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The apparent lack of supervision makes it harder for military officials to cast this as a one-time, isolated incident, particularly after an Army general concluded last week that Marine officers had been negligent in failing to probe the deaths in Haditha. In a joint statement, the U.S. ambassador and the senior U.S. commander in Iraq called the soldiers' alleged acts in Mahmudiya "absolutely inexcusable and unacceptable." Officials say one purpose of their pledge to vigorously and transparently investigate and prosecute the crimes is to quell the calls from Iraqis, among them Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to stop granting U.S. troops immunity from local prosecution, a notion that Pentagon officials consider "a nonstarter," especially in a country whose legal system is practically nonexistent.
If there was an element of strategic calculation behind the public remarks of U.S. officials, there was genuine emotion too. In private meetings with Abeer's relatives, military officers apologized repeatedly, and a one-star general hugged her two orphaned brothers. "The general seemed emotionally distressed. He was not pretending," concluded Mahdi Obeid Saleh, Abeer's cousin, who says he rushed to the crime scene and doused the flames on her burning body. Both Saleh and Army investigators initially thought the attack was the work of insurgents. "This is what happens when you harbor terrorists," a military translator lectured Saleh on the day of the slayings.
It wasn't until some three months later that officers got wind of a different story. In June, after insurgents killed a member of Green's troop and kidnapped and beheaded two others--there's suspicion, but no evidence yet, that this attack was a response to the rape and killings--another soldier in their infantry unit told Army combat-stress counselors in Baghdad about the alleged murders in Mahmudiya. Within 24 hours of the initial report, Army officers turned the case over to military criminal investigators at Iraq's Camp Slayer. Six days later, the FBI arrested Green near his grandmother's house in Nebo, N.C., where he was visiting after attending a troopmate's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.
The details of Green's biography contain little to suggest he was destined for trouble but nothing that indicates he knew how to avoid it either. He was born in Midland, Texas, and bounced between parents who divorced when he was 4. Green, who was in his teens when his mother spent six months in jail for drunken driving, dropped out of school after 10th grade. In February 2005, fresh from a three-day jail stint for underage possession of alcohol, he enlisted in the Army, and a month later--during basic training--he was baptized in a makeshift prayer room in a kitchen at Fort Benning, Ga. In December, after Green had been sent to Iraq, he was quoted in a newspaper article as saying of a house-to-house search for insurgents, "It's kind of disappointing that we didn't find anything."