The
New York Times' Paul von Zielbauer is on the Marine atrocity beat. He's the author of the surprisingly analytical article I
blogged a few posts ago. His recent follow-up, on the Haditha hearings, is a return to media normalcy --
'Lawyers on Haditha Panel Peer into Fog of War':
...the seven-day hearing opened a rare public window onto a debate about how the Marine Corps is fighting in Iraq against a ruthless insurgency that uses civilians as cover and disregards the laws of conflict taught in the United States.
As a description of what happened on November 19, 2005 in Haditha, that's just bizarre.
A roadside bomb exploded as a convoy went by, killing a marine in the gruesome way that such weapons do. The squad leader went berserk, ordering five unarmed men out of a nearby taxi and shooting them on the spot, after which another sergeant pissed on their bodies. Then a lieutenant arrived and ordered the unit to "take" a nearby house. They proceeded over the next several hours to kill nineteen men, women, and children in four houses with fragmentation grenades and machine guns.
Who disregarded the laws of conflict here? Where in this episode are insurgents using civilians as cover?
Von Zielbauer lets this exchange go by without a word of correction:
“If there had been 150 bodies [of noncombatants killed in action] that day,” Major McCann asked, ... “where would we be, in your mind?”
Captain Dinsmore, a 21-year veteran testifying by telephone from Iraq, offered a relatively impassioned response. He said the Iraq war rarely provided clear lines between combatants and civilians. The marines in Haditha that day, under small-arms fire in a profoundly hostile Sunni Arab region, could either abide by the laws of war and risk being killed, or could take aggressive steps to protect themselves and their squad members, and risk committing a war crime.
The clarification that the reporter fails to mention: The investigation that finally took place (after
Time published the story of the massacre four months later) found no forensic evidence that the unit took any fire at all, small arms or otherwise. All the bulletholes in the area were from the marines' weapons. The witnesses and participants tell wildly different stories about who was being shot at. And the only weapon found in the four houses where the residents were killed was one pistol, which had not been fired.
But who's counting? Fog of war, man, fog of war.
Update: 21 May 3:30 am - Somehow I missed until today William Langewiesche's
'Rules of Engagement', an eminently worthwhile piece on the Haditha incident that appeared last November. I don't remember anyone linking to it or discussing it at the time, but the pointers to his just-out article on nuclear proliferation all mention and praise 'RoE'. Rightly so; reading it has, among other things, helped me take a more generous view of von Zielbauer's article in the
Times. But I wish that Langewiesche had stuck with the story, because I'd be very interested in his response to a number of points that have come out since he finished writing.
For now, though, just wanted to note a passage that answers some of my questions about the
immunity deal offered to
the lying little weasel Lt. William Kallop:
Like other lieutenants in Kilo Company, Kallop was junior in all but rank to the senior enlisted men, to whom he naturally deferred. He had a reputation of being a little soft, a little lost. He was the pleasant son of a wealthy New York family, who had joined the Marine Corps, it was believed in Kilo Company, to prove something to himself before returning to a life of comfort. As a soldier he was said to be average.
When the allegations against Kilo Company surfaced in the spring of 2006, his parents vigorously reacted. They hired a New York public-relations firm that specializes in legal cases, and then engaged a defense attorney who is a former Marine general and was once one of the top lawyers in the Corps. The implicit warning may have had some effect. While McConnell and Chessani were humiliated and relieved of their commands, and Wuterich was fingered in public, Kallop was left untouched, though technically upon his arrival at Route Chestnut on November 19 he had become the commander on the scene.
Image: Sgt. Frank Wuterich by Lucian Read in Haditha, fall 2005.
Labels: Iraq mil
Yesterday a young man committed suicide in Guantanamo. Abdul Rahman Ma Ath Thafir al Amri, 34, of Taif, Saudi Arabia, was never charged with a crime. He was never permitted to see a lawyer. He has been imprisoned for the last five years. He was interrogated again and again and again, and quite possibly tortured. For most of the past year he has been locked away, like the hundreds of other men held with no charges and no hope of a trial or release, in a solitary cell for 22 hours a day. 
