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U.S. Army desperately seeking Key

The Globe and Mail reports that the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command has been trying to find and question Joshua Key, a deserter who took refuge in Canada and recently published an account of his tour of duty in Iraq called The Deserter’s Tale (House of Anansi Press) co-written with Canadian author Lawrence Hill.

“I can [confirm] for you that CID is attempting to locate and speak with this individual,” army spokesman Chris Grey said in an e-mail yesterday.

“We are attempting to contact him to follow up on some of the allegations he has made to [determine] if there is enough credible information to investigate further. We take any and all allegations of criminal wrongdoing very seriously.”

Most of the allegations that Joshua Key made in his book, The Deserter’s Tale, relate to the time he spent as a soldier in Iraq before fleeing to Canada in 2003. He wrote that at one point in Iraq he saw American soldiers playing soccer with the heads of decapitated Iraqis.

Quillblog hopes that the U.S. military would take allegations like that seriously and investigate, but we also hope it wouldn’t use such an investigation as an excuse to apprehend Key and charge him for desertion.