Memorial Day

Two soldiers I'm remembering today:

Alyssa Peterson and LaVena Johnson.


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May justice be done.
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Pull the other one.

Pres. Obama's getting cold feet about releasing long-withheld images of U.S. torture. [Update: Decision made.] The excuse he gives insults our intelligence:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters yesterday that President Obama has "great concern" about the impact that releasing the photos would have on soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asked whether the Justice Department's decision might be reversed, Gibbs declined to reaffirm the government's intentions.

"Great concern about the impact on troops?" Brotha, puhleeze. He's worried about the impact on the U.S. public, half of which is already far more interested in accountability for torture than he is, and the other half unwilling or unable to conceive of U.S. torture unless shown pictures.


He's worried about the impact on the Senate confirmation of Lt.Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who led a network of torture and assassination squads in Iraq until last year, as commander in Afghanistan. Many members of McChrystal's dirty-war task forces are still in the field in both countries, and probably Pakistan. They were told by Army JAGs that the abuse and torture of prisoners was legal, given a directive that said they were allowed to use torture techniques forbidden to regular soldiers, assured repeatedly that they'd be protected by higher-ups from being held responsible for their actions, and when a little investigative heat was applied, managed to scuttle it by the convenient destruction of computer files.

It's sickening to see Obama try to justify illegal secrecy by hiding behind the troops in just the way Bush used to do. It's even more appalling to see him not only do nothing to hold torture commanders accountable, but promote them.

Update: 1:00 pm, 14 May - Guest poster Neel Krishnaswami at Unqualified Offerings wonders if the connection between the photos and McChrystal is even more direct.

Update 2: 1:05 pm, 14 May - Revised and expanded version cross-posted at A Tiny Revolution.
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More military murder

Another case in which three U.S. soldiers appear to have shot and killed four bound Iraqi prisoners has come to light. This one took place in the spring of 2007, in West Rashid, a Shiite neighborhood in southwest Baghdad.

As in the Fallujah case, the ranking officer on the scene shot two of the prisoners and ordered the men with him each to shoot the others. Other members of their company were aware of the group's crime, but did nothing to prevent it or to report it. They're being charged with conspiracy murder; the shooters will probably be charged with murder.

After taking small-arms fire, the patrol chased some men into a building, arresting them and finding several automatic weapons, grenades and a sniper rifle, they said. On the way to their combat outpost, Sergeant Hatley’s convoy was informed by Army superiors that the evidence to detain the Iraqis was insufficient, Sergeant Leahy said in his statement. The unit was told to release the men, according to the statement.

"First Sergeant Hatley then made the call to take the detainees to a canal and kill them," Sergeant Leahy said, as retribution for the deaths of two soldiers from the unit: Staff Sgt. Karl O. Soto-Pinedo, who died from a sniper’s bullet, and Specialist Marieo Guerrero, killed by a roadside bomb.

The execution-murders took place in April 2007. Guerrero was killed on March 17, Soto-Pinedo on February 27. How many other non-commissioned officers think it's fine to kill Iraqis in cold blood as payback for the deaths of U.S. soldiers?

Update: 4:15 pm, 27 August - While I'm posting on the subject, another recent case and an update on an older one:

Two soldiers were charged in early August with assault and premeditated murder in the death of Ali Mansur Muhammad at some point after his release from U.S. detention in mid-May. Very few details were released; I'll follow up if more comes out.

Steven Dale Green, the main defendant in the rape of Abeer Hamza and the murder of her family in Mahmoudiyah in March 2006, will be tried three years after the crime.

Update 2: 12:55 pm, 28 Aug - Remember the right-wing screechfest a year ago when soldier Scott Beauchamp wrote a pseudonymous article for The New Republic portraying his unit as having, among other things, run down dogs with Bradley vehicles? The Army outed Beauchamp, said that he'd fabricated the incidents in his article. Among those denying the account was none other than Sgt. Hatley, in whose unit Beauchamp served (credit Bernhard at Moon of Alabama for the catch).

So, while members of the unit were busily denying that honorable soldiers could possibly do anything as terrible as kill a dog or show disrespect to Iraqi remains, at least seven of them were aware that its officers had murdered live Iraqi human beings, handcuffed prisoners.

Spencer Ackerman recently released a backgrounder/update he wrote last year on Beauchamp, who was hung out to dry by TNR. He notes at his blog that the Army began an investigation into the murders this past January, though they wouldn't confirm at the time that the unit in question was Beauchamp's.

