In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02069.html
Iraqi Townspeople Describe Slaying of 24 Civilians by Marines in Nov. 19 Incident
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 27, 2006; A01
BAGHDAD, May 26 -- Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.
Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. "I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am good,' " Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."
The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif's house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.
Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation, based on accounts of survivors and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha's hospital and inside victims' houses.
An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
"Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood," said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.
Haditha is one of a chain of farm towns on the Euphrates River where U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled foreign and local insurgents without resolution for much of the war. The first account of the killings there was a false or erroneous statement issued the next day, Nov. 20, by a U.S. Marine spokesman from a Marine base in Ramadi: "A U.S. Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.''
The incident was touched off when a roadside bomb struck a Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment supply convoy. The explosion killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, who was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Following in the footsteps of two Marine uncles and a Marine grandfather, Terrazas had planned to go to college when it was all done, his family said.
Insurgents planted the bomb on a side road off one of Haditha's main streets, placing it between two vacant lots to try to avoid killing -- and further alienating -- Haditha's civilians, residents said. It went off at 7:15 a.m. Terrazas was driving the Humvee, and he died instantly. Two other Marines in the convoy were wounded.
"Everybody agrees that this was the triggering event. The question is: What happened afterward?" said Paul Hackett, an attorney for a Marine officer with a slight connection to the case.
The descriptions of events provided to The Post by witnesses in Haditha could not be independently verified, although their accounts of the number of casualties and their identities were corroborated by death certificates.
In the first minutes after the shock of the blast, residents said, silence reigned on the street of walled courtyards, brick homes and tiny palm groves. Marines appeared stunned, or purposeful, as they moved around the burning Humvee, witnesses said.
Then one of the Marines took charge and began shouting, said Fahmi, who was watching from his roof. Fahmi said he saw the Marine direct other Marines into the house closest to the blast, about 50 yards away.
It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. Although he had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years ago, Ali was always one of the first on his block to go out every morning, scattering scraps for his chickens and hosing the dust of the arid western town from his driveway, neighbors said.
In the house with Ali and his 66-year-old wife, Khamisa Tuma Ali, were three of the middle-aged male members of their family, at least one daughter-in-law and four children -- 4-year-old Abdullah, 8-year-old Iman, 5-year-old Abdul Rahman and 2-month-old Asia.
Marines entered shooting, witnesses recalled. Most of the shots -- in Ali's house and two others -- were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, physicians at Haditha's hospital said.
A daughter-in-law, identified as Hibbah, escaped with Asia, survivors and neighbors said. Iman and Abdul Rahman were shot but survived. Four-year-old Abdullah, Ali and the rest died.
Ali took nine rounds in the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back, according to his death certificate.
The Marines moved to the house next door, Fahmi said.
Inside were 43-year-old Khafif, 41-year-old Aeda Yasin Ahmed, an 8-year-old son, five young daughters and a 1-year-old girl staying with the family, according to death certificates and neighbors.
The Marines shot them at close range and hurled grenades into the kitchen and bathroom, survivors and neighbors said later. Khafif's pleas could be heard across the neighborhood. Four of the girls died screaming.
Only 13-year-old Safa Younis lived -- saved, she said, by her mother's blood spilling onto her, making her look dead when she fell, limp, in a faint.
Townspeople led a Washington Post reporter this week to the girl they identified as Safa. Wearing a ponytail and tracksuit, the girl said her mother died trying to gather the girls. The girl burst into tears after a few words. The older couple caring for her apologized and asked the reporter to leave.
Moving to a third house in the row, Marines burst in on four brothers, Marwan, Qahtan, Chasib and Jamal Ahmed. Neighbors said the Marines killed them together.
Marine officials said later that one of the brothers had the only gun found among the three families, although there has been no known allegation that the weapon was fired.
Meanwhile, a separate group of Marines found at least one other house full of young men. The Marines led the men in that house outside, some still in their underwear, and away to detention.
The final victims of the day happened upon the scene inadvertently, witnesses said. Four male college students -- Khalid Ayada al-Zawi, Wajdi Ayada al-Zawi, Mohammed Battal Mahmoud and Akram Hamid Flayeh -- had left the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah for the weekend to stay with one of their families on the street, said Fahmi, a friend of the young men.
