Charges Dropped in ‘Friendly Fire’ Deaths

The Air Force dropped involuntary manslaughter charges against two reserve pilots responsible for the “friendly fire” bombing that killed four Canadian soldiers near the Afghan city of Kandahar last year, military officials said Thursday.

The decision provoked an angry response from relatives of the Canadians killed in the bombing, but a top Canadian defense official issued a measured response.

Air Force officials said F-16 pilot Maj. Harry Schmidt, 37, who dropped a 500-pound bomb on allied soldiers, will face nonjudicial punishment. Schmidt’s supervisor, Maj. William Umbach, 44, will receive a reprimand for “leadership failures.”

Schmidt now faces administrative penalties that are limited to a reprimand, 30 days’ confinement in his quarters, loss of one month’s pay and restrictions on travel for two months. He could separately be permanently banned from flying by an Air Force Flying Evaluation Board.

Schmidt and Umbach, Illinois National Guard pilots, were the first to face criminal charges in a friendly-fire incident in a time of war.

The decision ends a legal showdown in which the two were charged with involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and dereliction of duty, carrying combined penalties of up to 64 years in prison.

But it is unlikely to assuage Canadian feelings about the April 17, 2002, incident, the deadliest involving Canadian troops in a combat zone since the Korean War.

The incident drove a wedge between Canadian politicians and their American counterparts and chilled relations between troops from the two nations at the base in Kandahar, near the site of the bombing.

The families of the deceased Canadian soldiers expressed outrage after U.S. and Canadian military officials met with them to explain that the homicide and assault charges would be dropped.

“It’s going to happen again and again. They are just whitewashing everything,” said Clair Leger in Ottawa, whose son, Sgt. Marc Leger, was killed.

“Top guns are so special, but what about the poor soldiers beneath them?” Leger told Global Television News, a Canadian station.

Canadian officials have persistently called for strict punishment over the incident, but Lt. Gen. Ray Henault, chief of the Defense Staff, offered a careful response.

“I appreciate that the soldiers’ families and friends, as well as all Canadians, have strong feelings about the outcome of the U.S. proceedings and the welfare of Canadian Forces personnel,” Henault said in a statement.

“Although this tragic incident underscores the risks taken by Canadian Forces personnel, we remain committed to defending Canada and to contributing to international peace and security. Our participation in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan exemplifies this commitment.”

Henault said Canada “will continue to work with our allies to mitigate the possibility of such a tragedy recurring.”

The Air Force decision is not necessarily final. Schmidt’s attorney, Charles Gittins, said his client was considering his right to reject the offer of administrative punishment and insist on a trial. That would force the Air Force to either move ahead with a court-martial, drop all proceedings or seek some other way of punishing him, legal experts said.

“Like the other 14 friendly-fire accidents that have occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, charges should not have been pursued in the first place,” Gittins said.

Such a challenge would be extremely unusual, said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit lawyers trade association.

In dropping the charges, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, essentially endorsed the recommendation of a military panel.

Carlson recommended that Umbach’s request to retire be approved.

“He believed under all the circumstances of the case offering an Article 13 [trial] to Maj. Schmidt and a letter of reprimand for Maj. Umbach met the interests of justice and discipline,” Capt. Denise Kerr, an Air Force spokeswoman, said of Carlson’s decision.

An administrative trial would explore whether Schmidt failed to ensure he was not bombing a friendly target and failed to follow instructions of an Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, surveillance plane not to fire.

According to separate Canadian and American military inquiries, the incident began at 2 a.m. on April 17, 2002.

The two F-16 pilots were flying over Tarnak Farms, a former Al Qaeda training site south of Kandahar that the U.S. military turned into a live-fire training ground, when the lead pilot saw what he described as fireworks.

Umbach, who was returning to Ahmad al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait after a long patrol over Afghanistan, was given permission from a nearby AWACS surveillance plane to target the site but not to fire, the reports found.

As he “locked on” to the Canadian soldiers, Schmidt, Umbach’s wingman, saw more flashes that he thought were surface-to-air missiles and asked for permission to fire his 20-millimeter cannon.

The AWACS commander told him to hold fire and asked for more information.

Instead, Schmidt invoked his right to defend his plane, the reports said, saying, “I’m rolling in, in self-defense.”

The pilot plunged to 10,000 feet and dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb that killed Leger, Pvt. Richard Green, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer and Pvt. Nathan Smith, and injured eight others, the report said.

The Canadian soldiers, from the 3rd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, were firing a range of weapons, from pistols to shoulder-fired anti-tank guns, but not surface-to-air weapons, defense officials said.

The Canadians took all necessary precautions, according to the reports. They had sought approval for the night-firing training at a designated training site routinely used by allied soldiers and even stationed a Canadian sentry in the air-control tower at the U.S. base in Kandahar, the Canadian report said.

Even if the case ends with modest penalties for Schmidt, it leaves several issues unresolved, legal experts said.

It did not resolve the contradiction between the provision in the military code of justice prohibiting pilots from flying under the influence of amphetamines and the routine practice of giving them “go-pills.”

Schmidt and Umbach blamed amphetamines they had taken and the “fog of war” for the incident.

Fidell said the case also sets a murky precedent for friendly-fire incidents like those that have continued in Iraq, including an incident in which an American pilot opened fire on two British vehicles, killing one soldier. If the United States is not viewed as requiring accountability for friendly-fire incidents, “that only builds pressure for international forums like the International Criminal Court” to which the Bush administration refuses to subject U.S. citizens, Fidell said.

“This is quite a rich broth,” Fidell said. “If it’s over today then it’s over in an inconclusive kind of way .... You could easily run a week’s worth of law school seminars on this.”