Up periscope

Outside the Wire reports:

Was a brigade commander an instigator or just asleep at the switch while the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, “kill team” was allegedly murdering civilians?

An Army investigation finds no “causal relationship” between Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV’s aggressive leadership and the killings, but it criticizes Tunnell for neglectfulness that created a climate ripe for misconduct.

This kinda reminds me of my first courts in Iraq.  The testimony was that the brigade commander was aggressive about the mission.  During ROE briefings he held up the ROE card in one hand, while he was telling the Soldiers that he wanted a lot of dead Iraqi’s (while doing the stamping his foot bit on the podium), and the stamping the foot bit reminded me of NJS.

My latest issue of Rolling Stone arrived.  I noticed this on one of the photographs:  "A source tells Rolling Stone that the two men in this previously unreleased photo were "innocent farmers" killed by a platoon not yet implicated in the scandal[.]"

Kate Wiltrout at Virginia Pilot reports:

Two vastly different portraits of Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin M. Curtis emerged at his court-martial Monday.

In one, he’s a renegade who flouted the Navy’s rules and made up his own, who routinely abused junior sailors assigned to the security division of the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, who thrived on having absolute authority.

In the other, he’s a hardworking but administratively inept leader who liked to roughhouse with the guys in his department, only to be brought down by vindictive sailors being forced out of the Navy.

Threat Level reports that the Army is saying Manning used data mining software as part of his retrieval of classified information.

Fay Observer reports that:

Jurors in the court-martial of a Fort Bragg soldier [United States v. Cain] accused of lying about a fatal stabbing began their deliberations this afternoon.