejected.

    Asked why someone like Delano Holmes was allowed to deploy to Iraq, Marine Capt. Brett Miner, a prosecutor at Holmes' court-martial, said: "We're kind of short on bodies.''

    Indianapolis police records show that on Jan. 13, 2002, when Holmes was 16, officers dispatched an ambulance to his high school after Holmes threatened to kill himself.

    Ellie


  2. #2
    July 14, 2008
    For some veterans, war stress provides an easy out for postwar crimes, experts say
    By McClatchy Newspapers

    Second in a four-part series. (Click here to read other parts of this series)

    Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones saw the horrors of the Iraq war firsthand, including the site where his fellow Marines allegedly killed 24 women, children and other civilians at Haditha.

    So when he returned to Kings County, Calif., got drunk and drove a stolen pickup into someone's living room, family and friends blamed the psychological effects of war, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

    His crime, like others committed by returning war veterans, caught the attention -- and sympathies -- of lawmakers and veterans groups. California passed legislation in 2006, and at least four other states have drafted or considered laws to empower judges to send these veterans to treatment in lieu of prison because their crimes may be the byproduct of war.

    But a yearlong examination by The Sacramento Bee found veterans sometimes had criminal records and other questionable backgrounds before they went to a war zone, and experts said that since crime is not a typical symptom of PTSD, their subsequent crimes more likely were a product of their backgrounds than of the war.

    "It's an excuse, the way I see it,'' said Catherine Casey, whose 16-year-old daughter was killed in 2006 by another former California-based Marine driving drunk in Minnesota. "To use it as a crutch or an excuse for our behavior is, as far as I'm concerned, unacceptable.''

    Casey, a police investigator who does background checks for the Minneapolis Police Department, was angry not only because her daughter died, but also because she learned the man who killed her had a history that included alcohol offenses before he joined the military.

    The public for decades has recognized that war can cause psychological problems, but it was the post-Vietnam era that spawned a large number of studies into what became known as PTSD.

    The Bee's examination found that the services are accepting a growing number of recruits with criminal backgrounds, and experts said they are more likely to suffer PTSD and more likely to respond to stress by committing crimes.

    "If these individuals who because of their past histories and their genetics are prone to be violent and have been violent in the past, stress can exacerbate that behavior,'' said Dr. Elisabeth Binder, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta who has recently completed a PTSD study.

    * * *

    Lance Cpl. Briones' criminal history in the southern San Joaquin Valley began long before he experienced the stress of a combat zone, and that criminal history is directly connected to his ending up in Iraq.

    "He wasn't a person who I would classify as a real upstanding citizen, before or during the military,'' said Kings County Deputy District Attorney Adam Nelson.

    Briones was arrested on felony drug charges on July 20, 2003, after Hanford police received complaints about intoxicated people at a convenience store. Officers found seven baggies in Briones' pockets that they reported contained marijuana and money, an indication he had been selling drugs, according to Nelson.

    Briones was "very intoxicated,'' the police report says, and he "was out of control at the jail and had to be restrained several times to keep him from hurting himself or others.''

    Later, Nelson said, "his attorney contacted our office and said the guy wants to go into the military. At the time, we said that would probably be the best thing for him.''

    The office agreed to drop charges if Briones enlisted, but Nelson now believes that agreement was a mistake.

    Shortly before he deployed to Iraq in 2005, Briones was charged with drunken driving in Orange County, not far from the Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years' informal probation.

    In 2006, the Marine Corps charged Briones with stealing nearly $4,000 in night-vision goggles and binoculars in Iraq and with trying to send two 9 mm pistols in the mail. The Marines also accused Briones of a rape at Camp Pendleton.

    That same year, he came home on leave to Kings County, stole a pickup and drove it into a living room, with a blood-alcohol level nearly double the legal limit.

    A police report described Briones' behavior in the jail as "combative,'' similar to his behavior in jail before he joined the military.

    Still, his war experiences were quickly blamed.

    "My boss was getting crank calls at his house, swearing at him because he's prosecuting this hero,'' Nelson said.

    Briones faced a maximum sentence of three years and eight months for vehicle theft, DUI and vandalism, but he pleaded guilty only to vandalism and received a two-year sentence. All the military charges were withdrawn shortly after the accident.

    Nelson said a psychiatric evaluation found that Briones "was suffering from stress, but that it was not an excuse for what he did.''

    * * *

    Because of links to the Haditha killings, the Briones case was making headlines worldwide as the chairwoman of the California Assembly's Veterans Affairs Committee was pushing fellow lawmakers to offer veterans treatment in lieu of prison.

