S1E3: Bobby from Ohio

I met a lot of soldiers who empathized with Bobby, almost all of them. I didn't rant his soldiers all the time, basically saying been there, done that, and I predicted, and I said in the newspapers, I said, we better get ready for more Bobby Bails.

John Henry Brown represented staff Sergeant Robert Bales in military court after he committed the Candaharm massacre.

The soldiers I met who knew Bobby, I look very highly at them, very highly. He took on becoming a role model for younger soldiers. He thought that was part of his job. I had never met any of us send men. Is that anything bad about Bobby Bails.

As a lawyer, Brown is known for working with some of society's most notorious figures, including serial killer Ted Bundy. He titled his autobiography The Devil's Defender. In twenty twelve, he took on his newest client.

There were a number of titles when I always let Bobby alone, and Bobby would cry, and he would not cry for himself much, but mostly for what happened. But none of us should be judged on the worst day of our lives. There's many other aspects to our lives that mitigate the worst six that we've done, thank God.

Previously on the War Within.

Bob was always on ready. He wanted to make sure everyone was protected.

We came upon one hundred and sixty pounds of explosives. I go see the guy that is if responsible for the VSP. I'm like, hey, man, we need to go do something. He said, basically, you know this isn't your business. I hope to get out there, find guys that weren't planning ID shoot him.

And come back.

So I got the knock on the door three am.

The guard at the gate says that somebody left the base.

Come back to the VSP. They got their guns drawn on me.

I got call my cell phone and it was Bob and the first thing out of his mouth was you.

Need to run. Something really bad has happened.

I said, Bales, what the fuck happened? He looked up and he said, I think I need a lawyer.

I'm Mike McGinnis. This is the War Within the Robert Bayles story. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was never expected to reach this level of notoriety. His conception of himself as an all American guy clashes with the pariah that he has become, and his extensive interviews with documentarian Paul Blowski, Baal's pins picture of an early life that was seemingly as normal as anyone else's.

Let's begin with where are you from, where you're born?

Where'd you grow up? Hight.

I grew up in Norwood, Ohio. It's a suburb of Cincinnati, blue collar town. We had a General Motors plant there until nineteen eighty seven. You know, my dad worked in a factory his whole life. My mom never worked, stay at home mom.

So brothers, sisters, you know what. You know, how many kids are in the family where it joined.

I had four brothers.

I'm the youngest of five.

So I was a kid that got beat up and protected, so you know a little bit of both, you know. I think I got a lot of attention. I got to spend a lot of quality time with my dad that I think my older brothers didn't get.

Growing up as the baby of a family with five growing boys, finances were often spread then.

We didn't have much money, you know. I think the most money on my dad ever made was like twenty seven thousand dollars.

You know.

The one fights that I remember with my mother and father were about money, and so I think that left a real taste in my mouth. We were the blue collar gyes. You know, we were the you know, you guys aren't that smart. You know you're going to have to, you know, be more physical. You know you're gonna end up working in a factory. You know, that's the lifestyle. So I think the idea of proving people wrong, proving that you can do, and the idea that you know you want to get up.

During his time as an active duty soldier, Robert Bales was known for his dedication to his craft. It's a work ethic that was developed at a young age on the grid iron.

I love football, you know, as a kid, you know, I mean when I was seven, I'd come home in the backyard and I had my whole football team, a little nerve football out there, throwing my nerve football to my fake guys in the backyard. Later in high school, I was cabin the football team.

In those kind of groups, there's some people that are kind of the ones that are plotting out and organizing, kind of the leaders some of their followers.

You know, this is the.

Dynamic I think as far as the leader I don't think that really developed until seventh and eighth grade football. I think it changed because I just had a knack for it. You know, you start doing some things and you start getting counted on, and then it carries over. I think football carries over to sports in general, carryover

A part of that fraternity.

You're working with your best friends. I mean, these guys are your best friends in life. You know, you do everything together.

The people who know Bails will attest that he's a fiercely loyal person, whether it's on the football field or the battlefield. You could argue that he's always had a protective streak. Nowhere was this more apparent than with a friendship that Bob Foster with his next door neighbor Wade.

I started working with Wade when I was fourteen. Wade has Microsoft offlies, which means that his brain closed too early, or the soft spot in his brain closed up so his brain could expand.

Good looking guy.

