NEW YORK TIMES
Arizona plans to execute Jeffrey Landrigan next week, but his lawyers are arguing that one of the drugs that the state intends to use to end his life may not be good enough.
The planned execution of Mr. Landrigan, convicted of murder in 1990, coincides with a shortage of the anesthetic used in the state’s execution protocol, sodium thiopental. The thiopental shortage has already caused delays in executions around the country. Arizona officials have the drug, but defense lawyers for Mr. Landrigan are asking to stay the execution until the state reveals where it got its supply.
If Arizona obtained the drug from an overseas supplier, they argue, it may be substandard and violate Food and Drug Administration rules for importation. Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group that supports the death penalty, said that arguing over the safety of a drug for executions is “absurd.”
“As long as it’s a real drug manufacturer and not mixed up in somebody’s garage, it doesn’t matter where it came from,” Mr. Scheidegger said. While the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to determine whether drugs are safe and effective, he said, “in this case, safe and effective are opposites.”
Shelly Burgess, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., said that imported drugs must go through an approval process before being used in the United States, but added that executions are “clearly not under our purview or authority.”
Megan McCracken, an adviser on lethal injection issues to the death penalty clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, argued that the origin of the drug used was nonetheless important under the law.
She cited the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and a 2008 decision by the Supreme Court. In that case, Baze v. Rees, the court left room for challenges to execution methods that involve a demonstrated risk of severe pain compared with available alternatives.
To Ms. McCracken, the lack of information about the drug opens Arizona to a challenge under the Baze decision. “Its provenance matters,” she said. “I don’t think you can say that thiopental is thiopental is thiopental.”
Judge Roslyn O. Silver of United States District Court on Thursday asked the state to voluntarily reveal where the drug had come from. She set the matter for oral argument on Monday.
The state, in a brief filed Friday, declined to identify the source of the drug, citing state confidentiality laws intended to shield those involved in executions from harassment by death penalty opponents. It denied that the drug to be used was substandard, and suggested that the criticism of the drug was an “improper delay tactic.”
The state, the brief said, “takes its responsibility to carry out an execution seriously and has attempted to construct a protocol to carry out executions as humanely as possible.”
Kent E. Cattani, an Arizona assistant attorney general, said that the supply of the drug obtained by the state was effective, and noted that the protocol in place involved several methods for determining that the inmate was unconscious before administering the final drug. While an important concern with the administration of powerful anesthetics is that the patient might receive too much, Mr. Cattani explained, “it’s obviously not a consideration here.”
In fact, the amount that is given to inmates is more than 10 times the recommended dose for surgical procedures. “There’s little or no chance that he would regain consciousness,” he said.
If the judge insists on knowing the origins of the drug, he said, “we would ask that it be disclosed under seal.” To Ms. McCracken, the state’s response was inadequate, akin to saying, “Just trust us,” she said.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Tougher laws, safer cars: Fatal crashes involving teen drivers fall by a third over 5 years
STAR TRIBUNE
By MIKE STOBBE , Associated Press
ATLANTA - Fatal car crashes involving teen drivers fell by about a third over five years, according to a new federal report that partly credits the drop to tougher state limits on younger drivers.
The number of deaths tied to these accidents fell dramatically from about 2,200 in 2004 to 1,400 in 2008, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
The CDC looked at fatal accidents with drivers who were 16 or 17. There were more than 9,600 such incidents during the five-year span and more than 11,000 people died in the crashes.
The rate of these fatal crashes has been declining since 1996. CDC officials credit a range of factors, including safer cars with airbags and highway improvements.
But experts say a chief reason is that most states have been getting tougher, curbing when teens can drive and when they can carry passengers.
"It's not that teens are becoming safer," said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an Arlington, Va.-based research group funded by auto insurance companies.
"It's that state laws enacted in the last 15 years are taking teens out of the most hazardous driving situations," such as driving at night or with other teens in the car, he said.
Graduated driver's licensing programs, as they are called, began appearing in 1996 and now 49 states have them. Some are more restrictive than others, which may be one reason why death rates vary by state, Rader said.