    "I brought (Briones) up, I remember, during the committee,'' said Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, who is from Hanford, in Kings County. "I didn't know the specifics of the case to say he had PTSD, but I said ... you've got to believe that (the war) had to have had some kind of impact.''

    Told that Briones had been arrested on felony drug sale charges prior to his service, Parra said, "Yeah, so he sold drugs. But again, he went to war, saw horrific crimes being committed. Did that time and experience in Iraq affect him when he got back?''

    The first version of the bill would have mandated that judges divert veterans diagnosed with PTSD to treatment. The governor vetoed it.

    "The trauma of war is unfortunate, but justice for crime victims and the safety of the public must remain a paramount concern of the criminal justice system,'' Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote in his veto message.

    The version signed by Schwarzenegger in September 2006 empowers California judges to bypass sentencing guidelines and choose between treatment or jail for veterans convicted of any crime.

    * * *

    The media and the public have focused most of their attention on the war records of returning veterans who commit crimes, not their criminal records.

    Mastermichael Ramsey was one of more than 100 veterans identified in a New York Times series linking crimes by veterans to post-traumatic stress.

    But Ramsey's criminal history began in his hometown of Milwaukee long before he joined the Army and long before he experienced the stress of a war zone.

    Thirteen days after his 17th birthday, in May 1999, Ramsey was accused by Milwaukee police of threatening to "shoot and kill'' someone. He was ordered to court on a charge of disorderly conduct, but failed to appear.

    Two days later, Ramsey was accused of stealing a Toyota and driving it to school, resulting in a six-month jail sentence, which was stayed, and a two-year probation term. Six months after his sentencing, Milwaukee police restrained Ramsey at Harold S. Vincent High School as he shouted profanities and tried to physically confront a school official, who had accused him of gambling.

    Ramsey was charged with disorderly conduct and again missed a court appearance, prompting the court to issue a warrant for his arrest.

    Ellie


  3. #3

    Exclamation

    July 15, 2008
    Soldier who shot Iraqi journalist had a long record of trouble
    By McClatchy Newspapers

    Third in a four-part series. (Click here to read other parts of this series)

    Dr. Yasser Salihee's body lay in his compact car on a busy Baghdad street for everyone to see.

    The doctor, employed as a journalist, was shot by an American soldier who claimed that Salihee refused to slow down and who believed he presented a threat.

    Though the details are disputed, the results were not: The June 2005 shooting outraged the very population the military is trying to win over.

    "Before the accident I loved the Americans ... but after the accident, I hate all the Army," Salihee's widow, Raghad Al-Jabar Al wazan, also a medical doctor, told The Sacramento Bee. "All my neighbors were hating the Americans."

    The shooter seemed beyond suspicion, with a resume fit for a character from a John Wayne movie: son of a Vietnam-era fighter pilot, former elite Army Ranger, sniper team leader, accomplished hunter and marksman, aspiring wilderness guide with a trunk full of awards and a small fan club of admiring young soldiers.

    "This kid was a good soldier," said former Louisiana National Guard Maj. Andre Vige, who conducted an administrative inquiry into the shooting. "Good outfit. Good guys. One of the premier combat brigades of the National Guard. They were the standard-bearer."

    But a yearlong examination by The Bee found that the shooter, Staff Sgt. Joseph J. Romero, brought a long, troubled past with him to Iraq, and the Guard unit Vige praised was riddled with misfits, drug users and soldiers with criminal records - at least two of them former mental patients.

    Romero is one of more than 70 soldiers and Marines with questionable backgrounds who were linked to incidents in the military, most occurring in Iraq, The Bee examination found.

    Romero's history was similar to that of many of the others in The Bee examination: financial difficulties, domestic troubles, minor but persistent criminal histories, allegations of substance abuse - or combinations of the four.

    "CID (Army Criminal Investigation Command) had a long rap sheet on him," said Col. John Dunlap of the Louisiana National Guard, who supervised two drug investigations of Romero in Iraq. "There was a ton of stuff, and it was like he'd slip out every time. Nothing would happen to him."

    When he shot Salihee, Romero was under investigation for selling cocaine, military records show, and days before the shooting, Romero threatened to kill a fellow soldier who reported him to CID.

    Twenty-one days after the shooting, the drug allegations prompted the Army to strip Romero of his leadership, bar him from missions and take away his large-caliber sniper rifle.

