Sunday, March 16, 2008 | News, In this Issue...
In cold blood

In February, a Georgia soldier was found not guilty of murdering an Iraqi civilian. But his case raises questions about following illegal orders

U.S. Army Specialist Christopher Shore of Winder
CREDIT: Marco Garcia for the Honolulu Advertiser and the Associated Press

By Josh Clark and Stephanie Ramage

U.S. Army Specialist Christopher Shore, a quiet, 25-year-old married father of two from Winder, Ga., had been living in Iraq for fifteen months when night fell on the outskirts of the northern city of Kirkuk on June 22, 2007. In the darkness, he and the rest of his scout platoon stormed what they believed was the safe house of an insurgent cell responsible for setting a roadside bomb. The house’s occupants were rounded up and their hands tested for traces of explosives. Three tested positive. One was taken outside by the platoon’s commanding officer, Sgt. 1st Class Trey Corrales, who was, according to reports, keyed up after a friend had been burned alive in an earlier attack.

Corrales interrogated the suspect, but when the Iraqi admitted nothing, the 34-year-old sergeant from San Antonio, Texas, allegedly tried to force him to hold an AK-47 rifle, ostensibly to arm him, thus justifying the man’s impending death. The Iraqi refused to take the gun, his palms turned outward in front of him, emphatically shaking his head, saying, “No, mister. No, mister. Not me.” Corrales told the man to run, and when the man turned, Corrales allegedly shot him several times.

According to the Honolulu Advertiser and the Associated Press, which covered the resulting court-martial proceedings, there were about 20 scouts at the house during the raid. But even with so many potential witnesses, the facts become less clear from that point on. Various published accounts state that the suspected bomb maker lay bleeding, still alive, and that Corrales called Shore over to where the man lay on the ground and told him to “finish” the man. Shore, whom fellow soldiers describe as warm and very funny, raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, firing twice.

A couple of days later, Shore’s father, Brian, got a call from his son.
“He said, ‘Dad, I may end up in the newspaper, some stuff has happened.’”—Brian Shore on the court-martial proceedings against his son

“He said, ‘Dad, I may end up in the newspaper, some stuff has happened,’” the senior Shore recalls.

Brian Shore wasn’t terribly shaken by the call. The two always stayed in touch via e-mail or phone, and Brian is used to his children being in dangerous, and therefore potentially controversial, situations. Two of Christopher’s brothers serve in the Army and the Marines, and their father understands that there are things his sons will see and do that they won’t want to discuss.

With Christopher, as with the others, he has a standing agreement.

“If he ever wants to talk about the military, he can feel free to talk to me about it. But I won’t push him to talk,” he says.

During that first phone call home after June 23, Christopher didn’t say much, and, true to his word, Brian didn’t push him for details.

“He keeps things to himself,” Brian says. “He’s always been a private person. He’s a good kid, but he’s never talked about his personal life.”

It became clear just what the “stuff” Christopher had mentioned actually was when, several days later, he called his father at 3 a.m. to tell him that he’d been charged with third-degree murder.

His personal life soon became very public. Corrales was charged with premeditated murder. The circumstances surrounding the two of them that night in Kirkuk made international headlines. Reports of the incident stoked an already blazing forum of public opinion that fed on accounts of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and of Marines murdering civilians in Haditha. The fact that it was Christopher Shore himself who had reported the incident to superior officers was lost in the press frenzy as he and Corrales were painted as yet more examples of a military presence that had gone berserk in the desert—another reason why the U.S. should pull out of Iraq.

VIOLENCE, CHANCE AND REASON

The picture of an army left to its own questionable devices is as old as war itself. In his book “On War,” published posthumously in 1832, the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz suggested that war is driven by three forces: first, “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force”; second, “the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam”; and third, the “element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason.”

The rise of well-organized armies was supposed to insure that the third would be the dominant force, putting a rigid hierarchy in place to carry out rational policy, thus avoiding unnecessary chaos and violence. Ironically, the idea of the American military as a chain-of-command machine that runs with more precision than any other in the world has made it increasingly hard for civilians to understand how something that is purportedly a routine duty can become a horrific renegade action.

