Chicken Wings

Ex-US soldier jailed over Iraq rape

He called his actions "really messed up and wrong" but looked to the prosecution and said "you still don't know what happened. You weren't there."

"All I ever did was what they told me to do," Green said, adding that the group's ranking soldier - former Specialist Paul Cortez - "ordered all of this."

Green said the soldiers who went to Iraq were "strung out to dry" and that he hoped anybody thinking of volunteering for service would see what happened to them and stay home.

"Y'all can act like I'm a psychopath or a sexual predator or whatever," Green said. "But if I had never gone to Iraq I would never have got caught up in anything like this."

During closing arguments at his initial sentencing hearing, Green was described alternately as "criminal and perverse" and deserving of the death penalty, and as a "broken warrior" whose life should be spared.

Cortez and another soldier described how they changed into black silk underwear and masks so they would look like insurgents and headed for the house of a girl they had seen walking through the village.

They testified that Green took Janabi's parents and sister into another room and shot them while two of the other soldiers raped her. Then Green took his turn with the sobbing girl before putting a pillow on her face and shooting her dead.

The soldiers set the house on fire by tossing a lighter onto a Kerosene-soaked blanket covering her naked body. Then they went back to their checkpoint about 200 meters away and grilled chicken wings.