Captain Michel Rainville was a Canadian soldier who has courted controversy on several occasions for his orders leading to public outcry. He was ultimately acquitted of criminal charges for his actions, but released from military service. [1]
In February, 1992, Rainville led an assault against the guard room at the entrance of the Citadelle in Quebec City, tying up the guards and taking weapons. This exercise to test the security of the installation had been approved by Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Daigle. [2] However, in 2001 Rainville was convicted of kidnapping, assault and death threats when it was revealed that he tortured and sodomised another soldier during the exercise. [2] He was later sentenced to 20 months imprisonment to be served in the community as a result. [3]
On May 15, 1992, [4] Rainville was the officer in charge of an Escape and Evasion training exercise during which Canada's first female infantry officer, Sandra Perron, along with all the male candidates of the Infantry Basic Officer Course, was tied to a tree barefoot in the snow and punched. Although she did not raise any issue with the training, the incident was reported by Perron's boyfriend and upon leaving the Army photographs were leaked to the media, throwing the Canadian Forces into public disrepute, although Rainville defended himself saying that if he hadn't struck Perron, "she would have lost credibility" with other, male, officers. [1]
He also posed for a media photograph dressed in his Canadian uniform to which he added non-regulation knives; he was later characterized as a "Rambo type". [2]
The Somalia Affair saw Rainville issue an autonomous 1993 order re-labeling petty thieves at a Canadian military base in Belet Huen as "saboteurs" and authorizing deadly force which resulted in the shooting death of an unarmed Somali named Ahmed Arush. [1] Rainville relied on the argument that a fuel pump used to service American MedEvac helicopters had been stolen deliberately to hinder the military effort, while critics pointed out that any saboteurs likely would have ignited the thousands of gallons of fuel surrounding it. [1] Rainville enlisted Corpoal Ben Klick of the PPCLI to lay in a truck bed at night, awaiting potential "saboteurs" with a rifle. [1]
Rainville had offered to buy a case of beer for the first Canadian to shoot a Somalian, "a six-pack for a wound, 24 for a kill". [4]
When he returned to Canada from Somalia, he was convicted of possessing pyrotechnical devices belonging to the Canadian Forces. [2]
Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing of a soldier, usually a superior, by a fellow soldier. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often committed or attempted with a fragmentation grenade, to make it appear that the killing was accidental or during combat with the enemy. The term fragging now encompasses any deliberate killing of military colleagues.
Charles A. Graner Jr. is an American former soldier who was court-martialed for prisoner abuse after the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Along with other soldiers of his Army Reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, Graner was accused of allowing and inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious prison in Baghdad during the United States' occupation of Iraq.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
The Somalia affair was a 1993 Canadian military scandal, prompted by the beating to death of Shidane Arone, a Somali teenager, at the hands of two Canadian peacekeepers participating in humanitarian efforts in Somalia. The act was documented by photos, and brought to light internal problems in the Canadian Airborne Regiment. Military leadership were sharply rebuked after a CBC reporter received altered documents, leading to allegations of a cover-up. The Somalia affair tarnished Canada's international reputation in what was heralded as "the darkest era in the history of the Canadian military".
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The King's Guard are sentry postings at Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace, organised by the British Army's Household Division. The Household Division also mounts sentry postings at Horse Guards, known as the King's Life Guard.
The Canadian Airborne Regiment was a Canadian Forces formation created on April 8, 1968. It was not an administrative regiment in the commonly accepted British Commonwealth sense, but rather a tactical formation manned from other regiments and branches. It was disbanded in 1995 after the Somalia affair.
Manadel al-Jamadi was an Iraqi national who was killed in United States custody during a CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison on November 4, 2003. His name became known in 2004 when the Abu Ghraib scandal made headlines; his corpse packed in ice was the background for widely reprinted photographs of grinning U.S. Army specialists Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner each offering a "thumbs-up" gesture. Al-Jamadi had been a suspect in a bomb attack that killed 34 people, including one US soldier, and left more than 200 wounded in a Baghdad Red Cross facility.
Muhamad Husain Kadir was an Iraqi prisoner killed in 2004. Private First Class Edward L. Richmond, a U.S. Army soldier, was convicted of manslaughter in relation to his death. Richmond was sentenced to three years in prison and a dishonorable discharge, as well as pay forfeiture and a reduction in rank.
The Royal Malay Regiment is the premier unit of the Malaysian Army's two infantry regiments. At its largest, the Malay Regiment comprised 27 battalions. At present, three battalions are parachute trained and form part of the Malaysian Army Rapid Deployment Force. Another battalion has been converted into a mechanised infantry battalion while the remaining battalions are standard light infantry. The 1st Battalion Royal Malay Regiment acts as the ceremonial foot guards battalion for the King of Malaysia, and is usually accompanied by the Central Band of the Royal Malay Regiment. As its name suggests, the regiment only recruits ethnic Malays.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.
Dilawar, also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
The use of capital punishment by the United States military is a legal punishment in martial criminal justice. Despite its legality, capital punishment has not been imposed by the U.S. military in over sixty years.
William J. Kreutzer Jr. is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted of killing one officer and wounding 18 other soldiers when he opened fire on a physical training formation on October 27, 1995, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Kreutzer was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life in prison by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals in connection with concerns regarding mental illness.
Martha T. Rainville is a retired U.S. Air Force officer who attained the rank of major general. She was the first woman in U.S. history to become a state adjutant general when she served in that post with the Vermont National Guard.
The French military mission of 1867 to 1868 was one of the first foreign military training missions to Japan, and the first sent by France. It was formed by emperor Napoléon III following a request from the Tokugawa shogunate through its emissary to Europe, Shibata Takenaka, with the goal of modernizing the Japanese military.
Exercise Bright Star is a series of biennial combined and joint military exercises led by the United States and Egypt. The exercises began in 1980, rooted in the 1977 Camp David Accords. After its signing, the United States Armed Forces and the Egyptian Armed Forces agreed to conduct training together in Egypt.
A squadron was historically a cavalry subunit, a company- or battalion-sized military formation. The term is still used to refer to modern cavalry units, and is also used by other arms and services. In some countries, including Italy, the name of the battalion-level cavalry unit translates as "Squadron Group".
The Siege of the Montaña Barracks was the two-day siege which marked the initial failure of the July 1936 uprising against the Second Spanish Republic in Madrid, on 18–20 July 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The bulk of the security forces in Madrid remained loyal to the government, and supported by workers' militias, crushed the uprising.
Major Sandra Marie Perron is a former Canadian Army officer. She was the first female infantry officer in the Canadian Army. Perron served in the infantry from 1991 to 1996, completing two tours of duty in Yugoslavia. While in the Army she was subjected to sexual harassment and "excessively rough" training.