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Aaron Bridges Langston of Snowflake, Arizona, was sentenced to 26 months in a federal prison on Friday for stabbing a co-worker under his supervision in the neck while working in Irak. U.S. District Judge Earl H. Carroll ordered that the 26 months in federal prison be followed by three years of supervised release after Langston had served his prison sentence.
Langston, 32, was the supervisor for Indian National Gaddam Narayana who he stabbed in the neck on February 15 2007 during their deployment in Irak:
The indictment alleges that on February 15, 2007, at Al Asad Airbase, Iraq, the defendant assaulted Gaddam Narayana with a knife causing serious bodily injury. While employed as a military contractor by Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, defendant stabbed Gaddam Narayana, an Indian National, in the throat, cutting Narayana’s internal jugular vein.
Source: “MILITARY CONTRACTOR CHARGED WITH ASSAULTING MAN ON U.S. MILITARY BASE IN IRAQ”*
(Gaddam Narayana recovered from the assault.)
What is interesting about this case is that Langston is the only contractor to be prosecuted under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (See United States v. Aaron Bridges Langston, CR-07-210-PHX (U.S. Dist. Ct., Dist. of Ariz., Indictment, Feb. 27, 2007) under MEJA for any sort of violent or crime of physical abuse.
Notes:
* The original URI for this PDF was:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/az/press_releases/2007/2007-060(Langston).pdf
The US Attorney’s office for Arizona doesn’t seem to keep its archive for 2007 online. I have uploaded a copy of the original PDF to Gorilla’s Guides. It can be accessed from the original posting on Gorilla’s Guides.
** Langston’s case is cited by Human Rights First in their report “Private Security Contractors at War Ending the Culture of Impunity” [PDF]
*** Crossposted with minor differences from Gorilla’s Guides.
markfromireland
4 Comments
Think about that – the only contractor to be prosecuted for a crime involving violence or physically abusive behaviour. The only one.
mfi
There were more crimes committed thats a given so are you saying all these other crimes were not prosecuted at all or maybe they were prosecuted but under some secret law/ trial court system?
Digg opened. Thank you Mark. When I think of the crimes we know have been committed, my blood begins to boil. Apparently we must rely on other countries to prosecute our war crimes. (Thank you, Spain.)
I’m surprised only by the fact that someone was charged at all. Being told every day that brown people are the enemy both at home and abroad laid the groundwork for the turning of a blind eye to incidents such as this.
Without justice there is no peace.