Timelines
May 2005

Franklin Mayor Norman P. Blankenship Jr.. died Thursday night from complications from a cancerous brain tumor.

Blankenship, 57, died at 8:12 p.m. at Johnson Memorial Hospital, said Franklin Police Chief John Borges.

"He was a good mayor and a good friend," said Steve Hougland, president of the Franklin City Council.  "He was one of those people who was a stand-up guy."

Blankenship, a Republican, was elected to his second four-year term in November 2003.  The tumor was diagnosed in December 2003, and the mayor had undergone radiation treatments.  Blankenship was admitted to the hospital April 21 after experiencing complications.

City government adapted to Blankenship's condition and continued to function through the effort of department heads and the city council, Borges said.  The Blankenship family was with the mayor as he passed away in his sleep, Borges said.  Survivors include his wife, Linda, and their two children.

"He was a fine man," said Ron West, president of the Johnson County Council.

Before being elected to his first term in 1999, Blankenship served 22 years on the Franklin Police Department and was a former chief of that department.

He also was a member of the Indiana Army National Guard, where he had served since 1979.

In February 2003, Blankenship's Guard unit was called to active duty, though he was able to serve in the unit at Camp Atterbury while still fulfilling his city duties.

He was a member of Franklin Masonic Lodge 107, American Legion Post 205, Air Commando Association, Elks Lodge 1818, the Franklin Jaycees, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and the Johnson County Fraternal Order of Police.  He also was a member of the board of directors of Johnson County Senior Services and the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns and was past president of the South Central Mayors Roundtable and the Indiana Conference of Mayors.

Normal functions of the city executive branch will continue to be carried out by the department heads, Borges said.  Hougland continues to serve as city spokesman .  Republican precinct committee leaders eventually will select a new mayor, Hougland said.

The Blankenship family deeply appreciates the prayers, support and friendship of the Franklin community during this difficult time, Borges said.  Funeral arrangements are pending and will be announced as soon as possible, he said.   Memorial contributions can be made to the Johnson County Community Foundation, in care of The Blankenship Family Patriotic Fund. (Paul Bird and Kevin O'Neal , Indianapolis Star - Indianapolis,IN,USA)

May 20, 2005 - Indiana Guard receives award for training troops

The Indiana National Guard received an Army award this week for Camp Atterbury's mobilization efforts during the Iraq war and other missions.

Camp Atterbury, a 33,000-acre base 25 miles south of Indianapolis, has trained thousands of soldiers from Indiana and across the country.

The former camp commander, Col. Kenneth Newlin, and other officials traveled to Washington this week to accept the Army chief of staff's Combined Logistics Deployment Excellence Award. The base was chosen for the award in the National Guard supporting-unit category.

Newlin credited Camp Atterbury's staff for the base's transformation into a large-scale mobilization site since early 2003.

"It is amazing what these soldiers have accomplished in so little time," he said in a news release. "They literally established logistic functions from nothing more than some rough plans, with initially only minimal and, in some areas, no supporting infrastructure." (Indianapolis Star - Indianapolis, IN, USA)

May 23, 2005 - An Iraqi Police Officer's Death, a Soldier's Varying Accounts

The American soldier and the Iraqi police officer were on patrol together outside a flea market south of Baghdad, chatting from time to time, when one of them suddenly started shooting.

What prompted the gunfire is a matter of dispute, but one thing is not: The soldier, Cpl. Dustin M. Berg, fired three times at his Iraqi partner, Hussein Kamel Hadi Dawood al-Zubeidi, and killed him. As Corporal Berg ran away, he picked up Mr. Zubeidi's AK-47 and shot himself in the side.

In the days that followed, Corporal Berg lied about what happened, saying Mr. Zubeidi was the one who had shot him. And for months he went right on lying, after he recovered from his wound, after he left Iraq, even after he received a Purple Heart he did not deserve with his parents watching at a solemn ceremony back home in Indiana.

Corporal Berg has long acknowledged that he killed Mr. Zubeidi in a rush of moments that day in November 2003, but says he did so only after the officer abruptly raised his gun in a threatening way. Everything Corporal Berg now admits doing wrong after that - shooting himself and lying about the events - grew out of fear for what would happen to him, he says, and the knowledge that other soldiers in his unit had already been investigated for incidents in Iraq.

"I just didn't think anyone was going to believe me," Corporal Berg wrote in his most recent sworn statement, "and I didn't want to get into trouble for something I thought was the right thing to do."

Corporal Berg, a 22-year-old member of the Indiana National Guard, has been charged with murder and is scheduled for another military hearing on Monday. He is one of a handful of soldiers and marines who have been accused in connection with the deaths of Iraqis and who say they were acting in self-defense.