You wouldn't know if he was just sitting here that he was retarded, but he had. He was severely retarded. So you know, he never got he never made it past the age of reasoning. They lived next door to me, so I kind of grew up with him a little bit. And they had a program called Model fifty, which was established by Nancy Reagan, I believe, where families could keep their children at home and get help from the outside. So, you know, basically they hired me to help take care

Brother, you know what I mean.

Bob's commitment to his neighbor was the real deal. During his freshman year of college, his first year away from home, lead hurt himself badly. Baals ended up spending the next twelve months back in Norwood.

After I got out of high school and I was at Mount Saint Joseph and Cincinnati for a year. Well, Wade half falling down a flight of steps broke his hip, and so it was a lot of rehab to get him back to normal or get him back up walking, and so I spent some time doing that.

Bals grew up in Ohio in the eighties, so did I actually, although Bales is a few years older than me, but I can tell you firsthand it was rare for the varsity football cap to spend a lot of time with his disabled neighbor. That said, he was a young man who still had some growing up to do. His wife, Carrie thinks Bob was a different person before the two of them met his adults.

He was really popular in high school.

He was co captain of the football team, he was president of his senior class party.

But he was kind of a.

Jerk before he turned thirty. I'm not gonna lie.

Prior to meeting me when he was in his twenties, him and his friends would go out and he would go up to a girl, maybe a not so pretty girl, and he would pretend like he was shy and giving her his.

Number, and then he would walk away.

He goes, I'm really shy that you should give me a call sometime, right and his friends would be watching this and she would open it up and it would say call one eight hundred weight watchers. And so I told him, I'm like, look, if I met you before we were thirty years old, I wouldn't have liked you, and you wouldn't have liked me.

So much of Robert Bayales's childhood sounds like it could have been ripped from eighties movie. The big working class family, the football, the friendships, the pranks. There aren't many indicators that this guy would one day end up in Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. Compare that with some of the other infamous mass murderers in American history. Frequently, their upbringings were

I never believed that people were born evil. I never was raised that way, But when I met Ted Bundy, I changed my opinion. He was definitely a very evil person. Was clearly a sociopath. I don't think that the term serial killer was even in our vocabulary until the seventies or the eighties, when there were a lot of incidents like that. Then Ted came along, and of course that label fit him pretty well. There's no way that you could compare Bobby Bails to Ted Bundy at all. Bobby

Bob Let's transition from Middle America to the middle of the Afghan desert. After coming back to the VSP covered in blood, Robert Bales told Special Forces Captain Danny Fields that he needed a lawyer. That request would be honored the first the military had a more pressing priority.

So afterwards, you know, it was probably like three o'clock when it flew me out of panjaway to Kandahar. And there's like some blank times here where everything kind of runs together, you know. So I was in Candahar in this like little box room there's noiger than a storage closet.

Carrie Bales was responsible for recruiting star attorney John Henry Brown for one of the most polarizing cases of his career.

It was seeing my older sister and her husband's idea to get John Henry Bound involved because he's really good with the media.

He dealt with other, you know, controversial cases. I didn't know who he.

Was prior to meeting him, right, Like, I didn't go Google him or anything like that. He was a smart person, you know, who I knew was powerful.

I guess as.

In like probably the worst situation ever, and here he was someone that was going to that said they would you help us, certainly trying to help us.

I was contacted by Bobby's family. I remember They've been driving in my car getting a call on my bluetooth, and of course I'd heard in the news what had happened, but they had mentioned a name of any soldier involved. I just knew the General of publicity about some soldier going off the defense basically, so I knew the tragedy of the whole event.

We met with him and got him on board to help us.

Surreal, very surreal.

Carrie was scared, her family was scared to kids. This is a scary situation. The Taliban has nothing to be taken lightly. So the army whisked Carrie and her family away to a safe house on the base somewhere.

The military packed up our house for us and moved all of our things within that next week. I had to get a house on Fort Louis without telling anybody who I was. He and my kids definitely saw the media circus.

If you were watching the national news at this time. Robert Byles's name and background was hard to avoid.

His name has not been officially released by the military, but the military source now confirmed the suspect is Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. Obviously, it's easier now to look at his record and all of that.

He was a first platoon sergeant there in Afghanistan, did a lot of work with the tribal elders there.

Watching the story play out in the public arena. John Henry Brown only became more convinced that he was doing the right thing, picking up the phone for a defendant like Bales at a moment when most other people might have hung up.