For the sake of clarity, it helps to picture the duty of scouts like Shore and Corrales as a shell game, with an IED lurking underneath one of the shells. It’s the scouts who determine whether an average-looking house is actually a stronghold for insurgents, whether it holds a weapons cache, whether bombs are made within its walls, whether an insurgent leader calls it home, and whether any number of other activities that will result in the deaths of Iraqi and American soldiers are going on there. It’s a lot to figure out just by looking. And the looking itself sometimes draws fire; after all, if insurgents leave no survivors from a scout troop, the house’s inhabitants and their activities remain secret. So the suspected enemy combatant safe house becomes a shell in the deadly shell game, and Clausewitz’s “play of chance and probability” weighs in.

When scouts don’t find a combatant safe house or stores of guns and explosives, they’re supposed to find out just where these kinds of things are. To this end, they must be adept at field interrogation. And that is where Clausewitz’s “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” have the opportunity to subordinate policy, because the policy surrounding interrogation is a bit iffy.

The current U.S. Army Field Manual that Shore and his brothers in arms were issued strictly forbids any harsh physical or mental stress inflicted upon detainees in the name of intelligence gathering. Everyone knows there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed, but these days, exactly where it lies is up for periodic debate in Washington.

For example, on March 8, President George W. Bush vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding—a sort of simulated drowning performed on some interrogation subjects—and other controversial interrogation techniques. The legislation was passed a month after CIA Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress that “there are methods in CIA’s program that have been briefed to our oversight committees, are fully consistent with the Geneva Convention and current U.S. law, and are most certainly not torture.”

The use of such methods by intelligence agencies has been hashed out repeatedly by Congressional committees since 1996, when the Clinton Administration gave tacit approval to extraordinary renditions—allowing foreign governments to apply their own standards of treatment when interrogating terrorism suspects wanted by the U.S. But there hasn’t been a Rosetta stone on the topic as it relates to the military, aside from the guidelines of the Geneva Convention, which are apparently flexible, at least in the eyes of the CIA’s Hayden.

The confusion over what should and should not be allowed in the name of gathering intelligence in a war zone may help explain the outcry in some quarters over Christopher Shore spending 120 days in the brig for the events of June 23, 2007.

WHOSE BULLETS?

In October 2007, during a preliminary hearing at his home base in Hawaii, Shore told military attorneys that he had intentionally missed the suspected Iraqi bomb maker with both shots. What's more, he said, he felt he had no choice but to shoot, in order to “defuse” the tense situation, because he feared Corrales.

This corroborates what other members of Shore's company have said about Corrales, who’s been portrayed by Shore’s legal staff as a commanding officer with a hair-trigger temper. Essa Ahmed, an Iraqi interpreter for the platoon, testified that Shore seemed to shoot at the man under duress. The interpreter himself was fearful that he, too, might end up dead while Corrales was calling the shots.

The atmosphere around the barracks that Corrales commanded, according to Shore’s defense attorneys, was permeated with fear by the time the murder in Kirkuk took place. Already, Corrales had allegedly jammed his gun down the throat of an Iraqi goat herder during a prior interrogation, and had pummeled a motorist. He was also said to have punched an Iraqi woman at the house during the June 22 raid. Shore’s legal counsel suggests that Shore just happened to be the one who was unlucky enough to be within Corrales’ reach when things went completely haywire.

“I know my son,” says Brian Shore, who sat just behind his son throughout the court-martial in Hawaii. “He’s no saint, but he’s not a murderer either.”

With the testimony of his fellow soldiers squarely pointing to Corrales as the truly guilty party, Shore might have been off the hook, but the evidence didn’t exactly dovetail with his account. The man had been running away when Corrales allegedly first shot him, and Shore claims that he then fired twice, at Corrales’ command, and intentionally missed. However, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy of the Iraqi man found that he’d been shot five times, twice in the face. None of the witnesses could say how many times Corrales had fired, nor could anyone say for certain that Shore missed the man when he fired.

But other testimony, including Shore’s, said Corrales walked over to the man after Shore’s shots were fired, and fired on him again himself. Corrales was also alleged to have staged the scene by placing the AK-47 he’d earlier tried to force the man to take next to the dead body.

Ahmed, the Iraqi interpreter with Shore’s unit, testified that the man was not only alive but pleaded for his life after Shore’s shots were fired, saying in Arabic, “Help me, by Christ’s sake … I am a Christian, too.”

These testimonials sparked two key questions: Whose bullets actually ended the victim’s life? And even if it were Shore’s bullets that killed the man, should he be culpable for the consequences of his commanding officer’s orders?