The CDC found that Wyoming had the highest death rate, with about 60 traffic fatalities involving 16- and 17-year-old drivers per 100,000 people that age. New York and New Jersey, which have rigorous driving restrictions on teens, had the lowest rates, at about 10 per 100,000.
New Jersey and New York the most restrictive licensing programs — New Jersey essentially bans kids from driving until they are 17, and New York City prohibits teen driving until 18. Wyoming has a graduated driver's licensing program, but it's somewhat lax. For example, younger teens are allowed to drive until 11 p.m., while other states force them off the roads starting at 9 p.m., Rader noted.
By MIKE STOBBE , Associated Press
ATLANTA - Fatal car crashes involving teen drivers fell by about a third over five years, according to a new federal report that partly credits the drop to tougher state limits on younger drivers.
The number of deaths tied to these accidents fell dramatically from about 2,200 in 2004 to 1,400 in 2008, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
The CDC looked at fatal accidents with drivers who were 16 or 17. There were more than 9,600 such incidents during the five-year span and more than 11,000 people died in the crashes.
The rate of these fatal crashes has been declining since 1996. CDC officials credit a range of factors, including safer cars with airbags and highway improvements.
But experts say a chief reason is that most states have been getting tougher, curbing when teens can drive and when they can carry passengers.
"It's not that teens are becoming safer," said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an Arlington, Va.-based research group funded by auto insurance companies.
"It's that state laws enacted in the last 15 years are taking teens out of the most hazardous driving situations," such as driving at night or with other teens in the car, he said.
Graduated driver's licensing programs, as they are called, began appearing in 1996 and now 49 states have them. Some are more restrictive than others, which may be one reason why death rates vary by state, Rader said.
The CDC found that Wyoming had the highest death rate, with about 60 traffic fatalities involving 16- and 17-year-old drivers per 100,000 people that age. New York and New Jersey, which have rigorous driving restrictions on teens, had the lowest rates, at about 10 per 100,000.
New Jersey and New York the most restrictive licensing programs — New Jersey essentially bans kids from driving until they are 17, and New York City prohibits teen driving until 18. Wyoming has a graduated driver's licensing program, but it's somewhat lax. For example, younger teens are allowed to drive until 11 p.m., while other states force them off the roads starting at 9 p.m., Rader noted.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Chilean Miners Rescued
NEW YORK TIMES
The 33 miners who had been trapped underground for more than two months all returned to the surface late on Oct. 13th after a successful rescue operation that inspired Chile and riveted the world. The miners traveled up a narrow, nearly half-mile rescue shaft in a specially designed capsule. The final phase of the long rescue effort took roughly 22 hours. Luis Urzúa, the shift leader who organized the miners’ lives while they were underground, was the last to come up.
Many of the miners came bounding out of their rescue capsule as pictures of energy and health, able not only to walk, but, in one case, to leap around, hug everyone in sight and lead cheers. Their apparent robustness was testimony to the rescue diet threaded down to them through the tiny borehole that reached them on Aug. 22, but also to the way they organized themselves to keep their environment clean, find water and get exercise. Another factor was the excellent medical care they received from Chilean doctors who ministered to them through tubes leading 2,300 feet into the earth.
BACKGROUND: On Aug. 5, 2010, a gold and copper mine near the northern city of Copiapó, Chile caved in, trapping 33 miners in a chamber about 2,300 feet below the surface. For 17 days, there was no word on their fate. As the days passed, Chileans grew increasingly skeptical that any of the miners had survived — let alone all of them. But when a small bore hole reached the miners’ refuge, they sent up a message telling rescuers they were still alive.
A video camera threaded deep underground captured the first images of the miners, all apparently in good health. The discovery sparked jubilant celebrations nationwide as rescue efforts energized the country, which owes its prosperity to the rich copper mines in its northern region.
The miners later used a modified telephone to sing Chile’s national anthem to the hundreds of teary-eyed relatives celebrating above. In Santiago, the capital, motorists honked their car horns and people cheered wildly on subway platforms.