I believe the only reason to be a lawyer is to help people. I guess I've always been an advocate for the underdog, and it just seemed fundamentally unfair to me that someone who we created, had four deployments, should be treated the way he was being treated.

Brown sought to put the staff sergeant's strongest advocates front and center, but twenty twelve, the list of people willing to openly side with an alleged workmaninal was short. Brown himself was one, Carrie was another.

I felt it really important for me show the human side of Bob and that Bob is not what has been portrayed of him. And I remember thinking that I really liked Matt Lauer and that he would be a good listener to my story.

You've spoken to him twice on the phone.

Did you say, sweetheart, did you do this?

No?

No, I mean, as a spouse, wouldn't you want to ask that question quickly, honey, why are they saying these things about you?

Not on a monitored phone call. It was surreal. It was like, this isn't happening to me. This is like you watch it on TV's this kind.

Of story, this kind of thing happens to someone else, But here I am living this and it was frightening and not the way you want to be in the media. It just drives me crazy that everybody wants to think the absolute possible worst and it's not their family being drug through the mud.

Painful as it might have been. Kerrie went on National TV for one clear reason, to literally save Robert Bales' life.

The Secretary of the Fans, Leon Panetta, actually called for a death penalty sentlus, which is first of all, undue command influence and should not have been said. And I think that was one of the reasons why I ended up representing body. Leon Panetta, Well, here's somebody who's kind of known internationally as the humanitarian asking for the death penalty, and to me, that's inconsistent. Whatever happened. You know, we as the nation created Bobby and we were quickly abandoning him.

Secretary Panetta declined our interview request, so the veracity of his claim that Panetta asked for the death penalty is unclear, but he did take immediate action after the Canahar massacre, giving a press conference just hours after the news had broken.

Traveling overseas Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Himself, so the death penalty is a possibility.

Obviously, we were all deeply shocked and sad by the event that occurred there.

On the afternoon of March fifteenth, twenty twelve, four Star General John Allen gave a press conference on the Kandahar killings. Allen worked closely with Panetta and was responsible for managing the war effort in Afghanistan. His comments reveal a lot about how the US would be regarding Robert Bales.

In the case of Staffs. Sergent Bale's my sincere condolences to the loved ones, family members, and friends of those who were killed and injured in that senseless act of violence. Charges, as you know, have been preferred against Stas Argent Bales. Compensation payments to the families of the victims have been paid, and both the criminal investigation as well as an administrative investigation continues.

Something went terribly wrong investigation pending something went terribly wrong. How are you making sure something like that doesn't happen again.

We're investigating this one very thoroughly, and I'm looking at command climate of that unit.

In fact, let's go back to the village stability platform. The morning of March eleventh, twenty twelve, hours after the shit storm began, Brown might have said that the military was abandoning Bales, but that's in retrospect. In the heat of the moment, soldiers like Captain Fields and Private Alexander were left to deal with a volatile situation that Bales created.

Just having him on the base. After we kind of pieced together what we thought that he had done, it was a very uncomfortable feeling to have that person near you. We said, hey, make sure we're watching this guy, and let's let him pack a bag because he's going to have to get out of here.

I don't remember, you.

Know, exactly how long it was that he was there, but it could have been more than a few hours, you know. I remember they landed, he got right on the plane and took off, so he was gone pretty quickly.

In the region of panchwe the news of the American military breaking into civilian households and killing women and children was spreading fast.

At first light sun came up, there were people at our gate, and you know, they said, we want to speak to who's in charge. We see footprints that have left your base and are at the place where people were shot and killed.

We have the bodies.

We're going to bring them to you in the back of a pickup truck because we want you to see them.

That we're not lying to you.

And our front gate is not a gate.

It's a piece of wood with constantina wire up throughout.

It's not like some steel fortress thing that you think it would be right like in the movie An.

It's it's not any type of defensive barrier at all.

The Afghans were not there to inflict damage. What they were there to do is get bail. They wanted instant retribution for what happened, and they wanted to show us the evidence of what it happened.

These people came to the gate I saw.

I ended up seeing more people in front of that gate than I had in the previous forty five days. I don't know where they came from, but these people were showing up in force and they demanded. They said, we know it was at least one person here, if not more. They thought it was the entire base, honestly, and we want whoever did this.

Thank God. I could say, well, I'd love to give him to you, but he's not here. I just remember having relief that I could say.

That Captain Field's private Alexander and the man were calling Soldier x all guarded the entrance as an anguished, in formidable crowd grow outside.

