Iraq's My Lai - This will come out...
US press is refusing to put the details of this out, especially during flag-waving weekend in the US - Memorial Day - but I prefer to see the truth - warts and all, and here is some of it: All US soldiers are not heroes, some are murderers - confirmed by our own US Marine command and Pentagon. Some are dupes, lied to by the US, believing they are "defending their country" - not sure how that works since we started this war in Iraq. Some are heroes, but many of those now have major questions about what is going on - and how many lies they have been told.
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Iraq's My Lai
Marine officials have now confirmed that those accounts were false. What really happened, according to reports confirmed by the Pentagon, was this: A group of enraged Marines entered several homes in Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. A video of the aftermath -- showing that the residents were unarmed when they were shot at point-blank range -- was obtained by Time.
According to MSNBC, the video was confirmed by the Marines' own investigation: "Military officials say Marine Corps photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style." Women and children were among the 24 civilians murdered: "One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials. …"
Last week, Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., told reporters that "sources within the military" told him that "there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
According to the Marine Corps Times, up to a dozen soldiers face possible court-martial. Three officers were relieved of duty in April.
The media, hectored by the administration's charges that they don't report the illusory "good news" from Iraq, has shown little stomach for the story. In March, the Washington Post ran two brief stories on pages 10 and 15, respectively, about how the military was investigating an incident in which "civilians were killed in the cross-fire," and last week another on page 17. The New York Times reported the military's preliminary account about the "IED attack" back in November and ran a short piece on page 10 last week.
Most of the reporting has focused on Murtha, a former hawk who has become a vocal opponent of the war. It's a tidy storyline that reduces the horrific images of innocent children being blown away by vengeful Marines to a palpable and familiar partisan squabble.
But there's more going on than just the usual simplistic he said/she said reporting; the media's uncritical acceptance of the Iraq hawks' spin -- with notable exceptions like Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau -- makes them complicit in crimes like those alleged in Haditha. The editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times have the victims' blood on their hands, and they have no interest in turning Haditha into the Iraq war's My Lai.
The storyline has provoked the expected reaction from the war's dwindling number of supporters. As writer Steve Benen, perusing the right-wing blogs, noted:
"Some are calling Murtha 'dishonorable.' Others labeled him a 'traitor' and recommended that he be sent to 'jail.' Another added, 'Murtha has no honor left, no dignity, and will never be considered as a Marine except by his liberal buddies, who would hate him for wearing that uniform in the first place.'"
The other wholly predictable reaction was voiced by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who told reporters that the Haditha massacre was a case of a few bad apples, an isolated incident -- just as he had said after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed. "I don't want the actions of one squad in one city on one morning to be used to symbolize or characterize or tar the actions of our great troops," he said.
But the truth is that the story is unique only in that the evidence that a terrible crime took place appears to be too great for "plausible deniability."
Consider just a few reports:
A team of eight Amnesty International staffers reported on a host of abuses by coalition forces, including the killing of two unarmed kids -- one 12 years old -- during house to house searches.
"Many of the coalition soldiers and military police engaged in law enforcement do not have basic skills and tools in civilian policing," Curt Goering, a member of the Amnesty team in Iraq, noted.
The Associated Press reported that "Iraq's U.N. ambassador accused U.S. Marines of killing his unarmed young cousin in what appeared to be 'cold blood'" during another house search in Anbar province. The ambassador, Samir Sumaidaie, wrote that the troops had smiled after the "killing of an unarmed innocent civilian." He believed it was "a crime that may be repeated up and down Al-Anbar."
In early 2004, senior British commanders condemned "American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate." One officer told reporters "the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen." (The Brits have been accused of their own share of crimes in Iraq.)
In April of 2004, there were widespread reports -- in the foreign press -- that civilians were targeted during the "Siege of Fallujah." The Pentagon was outraged when journalists reported the number of civilians killed in the city. One report quoted Dr. Rafa Hayad al-Issawi, director of the city's main hospital, saying "the dead mostly included women, children and elderly." The Iraqi minister of health, Khudair Abbas, confirmed that U.S. forces had shot at ambulances -- in Fallujah and elsewhere -- and condemned the acts as possible war crimes. Snipers who served in Fallujah told the Los Angeles Times that "there might not have been such a 'target-rich' battlefield" since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.
In March, Knight-Ridder reported that senior Iraqi police officials had accused U.S. soldiers of executing 11 Iraqi civilians, including four children and a 6-month-old baby, in a raid near the city of Balad. The local police chief, Col. Farouq Hussein, said that the civilians had all been shot in the head. "It's a clear and perfect crime," he said.
Journalists like Dahr Jamail and Robert Fisk have all reported on other instances of civilians caught in the sites of American gunners. And these stories don't capture the "collateral damage" done by bombs and missiles.
None of this is to suggest that U.S. troops are a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs. These are America's sons and daughters, members of the most highly trained military in the world. They've been put into a situation where they're under constant threat in a country where it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. They've seen 20,000 of their buddies killed or injured, and according to a recent poll, almost nine out of 10 believe the war in Iraq is "retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11."
Ultimately, after Iraq's civilian population, those troops will pay the price for this war. Paul Rockwell, who interviewed a number of U.S. soldiers who claim to have committed atrocities in Iraq for the book "Ten Excellent Reasons Not To Join The Military," wrote that American troops are not only "expected to follow unlawful orders, they are also expected to bear lifelong burdens of shame, guilt and legal culpability for the arrogance of their own commanders -- who dispense life and death from an office computer."
Incidents like those alleged in Haditha, Ramallah and Fallujah are entirely predictable. In World War I, about four in 10 deaths were civilians; by World War II, civilians made up more than half of those killed; and in the post Cold-War era, about eight in 10 combat deaths have been among civilians. The ultimate moral tragedy is that while some number of soldiers may face prosecution, the real culprits won't be punished. There are just too many of them.
The guilty include not only the Bush administration's hardliners who conjured up this war, but also the Democratic hawks who enabled them and the media that spun their glorious war narrative and convinced so many ordinary citizens to jump on board. It's the Tom Friedmans and Kenneth Pollacks and Peter Beinarts, who only realized the Iraq war was a mistake when it proved to be as disastrous as every other "war of choice." They promised us a clean war; smart bombs would spare the innocent, a high-tech military would be finished in a fortnight and casualties on both sides would be limited.
Those of us who said that the war would be hell on Iraqis were called "pacifists" and "appeasers." The hawks got their war. Now we know that it's not a video game or glowing green explosions on CNN -- it's a bloody and uncontrolled mess and civilians are paying the price, as they always do.
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