Did Sgt. Bales Have Help?

    The rush to proclaim him "a lone nut" stumbles
    on official secrecy and conflicting evidence

by Jefferson Morley

Salon
March 21, 2012

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/21/did_sgt_bales_have_help/?source=newsletter

It's a familiar argument in the annals of American violence:
is some specific heinous deed the work of a disturbed
individual acting alone? Or is it the work of unidentified
conspirators? That's the question hanging over the case of
Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians
last weekend. With U.S. officials releasing no information
on how many soldiers are under investigation, it is
premature to rule out the possibility that Bales had no
accomplices.

A group of Afghan parliamentary investigators has concluded
that Bales was part of a group of 15-20 soldiers. As Outlook
Afghanistan reported Monday, "The team spent two days in the
province, interviewing the bereaved families, tribal elders,
survivors and collecting evidences at the site in Panjwai
district." One of the parliamentarians told Pajhwok Afghan
News that investigators believed 15 to 20 American soldiers
carried out the killings.

"I have encountered almost no Afghan who believes it could
have been one person acting alone, whether they think it was
a group or people back at the base somehow organizing or
facilitating it," Kate Clark of  the Afghanistan Analysts
Network told the Guardian. (The AAN is funded by four
Scandinavian governments, all of which have troops in
Afghanistan).

By contrast, few U.S. news account question that the
massacre was the work of one man acting alone. In the U.S.
media accounts Bales is described as the proverbial "lone
nut," a man under pressure from former investors and
foreclosing banks who may have had too many tours of duties
and too many drinks. In testimony to the House Armed
Services Committee today, Gen. John Allen, commander of the
international forces in Afghanistan, emphasized the singular
nature of Bales' actions. "We are now investigating what
appears to be the murder of 16 innocent Afghan civilians at
the hands of a U.S. service member," he said. Allen also
announced a separate administrative investigation into
"command relationships associated with [Bales'] involvement
in that combat outpost," which suggests the scope of the
probe may be broadening.

"He just snapped," an unnamed senior U.S. official told the
New York Times. "When it all comes out, it will be a
combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues." This
official's comments reportedly drew from "accounts of the
sergeant's state of mind from two other soldiers with whom
he illicitly drank alcohol on the night of the shootings,
the official said, and those soldiers face disciplinary
action."

Leave aside this official's willingness to draw sweeping
conclusions from limited evidence. The passing admission
that two other soldiers face disciplinary action for
drinking with Bales on the night of the massacre might cast
doubt on the notion that no one else knew what Bales was
going to do. Army spokeswoman Lt. Col Amy Hannah said in
telephone interview that she could not confirm the Times'
account. "I am not aware of any releases of information"
about other soldiers facing disciplinary action, Hannah
said. If the U.S. official's remarks to the Times were
accurate, then the Army is refraining from disclosing how
many soldiers are under investigation.

Then there is conflicting eyewitness testimony. In this CNN
video, one man describes the actions of a group in carrying
out the killings. "They took him my uncle out of the room
and shot him," he says. "They came to this room and martyred
all the children." But one boy seen on the tape says there
was only a single gunman. Still other witnesses pointed out
a place outside the home, where they said they found
footprints of more than one U.S. soldier.

Journalists seeking to clarify the question have been
thwarted. In Afghanistan, Pajhaowk Afghan News reports that
Lewis Boone, the public affairs director for coalition
forces, declined to answer questions about the massacre,
saying that a joint Afghan-ISAF team was investigating the
killings. As the Seattle Times noted yesterday, the Army has
been struggling "to regulate information on the Afghanistan
suspect."

Ryan Evans, who worked with ISAF in Afghanistan and is now a
research fellow at the Center for National Policy in
Washington, said the thought "a cover up is very unlikely."

"I think the most likely story is that Bales was acting on
his own," he said in an email, "but that either (a) he was
using multiple weapons systems and using standard small unit
tactics (basically re-positioning and moving around) which
gave the illusion of a larger force or (b) the local ODA
went out looking for him at some point and people saw them
or (c) a mixture of the two."

That may be, but the military's silence is only fueling
alternative theories. "An attack carried out by a group can
worsen Kabul-Washington relations more than it is now," says
Washington-based Afghan journalist, Farzad Lemeh. "Secondly,
it would affect all U.S. military for showing
mismanagement."

With the Obama's Afghan war policy facing another crisis, it
is understandable that the White House and the Pentagon want
to control the story. But the evidence does not entirely
support the narrative they're pushing.

[Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon and
author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August:
Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race
Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).]

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