We were getting intelligence reports that there were some bad actors in that crowd who either had some machine gun of some sort, or hand grenades or RPGs, but they had something that they were intending to use to harm us or through.

A few hours, like there were hundreds of Afghans, pissed Afghans outside our gate, bringing like they're bringing by shot up by his kids and stuff like that.

Ten feet away from me, fifteen feet away from you are a crowd of Afghans holding dead children, displaying the children pointing to them, crying, looking so enraged at us.

I mean, there's one guy, white Beard, and his eyes were just red. There was no call it.

The red in his eyes.

It became really personal at that time like, really really personal.

I'm looking at the crowd. I'm like, they're are coming and kill us all. They're coming, kill us all. And I understood it. I understood their anger. You know, if I was a dad and some shirk off came and they'ld be held a pay right, so.

Horrible When Bails attacked Hadji Muhammad Wazir had been spending the night his brother's house in another town. He recalls the morning after he learned that six of his seven children had been killed.

In the morning, we were having tea when one of the people of our village called us and said there was a problem in my house. I said, what's wrong? When they told me, I understood the situation. I thought that either there was a night operation by the Americans or it was bombed.

What was the reaction of you and the people of your village after the incident.

After the incident, all the people were provoked and their blood boiled. They say today they did this injustice to Haji Wazir. Tomorrow it will happen to me as well. Why is such cruelty done to us? Why are Knight military operations carried out against us? Why did they enter our house at night. What are their rights that an infidel enters Muslim house and tramples women, children and babies and makes them murdyers by shooting them and then they

Here's Mulla Baran, whose brother was killed by bales.

We continued our gathering from the morning until the scholars and elders told us to bury the martyrs. I am very grateful to the people of my place who gathered and demonstrated in front of the Americans and warned the Afghan government that we are attacking the American forces.

For both Afghan civilians and American soldiers in the region of Panjway, life became even more dangerous after March eleventh, twenty twelve. It started with the tense encounter outside of esp Beleambay and it didn't stop.

I think the second day, I remember waking up with almost this question of like was this real or was this a dream?

And then I walked outside and I thought, well, okay, yep, this was all real.

You know, balls got taken away in the helicopter, but we had to sleep there and like we had to essentially, you know, survive. I mean, it wasn't even cleaning up the mess. It was just survive where you are and there's nobody coming. It was bad before, but it got demonstrably worse after Bales was gone. I mean, the entire country of Afghanistan was on the safety standown for two weeks because of this incident.

For thirty days, basically we could do anything.

So in that month after the incident, when we were still in the base, a lot of targeted attacks on the base, you know, some order or some a lot of small arms fire, mostly just harassing fire.

The morning prayer that morning was just a geoon, just come here kill these people.

I basically slept with my rifle for a few weeks.

You know, for the thirty odd soldiers inside the VSP, options are limited. Fostering relationships with the locals is an impossibility. Fighting back against the Taliban would only create more problems. The only reason they're still there is to help the army complete in internal investigation otherwise known as AT fifteen to six.

It was identified obviously very shortly after the incident that you know, they needed to do an investigation, and in that time, basically our job was to answer the questions for the fifteen six. There was a I believe it was a one star general doing the fifteen to six and basically you just needed to be available for when he would call your name. And so that was our job until the fifteen six was done, and then we were going to be replaced.

The United States knew that the soldiers associated with the Kanahar massacre would eventually be going at home, but on a macro level, America had a bigger problem on its hands tensions with the Afghan central government, namely President Hamid Karzaid.

In twenty twelve, the relationship with the United States in Afghanistan was at an all time low, and every.

Time krsn I gave an interview, it became more and.

More evident that the relationship was breaking down with the Obama administration.

That's the voice of journalist Yealda Hakim, who was working for the Australian news outlet SBS Dateline in twenty twelve.

He talked about the sovereignty of the nation. That was something that he felt quite strongly about. I had quite a sort of an intense conversation with Hamid Kausei about, you know, sovereignty and the place of the nation and night raids.

Night raids were a point of contention during this period of the Afghan War. Associated Press reporter Kathy Gannett explains.

Tom mccarzi and the American administration were at art. The night rates were relentless, and that was in the middle of the night, a rating party of American soldiers goes into a village that is supposedly at Alaban Village and goes into the halls, separates the men the women. And it was a constant feature of the US strategy in Afghanistan. And it was strongly opposed by Hamid Karzai. And that's because the tribal people themselves were deadly opposed to this.