A Haditha taxi driver, Ahmed Khidher, was bringing them home, Fahmi said.
According to Fahmi, the young men and their driver turned onto the street and saw the wrecked Humvee and the Marines. Khidher threw the car into reverse, trying to back away at full speed, Fahmi said, and the Marines opened fire from about 30 yards away, killing all the men inside the taxi.
After the killings, Fahmi said, more Americans arrived at the scene. They shouted among themselves. The Marines cordoned off the block; then, and for at least the next day, Marines filed into the houses, looked around and came out.
At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.
The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.
The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said it sent copies of the journalism student's videotape to mosques in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, using the killings of the women and children to recruit fighters.
After Haditha leaders complained, the Marines paid compensation put variously by townspeople at $1,500 or $2,500 for each of the 15 men, women and children killed in the first two houses. They refused to pay for the nine other men killed, insisting that they were insurgents. Officials familiar with the investigations said it is now believed that the nine were innocent victims. By some accounts, a 25th person, the father of the four brothers killed together, was also killed.
As the official investigations conclude and fresh information continues to surface in Haditha, several aspects of the incident remain unclear or are in dispute.
For example, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, which helped break the news that spurred the military investigation, said he had been told by Marine officers that the rampage lasted three to five hours and involved two squads of Marines.
Although Marines' accounts offered in the early stages of the investigation described a running gun battle, those versions of the story proved to be false, officials briefed by the Marines said.
Also, one member of Congress who was briefed by Marines said in Washington that the shooting of the men in the taxi occurred before the shootings in the houses.
Another point of dispute is whether some houses were destroyed by fire or by airstrikes. Some Iraqis reported that the Marines burned houses in the area of the attack, but two people familiar with the case, including Hackett, the lawyer, said warplanes conducted airstrikes, dropping 500-pound bombs on more than one house.
That is significant for any possible court-martial proceedings, because it would indicate that senior commanders, who must approve such strikes and who would also use aircraft to assess their effects, were paying attention to events in Haditha that day.
The Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines have rotated back home, to California. Last month, the Marine Corps relieved Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani of command of the 3rd Battalion. Two of his company commanders were relieved of their commands, as well. Authorities said a series of unspecified incidents had led to a loss of confidence in the three.
In Haditha, families of those killed keep an ear cocked to a foreign station, Radio Monte Carlo, waiting for any news of a trial of the Marines.
"They are waiting for the sentence -- although they are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who killed a dog in the United States," said Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer preparing a file for Iraqi courts and the United Nations, if the U.S. trial disappoints. "Because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans.''
A Washington Post staff member in Iraq and staff writer Thomas E. Ricks and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
In Haditha
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Lulldapull
- Posts: 190
- Joined: Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:17 pm
- Location: Dar Al-Harb
June 13, 2006
Exception or Rule?
The Meaning of Haditha
By PAUL D'AMATO
As I go through a list of New York Times articles on the Haditha massacre, in which Marines murdered 24 Iraqi civilians, the following phrases keep popping up: "unprovoked attack," "unprovoked murder," "unprovoked killings."
This is presumably to counterpose the Marine's actions at Haditha to the more reasonable attacks in Iraq by U.S. armed forces--the attacks that are "provoked" by the behavior of Iraqis toward them. But can we make such a clean distinction?
Defenders of the Iraq occupation will say "no" for their own reasons. They'll say--these guys are under a lot of stress fighting a shadowy insurgency, that the "enemy" can be anywhere, and when soldiers see their buddies killed right beside them, it's only natural that they lash out. To quote the Chicago Tribune's Mike Dorning, U.S. soldiers face "a foreign population in which friend, foe and bystander may seem indistinguishable."
I'll try to give my own answer to this question by way of analogy. If someone conducts an armed invasion into your house and shoots you in your sleep, it is clear, is it not, that it is an unprovoked attack.
Now, let's say you violently resist the armed home invader and, in the ensuing melee, he kills you--did you provoke him to attack? Is a condition of the home invader's attack being "unprovoked" that the homeowner submit peacefully to the home invasion? No, it would still be an unprovoked attack. The action of the homeowner, on the other hand, would be a provoked attack, i.e., an attack provoked by the home invader.
