OT:OT:OT:NO MS:NO HURT USA:Army of one
abdi
Published on Saturday, May 27, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Photos Indicate Civilians Slain Execution-Style
An official involved in an investigation of Camp Pendleton Marines'
actions in an Iraqi town cites `a total breakdown in morality.'
by Tony Perry and Julian E. Barnes
WASHINGTON - Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have
convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed
Iraqis, some of them "execution-style," in the insurgent stronghold of
Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials
close to the investigation said Friday.
The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the
victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the
head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.
One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines
from Camp Pendleton "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership,
with tragic results."
The case may be the most serious incident of alleged war crimes in
Iraq by U.S. troops. Marine officers have long been worried that Iraq's
deadly insurgency could prompt such a reaction by combat teams.
An investigation by an Army general into the Nov. 19 incident is to be
delivered soon to the top operational commander in Iraq. A separate criminal
investigation is also underway and could lead to charges ranging from
dereliction of duty to murder.
Both investigations are centered on a dozen Marines from the 3rd
Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The battalion was on
its third deployment to Iraq when the killings occurred.
Most of the fatal shots appear to have been fired by only a few of the
Marines, possibly a four-man "fire team" led by a sergeant, said officials
with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The same sergeant is suspected of filing a false report downplaying
the number of Iraqis killed, saying they were killed by an insurgent's bomb
and that Marines entered the Iraqis' homes in search of gunmen firing at
them. All aspects of his account are contradicted by pictures, statements by
Marines to investigators and an inspection of the houses involved, officials
said.
Other Marines may face criminal charges for failing to stop the
killings or for failing to make accurate reports.
Of the dead Iraqis, 19 were in three to four houses that Marines
stormed, officials said. Five others were killed near a vehicle.
The intelligence team took the pictures shortly after the shooting
stopped. Such teams are typically assigned to collect information on
insurgents after firefights or other military engagements.
Investigators and top officers of the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force, which oversees Marine infantry, aviation and support
units in Iraq, have viewed the pictures.
The incident began when a roadside bomb attached to a large propane
canister exploded as Marines passed through Haditha, a town on the Euphrates
River. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee, was killed and
two other Marines were wounded.
Marines quickly determined that the bomb was a "line-of-sight"
explosive that would have required someone to detonate it. Marines and Iraqi
forces searched houses and other structures in the narrow, dusty streets.
Jets dropped 500-pound bombs and a drone aircraft circled overhead.
Time magazine, in a report published in March, quoted witnesses,
including a 9-year-old girl, Eman Waleed, who said that she saw Marines kill
her grandparents and that other adults in the house died shielding her and
her 8-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman.
An elder in Haditha later went to Marine officials at the battalion's
headquarters to complain of wanton killings.
The Marines involved in the incident initially reported that they had
become embroiled in a firefight with insurgents after the explosion.
However, evidence that later emerged contradicted that version.
"There wasn't a gunfight, there were no pockmarked walls," a
congressional aide said.
"The wounds indicated execution-style" shootings, said a Defense
Department official who had been briefed on the contents of the photos.
The Marine Corps backed off its initial explanation, and the
investigations were launched after Time published its account.
Some lawmakers are asking the Marine Corps why an investigation wasn't
launched earlier if the intelligence team's pictures contradicted the
squad's account. The pictures from the intelligence team would probably have
been given to the battalion intelligence officer, and they should have
raised questions immediately, one congressional aide said.
The intelligence teams typically comprise Marine Corps reservists,
often police officers or other law enforcement officials in civilian life
who travel with active-duty battalions or regiments.
Such questions were put to Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee during
a series of individual briefings over the last week. One focus of the
administrative investigation by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell is to find
out how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the misreporting went.
Military officials say they believe the delay in beginning the
investigation was a result of the squad's initial efforts to cover up what
happened. Military and congressional sources said there was no indication
that the members of the intelligence team did anything improper or delayed
reporting their findings.
"They are the guys that probably provided the conclusive,
demonstrative evidence that what happened wasn't as others had described," a
congressional staffer said.
