OUTCRY IN AMERICA AS PREGNANT WOMEN WHO LOSE BABIES FACE MURDER CHARGES

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 June 2011


Across the US, more and more prosecutions are being brought against women who lose their babies. Photograph: Alamy

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state's "chemical endangerment" law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.

Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way. During her pregnancy her foetus was diagnosed with possible Down's syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination, which Kimbrough declined as she is not in favour of abortion.

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.

Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."

She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars. "I'm just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids," she said. "They say I'm a criminal, how do I answer that? I'm a good mother."

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion, in which conservative prosecutors are chipping away at hard-won freedoms by stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception. In Gibbs' case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi's highest court that her prosecution makes no sense. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.

"If it's not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is," Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.

McDuff told the Guardian that he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example. "I hope it's not a trend that's going to catch on. To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme."

He pointed out that anti-abortion groups were trying to amend the Mississippi constitution by setting up a state referendum, or ballot initiative, that would widen the definition of a person under the state's bill of rights to include a foetus from the day of conception.

Some 70 organisations across America have come together to file testimonies, known as amicus briefs, in support of Gibbs that protest against her treatment on several levels. One says that to treat "as a murderer a girl who has experienced a stillbirth serves only to increase her suffering".

Another, from a group of psychologists, laments the misunderstanding of addiction that lies behind the indictment. Gibbs did not take cocaine because she had a "depraved heart" or to "harm the foetus but to satisfy an acute psychological and physical need for that particular substance", says the brief.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument put forward in the amicus briefs is that if such prosecutions were designed to protect the unborn child, then they would be utterly counter-productive: "Prosecuting women and girls for continuing [a pregnancy] to term despite a drug addiction encourages them to terminate wanted pregnancies to avoid criminal penalties. The state could not have intended this result when it adopted the homicide statute."

Paltrow sees what is happening to Gibbs as a small taste of what would be unleashed were the constitutional right to an abortion ever overturned. "In Mississippi the use of the murder statute is creating a whole new legal standard that makes women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies and threatens them with life imprisonment for murder."

Miscarriage of justice

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

In other states laws designed to protect children against the damaging effects of drugs have similarly been twisted to punish childbearers.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

THE BERLIN-BAGHDAD EXPRESS:THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND GERMANY'S BID FOR WORLD POWER, 1898-1918 BY SEAN McMEEKIN

The roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the 'half-mad imperial enterprise' of Germany's last Kaiser Wilhelm II,

George Walden The Observer, Sunday 18 July 2010

In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar wrote of Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran's President Ahmadinejad might envy: "If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief!" Sean McMeekin's book helps us understand how such a pearl of murderous mendacity could ever have been uttered. Islamic ties to National Socialism can be traced back as far as Kaiser "Hajji" Wilhelm II (German emperor from 1888-1918) who, for not especially religious reasons, became infatuated with the Muslim world.

It was Wilhelm who persuaded Turkey into joining the first world war with a mixture of gold, blandishments and promises. These included not just the recovery of territory and the championing of Constantinople against its religious rival, Mecca, but a jihad to liberate all Muslims under British domination. The result would be a world where Islamism and a German empire would peaceably blend.

"A half-mad imperial enterprise of fin-de-siècle Europe," is McMeekin's description. The Rasputin of the piece was Baron von Oppenheim, a man of protean hatreds, not only towards the entente powers (the British, French and Russians), but most notably towards himself. A self-loathing Jew of pathological proportions, every word of his title was a lie: he was neither a baron, a "von", nor in the dynastic or religious sense an Oppenheim. The wealthy grandson of Salomon Oppenheim, founder of the great bank, he lived as a harem-keeping Arab and filled the emperor's ear with anti-British and antisemitic bile, and chaotic dreams of empire.

After his attempts to goad Muslims into massacring the infidel came to not very much, Oppenheim was, by the 1930s, on the Nazis' payroll, introducing his fanatically Jew-hating friend Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (appointed by the British) to Hitler. It was Husseini who helped Heinrich Himmler form Muslim SS units in the Balkans; they proceeded to murder 12,600 of Bosnia's 14,000 Jews.

Third in a book rich in antiheroes is Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909 and paranoid reactionary, eventually dethroned and imprisoned by the Young Turks revolt in 1909. McMeekin suggests that it was in part the failure of the British to support the reformists that kept Turkish ties with Germany in place after Hamid's fall.

McMeekin is scathing about British blindness. A more imaginative approach to the Young Turks could have changed this aspect of the war: Germany's ties with Turkey were predominantly with the reactionaries and our influence with the forces for change could have weakened Berlin's position. The reasons we failed to see the future were culpably stupid: a distrust of the Young Turks based on crazy rumours about their supposedly Jewish connections.

