JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. -- The highest-ranking of five soldiers charged with killing Afghan civilians for fun last year took advantage of weak leadership in the platoon to lead his underlings into the diabolical plot, an Army prosecutor told jurors as the sergeant’s court martial began Monday.
Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., has pleaded not guilty to 16 criminal charges ranging from murder to taking fingers off the victims’ corpses to keep as bloody mementos. He maintains that, as far as he knew, the three killings early last year were legitimate engagements—and that his co-defendants conspired to blame him when they got caught.
“What you are seeing in this case is the ultimate betrayal of an infantryman,” said Gibbs’ attorney, Phil Stackhouse.
Stackhouse acknowledged in his opening statement that Gibbs took fingers off the three victims and either kept them as war trophies or gave them to others involved in the killings.
A prosecutor, Capt. Dan Mazzone, told the jurors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle that this wouldn’t be a case where they have to second-guess difficult combat decisions.
“This case is the exact opposite: It is about premeditated murder,” Mazzone said.
The crimes are among the most gruesome allegations to emerge from the Afghan war. Of the five soldiers charged as part of the so-called “kill team” within the platoon, three have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Gibbs, who faces up to life in prison without parole if convicted.
Gibbs joined the unit in what was then known as the 5th Stryker Brigade in Kandahar province in late 2009. He soon began telling others how easy it would be to kill civilians, Mazzone said.
And when the platoon later came across a body that had been mangled by a helicopter gun, Mazzone said, Gibbs had reason to believe he’d really be able to get away with murder: As the platoon’s leadership watched, one soldier stabbed the corpse with a knife and posed for a photo.
“This platoon is out of control,” Mazzone said. “He sees weak leaders, he sees an opportunity, he sees soldiers who are willing to cross the line.”
Gibbs’ lawyer, Phil Stackhouse, sought to lay the blame for any unjustified killings with Gibbs’ comrades. When Gibbs came to the unit, hash smoking was already rampant, Stackhouse said. Gibbs, who had more combat experience than most of the others, did talk frequently of previous shootings he’d been involved in—including one in Iraq, when Gibbs fired on a car that refused to stop at a checkpoint, only to later learn that the vehicle was carrying an innocent Iraqi family.
The others may have misinterpreted Gibbs’ stories, Stackhouse suggested.
“On hash-filled nights, under a cloud of intoxication ... they’d talk about these things,” he said.
Stackhouse admitted in his opening statement that Gibbs took fingers from the victims. He noted that while it’s inappropriate to take such trophies, soldiers are taught to disassociate war casualties from the human being they once were.
Gibbs is accused of a wide range of misconduct, from providing a grenade used in January 2010 to kill the first victim, an unarmed farmer in a field in Kandahar province, to directly shooting or tossing grenades at the next two in February and May of that year. One co-defendant, then-Cpl. Jeremy Morlock of Wasilla, Alaska, said that he or Gibbs enlisted one other soldier to participate in each of the three killings.
Asked why he took part in the killings, Morlock, the first witness, testified Monday that the unit had trained to be deployed to Iraq, and were frustrated that at the last minute their orders were changed to Afghanistan. They wanted action and firefights; instead they got meetings, Morlock said.
“It was a lot of meet-and-greets, shaking hands,” he said.
Prosecutors say Gibbs also led a group of others in assaulting a soldier who reported drug use in the unit, and that he threatened that same soldier with fingers severed from the bodies of dead Afghans. That soldier, Pfc. Justin Stoner, ultimately prompted the war crimes investigation by telling investigators who were looking into his beating that members of his platoon had engaged in unjustified kills.
Stackhouse admitted that Gibbs used the severed fingers to threaten Stoner.
Morlock has pleaded guilty in a deal for a 24-year sentence. Pfc. Andrew Holmes of Boise, Idaho, admitted involvement in the first killing and was sentenced to seven years, and Spc. Adam Winfield of Cape Coral, Fla., admitted involvement in the third killing and was sentenced to three years. Winfield had previously tried to blow the whistle on the plot by reporting it to his family, who reported the allegations to Lewis-McChord after the first killing.
The report went unheeded, and two more civilians were killed before the defendants were arrested in May 2010.
Spc. Michael Wagnon, of Las Vegas, who is charged with direct involvement in the second killing, has a court martial scheduled for January.
Gibbs trial is expected to last at least until Friday. The verdicts need not be unanimous; four out of five jurors must agree to convict him.
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