2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, the Marine accused of shooting two Iraqis in the back after ordering their handcuffs removed, has been cleared of premeditated murder charges and will not be reprimanded for using excessive force, despite loading a second magazine and firing up to 60 rounds into the men. Pantano, who had gone “to sniper school, one of the Marine Corps’ toughest,” was standing ten feet away from the men when he riddled them with bullets. Luckily for Pantano and the two men standing sentry the truck/white sedan wasn’t booby trapped, according to Joseph Farah, the reason Pantano forced the Iraqis to search it.
Hell’s Kitchen
By Steve Fishman
…a few weeks after arriving in Iraq, Pantano’s platoon had been dispatched to a dusty house along a dirt road near Mahmudiya, in the Sunni triangle. It was an ordinary house—one story, concrete. According to intelligence, it had been taken over by “Ali Baba,” as Pantano’s young Marines called the insurgents.
The intelligence seemed good, suspiciously good to Pantano. “My senses,” he’d write later, “were fully alert.”
At the scene, Pantano divided his platoon of 40 Marines. He sent a dozen to raid the house. The remainder dispersed, guarding his flanks. As Marines approached the target, a white sedan backed out and drove away. Pantano radioed that he’d take down the car. Pantano, 32, had with him a Navy medic, George Gobles, 21, whom everyone called Doc, and his new radio operator, Sergeant Daniel Coburn, 27.
Pantano yelled for the car to stop. When it didn’t, two warning shots were fired. The occupants, a man in his thirties or forties and another about 18, both wearing “man dresses,” as the Marines called them, finally stopped and raised their hands. They were unarmed.
Pantano received word from the Marines who’d taken the house. They’d found a modest cache of arms and also some significant items, including stakes used to aim mortars.
Pantano, who earlier had the Iraqis put in plastic handcuffs, now had Doc Gobles cut the cuffs off, which he did with his trauma shears. Then Gobles marched the two prisoners to their vehicle, placed one in the open door of the front seat, the other in the open door of the rear seat. Pantano motioned to the prisoners to search the car. He ordered Gobles to post security at the front of the car; Sergeant Coburn at the rear. Both men turned their backs on Pantano and the Iraqis.
A short time later, the shots started. Gobles and Coburn spun around. Pantano, ten feet from the Iraqis, emptied his M-16’s magazine, reloaded, emptied another. Later, Coburn recalled wondering “when the lieutenant was going to stop, because it was obvious that they were dead.” Photos, souvenirs taken by a Marine, would show one Iraqi nearly embracing the backseat of the car. The other lolled on his side, his head on the floorboard.
Coburn seemed distraught. He grabbed Gobles. “What the hell just happened?”
“Don’t worry,” Gobles said to settle him. “The blood is not on your hands.”
The “new twist” reports are citing as the reason Pantano has been exonerated are autopsy reports perfomed on the exhumed bodies showing frontal entrance wounds. From the Washington Times:
Second Lt. Barry Edwards, a spokesman at Camp Lejeune, said Navy investigators arranged with family members to recover the bodies before the hearing and conducted the exhumation after Col. Winn’s report was completed.
The autopsies were completed last week at Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland and they supported Lt. Pantano’s statement that he shot the men as they came at him.
The WT included this in an April 27, 2005 report:
In a statement, Lt. Pantano has told investigators the two Iraqis had their backs to him and continued talking to each other despite warnings to be quiet.
“After another time of telling them to be quiet, they quickly pivoted their bodies toward each other. They did this simultaneously, while speaking in muffled Arabic. I thought they were attacking me and I decided to fire my M-16A4 service rifle in self-defense,” the statement said.
Yet according to the “souvenirs,” the photographic evidence, both men were still in the vehicle, one in front, one in the rear. If they pivoted toward each other they would have been facing each other over the seat, not sideways towards Pantano. “No weapons were found on the men, who were handcuffed as a Navy corpsman checked their car for weapons.” The corpsman was Navy medic George (Doc) Gobles, all three men agree on that, but if his search was cursory, as Pantano asserts, then firing 60 bullets into a possibly booby trapped vehicle whilst standing only ten feet away and two others under his command nearby, renders the reason he ordered the Iraqis to search it a sham, unless Pantano wanted to blow himself and his troops to hell.
“Lt Pantano gave up a six-figure salary as a Manhattan film company executive and left his pregnant wife, former model Jill Chapman, to go to Iraq as a platoon commander,” writes Brian Kates in The Daily Telegraph. Pantano, a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, issued the following statement, introduced by The Washington Times as an e-mail sent to the paper:
“My family and I are grateful to our community in Wilmington [N.C.], to our friends, our families and to all of the Americans that have stood up to be counted when the chips were down.”
“As we approach this Memorial Day, thankful for so much, we will not forget those that have gone before and the families who have given the ultimate sacrifice. Semper Fidelis — we will always be faithful.”
Speaking to Steve Fishman for the New York Magazine article last month, Pantano was less formal:
As a boy in a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d longed to be Lancelot. Now, he says, “I’m just trying to fucking shut these things down,” he says, though sometimes, he adds, “I can hardly fucking concentrate, I can hardly fucking see.”
A few stars are out, though the woods behind the property are impenetrable. Suddenly, Pantano gets up, walks toward the fence. “He heard a noise,” Jill says. And so Second Lieutenant Pantano, his battalion’s best, moves to the perimeter, stares into the dark woods, scouting for the enemy.
He should look in the mirror.