US Army Staff Sergeant Bales out

Now that he's safely back in the good ole USA, where no harm -- like a lynch mob -- can befall him, the Army has finally identified the soldier who allegedly massacred 16 Afghan villagers earlier this week.

He is Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, formerly of Washington state and now resident in the stockade at a base in Kansas. This photo (by Ryan Hallock, US Army) of a soldier identified as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, left, appeared in an article in High Desert Warrior, a US military website, last year. Good luck looking for it though. According to Reuters, the article and photo have since been removed from the site.

It is said that Bales just "snapped", due to the stress of war. How one man could have killed 16 Afghans -- 9 of them women and children -- in houses up to 2 miles apart, and had time to burn at least some of the bodies before returning to his base, has not yet been explained. The villagers say there was more than one attacker. Obviously that's impossible. Why would we doubt military spokesmen who tell us there was just the one (temporarily?) deranged individual.