News reports suggested that ventilation shafts had survived the mine’s collapse, allowing enough fresh air to reach the chamber where the miners were trapped. The miners were able to use heavy equipment to provide light and charge the batteries of their head lamps, and they drank water from storage tanks to survive.
The 33 miners who had been trapped underground for more than two months all returned to the surface late on Oct. 13th after a successful rescue operation that inspired Chile and riveted the world. The miners traveled up a narrow, nearly half-mile rescue shaft in a specially designed capsule. The final phase of the long rescue effort took roughly 22 hours. Luis Urzúa, the shift leader who organized the miners’ lives while they were underground, was the last to come up.
Many of the miners came bounding out of their rescue capsule as pictures of energy and health, able not only to walk, but, in one case, to leap around, hug everyone in sight and lead cheers. Their apparent robustness was testimony to the rescue diet threaded down to them through the tiny borehole that reached them on Aug. 22, but also to the way they organized themselves to keep their environment clean, find water and get exercise. Another factor was the excellent medical care they received from Chilean doctors who ministered to them through tubes leading 2,300 feet into the earth.
BACKGROUND: On Aug. 5, 2010, a gold and copper mine near the northern city of Copiapó, Chile caved in, trapping 33 miners in a chamber about 2,300 feet below the surface. For 17 days, there was no word on their fate. As the days passed, Chileans grew increasingly skeptical that any of the miners had survived — let alone all of them. But when a small bore hole reached the miners’ refuge, they sent up a message telling rescuers they were still alive.
A video camera threaded deep underground captured the first images of the miners, all apparently in good health. The discovery sparked jubilant celebrations nationwide as rescue efforts energized the country, which owes its prosperity to the rich copper mines in its northern region.
The miners later used a modified telephone to sing Chile’s national anthem to the hundreds of teary-eyed relatives celebrating above. In Santiago, the capital, motorists honked their car horns and people cheered wildly on subway platforms.
News reports suggested that ventilation shafts had survived the mine’s collapse, allowing enough fresh air to reach the chamber where the miners were trapped. The miners were able to use heavy equipment to provide light and charge the batteries of their head lamps, and they drank water from storage tanks to survive.
Monday, October 11, 2010
School Sued over Nose Piercing
TWEEN TRIBUNE
The American Civil Liberties Union claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that a North Carolina school violated the constitutional rights of a 14-year-old student by suspending her for wearing a nose piercing.
The lawsuit from the state chapter of the ACLU seeks a court order allowing Ariana Iacono to return immediately to Clayton High School, which has kept her on suspension for four weeks since classes started.
The complaint hinges on Iacono's claim that her nose piercing isn't just a matter of fashion, but an article of faith. She and her mother, Nikki, belong to a small religious group called the Church of Body Modification, which sees tattoos, piercings and the like as channels to the divine.
"This is a case about a family's right to send a 14-year-old honor student to public school without her being forced to renounce her family's religious beliefs," wrote lawyers from the ACLU and the Raleigh firm Ellis & Winters in a brief supporting the lawsuit.
The Johnston County school system has a dress code banning facial piercings, along with short skirts, sagging pants, "abnormal hair color" and other items deemed distracting or disruptive.
But the dress code also allows for exemptions based on "sincerely held religious belief," and says, "the principal or designees shall not attempt to determine whether the religious beliefs are valid, but only whether they are central to religious doctrine and sincerely held."
That's where the school stepped over the line, the lawsuit alleges, saying officials repeatedly dismissed explanations of the Iaconos' faith by the family and their Raleigh minister.
"We followed all the rules, so I don't understand why the school is being so unreasonable," Nikki Iacono said. "The dress code policy allows for a religious exemption, and I explained to the principal and various school officials how my daughter's nose stud is essential to the expression of our family's religious values."
Terri Sessoms, spokeswoman for Johnston County schools, said the district had received notice of the lawsuit, but officials can't comment on disciplinary actions involving individual students.
