Sergeant 1st Class Charles Martland, the Green Beret being
separated involuntarily from the U.S. Army for kicking and body slamming an
Afghan police commander he describes as a "brutal child rapist," began
telling his side of the story Monday.
Martland is
under a gag order imposed by the Pentagon, but at the request of Rep. Duncan
Hunter, R-Calif, he wrote a statement detailing his actions on Sept. 6, 2011,
which was obtained by CNN.
"Kicking me
out of the army is morally wrong and the entire country knows it,"
Martland writes. Last week the Army rejected his appeal.
Martland and
former Captain Daniel Quinn were disciplined by the Army after they beat a
powerful local police official who they concluded had been raping a small boy.
They say they had been encouraged by higher-ups that there was nothing to do
about such horrific acts, that these were Afghan problems for the Afghan
authorities to work out.
But the Afghan
authorities wouldn't do anything about it, the two soldiers say.
"Our ALP
(Afghan Local Police) were committing atrocities and we were quickly losing the
support of the local populace," Martland writes in his statement.
"The severity of the rapes and the lack of action by the Afghan Government
caused many of the locals to view our ALP as worse than the Taliban."
Quinn and
Martland were told by a young Afghan boy and his mother, through an Afghan
interpreter, that the boy had been tied to a post at the home of Afghan Local
Police commander Abdul Rahman and raped repeatedly for up to two weeks. When
his mother tried to stop the attacks, they told the soldiers, Rahman's brother
beat her. Quinn says he verified the story with other ALP commanders from
neighboring villages. Then they invited Rahman to the camp.
"After the
child rapist laughed it off and referenced that it was only a boy, Captain
Quinn picked him up and threw him," Martland writes. Martland then
proceeded to "body slam him multiple times," kick him in the rib
cage, and put his foot on his neck. "I continued to body slam him and
throw him for fifty meters until he was outside the camp," Martland
writes. "He was never knocked out, and he ran away from our camp."
The incident lasted no more than five minutes, he says.
Quinn told CNN's
"The Lead" last week "We basically had to make sure that he
fully understood that if he ever went near that boy or his mother again, there
was going to be hell to pay."
"While I
understand that a military lawyer can say that I was legally wrong, we felt a
moral obligation to act," Martland writes.
Quinn told CNN
that they took the action they took because otherwise nothing would be done by
the Army or local authorities. "The reason we weren't able to step in with
these local rape cases was we didn't want to undermine the authority of the
local government," he said. "We were trying to build up the local
government. Us acting after the local government fails to can certainly
undermine their credibility."
The Pentagon
denies that telling soldiers to look the other way is official practice.
"We have
never had a policy in place that directs any military member, or any government
personnel overseas to ignore human rights abuses," Defense spokesman Capt.
Jeff Davis said. "Any sexual abuse, no matter who the alleged perpetrator
and no matter who the victim, is completely unacceptable and
reprehensible."
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