The Berlin-Baghdad railway runs like a thread through the whole calamitous tale. Strategically, its aim was to bind Turkey and the Germans together, while sabotaging Britain's links with India by threatening Suez, and providing Germany with its own shortcut to the east through Basra.Its construction, begun in 1903, was repeatedly delayed for financial and technical reasons: 27 tunnels were required, many of them kilometres long through the Taurus mountains. The only concern the Germans manifested about their Turkish allies' infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians in 1915 was that it delayed construction further. Despite massive injections of German cash, the railway was only completed in 1940.

McMeekin talks of this aspect of the first world war as the new great game, and its ironies and anomalies were endless, especially from today's viewpoint. To ingratiate themselves with the Arabs, at one point the Germans and the British were competing to subsidise the purest strain of Islam. Then there is the idea of Catholic and Protestant Germany issuing vicious propaganda inciting Muslims to massacre their Christian brothers. And though they failed to stir up holy war, the Germans had better luck in dispatching Lenin back home to cripple Russia's war effort. Unfortunately for Berlin it was this, together with Germany's success in bringing Turkey into the war, that hastened the downfall of the Romanovs and the onset of the Bolshevik era.

McMeekin's book is also rich in farce. The Bedouins Oppenheim was keen to recruit for his jihad were unreliable holy warriors, given to shouting "Allahu Akbar" so loudly before battle they gave away their position. Muslim recruits to the SS taught about the closeness of Nazi and Muslim ideals responded so well that some began to see the Führer as the second prophet.

The biggest winners in this theatre, the author believes, were the Bolsheviks and the Turks, who regained lost territories as well as their independence. For Britain, there was little more than the poisoned inheritance of Mesopotamia and Palestine. McMeekin is hard on everyone involved, but especially the Germans. To encourage reactionary Islam, squandering a fortune in bribes in the process, and help the Bolshevik revolution succeed while losing the war, does not say much for the abilities of the Kaiser and his lieutenants.

The roots of current catastrophes in the Middle East, he writes, are conventionally attributed to the postwar cynicism of the entente powers. There are reasons for this, but McMeekin wonders why Germany's responsibility is missing. To me, it appears as another example of Anglo-American puritan guilt-grabbing, a perverted form of spiritual pride illustrated by our tendency to beat our breasts louder than anyone else.

McMeekin has written a powerful, overdue book that for many will open up a whole new side to the first world war, while forcing us to be less reticent in confronting indelicate matters, such as the origins of Nazi-Islamist links.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

EGYPT: A LIFE BEFORE THE AFTERLIFE

Gloomy tombs and morbid mummies? Everyday Egypt was much more than that, argues Richard Parkinson in a first glimpse of a new series focusing on the ancient world, free with tomorrow's Guardian

• Richard Parkinson guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 November 2010
  



Wall painting on plaster from the Tomb of Nebamun, 1350 BC Photograph: British Museum

Ancient Egypt rarely escapes our stereotypical view of it: an exotic place full of pyramids crammed with cursed treasure, waiting to be discovered by adventurous archaeologists. As in René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's comic Asterix and Cleopatra, it is often presented as a land of spooky tombs and people speaking in hieroglyphic pictures. These stereotypes are themselves quite ancient – even to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was a quintessentially different culture. But they trivialise a complex society.

Ancient Egypt is one of the first civilisations that children are taught about, and so people sometimes assume that it must be a "childish" culture, an early step in humanity's evolution towards modernity. People of all ages visit the displays of mummies in the British Museum, and there can be no more vivid way of stirring anyone's historical imagination than to look into an actual ancient face. But as we stare, we can sometimes forget that they were more than mummies, and that once they were people as complex and sophisticated as us.

Some of our misunderstandings about ancient Egypt come about in part because the Egyptians presented much of their history in a monumental and monolithic form. For centuries, the Egyptians codified in stone their history as a list of kings, each the son of the sun god, each a triumphant hero who, with each reign, re-established order in a chaotic universe. Even now, Egyptian history is conventionally divided into great kingdoms of centralised rule, the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, divided by periods of supposed chaos. The central role of the king is perhaps the key to Egypt's self-representation: every king re-established Egyptian society, eternal and unchanging since the time of the gods.

In these official records, Egypt presented itself as an extremely conservative culture. As in any society, it is all too easy to accept this ideology at face value, but there were huge changes behind this facade and continual tensions between the royal centre and periphery – aspects of history that were written out of royal inscriptions. After so many centuries, how can we get behind these official political pronouncements and begin to understand the Egyptians in context?

