TACOMA, Wash (Reuters) ? A U.S. Army sergeant accused of murdering three unarmed Afghan civilians casually shot one victim "with a smile on his face," then pulled a tooth from the dead man's mouth, a fellow soldier testified on Wednesday.
The chilling account followed testimony from several other ex-peers of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs who recalled that he referred to Afghan villagers as "savages" and once told another soldier, "the Army needs more people who can kill people."
The portraits of Gibbs as a cold-blooded, renegade squad leader with a deep ethnic hatred of the very people U.S. troops were supposed to be protecting from Taliban forces emerged during a third day of testimony in his court-martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma.
But defense lawyers sought to discredit the prosecution's star witness, former Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, with a video clip he shot of himself delivering a profanity-laced, racist diatribe against a group of Afghan men detained by U.S. troops.
Morlock's ranting, craven appearance in the video contrasted sharply with his calm, focused demeanor in court earlier this week, when he took the stand to paint Gibbs as the instigator behind murders of innocent villagers staged to look like legitimate combat engagements.
Morlock, previously sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in the same three killings with which Gibbs is charged, quoted Gibbs on Monday as telling him: "'We can get away with it. It's that easy.'"
The court-martial caps an 18-month investigation of the most egregious case of atrocities by U.S. military personnel during 10 years of war in Afghanistan -- killings initially exposed through a probe of rampant drug abuse among soldiers.
Photos seized as evidence in the case of Morlock, Gibbs and other soldiers posed grinning with the bodies of Afghan casualties have drawn comparisons to the inflammatory Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004.
Gibbs, 26, of Billings, Montana, is the highest-ranking of five enlisted men from the infantry unit formerly known as the 5th Stryker Brigade charged with murdering Afghan villagers while deployed last year in Kandahar province.
He also was charged with cutting fingers off Afghan bodies as war trophies and beating a fellow soldier who had alerted superiors to hashish use in their unit. Seven other Stryker soldiers were charged with lesser offenses. Most already have reached plea deals and have been sentenced.
'JUST A NORMAL HOUSE ...'
One of them, Ashton Moore, convicted on drug charges, testified on Wednesday about a conversation in which Gibbs asked Moore if he would be willing to shoot an Afghan without knowing whether he was an enemy combatant.
"I said, 'no' (and) he said, 'I think the Army needs more people who can kill people,'" Moore recalled.
The climax of Wednesday's proceedings came in testimony from former Army Specialist Adam Winfield, 23, about how he, Gibbs and other troops searched a village for signs of Taliban activity during a routine patrol in May 2010 and encountered a family huddled inside one home.
"Just an old man, his family and a bunch of kids, just a normal house, nothing going on," Winfield said, recounting that Gibbs gestured at the man and asked, "Is this the guy?", then discussed how the man might have attacked them with a grenade.
Having heard Gibbs and Morlock boast about two previous slayings, Winfield testified, he realized this was the next "guy to be killed." Gibbs then led the individual outside and around a corner.
"It was just a matter of seconds -- boom, boom, boom," Winfield testified, adding that Gibbs ordered the others to yell, "Grenade, grenade!" as he set off an actual grenade that mangled the victim's legs, then yelled at his men, "You guys were supposed to shoot."
After the ensuing pandemonium, Winfield said, he moved close enough to see the victim lying on the ground and watched as "Gibbs shot him two more times with a smile on his face."
Next, Winfield testified, Gibbs bent down and "pulled a tooth from the guy" and offered it to Winfield, who said he responded, astonished, by saying, "I'll just get it later."
Winfield himself pleaded guilty in August to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison.
A fourth co-defendant charged as a member of the self-styled Stryker "kill team," Andrew Holmes, pleaded guilty in September to a single count of murder and was sentenced to seven years prison. The fifth soldier charged with murder, Michael Wagnon, still faces a court-martial.
If convicted on all charges, Gibbs faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He pleaded not guilty on the first day of his court-martial last Friday. The trial is expected to run through at least the end of next week.
(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Peter Bohan)
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