One could argue that staff Sergeant Bales took the concept of a night raak to its logical yet horrific extreme. Several days after the incident, Karzai addressed it in a speech, saying, quote, this has been going on for too long. You've heard me before. It is by all means the end of the rope.

Here it was clear that the Afghan government had lost complete control of the situation. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, if they ever were, but certainly Karzai in twenty twelve gave off that perception.

The US military's reaction to the killings added insult to injury. Karzai wanted Bales to be tried in Afghanistan, where he would be executed in accordance with Afghan justice, but as we learned earlier, Bales was rushed back home to face trial in America. Kathy Gannon says that was standard operating procedure.

Nobody ever thought the Americans would bye by Afghan law. I mean, it's not like anybody believes that the Americans are going to let a military person, whatever his prime stay in the country where he committed it.

Even so, veteran and Panjwai podcast host Curtis Grace argues that America's unilateral decision had serious ramifications for Karzai.

He did look weak when we took Bob Byles out of the country within twenty four hours of him doing it, and he, I mean, he was gone, like the Afghans never got a chance, and it made cars I look really weak. And his brother in fact went to Belumby and tried to go to nau Gbn and lost him of his personal guard trying to go there all to try and be like, no, we are in charge here, this is an Afghan matter, and we just like took

The telebumnel gaining a lot of ground, The war was intensifying. Obama was trying to find a solution with a partner who was increasingly being backed into a corner and discrudged. So Kusai's rhetoric was getting more and more intense and the relationship was deteriorating.

In late March of twenty twelve, yalde Hakim was on assignment in Afghanistan.

I was an Afghan born Western journalist. I had access to the Western press and a platform, but my Afghan heritage meant I had a level of empathy for the country of my birth and for the people and what they were going through.

The region wasn't mourning for the victims of the Kandahar massacre. Even so, nobody seemed to know what had actually happened. As John Henry Brown recalled, the Afghan police weren't able to conduct a proper examination of the crime scene.

That area became so dangerous after the incident that I don't think we the United States went back there and did a normal investigation. I mean, you know, there was no CSI.

Like many reporters at the time, Yelda was frustrated by this lack of concrete information that existed on the case.

This whole thing became shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Virtually as soon as they went and got fails, he disappeared overnight from the face of the earth.

There wasn't any real acknowledgment of what.

Had just taken place, and everything just shut down, and the Afghan partners were working with the US military to kind of do as they were told, which was hide the witnesses away, don't let the investigators get involved, don't let anyone go out to the field where it happened.

Diffuse, diffuse, diffuse.

But that ended up having a detrimental effect, because you know, the minute you tell journalists they're not supposed to do something, they make sure they do do it.

Yolder had recently developed a rapport with Karzai. She lobbied the Afghan president for access to Alakosa and Najebien. The villagers hit by staff Sergeant Bales.

Because he was so furious and this was such an intense time in the country, he sort of said, allow

Her goal was set people, you're perilous, figure out exactly what happened on the night of March eleventh, twenty twelve.

We had to provide clarity.

We were on a fact finding mission trying to report or figure out what the truth was. In the last fifteen years of reporting from Afghanistan, I've realized nothing is as it seems.

It's all very murky. So my whole aiming.

As the only journalist on the ground was to provide some kind of clear timeline. I knew that I had sort of one shot at this, and I knew the dangers involved, and I was going to give it my.

Absolute all.

Y'all, to quickly learn what Bales and his fellow soldiers already knew. The road to Panjway was treacherous.

I went to the police headquarters in Kandahar and they said to me, you want to go to Punchway, not happening. No way in hell are you going anywhere in your Punchway. If you have a death wish, you got a Punchway.

We don't have approval from the US military.

They're not going to support this operation, and we're not willing to lose a single man for this.

But we knew we needed to get.

To the crime scene, and so me, my cameraman, my security traveled to the road heading into Punchway alongside General Rosark in his convoy.

General Rozak was the head of police and Candor Heart. He served as the de facto chaperone of the trip.

I remember sitting in the car with Razakh, and you know, he was someone who had all sorts of allegations of atrocities in his name and the treatment of human rights violations, and we were single handedly holding together Candor Heart against it falling to the Taliban and the Americans knew he was an important allied there. I am in the car with him, and suddenly the convoy comes out of fire and I'll never forget this.