    The Bee made numerous attempts to seek Romero's comments, sending FedEx packages to him and his attorney and making two trips to Louisiana. Romero agreed to a meeting in January, but when a reporter and photographer arrived at his family's home, they found only his stepfather, mother and attorney there.

    Frank R. Durand, retired from the Louisiana State Police and currently a lieutenant assigned to the evidence department of the local Sheriff's Office, said his stepson had changed his mind and "there will be no comment."

    * * *

    The earliest public criminal record on Romero in his hometown of Lafayette shows that on April 15, 1990, he was charged in municipal court with simple assault along with his friend Michael Wayne Boleyn Jr., who was charged with battery.

    Ten months later, on Feb. 14, 1991, Lafayette Parish sheriff's detectives learned that Romero was visiting gun dealers to price a stolen shotgun. Five days later, sheriff's records show, Romero told detectives he got the shotgun from Boleyn in exchange for a deer hunting stand, a water slide and a pair of rubber boots.

    Authorities subsequently accused Boleyn in a string of residential burglaries that included the shotgun theft and, Boleyn said, he agreed to join the Louisiana National Guard at the suggestion of law enforcement officers. As a result, he said, the prosecutor dropped six of the eight burglary charges, and he was sentenced to five years' probation.

    Boleyn, during an interview at his home near Lafayette, said he and Romero had been close friends. He claimed the two had committed the burglaries together and that he has been angry ever since because he took all the blame.

    "Joe was in it just as much as me," Boleyn said. "Nothing happened to him."

    Carrol Clavelle, who investigated the burglary as a detective for the local Sheriff's Office, said Romero provided valuable information about the thefts, which was one of the reasons he wasn't charged with possession of stolen property.

    On Feb. 5, 1991, five days after Clavelle was assigned to the burglary case, Romero entered the Army.

    * * *

    Romero's Army career soared in the months following his enlistment, and he became a member of the elite 75th Army Ranger Regiment, assigned to Fort Benning, Ga.

    His career crashed even faster.

    As tensions mounted in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the summer of 1993, Romero and other Rangers trained at Fort Bliss, Texas, not far from the Mexican border. During a break in training, Romero and other Rangers crossed the border into Juarez.

    Donald "Donnie" Lee Thomas, Romero's supervisor then, said the Rangers were ordered not to go to Mexico, but he drove Romero and several others to Juarez. He knew he couldn't stop them, he said, so he sought to ensure their safe return.

    Discipline was swift and harsh.

    Col. Danny McKnight, now retired, said he forbade any of the 35 or so Rangers who had violated his order from deploying to Somalia. Rangers who obeyed his orders were sent to reinforce Rangers who had just fought the now-famous Battle of Mogadishu, subject of the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

    That battle made Rangers famous everywhere; the trip to Mexico made Romero and the others infamous among fellow Rangers, who dubbed them "The Juarez Rangers."

    Many of the disciplined soldiers left the Rangers altogether, but some, including Romero, were accepted into a platoon of misfits at the Ranger school, assigned to play enemy soldiers but no longer eligible to deploy as real Rangers.

    "When I got there, there was a lot of - how should I say - ash and trash," recalled former 1st Sgt. Sean T. Kelly, who took over the platoon in 1994 on a mission to rid it of drug users.

    * * *

    Drug allegations against Romero grew more serious after he left Fort Benning.

    At Fort Richardson, Alaska, on Oct. 10, 1996, he was identified as the target of an Army criminal investigation into cocaine use, but records show he was not charged due to a lack of evidence. And in the tiny town of Newaygo, Mich., where Romero lived for about two years after leaving the Army in 1999, several people told The Bee that Romero openly used drugs, including methamphetamine, and was involved in drug sales.

    Dean Allen Robinson, identified by Michigan law enforcement authorities as an associate of a Latino drug kingpin, said during an interview at the Michigan state prison in Carson City that Romero worked for him in his logging business, and he regularly supplied Romero with drugs and used drugs with him. Romero, Robinson said, also helped him prepare drugs for sale in exchange for free samples.

    Romero and the 21-year-old Louisiana woman who moved to Michigan with him also had financial problems. In November 2001, they were the subjects of a complaint filed in the judicial district court in White Cloud, Mich., for $984 in unpaid rent. They subsequently moved into a mobile home and quit paying the rent, said the landlord, Mark Presler, who lives with Robinson's sister.

    After he returned to Louisiana, Romero's relationship with his girlfriend ended, but his financial problems continued and he became the target of a paternity case that would linger for six months before being dismissed.

    Ellie


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