Ariana Iacono has been suspended four times since fall classes started, missing 19 out of 28 school days so far. On Monday, the school system denied an appeal of her most recent suspension, and told her she'd have to attend South Campus Community School, an alternative facility for students with disciplinary and other problems. She still wouldn't be allowed to wear the nose piercing in the other school.
Nikki Iacono, 32, joined the Church of Body Modification in 2009, and her daughter followed a year later. Their minister, Richard Ivey, thinks school officials are dismissing a little-known belief system simply because it's unfamiliar.
"I'm shocked that it's gone this far, but I guess I'm not surprised they'd be so quick to stick with their first judgment and not hear anyone else's reasoning," he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that a North Carolina school violated the constitutional rights of a 14-year-old student by suspending her for wearing a nose piercing.
The lawsuit from the state chapter of the ACLU seeks a court order allowing Ariana Iacono to return immediately to Clayton High School, which has kept her on suspension for four weeks since classes started.
The complaint hinges on Iacono's claim that her nose piercing isn't just a matter of fashion, but an article of faith. She and her mother, Nikki, belong to a small religious group called the Church of Body Modification, which sees tattoos, piercings and the like as channels to the divine.
"This is a case about a family's right to send a 14-year-old honor student to public school without her being forced to renounce her family's religious beliefs," wrote lawyers from the ACLU and the Raleigh firm Ellis & Winters in a brief supporting the lawsuit.
The Johnston County school system has a dress code banning facial piercings, along with short skirts, sagging pants, "abnormal hair color" and other items deemed distracting or disruptive.
But the dress code also allows for exemptions based on "sincerely held religious belief," and says, "the principal or designees shall not attempt to determine whether the religious beliefs are valid, but only whether they are central to religious doctrine and sincerely held."
That's where the school stepped over the line, the lawsuit alleges, saying officials repeatedly dismissed explanations of the Iaconos' faith by the family and their Raleigh minister.
"We followed all the rules, so I don't understand why the school is being so unreasonable," Nikki Iacono said. "The dress code policy allows for a religious exemption, and I explained to the principal and various school officials how my daughter's nose stud is essential to the expression of our family's religious values."
Terri Sessoms, spokeswoman for Johnston County schools, said the district had received notice of the lawsuit, but officials can't comment on disciplinary actions involving individual students.
Ariana Iacono has been suspended four times since fall classes started, missing 19 out of 28 school days so far. On Monday, the school system denied an appeal of her most recent suspension, and told her she'd have to attend South Campus Community School, an alternative facility for students with disciplinary and other problems. She still wouldn't be allowed to wear the nose piercing in the other school.
Nikki Iacono, 32, joined the Church of Body Modification in 2009, and her daughter followed a year later. Their minister, Richard Ivey, thinks school officials are dismissing a little-known belief system simply because it's unfamiliar.
"I'm shocked that it's gone this far, but I guess I'm not surprised they'd be so quick to stick with their first judgment and not hear anyone else's reasoning," he said.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Could California's Prop. 19 lead to pot legalization across the U.S.?
TIME MAGAZINE
Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 19: the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Prop 19 would make recreational use of marijuana entirely legal — and allow cash-strapped cities to raise funds by taxing it. Completely legalizing pot may sound like a radical idea, but not to the people who are actually going to decide: the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll found that 52% of likely voters support Prop 19, with just 41% who oppose it.
In fact, Prop 19 is polling better than Senator Barbara Boxer or her Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina. It is also outpolling the gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman. It is gaining support as the election grows nearer — and it has the backing of the state Service Employees International Union, perhaps the state's most powerful union.
One of the main arguments for rethinking marijuana laws is economic. A new study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that turning cannabis into a regulated commodity would save $8.7 billion in law-enforcement costs annually, while generating $8.7 billion in revenue.
Supporters of Prop 19 argue that in these dire fiscal times, when the state has been laying off teachers and hospitals have been firing nurses, putting low-level pot users through the legal system is a luxury California cannot afford. Governor Schwarzenegger — who opposes Prop 19, which he believes goes too far — said when he signed the pot-infraction law that bringing criminal charges for pot possession is a waste of "limited resources" in a time when the state faces "drastic budget cuts." The governor may also have been thinking about conditions in his state's prisons, which house twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold, and were ordered last year to reduce the overcrowding.
