Staff Sergeant Robert Bales
Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, charged with murdering 16 Afghan villagers last year, is going to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, his lawyer says.
That’s as good, as these things go, as Bales can expect to get, personally.
He’s expected to enter a plea of guilty next Wednesday, June 5, and be sentenced to life imprisonment, perhaps with a chance for parole, in September.
It’s also good for the Army.
It means there won’t be a full-fledged court martial with testimony the Army probably prefers not be aired. Bales, 39, is charged with the most serious war crime committed by a U.S. troop during the 12-year-long war in Afghanistan.
Bales was the face of what can happen when the nation decides to wage a long war with a short force. He was on his fourth deployment – one he had said he didn’t want – when the Ohio native and father of two allegedly launched his killing spree.
He will have to explain to the military court what he did that night and why, to the degree that he can. But the plea deal means the Army is unlikely to dive as deeply into the roots of Bales’ actions as a full-fledged court martial would go. Both the judge and the commander of Joint Base Lewis McCord outside Seattle will have to approve the deal.
There was lots of talk about contraband Jack Daniels whiskey being consumed – by Bales ands others – the night of March 11, 2012, when the slaughter occurred in Kandahar province. And that he may have been under the influence of some drug – perhaps steroids, Valium or mefloquine, also known as Lariam, an anti-malarial medication.
Emma Scanlan, one of Bales’ attorneys, said during his November preliminary hearing that the Army had provided Bales with “shockingly limited” treatment for his PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
“He’s broken,” John Henry Browne, Bales’ attorney, told the Associated Press on Wednesday, “and we broke him.”
Regardless of how good it is for Bales, personally, and the Army, professionally, it stinks for the U.S. taxpayers who sent him off to war, the villagers — nine of them children or teen-agers — that he allegedly killed, and the truth.