The Marine Corps apologized to the families of several of those killed
and made payments to compensate them for their losses. The families have
denied permission to have the bodies exhumed for investigation.
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a retired Marine colonel, said there was
clearly an attempt to cover up the incident by those involved. But he said
he did not think the Marine command was slow in investigating.
"There is no question that the Marines involved, those doing the
shooting, they were busy in lying about it and covering it up - there is no
question about it," Kline said. "But I am confident, as soon as the command
learned there might be some truth to this, they started to pursue it
vigorously. I don't have any reason now to think there was any foot
dragging."
As Marines moved across the desert into Iraq on March 19, 2003, each
Marine received a signed statement from then-Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis,
commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, exhorting his troops to fight
vigorously but to treat noncombatants with "decency . chivalry and soldierly
compassion."
"Engage your brain before you engage your weapon," he said.
As detailed in Bing West's book "The March Up: Taking Baghdad With the
1st Marine Division," Brig. Gen. John Kelly, assistant division commander,
was concerned about instances of seemingly random firing by Marines, most of
them untested in combat. Kelly is now the Marine Corps' congressional
liaison and has helped Hagee deliver briefings to legislators on the
investigations into the Nov. 19 incident.
Hagee left for Iraq on Thursday to sternly remind Marines that harming
noncombatants violates Marine policy and numerous laws governing warfare. He
plans to give the same message to troops at Camp Pendleton and other Marine
bases when he returns.
Haditha has been a particularly difficult area for the Marines.
Officers have said they lack enough troops to do an adequate job of
developing intelligence and then confronting insurgents.
A documentary shown this week on the A&E Network detailed the
frustrations of a company of Marine reservists who had 23 members killed and
36 wounded during a deployment last year in Haditha.
One Marine sergeant, in an interview after his unit had returned to
Columbus, Ohio, remembered a raid in which he burst into a home and came
close to killing two women and a teenage boy out of rage for the deaths of
fellow Marines.
Sgt. Guy Zierk, interviewed in the documentary, "Combat Diary: The
Marines of Lima Company," said he knew at that point that he had been in
Iraq too long.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perry reported from San Diego and Barnes from Washington. Times staff
writer Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
###
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abdi
Published on Saturday, May 27, 2006 by Pierre Tristam/Candide's
Notebooks
The Few, The Proud, The Murderers
by Pierre Tristam
Of course the first line of defense, for those craven enough to defend
atrocities just because Americans commit them, is to say that Iraqis do
worse. And in fact the U.S. military, after lying about the massacre of 24
Iraqi civilians in Haditha last year, then lying about the number of Iraqis
killed, then covering up the massacre until a Time magazine article made it
impossible to keep lying, attempted that very line of defense: As Time
reported in March, "Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the
Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of [military
investigators] does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault
for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who 'placed
noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend
themselves.'" All lies, of course. There were no insurgents hiding among
civilians. There was no crossfire. The Marines weren't defending themselves.
They were out on a rampage, murdering at point-blank leisure, logding
bullets in the heads of women and children, My Lai-style.
There is one buried quarter truth in Michelle Martin's official story
(odd, how her name rhymes with the name of that most craven of right-wing
bloggers, to whom apologizing for brutality, as long as it's camouflaged in
stars and stripes, is a back-seat shtick), though it doesn't justify what
happened in Haditha: When you train men not only to kill but to become
sub-human drones who dehumanize their enemy in turn, and when you place them
in situations where they want to see nothing but sub-human creatures, you
can't expect them not to act the part they've been trained to act.