The problem with the term "unprovoked attack" is that it deliberately obscures the larger picture--that the entire U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq itself is an unprovoked attack by a foreign army on the Iraqi people. All U.S. armed action in Iraq is provocative in this sense; all Iraqi reactions to it are provoked by the occupation.
It is shameful that we should even have to explain this, so numbed are many people in this country to the idea that the U.S. is perfectly within its rights to operate hundreds of military bases around the world and invade any country at will, and that it isn't legitimate for anyone to resist it.
The top military brass lies when it says that massacres like Haditha are the exception. The entire U.S. military machine is a machine for violently enforcing U.S. will abroad.
Soldiers (even more than U.S. civilians if that's possible) are trained in methods that dehumanize Arabs and Muslims to make it easier to kill them. Massacres of Iraqis--civilians and resistance fighters alike--are built into the situation.
Military occupations almost always become total wars on the occupied population, because the majority seethe with hatred against the occupiers and eventually resist by whatever means at their disposal. Within that group, a significant minority are provoked to such outrage that they decide to take up the gun against the occupier.
This is why the U.S. soldier cannot distinguish between friend and foe--occupying armies have very few friends--or collaborators, in the common vernacular. As the Haditha scandal develops, expect to hear stories about many more Hadithas.
Of course, everything would go a lot more smoothly if the Iraqis would just accept heavily armed U.S. troops tramping through their streets, wrecking their infrastructure and shooting their family members. If Iraqis could just stop "provoking" American soldiers, then perhaps these damnable massacres wouldn't occur anymore.
Alternatively, the resistance could identify itself a little better to American troops--perhaps wear green uniforms or wave little flags. During the American revolution one British officer complained: "Never had the British army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose; they send their riflemen five or six at a time who conceal themselves behind trees, etc., till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!"
Paul D'Amato is the Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review. He can be reached at: [email protected]
http://www.counterpunch.org/damato06132006.html
Exception or Rule?
The Meaning of Haditha
By PAUL D'AMATO
As I go through a list of New York Times articles on the Haditha massacre, in which Marines murdered 24 Iraqi civilians, the following phrases keep popping up: "unprovoked attack," "unprovoked murder," "unprovoked killings."
This is presumably to counterpose the Marine's actions at Haditha to the more reasonable attacks in Iraq by U.S. armed forces--the attacks that are "provoked" by the behavior of Iraqis toward them. But can we make such a clean distinction?
Defenders of the Iraq occupation will say "no" for their own reasons. They'll say--these guys are under a lot of stress fighting a shadowy insurgency, that the "enemy" can be anywhere, and when soldiers see their buddies killed right beside them, it's only natural that they lash out. To quote the Chicago Tribune's Mike Dorning, U.S. soldiers face "a foreign population in which friend, foe and bystander may seem indistinguishable."
I'll try to give my own answer to this question by way of analogy. If someone conducts an armed invasion into your house and shoots you in your sleep, it is clear, is it not, that it is an unprovoked attack.
Now, let's say you violently resist the armed home invader and, in the ensuing melee, he kills you--did you provoke him to attack? Is a condition of the home invader's attack being "unprovoked" that the homeowner submit peacefully to the home invasion? No, it would still be an unprovoked attack. The action of the homeowner, on the other hand, would be a provoked attack, i.e., an attack provoked by the home invader.
The problem with the term "unprovoked attack" is that it deliberately obscures the larger picture--that the entire U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq itself is an unprovoked attack by a foreign army on the Iraqi people. All U.S. armed action in Iraq is provocative in this sense; all Iraqi reactions to it are provoked by the occupation.
It is shameful that we should even have to explain this, so numbed are many people in this country to the idea that the U.S. is perfectly within its rights to operate hundreds of military bases around the world and invade any country at will, and that it isn't legitimate for anyone to resist it.
The top military brass lies when it says that massacres like Haditha are the exception. The entire U.S. military machine is a machine for violently enforcing U.S. will abroad.
Soldiers (even more than U.S. civilians if that's possible) are trained in methods that dehumanize Arabs and Muslims to make it easier to kill them. Massacres of Iraqis--civilians and resistance fighters alike--are built into the situation.