Occasionally we have different types of evidence for the same events, which allow us a fuller picture. In 1858BC at Semna, in Nubia at the southern edge of Egypt, King Senusret III erected an inscription to mark the border of his territory. In this, he proclaimed scornfully that the Nubian locals "only have to hear and then fall at a word: just answering them makes them retreat". But the archaeological context reveals that the inscription was erected in a massive mud-brick fortress, which shows that the king needed more than words to control the Nubians. And this fortress was part of an expansion into Nubia that was motivated by complex economic and political factors. The history of the area was not simply a triumph of royal rhetoric.

For one week during the reign of the following king, Amenemhat III, we have evidence that hints at a more complex history underlying this monumental facade. A fragmentary series of military despatches records trivial realities such as the arrival of a group of soldiers to report "on month 4 of winter, day 2 at breakfast-time" that a patrol had returned with the news that "we found the tracks of 32 men and three donkeys". This was a civilisation not just of pyramids, but also petty paperwork and interrupted breakfasts.

The ancient Egyptians were, of course, as fully aware as any modern historian or politician of the difference between words and reality. The dichotomies between what one can say on an official monument and what one really feels is vividly conveyed in a letter from Luxor, dated around 1100BC, in which the pharaoh's general Payankh tells a scribe to have two troublesome policemen "put in two baskets and thrown into the water by night – but don't let anyone find out". He continues: "and Pharaoh (life, prosperity, health!) – how will he even get to this part of the land? And ... whose boss is he anyway?" Such dissidence is unthinkable in Egyptian official writings, although even here the writer adds the obedient salutation to the Pharaoh's health even as he mocks him.

Life and death

Boris Karloff in the 1932 motion picture The Mummy Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Popular books often tell us that the ancient Egyptians spent their whole life preparing for death. Western cinema has been haunted by the image of the mummy emerging from its tomb to send innocent westerners to their doom ever since Boris Karloff appeared as the bandaged Imhotep in 1932. But if we read Egyptian poetry, we find that their attitudes to death were more complex. Poets lament the cruelty of death, and urge their readers to enjoy life: "Follow the happy day! Forget care!"

Because cemeteries were located in the desert, they are better preserved than anything else, and this has given us a very distorted view of the culture – imagine if only municipal cemeteries were preserved from Victorian Britain.

Yet they can still tell us as much about life as death – the dry desert can preserve organic material so well that we can still handle actual wigs, baskets, food and flowers from 3,000 years ago. Objects from a person's life were buried with them in the tomb, and when we can still see a baker's fingerprints in an ancient loaf of bread we sense some of the material experience of their lives better than from any inscription.

But even here there is a danger: tombs filled with such variety tell us only about the lives of those who could afford to be buried this way – that is, the wealthy elite.

Gossip and swearing

Scenes inside the tombs themselves defy the cliches: the modern visitor is often shocked to find how intimate and colourful a place they are. They show workmen squabbling and fighting among themselves, very much alive. And when we can observe the ancient Egyptians' own interactions with their dead, they were usually not concerned with magic or curses as we might expect, but with more immediate domestic matters. People would visit tomb-chapels and sometimes write letters to their dead relatives, asking them for help with ongoing family problems. In one example, a husband asks his dead wife why she is persecuting him from the underworld, repeatedly protesting (perhaps rather too much) that he had never done anything with the serving girls. The blessed dead were still part of the living family even when they had left the land of the living.

Deir el-Medina, Egypt - Ancient mudbrick walls crumble in the desert west of the Nile River at Luxor, Egypt Photograph: Roger Wood/CORBIS

Much less survives from settlement sites because they were almost always in the agricultural land of the Nile valley. Luckily for us, there are a few exceptions, such as the village of the craftsmen who decorated the royal tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, now known as Deir el-Medina, in the 1200sBC. For reasons of convenience, this was built near their workplace in the desert hills, and so it preserves a unique range of archaeological and textual material. In Deir el-Medina we can still see and study their living spaces, their furniture and vast quantities of discarded broken pottery. We can also still read about the minutiae of daily life: the problems of donkey hire, and accusations of sleeping around ("he had sex with the lady Hel while she was married to Hesysunebef … and when he'd had sex with Hel he had sex with Webkhet, her daughter. And then Aapehty, his son, had sex with Webkhet"). We can see universal human concerns embodied in very different cultural ways from our own: government–employed artists drew cartoons in which animals parody the official art they produced for the kings – a mouse pharaoh in a chariot attacks a citadel of cats, imitating scenes of royal victories. This one small village gives us evidence for a full range of human intrigues, gossip, learning, sophistication and sensuality that is mostly lacking in our record of Egypt's long history. In Deir el-Medina it is impossible to forget that these ancient people were once very much alive.