I keep remembering that Bob Herbert column in the Times last May,
relating the story of Aidan Delgado, a U.S. soldier who served in Iraq: "He
wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states," Herbert wrote, "a
top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill
some ragheads and burn some turbans. 'He laughed,' Mr. Delgado said, 'and
everybody in the unit laughed with him.' The officer's comment was a
harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is
routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: 'Guys
in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee
and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd
keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's
heads.' He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this
practice. 'I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does
this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said:
'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being
surrounded by hajis.'' 'Haji' is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's
used the way 'gook' or 'Charlie' was used in Vietnam. Mr. Delgado said he
had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children
with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in
the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said,
when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis
who had done nothing wrong." (The full column is available here.) The
banality of evil doesn't have to rise to the level of genocide to find its
stage. To the contrary. Evil at its most routine is localized affair, the
more debased for being either completely out of sight and accountability, or
for being tacitly, happily condoned by its executioner's posse. The Haditha
massacre stands out only because in its case someone was there to report it.
But who doubts that these atrocities aren't routine, or that a soldier's
swift kick in the chest of a six year old boy is any less of an atrocity,
considering what that soldier would do to an adult if can be such a brute
toward children?
What's almost as repulsive, though in this case only ink is being
spilled, not blood, is the way the subsequent reporting about the massacre
is being laid out. The New York Times this morning, with its usual, but in
this case nauseating, restraint in balance's name, pulls a classic example
of mitigating atrocity with qualifiers. The lead paragraph refers to a small
number of marines carrying out "extensive, unprovoked killings of
civilians," establishing right away the rogue-soldier theory that was
attempted in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. The downplaying of U.S. torture as
an institutional rather than an exceptional strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan
was successful, at least in the public's mind. The evidence suggests
otherwise. It does so as well when it comes to wanton killings, whether it's
the trigger-happy soldiering at Iraqi checkpoints or the killing of
civilians in allegedly collateral circumstances. Yet you can see the Haditha
massacre's dowplaying game already in full swing. The Times has the story
over two columns above the fold, but to the left of a four-column spread
about the Enron verdict. Enron is news. It isn't bigger news than the
massacre of twenty-four Iraqis at the hands of U.S. marines. Not by any
stretch of journalistic calibration. But such are the tastes for news in the
United States that business porn will always outplay patriotism's barbarity.
Americans don't want to know what their soldiers are doing in their name in
Iraq. The cost to Iraqis is immense. It's more devastating, especially in
human terms, than anything Enron ever did. But it's safer to focus on
old-fashioned homegrown corruption and malfeasance. In that sense Ken Lay
and Jeffrey Skilling are doing the American public a favor, in distractions
and entertainment, and the public is grateful. They may be bad guys, but
they're our bad guys, and they're providing cover for what our supposedly
good guys, our supposedly heroic soldiers, under the leadership and don't-mess-with-Texas-encouragement
of their apologist-in-chief, are doing in Iraq.
For the record, the Los Angeles Times' lead about the massacre had
none of the New York Times' daintiness. It was to the point: "Marines from
Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and
children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent
stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found." The Washington
Post, spokespaper to American militarism, ignores the story altogether. One
more point about the Times story. The very last paragraph raises the
prospect of yet another massacre, though it reads like an afterthought: "The
Marines also disclosed this week that a preliminary inquiry had found
'sufficient information' to recommend a criminal probe into the killing of
an Iraqi civilian on April 26 near Hamandiyah, a village west of Baghdad."
But isn't the discovery and uncovering of atrocity always an afterthought,
if even that?
© 2006 Pierre Tristam
###
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"abdi" <ab...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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abdi
Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 by the Independent / UK
War Crimes: My Lai is a Lesson from History
The killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has reminded America of another
massacre that tarnished its reputation 38 years ago.
by Rupert Cornwell
To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have
seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder
to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group
of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running
amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a
town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni
Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in
South Vietnam.
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K
or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam,
the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie
Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated
by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005,
when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and
children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the
death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a
roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been
killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the
hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED
(Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life
had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence
concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C
Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the
operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed
college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being
sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am
on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only
700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of
military age," one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted,
women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at
least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have
personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered
into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over.
The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to
over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages
ranging from 1 to 82.
My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in
Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered
hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of
the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle,
where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to
the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi
insurgents in Haditha today.
An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago.