Military occupations almost always become total wars on the occupied population, because the majority seethe with hatred against the occupiers and eventually resist by whatever means at their disposal. Within that group, a significant minority are provoked to such outrage that they decide to take up the gun against the occupier.
This is why the U.S. soldier cannot distinguish between friend and foe--occupying armies have very few friends--or collaborators, in the common vernacular. As the Haditha scandal develops, expect to hear stories about many more Hadithas.
Of course, everything would go a lot more smoothly if the Iraqis would just accept heavily armed U.S. troops tramping through their streets, wrecking their infrastructure and shooting their family members. If Iraqis could just stop "provoking" American soldiers, then perhaps these damnable massacres wouldn't occur anymore.
Alternatively, the resistance could identify itself a little better to American troops--perhaps wear green uniforms or wave little flags. During the American revolution one British officer complained: "Never had the British army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose; they send their riflemen five or six at a time who conceal themselves behind trees, etc., till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!"
Paul D'Amato is the Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review. He can be reached at: [email protected]
http://www.counterpunch.org/damato06132006.html
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006_ ... chive.html
Were Kalishnikovs Used to Kill the People of Haditha?
Was it Russian Kalishnikov Rifles, a favorite Al Qaeda weapon, that killed the people of Haditha in November?
A November 2005 video still provided to Reuters by Hammurabi Human Rights group shows covered bodies, which Hammurabi says, are of a family of 15 shot dead in their home in Haditha, in western Anbar province, Iraq. U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, a defence official said on Friday, May 26, 2006. (Hammurabi Organisation via Reuters TV/Reuters)
The weapons used in Haditha were Kalishnikovs.
That is what a caller today said on the Sean Hannity radio program.
The military man who called in this afternoon said that the shells were from a Kalishnikov rifle and not a US made weapon from pictures taken in Haditha.
Of course, if this were proven it would certainly impact the story.
Were Kalishnikovs Used to Kill the People of Haditha?
Was it Russian Kalishnikov Rifles, a favorite Al Qaeda weapon, that killed the people of Haditha in November?
A November 2005 video still provided to Reuters by Hammurabi Human Rights group shows covered bodies, which Hammurabi says, are of a family of 15 shot dead in their home in Haditha, in western Anbar province, Iraq. U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, a defence official said on Friday, May 26, 2006. (Hammurabi Organisation via Reuters TV/Reuters)
The weapons used in Haditha were Kalishnikovs.
That is what a caller today said on the Sean Hannity radio program.
The military man who called in this afternoon said that the shells were from a Kalishnikov rifle and not a US made weapon from pictures taken in Haditha.
Of course, if this were proven it would certainly impact the story.
-
Lulldapull
- Posts: 190
- Joined: Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:17 pm
- Location: Dar Al-Harb
MASSACRE AT HADITHA
June 19, 2006
MASSACRE AT HADITHA
NEW YORK – All wars produce civilian casualties. Many Americans, used to the `clean’ video-game images of their recent conflicts, have forgotten this fact when they repeat such mindless slogans as `stay the course’ and `get the job done.’
Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, of the 1st Marine Regiment was patrolling the Iraqi town of Haditha when a roadside bomb killed one of its members. Kilo’s men claim they `lost it.’ They allegedly burst into the nearest house and gunned down 24 men, women and children cowering inside.
If the massacre indeed occurred, then add Haditha to those other shameful place names that have become hallmarks of the US war in Iraq and its so-called `war on terror:’ Guantanamo, Bagram, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib.
The US military first tried to dismiss the Haditha killing as an accident of war, then sought to cover it up, as has been routinely done with other civilian killings in Iraq. The Pentagon still refuses to reveal the total number of Iraqis civilian casualties.
But many Americans and members of the US Congress were outraged by Haditha and are demanding the Marines involved and superior officers face prosecution.
The US military responded by forcing troops in Iraq to attend `sensitivity sessions’ about `core American values’ – ie lectures that it’s bad to murder women and children. Any soldiers who need such instruction belong in jail, not the armed forces. This is military bureaucratic stupidity at its worst.
If Kilo Company’s men did murder 24 civilians, they must face trial for murder, and their superior officers for covering up the crime.
But the soldier’s punishment should be mitigated by the fact they were sent into a dirty guerilla war fought in the middle of a largely hostile civilian population in which such atrocities are inevitable.
