Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  These same gangs were also trafficking drugs from Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’d stop convoys at the border, both military and civilian, and we would find heroin and hash and lots of cash,” Stoleson tells me. “The biggest was around 750 kilos and $500k in cash.” He says you could pick up a camel shoe of hash or heroin on the Iran border for $1,200 and transport it to the Syrian border, making up to $25,000 per shoe or kilo, and it was a big industry until the border controls were tightened up in 2006, when the threat of bombings in Kuwait became a reality (Stoleson was in Camp Navistar in Kuwait, which was just forty miles from Iran). “But we had a Latin King from New York getting pot shipped to him and dealing on base,” he added. “I turned in a Latin King by noticing his [tattoos] and nothing happened.” They were even planning trafficking from Latin America to the US while deployed. “I overheard two troops talking about working with [Mexican drug gang] Zetas to move product from his cousin in Colombia to the States,” added Stoleson. His claims were given further credence in early 2012 when a drug ring “kill-team” composed of veterans and active-duty US military personnel was broken up by drug enforcement agents. The men involved—led by First Lieutenant Kevin Corley—were under the impression that the violent, mass-murdering Mexican drug cartel, the Zetas, had hired them. They were not naïve—it was becoming increasingly common, as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was only too well aware, hence the methodology of the sting operation. As InSight Crime magazine, which covers organized crime throughout the Americas, reported:

  On March 24, First Lt. Kevin Corley arrived with a three-man team at a warehouse in the border city of Laredo, Texas, armed with two semiautomatic rifles, a combat knife and a .300-caliber bolt-action rifle equipped with a scope. The men believed they had been hired by the Zetas to carry out a contracted killing and raid of a rival drug trafficking group’s storehouse, and had been called to receive the final details of the assignment.83

  Corley had been conferring with DEA agents posing as Zetas for six months, and promised to carry out assassinations for them in the US, which are known in the business as “wet work.” Aware of his privileged status as a US soldier, Corley had boasted to his would-be paymasters of the ease with which he could steal weapons from where he was posted in Colorado. It wasn’t just bluster. He allegedly provided agents with “bulletproof vests, training manuals and other stolen military equipment.” They were the same kind of products you could now find on sale on eBay courtesy of the US military. In America in 2012, none of this was not out of the ordinary.

  But inter-gang violence, while prevalent on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago, has not erupted into full-scale war within the US military, mainly because gangs like the Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples have pooled their resources and embarked on joint criminal enterprises, including but not limited to drug trafficking. The FBI reports that “rival gang members at Fort Bliss . . . have joined forces to commit assaults on civilian gang members.”84 One of those alleged to have been involved was Jerell Hill, an eighteen-year-old soldier who was arrested at Fort Sill, a military base in Oklahoma, in October 2007, and charged with attempted murder in connection with the shooting of five people in the Barclay neighborhood of his hometown, Baltimore. Investigators suspected Hill of being a member of the Pasadena Denver Lane gang, a local Bloods group, while the five shot—including a sixteen-year-old and a woman—allegedly had links to a rival gang called the Young Gorilla Family. Both gangs had a history of homicides which had brought the number of slayings in Baltimore to a stunning 240 by October of that year. Hill’s father was incredulous, telling the press: “He had a little gang he hung out with . . . As far as calling them one of these Bloods or Crips, I have no idea about that.”85 But he need not have worried, as two days later the prosecutors dropped the case, saying it was “legally insufficient” but that Hill would remain a “person of interest.”86 Hill’s parents claimed that he had returned to Oklahoma on September 11, long before the September 20 murder. But police drew attention to the fact he had only checked into Fort Sill on September 21. Police said they would continue to investigate his whereabouts in that interregnum. In the meantime, Hill was sent back to Fort Sill and returned to active duty.

  Scott Barfield was a Defense Department gang detective at Fort Lewis in Washington state before he was ejected for raising the alarm in the media. “I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present,” he said in 2006, before adding, “I think that’s the tip of the iceberg.” At a later stage he said, “a friend of mine is a recruiter. They are being told less than five tattoos is not an issue. More than five, you do a waiver saying it’s not gang-related. You’ll see soldiers with a six-pointed star with GD [Gangster Disciples] on the right forearm.” An investigation by Stars and Stripes, the military journal, found that the number of gang-related incidents officially recorded by the army was small in 2007 at sixty, but that had nearly tripled from the year before. The 2007 report stated the extent of the problem at Fort Bliss: “Since 2004, the FBI and El Paso Police Department have identified over 40 military-affiliated Folk Nation gang members stationed at the Fort Bliss Army Installation in Texas who have been involved in drug distribution, robberies, assaults, weapons offenses, and a homicide, both on and off the installation.” In May 2005, eight US soldiers were charged with participating in a widespread bribery and extortion conspiracy. FBI source information revealed that several military personnel stationed in Colombia had “transported forty-six kilograms of cocaine to El Paso.”87