The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several
articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the
Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But,
apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things
that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends
to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly
with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian
population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true
sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to
impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even
under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US
Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and
say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty
is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies
alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have
done something similar?
Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents
and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the
commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush
invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the
White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more
clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.
In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up,
including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal
victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only
one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness
accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had
heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of
Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September
1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with
premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the
story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in
April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at
least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left
by the Iraq War.
A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far
more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of
allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details.
The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some
Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges
that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the
US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding
need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.
If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three
separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in
the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human
decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of
the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My
Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land.
Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of
soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important,
Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not
be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion
here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when
details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge.
Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight
earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken
the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If
I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American
people." And so it would ultimately prove.
But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls
first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10
Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a
disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to
acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last
Thursday.
Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of
clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no
co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the
affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly
respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a
sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war
was doing America more harm than good.
Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very,
very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam
noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told
him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first
thought.
"This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of
the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're
set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu
Ghraib."
For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This
investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it
should have been made public and people should have been held responsible
for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will
be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only
person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few
years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not
sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents
of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges,
is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its
military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha
may do the same.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
###
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"abdi" <ab...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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abdi
Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Did Bush's "Bring it On" Bravado Bring On the Haditha Massacre: Iraq's
My Lai?
by Tom Turnipseed
In a rather subdued effort to rally support for their war of choice as
questions arise about their continued tenures in office, a somewhat contrite
and stammering President George W. Bush and his war weary, but ever slick
talking side-kick, Prime Minister Tony Blair held a joint White House press
conference Thursday evening. Due to the increasingly virulent insurgency
that has turned their Iraq War game into a costly debacle, their once cocky
cheer-leadership is now critically challenged by a credibility crunch with
the voters of the U.S. and the U.K.
When asked if they had made any mistakes in the Iraq War, Bush twisted
his head, stretched his neck and looked up and away from the eyes of the
press corps who have heard so many previous denials of responsibility for
his costly miscalculations. Then our self-described, God directed, great
decider actually admitted that he had acted like a "cowboy" when he laid
down the gauntlet to Iraq insurgents in 2003 to "bring it on". He added it
was also a mistake for him to have repeatedly railed that he wanted to get
Osama bin Laden "dead or alive". Commenting on the prisoner torture scandal
at Abu Ghraib, Bush said it was, "the biggest mistake that's happened so
far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq." Bush said "I learned
some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated
manner", and it was "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong
signal to people."
Since Bush is the commander in chief of all U.S. military forces, I
wonder if such Rovian, red meat for red states, ranting by Bush might have
"sent the wrong signal to people" like the U.S. Marines who are now under
investigation for massacring two dozen innocent civilians, including women
and children, last November in Haditha, Iraq. Haditha has been a hotbed for
Sunni insurgents. In a post press conference analysis, Bush was praised for
his candor in admitting the mistake by Chris Matthews on MSNBC along with
other talking heads of our media elite. The New York Times reported on May
26 that the Marines "carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of
civilians", according to Congressional, military and Pentagon officials. I
wonder if Matthew's panel of pontificators would praise the Marines for
systematically killing innocent men, women and children in Haditha. who
could have been acting in response to the irresponsible "bring them on"
rhetoric of their cowboy commander-in-chief?
Evidently, the first official report from the military on Nov. 20
about the Haditha massacre was a total cover-up. The truth was indeed a
casualty of war when the report said that "a U.S. marine and 15 Iraqi
civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb" and that
"immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with
small-arms fire". Evidence now indicates the civilians were killed during
three to five hours of a search and destroy sweep and "included shootings of
five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least
two homes that included women and children, officials said", according to
the NY Times..
The NY Times also reported that Republican U.S. Rep. John Kline, of
Minnesota, said "this was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines
at civilians. This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be
an atrocity." Kline is a retired Marine colonel. Last week Marine Corps
officers briefed members of Congress and again on Wednesday and Thursday
because of their dismay at the part marines played in executing innocent
civilians. The killings were said to be "methodical in nature". Attorneys
involved in the investigation revealed that the capital crime of murder
might be charged in the most grievous case of misconduct by the U.S.
military in Iraq. Another inquiry intends to find out if the atrocities were
deliberately covered up.