Iraq, and the growing conflict in Afghanistan, are typical of the 20th Century’s colonial guerilla wars. Faced with frequent bombs, sniping, mines, ambushes and treachery by supposed local `allies,’ even the best-trained occupation armies soon became brutalized, sadistic, cynical, then demoralized.
I have witnessed this same pattern in every guerilla war I covered, observed, or in which I participated: Algeria, Vietnam, Kashmir, Angola, Namibia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kurdistan, South Africa, Kosovo, Palestine.
Villages that sheltered rebels were destroyed, hostages shot. Civilians quickly became identified with the enemy and considered fair game for increasingly trigger-happy troops.
Murderous reprisals occur in all guerilla wars. Any army sent into a dirty guerilla war like Iraq or Afghanistan will slaughter civilians and become corrupted.
Particularly so when it is a professional army drawn from the lowest rank of American society, high school dropouts, and the unemployable. The culture of mass reprisals, easy killing, brutality, and torture risks seeping back into the higher military command structure, and then into the domestic security forces.
A poll this month showed the shocking results that 75% of US troops in Iraq actually believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind the 9/11 attacks.
It seems just, but also unfair, to prosecute the men of Kilo company when other US forces have killed at least 38,000 Iraqi civilians (some estimates say 100,000), wrecked much of what once was one of the Arab World’s most advanced country, and hold over 20,000 political prisoners – more than Saddam Hussein did.
The simple answer is that the US Army and Marines should never have been sent to wage a neo-colonial war of pacification in Iraq – or Afghanistan. The longer US forces stay there, the more they will become brutalized, undisciplined, and hated.
US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are trying to avoid killing civilians. But bombing and shelling, the primary cause of civilian deaths, are too often used to intimidate villages and tribes, or punish enemy ambushes. The destruction of much of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a resistance stronghold, was a brutal example.
The rule: bomb or shoot or shell first, check later. Dead civilians are labeled `killed suspected Taliban militants’ or `suspected Iraqi terrorists.’ In western thinking, killing civilians from the air hardly counts. Detonating roadside bombs is `terrorism;’ dropping them from the air is `counter-terrorism.’
During the 1991 First Iraq War, the US bombs and missiles destroyed much of Iraq’s water purification and sewage system. Post-war sanctions prevented Iraq from importing equipment to repair these sanitary facilities or even chlorine to purify water. Contaminated water was the primary cause of the death of over 500,000 Iraqi civilians, the majority children, between 1991 and 2003. If this cruel act does not fit the definition of war crimes I do not know what does.
The real blame for Haditha, of course, belongs to the Bush Administration for plunging the US into an unnecessary war in Iraq, and with Pentagon brass for covering up civilian killings and failing to prosecute those responsible. And with those senior Washington officials who spit on the Geneva Conventions and laws of war and telegraphed their contempt right down the military chain of command.
30
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/20 ... at_had.php
MASSACRE AT HADITHA
NEW YORK – All wars produce civilian casualties. Many Americans, used to the `clean’ video-game images of their recent conflicts, have forgotten this fact when they repeat such mindless slogans as `stay the course’ and `get the job done.’
Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, of the 1st Marine Regiment was patrolling the Iraqi town of Haditha when a roadside bomb killed one of its members. Kilo’s men claim they `lost it.’ They allegedly burst into the nearest house and gunned down 24 men, women and children cowering inside.
If the massacre indeed occurred, then add Haditha to those other shameful place names that have become hallmarks of the US war in Iraq and its so-called `war on terror:’ Guantanamo, Bagram, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib.
The US military first tried to dismiss the Haditha killing as an accident of war, then sought to cover it up, as has been routinely done with other civilian killings in Iraq. The Pentagon still refuses to reveal the total number of Iraqis civilian casualties.
But many Americans and members of the US Congress were outraged by Haditha and are demanding the Marines involved and superior officers face prosecution.
The US military responded by forcing troops in Iraq to attend `sensitivity sessions’ about `core American values’ – ie lectures that it’s bad to murder women and children. Any soldiers who need such instruction belong in jail, not the armed forces. This is military bureaucratic stupidity at its worst.
If Kilo Company’s men did murder 24 civilians, they must face trial for murder, and their superior officers for covering up the crime.
