SEATTLE — Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers.
The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians this year.
Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb-drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the media and provoke anti-American violence.
“We’re in a powder-keg situation here,” said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University. Because the images are not classified, “I think they have to be released if they’re going to be evidence in open court in a criminal prosecution,” he said.
Maj. Kathleen Turner, a spokeswoman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, where the accused soldiers are stationed, acknowledged that the images were “highly sensitive, and that’s why that protective order was put in place.” She declined to comment further.
At least some of the photos pertain to those killings. Others might have been of insurgents killed in battle, and some might have been taken as part of a military effort to document those killed, according to lawyers involved in the case.
Among the most gruesome allegations in the case is that some of the soldiers kept fingers from the bodies of Afghans they killed as war trophies.
Four members of the unit — two of whom also are charged in the killings — have been accused of wrongfully possessing images of human casualties, and another is charged with trying to impede an investigation by having someone erase incriminating evidence from a computer hard drive.
“Everyone would share the photographs,” one of the defendants, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, told investigators. “They were of every guy we ever killed in Afghanistan.”
Morlock’s attorney, Michael Waddington, said the photos were not shared just among the defendants or even their platoon. He cited witnesses who told him that many at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province kept such images.
The graphic nature of the images recalled famous photos that emerged in 2004 from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those pictures — showing smiling soldiers posing with naked, tortured or dead detainees, sometimes giving a thumbs-up — stirred outrage against the U.S. at a critical juncture and were a major embarrassment to the American military in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war.