The LA Times said, "Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team
have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed... unarmed Iraqis,
some of them "execution-style," in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha. A
spokesman for Human Rights Watch, Marc Garlasco, said, "What happened at
Haditha appears to be outright murder", and, "the Haditha massacre will go
down as Iraq's My Lai".
The Abu Ghraib regret by Bush is also very interesting, given his
"Bring it On" and "Dead or Alive" rhetoric and his administration's
promulgation of policies that even encouraged such heinous and inhumane
conduct. Recently, the United Nations Committee Against Torture sharply
criticized the United States for its rendition policies regarding captives
it labels "terrorists". The Bush administration has denied any illegality or
wrongdoing in conceiving and carrying out such torture techniques. The
Committee denounced our sending suspected terrorists to overseas secret
prisons in countries where torture is commonplace. The Abu Ghraib scandal
involves siccing dogs on suspected terrorists, sexual humiliation, and
frightening them with drowning, and the U.N. Committee mentioned and
specifically condemned such types of torture.
American voters disapprove of our cowboy President's "Bring it On"
bravado that brought on such atrocities as Haditha and Abu Ghraib. Bush's
low 30s approval ratings in recent polls are almost as low as Blair's 26% in
Britain. Blair, who fancied himself as another Churchill is expected to be
forced to resign due to Iraq within a year. Bush, who now compares himself
with Harry Truman, could suffer the fate of Richard Nixon, or worse, if the
Democrats win control of Congress.
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and political activist in
Columbia, South Carolina. www.turnipseed.net
###
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"abdi" <ab...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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abdi
New 'Iraq massacre' tape emerges
The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been
responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians.
The video appears to challenge the US military's account of events that took
place in the town of Ishaqi in March.
The US said at the time four people died during a military operation, but
Iraqi police claimed that US troops had deliberately shot the 11 people.
A spokesman for US forces in Iraq told the BBC an inquiry was under way.
The new evidence comes in the wake of the alleged massacre in Haditha, where
US marines are suspected of massacring up to 24 Iraqi civilians in November
2005.
'Massacre'
The video pictures obtained by the BBC appear to contradict the US account
of the events in Ishaqi, about 100km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on 15
March 2006.
The US authorities said they were involved in a firefight after a tip-off
that an al-Qaeda supporter was visiting the house.
According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing
four people - a suspect, two women and a child.
But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and
deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and
four women, before blowing up the building.
The video tape obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and
children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says
were clearly gunshot wounds.
The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.
It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and
is believed to be genuine, the BBC's Ian Pannell in Baghdad says.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5039420.stm
Published: 2006/06/01 22:06:25 GMT
© BBC MMVI
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Published on Saturday, June 3, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Way Americans Like Their War
by Robert Fisk
Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?
The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and
the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of
the United States' army of the slums go further?
I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul
might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary,
counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old
friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But
when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no
circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand
that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like
this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document
showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma
wounds."
What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is
doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps?
After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.
It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are
corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still
uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole
villages. We know of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya.
We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while
their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700
Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the
Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this
is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in
Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.
I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about
Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned
upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they
became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified
in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day
we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet.
Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become
little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further
from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists"
but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in
Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to
hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."
In a way, we reporters are also to blame. Unable to venture outside
Baghdad -- or around Baghdad itself -- Iraq's vastness has fallen under a
thick, all-consuming shadow. We might occasionally notice sparks in the
night -- a Haditha or two in the desert -- but we remain meekly cataloguing
the numbers of "terrorists" supposedly scored in remote corners of
Mesopotamia. For fear of the insurgent's knife, we can no longer
investigate. And the Americans like it that way.
