AN ARMY VET HAS BEEN TELLING THE NEWS MEDIA that he witnessed US military personnel commit war atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the rape of an Iraqi woman, the execution of 12 to 17 prisoners in Afghanistan and robberies. He claims that after reporting the crimes to his superior officers he was told “to forget about it.”
Former Army Range Luke Sommer is now in Canada fighting US extradition efforts on charges that he was the mastermind behind robbingf a Tacoma bank last August. According to a December 17 Seattle Times story, Sommer “stops just short of admitting to the crime. But he says that if he did rob the bank, his motives were political.”

The 20-year-old Sommer has made no direct admission of the charges relating to the $54,011 armed robbery,but he reasons that if Americans are let off the hook for war crimes and fraud in other countries, then why not forget about a little bank heist in the US? (Sommer has yet to detail the war crimes he claims he witnessed.)
CRAZY WORLD: If it’s okay there, why not here?
The Army Times revisits the story this week with the headline Rangers as robbers?. It’s all the standard safe re-reporting that Army Times top editors perfer, but the story does include a succinct comment from Sommer about the allegations against him: “It illustrates one very essential truth, that we are willing to tolerate it when it’s against other people, but when it’s against us, we will prosecute it to the fullest extent of the law.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Dion adds that the evidence will show that Sommer and other conspirators were planning to launch a criminal organization. “They wanted funding for it and that that’s what this robbery was about,” Dion tells the Army Times. Dion is leading the effort to extradite Sommer and two alleged co-conspirators from Canada.