But the biggest factor driving the pro-legalization movement is simply changing attitudes. People today are more skeptical of the claim that pot is a gateway drug and that people who use it are destined to move on to harder substances. In fact, a study published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that life factors like employment status and stress were stronger predictors of whether teenagers would use other illegal drugs than whether they had smoked marijuana.
Many supporters of legalization acknowledge that marijuana has bad health effects. They just argue that it is hypocritical to make pot use a crime, when alcohol — which has well-documented links to automobile fatalities, domestic abuse and birth defects — remains legal. The alcohol industry has been contributing to the "Say No on Prop 19" campaign, no doubt worried that if pot is legalized, it will cut into beer and liquor sales.
Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 19: the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Prop 19 would make recreational use of marijuana entirely legal — and allow cash-strapped cities to raise funds by taxing it. Completely legalizing pot may sound like a radical idea, but not to the people who are actually going to decide: the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll found that 52% of likely voters support Prop 19, with just 41% who oppose it.
In fact, Prop 19 is polling better than Senator Barbara Boxer or her Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina. It is also outpolling the gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman. It is gaining support as the election grows nearer — and it has the backing of the state Service Employees International Union, perhaps the state's most powerful union.
One of the main arguments for rethinking marijuana laws is economic. A new study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that turning cannabis into a regulated commodity would save $8.7 billion in law-enforcement costs annually, while generating $8.7 billion in revenue.
Supporters of Prop 19 argue that in these dire fiscal times, when the state has been laying off teachers and hospitals have been firing nurses, putting low-level pot users through the legal system is a luxury California cannot afford. Governor Schwarzenegger — who opposes Prop 19, which he believes goes too far — said when he signed the pot-infraction law that bringing criminal charges for pot possession is a waste of "limited resources" in a time when the state faces "drastic budget cuts." The governor may also have been thinking about conditions in his state's prisons, which house twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold, and were ordered last year to reduce the overcrowding.
But the biggest factor driving the pro-legalization movement is simply changing attitudes. People today are more skeptical of the claim that pot is a gateway drug and that people who use it are destined to move on to harder substances. In fact, a study published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that life factors like employment status and stress were stronger predictors of whether teenagers would use other illegal drugs than whether they had smoked marijuana.
Many supporters of legalization acknowledge that marijuana has bad health effects. They just argue that it is hypocritical to make pot use a crime, when alcohol — which has well-documented links to automobile fatalities, domestic abuse and birth defects — remains legal. The alcohol industry has been contributing to the "Say No on Prop 19" campaign, no doubt worried that if pot is legalized, it will cut into beer and liquor sales.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Army investigators seize photos of soldiers posing with Afghan corpses, severed body parts
STAR/TRIBUNE
By GENE JOHNSON , Associated Press
SEATTLE - Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers. The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.
Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.
"We're in a powder-keg situation here," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University. Since the images are not classified, "I think they have to be released if they're going to be evidence in open court in a criminal prosecution," he said.
Maj. Kathleen Turner, a spokeswoman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, where the accused soldiers are stationed, acknowledged that the images were "highly sensitive, and that's why that protective order was put in place."
At least some of the photos pertain to those killings. Others may have been of insurgents killed in battle, and some may have been taken as part of a military effort to document those killed, according to lawyers involved in the case.
Among the most gruesome allegations is that some of the soldiers kept fingers from the bodies of Afghans they killed as war trophies. The troops also are accused of passing around photos of the dead and of the fingers.
Four members of the unit — two of whom are also charged in the killings — have been accused of wrongfully possessing images of human casualties, and another is charged with trying to impede an investigation by having someone erase incriminating evidence from a computer hard drive. "Everyone would share the photographs," one of the defendants, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, told investigators. "They were of every guy we ever killed in Afghanistan."