Unlike the prisoner abuses that have alarmed and riveted the public, these lesser-known cases have created divisions over the definition of murder in a fluid war zone. In Iraq, these stories have caused bitter resentment and distrust of the troops. Among Americans, they have strained units, leaving some Army supervisors saying troops seem reluctant to carry out their duties, and have led to an outpouring of anger in hometowns across the United States.

"These guys go out and do what their country asks them to do, and now they're being told they did it wrong?" said Rich Hendrix, a Vietnam-era veteran who spent a recent afternoon inside the American Legion Hall in Ferdinand, Corporal Berg's hometown of 2,300 in Southern Indiana, where residents overwhelmingly say they support him. "I say they're doing the best they can. You can't even be sure who's your friend and who's your enemy over there, so what are they supposed to do?"

Since the war in Iraq began more than two years ago, more than 20 American soldiers and marines have been accused of crimes in connection with the deaths of Iraqis, including the small number of cases in which service members have claimed self-defense. Navy personnel are also being investigated in the deaths of two detainees, though no charges have been filed. At least 10 service members have been convicted, but in most cases on less serious charges than those they originally faced.

No two wars are alike, making it impossible to compare these cases with those of past conflicts, and some people with military experience disagree over whether anything is different in the Iraq prosecutions.

'The Same Arguments'

In Vietnam, after a much longer involvement, 95 American soldiers and 27 marines were convicted of killing noncombatants. Gary D. Solis, who teaches law at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said many of those cases are similar to descriptions of killings in Iraq now being prosecuted.

"Look, there are guys who go out and for whatever reason murder defenseless people," Mr. Solis said. "They're crimes. And we're hearing the same arguments now that we heard then: that in the fog of war, you have to make instantaneous decisions. We heard exactly the same thing back then."

In some of the 20 cases, prosecutors allege that flagrant acts led to death. One soldier was convicted of murder in the death of a 17-year-old Iraqi whom he allegedly had sex with in a guard tower. Four others are accused of suffocating a detainee in a sleeping bag during an interrogation. Another was accused of shooting an unarmed Iraqi as he ran from a truck and, some witnesses said, waved a white cloth.

In other cases, service members have admitted their roles in the deaths, but have claimed that their actions were akin to "mercy killings," striking final blows to wounded Iraqis who were suffering.

Difficult Cases

But perhaps the most contentious cases are those of the handful of service members like Corporal Berg, who claim that they acted only to protect themselves from what they considered threats to their lives, as allowed by military rules. Some witnesses, however, say they saw something else entirely.

A marine from New York says he shot and killed two Iraqis he had just captured in a house raid because they made a hostile move in his direction; but why, then, did he empty his weapon, reload and shoot some more? A private from Louisiana said an Iraqi cowherd lunged toward another soldier in a field, so he shot and killed him; but the unarmed cowherd was in handcuffs, a fact, the soldier insisted, that he did not notice at first.

Jack B. Zimmermann, a Texas lawyer who has defended service members in similar cases and who also was a prosecutor and criminal judge in the Marine Corps, said he considers these cases "the closer questions - the troublesome ones."

And some military lawyers say they believe that those cases are being investigated more often in this war. Perhaps, they say, round-the-clock news media coverage of the fighting in Iraq has also meant increased scrutiny. Perhaps such cases are simply more likely to arise in a war complicated by urban combat and the fear of suicide bombers, hidden explosives and an uncertain enemy.

"In earlier wars, I don't think some of these homicide cases would be prosecuted at all," said Guy L. Womack, a Houston lawyer and retired Marine lieutenant colonel who prosecuted marines and has represented the Army reservist accused of being the ringleader of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "We're second-guessing things we don't need to second-guess."

In Iraq, criminal investigations like the one into Corporal Berg's shooting left a strange mark on other soldiers, acknowledged Capt. Rodney J. Shambarger, one of Corporal Berg's supervisors.

Some of the soldiers told Captain Shambarger that they felt "less apt" to fire their weapons for fear of being investigated themselves, according to a summary of the captain's sworn testimony at a hearing in Corporal Berg's case. On a few occasions, he said, the soldiers seemed to stop following the military rules of engagement. In one incident, a soldier watched as a vehicle ran a checkpoint, but he did not fire his weapon.

Captain Shambarger says Corporal Berg had a good reputation in his Guard unit, made up of soldiers from Ferdinand and the nearby town of Jasper. He was calm and quiet and did his job, the captain said, a "10 soldier" on a scale of 1 to 10. He was not the kind who was a "thrill seeker," nor was he a hotshot looking to return from war with a pile of medals.