Razak jumps out of this armored vehicle and.

I sort of sum into the car seat, and he gets into the front seat, picks up his rifle and just randomly.

Starts shooting into the distance.

And I just remember being quite horrified, just the randomness.

Of it, like there's someone shooting an our convoy just got out of the car and started shooting randomly.

And then we got back into the car and it was like as you were.

Once they reached their destination, Yelda and her crew knew they had officially entered a warzone.

You know. I was in my late twenties and no real responsibilities in life, and just sort of thinking, well, nothing's going to happen to me. But I remember as we're walking across, I could hear impasture and durry the two police officers.

They'd said with us. I remember them saying to each other, do you think they've really cleared this place of minds? You know, we know the Taliban have got booby.

Traps be careful eyes wide open to the potential risks. Yolda and her cameraman forged ahead into the villages.

So we go to punchwe and we do all that filming and then we sort of part ways with the police and Razakh.

And those guys village.

I went filmed inside Punchwey the home. I saw the crime scene. I saw the blood splotted on the walls.

You know.

We did all of that, and then we came back and then we came back to the police headquarters. We were staying at a different hotel, you know. We said goodbye to them, and I met Mala Baran at the military compound. His brother was killed and he had taken in his sister in law with all of her children into his home.

Mala Barran is one of the app hands we interviewed. Heard him speak earlier in this episode.

And Baran said, you know, you have to come to this certain area. So we're all getting out the car to.

Go to the village.

And he said, no, I'm only taking her. The rest of this, like security and your cameramen, they're not coming because it's all women. It's our women. I'm not taking sort of more white men into my home and it's either you or you don't do this. So I look at my cameraman and he hands me a little handicap. Take this, and you know, are you comfortable to go?

And I sort of said, I think so.

There's no lights and we're walking into this neighborhood on the outskirts of Kandah. I remember looking back and the car that my team were in was getting further and further and further away, and then I just had a.

Moment where I couldn't see the lights.

From the car anymore, and I just thought to myself, Oh my god, I'm walking into a Tullivan trap and they're going to hold me for ransom.

This is the most stupid thing I could do. And so I stopped in.

My tracks and I said to him, I don't want to go any further. And he said to me why, and he looked at me and he realized I totally now was freaking out, and he said, it's okay, It's.

Going to be okay.

Let's take a moment to realize just how insane this looks. Yalder, a female foreign journalist going alone into villages that had just recently been the scenes of grizzly murders for an outsider to these tight knit patriarchal clans and families, intrusion into their lives, give me death. And here is Yalder going above and beyond to shed light on this story.

I got to the doors.

I just thought, he's going to open the doors and they're just going to be a whole heap of like men with guns inside, and that's it.

And when he opened the doors, it was dark and they didn't have any electricity.

And I looked into the distance and there was a woman sitting on the ground with multiple children around her.

Very small children. We're talking, you know, a.

Newborn and you know, a one year old, two year old, like very very small children, a combination of all of our aunt's kids and her own kids after her husband was killed. And I remember sitting on the ground and turning on my camera and.

Just doing this interview with her.

And he was saying to her, tell her what you saw, and the children started describing the boot of a soldier kicking one of the children in the stomach and stomping on one of the children, and then another child was saying they were multiple people.

That was what stayed with me, and that I found quite chilling.

I was interviewing a little girl and she said to me, I saw many.

Soldiers with lights.

She said, it was lights coming out of their helmets.

I saw many, many soldiers, and they came and they killed my father.

Coming up on the war within.

Giving a founding compensation for the loss of life, it's kind of a band aid fix.

I told the Americans that we don't want your money. We just want this person who wronged us to be executed.

My job as the prosecutor is to represent the government in the pursuit of justice. I wanted the public to understand that these people were human beings.

The military was hampered by the inadequacy of the Afghan police.

All of the people nearby said, yes, we saw two people here.

I want a conviction, playing by the rules, no insurmountable mistakes.

It's ninety seven conviction rate in the u CMJAY. The closest to that is Nazi Germany.

How many times do we see the army throw guys away all the time? The War Within the Robert Bailes Story is production of Bungalow Media and Entertainment, Checkpoint Productions and Mosquito Park Pictures in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series was created by executive producers Paul Plowski and David Check. Executive producers for Bungalow Media and Entertainment are Robert Friedman and Mike Powers. The podcast was written and produced by