The graphic nature of the images recalled famous photos that emerged in 2004 from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those pictures — showing smiling soldiers posing with naked, tortured or dead detainees, sometimes giving a thumbs-up — stirred outrage against the United States at a critical juncture. The photos were a major embarrassment to the American military in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war.
In a chilling videotaped interview with investigators, Morlock talked about hurling a grenade at a civilian as a sergeant discussed the need to "wax this guy."
Morlock's attorney, Michael Waddington, said the photos were not just shared among the defendants or even their platoon. He cited witnesses who told him that many at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province kept such images, including one photograph of someone holding up a decapitated head blown off in an explosion.
On Sept. 9, Army prosecutors gave a military representative of the defendants, Maj. Benjamin K. Grimes, packets containing more than 1,000 pages of documents in the case. Included were three photographs, each of a different soldier lifting the head of a dead Afghan, according to an e-mail Grimes sent to defense lawyers.
Later that day, before the documents could be shared with the defense lawyers, the prosecutors returned to Grimes' office and demanded to have the packets back, Grimes wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail first reported by The New York Times. The prosecutors cited national security interests and a concern that the photos could be released to the media.
Michael T. Corgan, a Vietnam veteran who teaches international relations at Boston University, said it should be no surprise that, even after Abu Ghraib, some soldiers take gruesome pictures as war souvenirs.
"They're proof people are as tough as they say they are," Corgan said. "War is the one lyric experience in their lives — by comparison every else is punching a time clock. They revel in it, and they collect memories of it."
By GENE JOHNSON , Associated Press
SEATTLE - Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers. The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.
Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.
"We're in a powder-keg situation here," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University. Since the images are not classified, "I think they have to be released if they're going to be evidence in open court in a criminal prosecution," he said.
Maj. Kathleen Turner, a spokeswoman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, where the accused soldiers are stationed, acknowledged that the images were "highly sensitive, and that's why that protective order was put in place."
At least some of the photos pertain to those killings. Others may have been of insurgents killed in battle, and some may have been taken as part of a military effort to document those killed, according to lawyers involved in the case.
Among the most gruesome allegations is that some of the soldiers kept fingers from the bodies of Afghans they killed as war trophies. The troops also are accused of passing around photos of the dead and of the fingers.
Four members of the unit — two of whom are also charged in the killings — have been accused of wrongfully possessing images of human casualties, and another is charged with trying to impede an investigation by having someone erase incriminating evidence from a computer hard drive. "Everyone would share the photographs," one of the defendants, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, told investigators. "They were of every guy we ever killed in Afghanistan."
The graphic nature of the images recalled famous photos that emerged in 2004 from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those pictures — showing smiling soldiers posing with naked, tortured or dead detainees, sometimes giving a thumbs-up — stirred outrage against the United States at a critical juncture. The photos were a major embarrassment to the American military in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war.
In a chilling videotaped interview with investigators, Morlock talked about hurling a grenade at a civilian as a sergeant discussed the need to "wax this guy."
Morlock's attorney, Michael Waddington, said the photos were not just shared among the defendants or even their platoon. He cited witnesses who told him that many at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province kept such images, including one photograph of someone holding up a decapitated head blown off in an explosion.
On Sept. 9, Army prosecutors gave a military representative of the defendants, Maj. Benjamin K. Grimes, packets containing more than 1,000 pages of documents in the case. Included were three photographs, each of a different soldier lifting the head of a dead Afghan, according to an e-mail Grimes sent to defense lawyers.
Later that day, before the documents could be shared with the defense lawyers, the prosecutors returned to Grimes' office and demanded to have the packets back, Grimes wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail first reported by The New York Times. The prosecutors cited national security interests and a concern that the photos could be released to the media.
Michael T. Corgan, a Vietnam veteran who teaches international relations at Boston University, said it should be no surprise that, even after Abu Ghraib, some soldiers take gruesome pictures as war souvenirs.
"They're proof people are as tough as they say they are," Corgan said. "War is the one lyric experience in their lives — by comparison every else is punching a time clock. They revel in it, and they collect memories of it."
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