A Young Soldier

In 2002, when Dustin Berg left for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., he was the first of four brothers to go anywhere much beyond Ferdinand, a town with mostly German roots and a place so precisely kept up that one resident describes Thursday as "mowing day."

Looking back, Mary Lee Berg said she never had an inkling that her son might want to become a soldier. But at 17, while he was still studying at Forest Park High School and was busy with pole vaulting and the FFA, Dustin asked her to sign a waiver that would let him join the military before his 18th birthday.

Ms. Berg said no; a year later, he did not need her signature.

After he arrived in Iraq in early 2003, Corporal Berg's phone calls home were upbeat, full of stories about the enormous rooms and gold bathroom appliances in Saddam Hussein's palaces, his mother said. But he also told of a rugged existence for his unit, simple netting to sleep under and a child's wading pool in lieu of a shower.

That November, a soldier arrived at Ms. Berg's home with alarming news: Corporal Berg had been hit by small arms fire, presumably from the enemy, during a security mission.

Ms. Berg said she never asked her son much about what happened. A counselor trained to help military families told her not to push or pry. So she let it alone, even when he came home a few months later and even after he and three other members of the First Battalion, 152nd Infantry drove three hours to Camp Atterbury to be pinned with Purple Hearts, decorations meant for those wounded in combat.

Accounts of a Shooting

Capt. Dan Stigall, the Army's prosecutor at Fort Knox in Corporal Berg's case, declined to be interviewed for this article, and Connie Shaffery, a spokeswoman for Fort Knox, said prosecutors would not provide documents, besides basic charging papers, because the case is continuing. But summarized transcripts of sworn testimony from a February Article 32 hearing, the military's equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, and copies of Corporal Berg's most recent sworn statement to an Army investigator offer a glimpse of the case from both sides.

On Nov. 23, 2003, behind a village flea market, Corporal Berg fired three rounds from his weapon, he wrote in the statement, striking Mr. Zubeidi in the head and chest. Corporal Berg then took Mr. Zubeidi's gun and shot himself in the left side.

Moments later, Corporal Berg ran from the area, toward several soldiers, holding his wound and screaming that he did not want to die, Sgt. First Class Joseph Milton said in sworn testimony. Sergeant Milton said he kept asking who had shot him, but Corporal Berg was rambling, emotional and nearly in tears. He spoke of a man in a red turban and a white "man dress." As he bled, he never mentioned the Iraqi police officer, Sergeant Milton said.

In the months that followed, Corporal Berg provided military investigators with conflicting descriptions of what happened. At first, he told them that Mr. Zubeidi shot him before he fired his weapon. Other times, he said he shot first and Mr. Zubeidi returned fire.

Then in June 2004, Corporal Berg said he wanted to "clear up the facts" and admitted to investigators that he had fired all the shots, including the one into his own side.

In that sworn, written statement, Corporal Berg described working the patrol shift with Mr. Zubeidi. They talked about their lives in Iraq and in the United States, about weapons and knives - "all kinds of stuff," Corporal Berg wrote. Then, Corporal Berg said, he saw the man in a red turban and white "man dress," a description that his lawyer said was similar to that of a suspected insurgent reported in the area a day before.

But when Corporal Berg told Mr. Zubeidi that he was going to radio the man's description so it could be investigated, he said Mr. Zubeidi said, "No, my friend."

Corporal Berg said he reached for his radio anyway, and saw Mr. Zubeidi lift his weapon. "His face turned blank and his eyes looked vicious," Corporal Berg wrote. "I thought he was going to kill me." So, he said, he began firing. He said he started to run away, but stopped at the police officer's weapon, which was lying on the ground, and started to panic about how the military might view the shooting and shot himself.

Before Corporal Berg's shooting, Captain Shambarger said, three other soldiers in his unit were investigated for various incidents, leaving others tense. In other units, too, service members say they are wondering how the military is deciding which cases to try and which to drop. A marine captured on videotape killing an unarmed Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah was cleared this month, while Second Lt. Ilario Pantano, a marine, is waiting to find out whether his shooting of the two Iraqis after a house raid will go to a court-martial or will be dropped, as advised by a hearing officer this month.

Other Investigations

As of late April, Army officials said they had opened 367 investigations into alleged abuse or homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Of those, 218 had been resolved, including 35 courts-martial and 105 administrative or other nonjudicial punishments against 129 soldiers.