I think it becomes a habit, this sort of thing. Already the horrors of
Abu Ghraib are shrugged away. It was abuse, not torture. And then up pops a
junior officer in the United States charged for killing an Iraqi army
general by stuffing him upside down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his
chest. And again, it gets few headlines. Who cares if another Iraqi bites
the dust? Aren't they trying to kill our boys who are out there fighting
terror.
For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the
brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the
killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people --
but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads,
yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are
going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the
innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi
elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, published in Great Britain.
© 2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Published on Monday, June 5, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
Marine's Wife Paints Portrait of US Troops Out of Control in Haditha
· Unit accused of abusing drugs and alcohol
· Officers relieved of duty after killing of 24 Iraqis
by Julian Borger in Washington
The marine unit involved in the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha
last November had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline and had drug
and alcohol problems, according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff
sergeants.
The allegations in Newsweek magazine contribute to an ever more
disturbing portrait of embattled marines under high stress, some on their
third tour of duty after ferocious door-to-door fighting in the Sunni
insurgent strongholds of Falluja and Haditha.
The wife of the unnamed staff sergeant claimed there had been a "total
breakdown" in the unit's discipline after it was pulled out of Falluja in
early 2005.
"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing
[violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than
possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when
they shot those civilians in Haditha."
The troops in Iraq have been ordered to take refresher courses on
battlefield ethics, but a growing body of evidence from Haditha suggests the
strain of repeated deployments in Iraq is beginning to unravel the cohesion
and discipline of the combat troops.
"We are in trouble in Iraq," Barry McCaffrey, a retired army general
who played a leading role in the Iraq war, told Time magazine. "Our forces
can't sustain this pace, and I'm afraid the American people are walking away
from this war."
The Newsweek account described a gung-ho battalion that had staged a
chariot race, complete with captured horses, togas and heavy metal music,
before the battle for Falluja in late 2004. The marines were given loose
rules of engagement in the vicious urban warfare that followed.
"If you see someone with a cellphone," said one of the commanders was
quoted as saying, half-jokingly, "put a bullet in their fucking head".
At one point in the battle, a marine from the 3rd battalion was caught
on camera shooting a wounded, unarmed man as he lay on the ground. However,
the marine involved was later exonerated.
The third battalion lost 17 men in 10 days in Falluja and by the time
the troops arrived in Haditha, in autumn last year, it was clear morale had
plummeted. A Daily Telegraph reporter who visited its headquarters early
this year at Haditha Dam, on the outskirts of the town, described it as a
"feral place" where discipline was "approaching breakdown". He reported that
some marines had left the official living quarters and had set up separate
encampments with signs ordering outsiders to keep out.
Other observers, however, have come away from time spent with the
marines with different impressions. Lucian Read, a photographer who spent
five months with Kilo company, said it was generally well led, although
sometimes squads had to go on patrol without an officer because there were
not enough to go around.
Mr Read told Time magazine that Kilo company was the "most human" of
the many units he had accompanied in Iraq. "They were never abusive," he
said. "There was a certain amount of antagonism and frustration when people
didn't cooperate. But it's not like they had 'kill 'em all' spray-painted on
the walls."
Three senior officers in the Haditha-based 3rd battalion of the first
marine regiment, known as the Thundering Third, have been relieved of duty
because of a "lack of confidence" in their leadership.
The officers include Captain Lucas McConnell, the head of Kilo
company, which was directly involved in the deaths of 24 unarmed Iraqis
there on November 19.
Another captain from the battalion, James Kimber, was relieved of duty
for a separate incident, according to his lawyer, who said his subordinates
in India company had sworn and derided Iraqi security forces in an interview
with Sky News.
The commander of the third battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey
Chessani, has also been made to step down pending the outcome of the Haditha
investigation.
A criminal investigation conducted by navy investigators into the
Haditha killings is still under way, but a parallel army inquiry into the
wider issues has been completed. However, a military official said some
findings might be withheld pending the principle inquiry findings.
On Saturday the Iraqi government rejected the findings of a US inquiry
into the death of nine civilians in a US raid in the town of Ishaqi and said
it would conduct its own investigation.
Copyright © 2006 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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