  Weapons Training

  While some gang members may enlist to escape their lifestyle, or as an alternative to incarceration (having been offered clemency in exchange for service), most enlist to receive weapons and combat training. One of the main dangers of the proliferation of gang members in the military is the access they gain to the top weapons in the world, along with the attendant training in how to use them. “While in the military, enlisted members are exposed to high-power weapons, such as machine guns and rocket launchers, and explosives, such as grenades and C-5—as well as body armor night-vision devices, gun parts, and ammunition,” said the California Department of Justice in 2005.88 It warned that “enlisted personnel are able to steal items by improperly documenting supply orders or by falsifying paperwork.” Throughout the War on Terror there have been countless cases of gang members stealing weapons and selling them on, as well as using their military training to heighten their effectiveness when carrying out a crime. A concerned Milwaukee, Wisconsin, police detective complained to the San Francisco Chronicle that “gang members are going over to Iraq and sending weapons back.” And sure enough in 2006, a former National Guard soldier was arraigned in federal court after being accused of bringing machine guns back to the US from Iraq to sell to a gun dealer in Georgia.89 A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that stolen US military equipment, including body armor, night vision goggles, and gear to protect against nuclear or biochemical warfare, was being sold on Craigslist and eBay.90 America was becoming a warzone. In El Paso, members of the city council decided they needed to tool up. They didn’t want to take any risks and approved the purchase of 1,145 assault rifles for $750,000 in order to supply all their officers with the civilian version of the M-4 military rifle. Representative Steve Ortega of District 7 said there had to be precautions to help “a population coming back from an extremely violent environment integrating with the civilian population,” adding “we want to make sure that the police department has all the resources it needs to make us the safest city in the nation.”91

  It was not hyperbole. In 2004, a fearless gang had begun a two month orgy of “commando-style” robberies in which they raided six banks in Maryland using fully automatic assault rifles, managing to cash in more than $350,000 and terrorize local citizens before being caught.92 It was revealed subsequently that the military-style operations were in fact made possible by the weapons which had been bought for $5,000 from a friend of one of the gang memb
ers, recently returned from Iraq. The police kept the soldier’s identity secret but said he was based at nearby Fort Meade. The weapons, which are “plentiful and cheap” in Iraq, according to the Washington Post, “were key to their strategy: using overwhelming firepower and body armor to frighten and intimidate bank employees and customers—and ward off police.” It worked. In the middle of their crime spree, Kate Collins, a police officer, pursued the getaway van shortly after the gang robbed a Chevy Chase Bank branch in Temple Hills. The robbers fired their machine guns in the officer’s direction as they fled the scene. “I felt my car shake,” she said. Collins was alone in her vehicle, armed with only a 9mm handgun. It wasn’t a fair match; by the end of the firefight her car had been hit forty-seven times. “I had a BB gun compared to them,” she complained. The Post reported at the time: “Law enforcement officials expressed concern that more high-powered battle weapons could end up being used in crimes against U.S. citizens and police.” A law enforcement official familiar with the case commented that winning prosecutions was a hard business before adding that screening for equipment sent back to the US by military members was nearly non-existent. In other words, there was little either law enforcement agencies or American civilians could do in the face of the onslaught. Baghdad had come to Temple Hills.

  In 2008, as the Bush administration drew to a close, General David Petraeus, then commanding general in Iraq, went to Washington, DC, to testify in Congress about progress in the troubled country. The political and media world gathered hoping to hear hopeful signals from the four-star general, but right-wing Republican Representative Tom Tancredo shocked the room by raising what many lawmakers thought was an obscure topic. “The fact that gang members are being trained in our military is a growing cause for concern,” he told Petraeus. “Our local law enforcement officers and gang units are now facing criminals who have obtained advanced weapons and training courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.” Then he began to show a hint of anger. “I find it very disconcerting that there are high-level military officials that are unaware of this growing problem. This is a serious issue that deserves serious attention from the Pentagon brass.”93 In response, Petraeus merely confirmed Tancredo’s worst fears, saying that he was not aware of gang activity in Iraq before promising to look into it. Of course, he never did. In truth, the military brass could not have been unaware of what was happening all along—all they needed to do was pick up a local newspaper across the country. But they couldn’t afford to slow down and instead of stemming the tide their program was only making it worse. The one regulation that had previously stopped the gangs’ infiltration, the ban on felons and other persistent criminals, was falling away as well.