Egyptology is a relatively recent discipline, and was born in imperial times. Unfortunately it is still tainted by its own colonialist stereotypes or those similar to the macho archaeologist embodied by Indiana Jones. Popular books still go on relentlessly about uncovering finds, cracking secret codes – a language that implies that we are acquiring hidden treasures and bringing them from primitive darkness into modern scientific light. Real Egyptology, however, is no longer about acquiring objects, but about understanding their meaning in their original context, and about working within the Egyptian landscape. Long gone is the old colonial arrogance that once denied to ancient Egyptians any possibility of being our equals – and denied to modern Egyptians any interest in their own culture: Egyptology is now always a partnership with modern Egypt. More sophisticated theoretical perspectives are developing, drawing on work from other disciplines, and we are beginning to understand Egyptian culture more as a whole, and less as a sequence of facts and artefacts. Our European stereotypes are not the only way of viewing this past, no matter how familiar and natural they seem to us. Modern scholarship has a lot to learn from how modern Egyptians have engaged with their history: when the Egyptian director Shadi Abd al-Salam filmed the story of a 19th- century discovery of royal mummies, his film was titled The Mummy – but instead of being another crude yarn of monsters and curses, it sympathetically explores our complex relationship with this ancient heritage, and reminds us that ancient and modern Egypt are parts of the same country.

Culture shock

When we encounter an ancient Egyptian artefact face to face, it often produces a strangely mixed feeling of meeting something very different from our own culture, but also very familiar. No matter how "other" it is, it can also give us a slight shock of recognition.

And sometimes not so slight. It is said that when the statue of the aristocratic lady Nofret from c2600BC was first discovered in 1871, the workman excavating the chamber ran out of the tomb, terrified. He had tunnelled into a chamber and looked through the hole to find he was looking straight into the statue's eyes, inlaid with rock crystal, which seemed to be staring back at him. The excavator, Albert Daninos, described the eyes as "uncomfortably real".

Which is exactly the point: when we look at the ancient world, we do not expect the ancient dead to look back at us, or to look so lively. We prefer them to stay safely dead, distant and irrelevant. "Uncomfortably real", the ancient Egyptians can still challenge our assumptions that ours is the only way of looking at the world, and remind us that they saw it differently.

Richard Parkinson is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. His main research interest is the poetry of the classical age of Egyptian literature

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

GEORGE W BUSH: KANYE WEST ATTACK WAS WORST MOMENT OF PRESIDENCY

Former US president says rapper calling him a racist during a Hurricane Katrina telethon in 2005 was an 'all-time low'

• Sean Michaels guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 November 201
  



George W Bush ... Kanye West comment was a 'disgusting moment'. Photograph: Charles Sykes/Rex Features

Despite leading the US into war and presiding over one of the greatest financial disasters in history, the worst moment of George W Bush's presidency was, he said this week, when Kanye West called him a racist. "It was a disgusting moment, pure and simple," Bush said. "I didn't appreciate it then [and] I don't appreciate it now."

In 2005 West appeared before millions on a live telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief. As Mike Myers stood dumbfounded beside him, the rapper extemporised on race, money and aid efforts, finishing with the now notorious accusation: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." West's outburst helped spur a national debate about the White House's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Five years later, Bush hasn't forgotten. "I can barely write [West's] words without feeling disgust," the former president explains in a forthcoming book. "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low."

"I still feel that way," Bush told NBC's Matt Lauer. "I felt [that way] when I heard [those words], felt them when I wrote them, and I felt them when I'm listening to them." Bush also recalled telling his wife it was "the worst moment" of his presidency. "It's one thing to say, 'I don't appreciate the way he's handled his business,'" he said. "It's another thing to say, 'This man's a racist'. I resent it, it's not true."

"I wonder if some people are going to read that, now that you've written it, and they might give you some heat for that," Lauer suggested. "The reason is this ..."

"Don't care," Bush said, interrupting.

"Well, here's the reason," Lauer continued. "You're not saying that the worst moment in your presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana. You're saying it was when someone insulted you because of that."

"No, and I also make it clear that the misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well," Bush said. "There's a lot of tough moments in the book."