In the case of Corporal Berg, he is charged with unpremeditated murder, multiple counts of false swearing, a false official statement, wounding himself in a combat zone and wearing a medal he did not qualify for.

Special Agent Clarence Joubert, an Army investigator who questioned Corporal Berg, probed one possible motive in the shooting. He asked Corporal Berg whether it was true that he had asked other Iraqi police officers to shoot him, so he could return to the United States.

Corporal Berg said no: "That was never said."

"I shot myself 'cause I was scared of what was going to happen to me with the military," Corporal Berg wrote in his statement. "It was not because of medals, drugs or even because it was maybe a way out of the desert."

Corporal Berg now stands at the edge of two paths.

One leads through Fort Knox, where he has been required to live and work on weekdays while awaiting his hearing and perhaps a formal court-martial. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

The other goes back to Ferdinand, where he and his fiancée were married in front of 400 guests last weekend, and where a mortgage has been signed, a baby is on the way and his boss insists that his old job upholstering furniture is still available at Best Chairs Inc.

The Ledger - Lakeland,FL,USA

May 24, 2005 - Indiana Guardsman Says He Shot Iraqi Officer In Self-Defense

FORT KNOX, Ky. -- An Indiana National Guard soldier charged with murdering an Iraqi police officer admitted Monday to the shooting, but said it was self-defense.

Cpl. Dustin Berg, 22, of Ferdinand, Ind., said the Iraqi officer pointed a gun at him to stop him from reporting possible insurgent activity.

"I thought I was going to die," Berg said during a hearing at Fort Knox. "I felt I had no choice but to fear for my life."

In unsworn testimony, Berg also admitted shooting himself after killing the Iraqi. Berg said he picked up the Iraqi's automatic AK-47 and shot himself in the stomach in an attempt to give the impression of a firefight and preclude an investigation into the Iraqi officer's death.

Cpl. Dustin Berg, 21, is shown here at a February 2004 ceremony at Camp Atterbury in Johnson County.

Monday's hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury, was to decide if Berg will face charges of shooting himself and lying about the incident. Hearing officer Maj. Samuel Butzbach will recommend to Fort Knox Commander Maj. General Terry Tucker whether Berg should face the additional charges.

A court martial on the murder charge was scheduled for July 25. The charges stem from a shooting in November 2003 when Berg was a member of the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 152 Infantry, a National Guard unit from Jasper, Ind.

During his testimony Monday, Berg recounted being on patrol with the Iraqi police officer at a base about 90 minutes outside of Baghdad, Iraq. While on patrol, Berg said, he saw a man in a red turban and white outfit matching the description of someone the military had been looking for.

Berg said when he tried to call in the man's location, the Iraqi police officer, who had been "like a puppy following us around," said "no, my friend" several times before pointing the AK-47 at him.

"I looked up and saw the most God-awful face I've seen in my whole life," Berg said. "He looked like a whole different person."

Berg said he feared for his life, then shot the man three times. Witnesses at the hearing in February said the police officer was shot in the head, chest and arm.

Berg said he then picked up the Iraqi's machine gun and shot himself in the stomach. That shooting was an attempt to limit any questions about the shooting of the police officer out of fear of a military investigation where there were no witnesses to back him up, Berg said.

The military had been investigating nearly every shooting, making soldiers nervous about getting into trouble, Berg said.

"It just seemed like everything we did there, we couldn't win for losing," he said. "I thought it would just blow over."

After shooting himself, Berg ran toward the base, said Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Milton, who also testified Monday. Berg said a possible insurgent -- a man in a red turban -- shot him, but did not mention  the dead Iraqi police officer, Milton said.

Capt. Dan Stigall, who is prosecuting the case, said Berg stuck with that story until 2004, when he admitted to killing the Iraqi police officer.

"He lied about this incident repeatedly, over and over again," Stigall said.

Berg's civilian attorney, Charles Gittins of Middletown, Va., said the soldier lied about shooting himself, but had no reason to kill the Iraqi police officer if he wasn't being threatened.

"I don't think you second guess a soldier in that situation," Gittins said. "He had a legal excuse to use deadly force."

Berg, who was charged in the case on Jan. 13, has since been put on active duty and assigned to Fort Knox.

Before Monday's hearing, the Army dropped two charges against Berg. One was for wearing an unauthorized Purple Heart for combat injuries, the other for making a false statement.

Fort Knox spokeswoman Connie Shaffery said the military authorized the Purple Heart before finding out that Berg shot himself, making him ineligible for the award. The false statement charge was dismissed because Berg was not on active duty when he made the statement, meaning he could not be charged under military law.

INDYchannel.com - Indianapolis,IN,USA