But the soldier’s punishment should be mitigated by the fact they were sent into a dirty guerilla war fought in the middle of a largely hostile civilian population in which such atrocities are inevitable.
Iraq, and the growing conflict in Afghanistan, are typical of the 20th Century’s colonial guerilla wars. Faced with frequent bombs, sniping, mines, ambushes and treachery by supposed local `allies,’ even the best-trained occupation armies soon became brutalized, sadistic, cynical, then demoralized.
I have witnessed this same pattern in every guerilla war I covered, observed, or in which I participated: Algeria, Vietnam, Kashmir, Angola, Namibia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kurdistan, South Africa, Kosovo, Palestine.
Villages that sheltered rebels were destroyed, hostages shot. Civilians quickly became identified with the enemy and considered fair game for increasingly trigger-happy troops.
Murderous reprisals occur in all guerilla wars. Any army sent into a dirty guerilla war like Iraq or Afghanistan will slaughter civilians and become corrupted.
Particularly so when it is a professional army drawn from the lowest rank of American society, high school dropouts, and the unemployable. The culture of mass reprisals, easy killing, brutality, and torture risks seeping back into the higher military command structure, and then into the domestic security forces.
A poll this month showed the shocking results that 75% of US troops in Iraq actually believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind the 9/11 attacks.
It seems just, but also unfair, to prosecute the men of Kilo company when other US forces have killed at least 38,000 Iraqi civilians (some estimates say 100,000), wrecked much of what once was one of the Arab World’s most advanced country, and hold over 20,000 political prisoners – more than Saddam Hussein did.
The simple answer is that the US Army and Marines should never have been sent to wage a neo-colonial war of pacification in Iraq – or Afghanistan. The longer US forces stay there, the more they will become brutalized, undisciplined, and hated.
US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are trying to avoid killing civilians. But bombing and shelling, the primary cause of civilian deaths, are too often used to intimidate villages and tribes, or punish enemy ambushes. The destruction of much of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a resistance stronghold, was a brutal example.
The rule: bomb or shoot or shell first, check later. Dead civilians are labeled `killed suspected Taliban militants’ or `suspected Iraqi terrorists.’ In western thinking, killing civilians from the air hardly counts. Detonating roadside bombs is `terrorism;’ dropping them from the air is `counter-terrorism.’
During the 1991 First Iraq War, the US bombs and missiles destroyed much of Iraq’s water purification and sewage system. Post-war sanctions prevented Iraq from importing equipment to repair these sanitary facilities or even chlorine to purify water. Contaminated water was the primary cause of the death of over 500,000 Iraqi civilians, the majority children, between 1991 and 2003. If this cruel act does not fit the definition of war crimes I do not know what does.
The real blame for Haditha, of course, belongs to the Bush Administration for plunging the US into an unnecessary war in Iraq, and with Pentagon brass for covering up civilian killings and failing to prosecute those responsible. And with those senior Washington officials who spit on the Geneva Conventions and laws of war and telegraphed their contempt right down the military chain of command.
30
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/20 ... at_had.php
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Lulldapull
- Posts: 190
- Joined: Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:17 pm
- Location: Dar Al-Harb
@Currychicken,curious wrote:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006_ ... chive.html
Were Kalishnikovs Used to Kill the People of Haditha?
Was it Russian Kalishnikov Rifles, a favorite Al Qaeda weapon, that killed the people of Haditha in November?
A November 2005 video still provided to Reuters by Hammurabi Human Rights group shows covered bodies, which Hammurabi says, are of a family of 15 shot dead in their home in Haditha, in western Anbar province, Iraq. U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, a defence official said on Friday, May 26, 2006. (Hammurabi Organisation via Reuters TV/Reuters)
The weapons used in Haditha were Kalishnikovs.
That is what a caller today said on the Sean Hannity radio program.
The military man who called in this afternoon said that the shells were from a Kalishnikov rifle and not a US made weapon from pictures taken in Haditha.
Of course, if this were proven it would certainly impact the story.
Senjata standar pasukan poendudukan AS di Iraq adalah Colt M4 (versi pendek M-16), bukan AK-47 yang biasa dipakai pejuang perlawanan Iraq dan serdadu bayaran AS alias Private Military Contractor...