While this incident may have bruised Bush's ego, the affair hasn't touched West as deeply. This week the rapper said his gaffe at the MTV Video Music awards in 2009 was "bigger ... than the Bush moment". "There's just so few black men [who] make it that far," he told hip-hop DJ Funkmaster Flex. "That's a responsibility, that's why so many fans of mine were upset because they're like: 'Man, you've got a powerful situation ... You can't be so reckless with your opinion. We can agree with you but you've got to play it in another type of way, because you can't throw away the opportunity.'" Apparently dissing Taylor Swift is more outrageous than taking shots at a sitting president.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

US SOLDIERS 'KILLED AFGHAN CIVILIANS FOR SPORT AND COLLECTED FINGERS AS TROPHIES'

Soldiers face charges over secret 'kill team' which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".
One soldier said he believed Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon".
Investigators said Gibbs, 25, hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a "kill team". While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians. According to the charge sheet, the first target was Gul Mudin, who was killed "by means of throwing a fragmentary grenade at him and shooting him with a rifle", when the patrol entered the village of La Mohammed Kalay in January.
Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field when Mudin emerged and stopped on the other side of a wall from the soldiers. Gibbs allegedly handed Morlock a grenade who armed it and dropped it over the wall next to the Afghan and dived for cover. Holmes, 19, then allegedly fired over the wall.
Later in the day, Morlock is alleged to have told Holmes that the killing was for fun and threatened him if he told anyone.
The second victim, Marach Agha, was shot and killed the following month. Gibbs is alleged to have shot him and placed a Kalashnikov next to the body to justify the killing. In May Mullah Adadhdad was killed after being shot and attacked with a grenade.
The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies.
Five soldiers – Gibbs, Morlock, Holmes, Michael Wagnon and Adam Winfield – are accused of murder and aggravated assault among other charges. All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.
The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.
The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.
Two days later members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of "snitching", gave him a beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. The soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the "kill team".
Following the arrest of the original five accused in June, seven other soldiers were charged last month with attempting to cover up the killings and violent assault on the soldier who reported the smoking of hashish. The charges will be considered by a military grand jury later this month which will decide if there is enough evidence for a court martial. Army investigators say Morlock has admitted his involvement in the killings and given details about the role of others including Gibbs. But his lawyer, Michael Waddington, is seeking to have that confession suppressed because he says his client was interviewed while under the influence of prescription drugs taken for battlefield injuries and that he was also suffering from traumatic brain injury.
"Our position is that his statements were incoherent, and taken while he was under a cocktail of drugs that shouldn't have been mixed," Waddington told the Seattle Times.

STEPHEN HAWKING SAYS UNIVERSE NOT CREATED BY GOD

• Physics, not creator, made Big Bang, new book claims
• Professor had previously referred to 'mind of God'

• Adam Gabbatt The Guardian, Thursday 2 September 2010

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why we exist, says Stephen Hawking. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises.

"The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, he said: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

NOT GUILTY. THE ISRAELI CAPTAIN WHO EMPTIED HIS RIFLE INTO A PALESTINIAN SCHOOLGIRL

· Officer ignored warnings that teenager was terrified
· Defence says 'confirming the kill' standard practice

• Chris McGreal in Jerusalem The Guardian, Wednesday 16 November 2005

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

The manner of Iman's killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

After the verdict, Iman's father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable.

"They did not charge him with Iman's murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times," he said. "This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children."

The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R's lawyers argued that the "confirmation of the kill" after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

Following the verdict, Capt R burst into tears, turned to the public benches and said: "I told you I was innocent."

The army's official account said that Iman was shot for crossing into a security zone carrying her schoolbag which soldiers feared might contain a bomb. It is still not known why the girl ventured into the area but witnesses described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post's operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to "lure" the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then "confirmed the kill".

"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over," he said.

Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.

On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.

The prosecution case was damaged when a soldier who initially said he had seen Capt R point his weapon at the girl's body and open fire later told the court he had fabricated the story.

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child's body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. "She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs," he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. "The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face."

The army's initial investigation concluded that the captain had "not acted unethically". But after some of the soldiers under his command went to the Israeli press to give a different version, the military police launched a separate investigation after which he was charged.

Capt R claimed that the soldiers under his command were out to get him because they are Jewish and he is Druze.

The transcript

The following is a recording of a three-way conversation that took place between a soldier in a watchtower, an army operations room and Capt R, who shot the girl

From the watchtower [three-way conversation between watchtower soldier, the operations room in another location, and finally, Captain R, the officer on the ground near watchtower "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward." "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death." "I think that one of the positions took her out." "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

From the operations room "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

Watchtower "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower "I think that one of the positions took her out."

Captain R "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

Capt R then "clarifies" why he killed Iman

"This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

• This article was amended on 1 September 2010, to make explicit that the opening watchtower conversation is between three participants.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010