  WAR CRIMINALS

  My main preoccupation in life is wanting to kill Iraqis, whoever they are and wherever they are.

  Steven D. Green, Iraq veteran and recipient

  of a “moral waiver” to serve, 200694

  In broad daylight on March 12, 2006, one of most horrific of the reported atrocities by the US military in Iraq was underway in a house near Yusufiyah, a town just south of Baghdad. A group from the Black Heart Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, famed for its courageous exploits during World War Two, had arrived at a family home fresh from a long drinking session of locally made whiskey, or what the soldiers called with disdain “hajji juice.” The men were frustrated, some at the end of their tether, after promises that they would soon leave the Triangle of Death, an area renowned for its high levels of violence and chaos, were consistently broken by their commanders. The tension had been compounded in recent days by the death of a sergeant close to the group, killed by an IED. The house in question was in close proximity to the checkpoint manned by the soldiers, some of whom over the past months had had their eye on the fourteen-year-old daughter of the couple who lived there. Conversations often involved fantasies about raping her; that day, they resolved to do it. They were led by Private First Class Steven D. Green, who had already been showing increasing signs of mental breakdown and illness, telling a combat-stress adviser sometime before of his overriding desire to kill Iraqis. On that day, he was on guard at a traffic control point and had been on duty eighteen hours. He told the other soldiers: “I’m going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car.” Not good enough, replied another soldier, James Barker, who told him: “I’ve got a better idea. We’ve all killed hajjis, but I’ve been here twice and I still never fucked one of these bitches.”95 The planned murders would actually only be the coda to a long day of crimes around checkpoints, which were a signature of the conflict. Earlier amid chaos at that same checkpoint, one soldier had opened fire, allegedly to restore order among a crowd, with one shot killing a woman in a pickup truck. “You fucking shot her in the head,” exclaimed another soldier. The squad, according to one of its members, fabricated a cover story to explain the shooting. Army investigators found no evidence of wrongdoing.

  It was in that frame of mind they arrived at the house that night and separated the girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, from her family. Green went into the room where Abeer’s parents were and shot them dead, along with their six-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, two other soldiers raped the young girl. When Green came back he raped her as well before using the family’s own AK-47 to shoot the girl in the head. The soldiers then burnt the house to the ground with the bodies inside. For three months nothing happened as the military believed the lie that it had been the work of Iraqi insurgents. In the Iraq War logs, released by Wikileaks, it wasn’t even recorded.96 In Mahmudiyah—the nearest major town to Yusifiyah—on that day, there were no significant activity reports detailing what the soldiers had done. There was no report of a family’s death in a burning house, or the charred corpse of a raped fourteen-year-old girl. It would have stayed that way, as many massacres of its kind undoubtedly have in Afghanistan and Iraq, except for the conscience of one of the soldiers in the battalion, Justin Watt. After a period of soul-searching he told officers that he had heard it was in fact soldiers in his own unit who had carried it out. Even then the military refused to believe him, not even taking precautions about the threat to his life from the soldiers who had learned that he had spoken up.

  In the eventual trial of those guilty, the level of incompetence in the military became horrendously clear. Testimony during the trial of Green revealed that an army counselor had called the unit “mission incapable” and recommended that it stop taking on missions due to high levels of stress, anger, and diminished morale. That didn’t happen, although before the allegations and criminal proceedings got underway, Green was discharged from the army with a “personality disorder.” In the end, he was given five life sentences. The defense had argued that the military should have withdrawn Green long before the massacre, and they had a sterling case. About a year earlier, in January 2005, Green was a high school dropout with too much time on his hands and soon to land himself in jail. He was convicted on alcohol possession charges, which was his third misdemeanor conviction. After he got out he decided to enlist in the military, a course that would—because of those convictions—require special dispensation because of his criminal record. It also emerged that he had unpaid fines against his name, and court records showed it had instructed “he must contact the court immediately.” Instead of doing so, Green was deployed to Iraq as part of the 101st Airborne Division, where he would go on to rape and murder. His journey from criminal to soldier was, however, becoming increasingly common.