War zone testimony brings horror to GI’S hearing

JOINT BASE LEWISMCCHORD, Wash. — Through a live video feed from half a world away in Afghanistan, in an extraordinary night court session, descriptions of chaos and horror poured into a military courtroom here as if from an open spigot.

“Their brains were still on the pillows,” said Mullah Khamal Adin, 39, staring into the camera with his arms folded, describing 11 members of his cousin’s family he found dead — most of the bodies burned in a pile in one room.

Adin, in a hearing that started here late Friday, was asked about the smell. Was there an odor of gasoline or kerosene? Just bodies and burned plastic, he replied through an interpreter.

The Army’s preliminary hearing in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar province this year, unfolded last week mostly in the bustling daylight of a working military base an hour south of Seattle. But to accommodate witnesses in Afghanistan, and the 12½-hour time difference, the schedule was shifted at week’s end, with testimony through cameras and uplinks in Afghanistan and here at Lewis-McChord starting at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time Friday and running until shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday.

The attacks, which occurred March 11 in a poor rural region while most of the victims were asleep, were the deadliest war crime attributed to a single U.S. soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and they further frayed the relationship between the U.S. and Afghan governments.

The military says Bales, 39, walked away from his outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush on two villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children, and others were women. After the victims were shot, some of the bodies were dragged into a pile and burned.

Most of the testimony, however graphic, was circumstantial, pointing to a lone American gunman but not directly implicating Bales. The villagers testified on the fifth day of a military proceeding known as an Article 32 investigation, held to establish whether there is enough evidence to bring Bales before a court-martial. If a court-martial is ordered and the Army decides to continue the prosecution as a capital case, the sergeant could face the death penalty.