Update: 1:00 pm, 9 Jan 2009 - Hatley is being charged with murder in the killing of the four Iraqi prisoners, and "faces additional charges of murder for a separate incident in January 2007" for which the Army has not provided details.

Fallujah: Death of command responsibility

The "battle of Fallujah" was itself a war crime, a punitive assault on a densely populated city initiated immediately after the November 2004 U.S. elections. It incorporated many specific war crimes, among them the use of white phosphorus, the murder of civilians, the sealing-off of hospitals and ambulances, and the killing of wounded and prisoners.

Remember when reporter Kevin Sites documented the shooting of a wounded, unarmed, prone prisoner by a Marine? [see image] The Marine wasn't charged with anything. There was a wave of denunciation and questioning of Sites and justification of the shooter. Well, there was more prisoner killing going on. In fact, it's pretty clear that the rules of engagement, such as they are in Iraq, were suspended in Fallujah.

Yet as each new atrocity comes to light, somehow commanders are never the ones facing charges, even when they're clearly responsible. In this case, three Marines were ordered to conduct a sweep of a house after another platoon member was killed by a sniper ("to get our heads back in the game", not because the sniper was firing from the house). They'd found and handcuffed four men, but their unit was moving out and "there was no time" to take prisoners:

"We called up to the platoon leader and the response was, 'Are they dead yet?'" Weemer said on the tape.

The three are in a hearing to determine if they'll be court martialed on charges of murder and dereliction of duty. The platoon leader is not facing charges. He's not even named in the news coverage of this hearing.

All this only came out because one of the participants talked about the experience during interviews as part of applying for a Secret Service job. Who knows how many more incidents are known only to the perpetrators?

Some veterans of the Fallujah rampage went on to murder civilians at Haditha a year later, and were only charged after video evidence became available and Time reported the story. In another perversion of command responsibility, all those shooters and their commanding officers have been let off one by one except Sgt. Wuterich, the squad leader. His court martial begins soon.

Mercs gone wild

The rampaging private armies that guard State Department and CIA personnel in Iraq have finally gone too far to ignore.

On September 16, a Blackwater convoy entered Nisour Square in the Mansour district of Baghdad. Spooked by the sound of a car bomb a quarter mile away, but not under attack from anyone, the guards strafed the cars that had stopped at the side of the street to make way for the convoy. The mercenaries fired not only from beside their armored SUVs but also from one of two 'Little Bird' helicopters overhead onto the cars trapped below, using a grenade launcher to set one car on fire. They killed at least 11 people and wounded 18 more.

As always in these kinds of incidents, Blackwater insisted that they were fired on and that those killed and wounded were "armed enemies", or at best unfortunate victims of a "firefight." But this time there was video, along with the testimony of survivors, Iraqi police, and witnesses in the buildings nearby -- all giving the lie to the killers' story.

The Iraqi government threatened to eject and ban Blackwater from the country. Citing the apparent absence of such an outraged reaction to earlier incidents, Prof. Deborah Avant found the Maliki government's response "puzzling", and put it down to political positioning. My reading was simpler: everyone has a breaking point.

The Iraqi government had been complaining to the State Department for the last year about shooting after shooting, and nothing ever came of it. Ordinary Iraqis seethed with anger, fear, and humiliation at the behavior of the thousand Blackwater mercs always present in and above Baghdad's streets. They drive their black armored SUVs wherever they feel like it, ramming vehicles, knocking over obstacles on the sidewalks, pointing their machine guns and often shooting at anyone who gets too close, and laying down a curtain of fire if they see or hear anything that they interpret as an attack.

Here is a list of some of the most serious incidents of the last year, fewer than half reported in the U.S. press or attributed to Blackwater at the time they occurred:

1. December 18, 2006 - Blackwater team busted out of a Green Zone prison a former government minister convicted of embezzling billions. The prison was overseen jointly by U.S. and Iraqi guards. Former Iraqi Electricity Minister Ahyam al Samarrai was awaiting sentencing on charges that he had embezzled $2.5 billion intended to rebuild Iraq's decrepit electricity grid. The only Iraqi cabinet official convicted of corruption so far, he subsequently was spirited out of the country and is believed to be living in the United States (and is said to have dual U.S.-Iraqi citizenship). This "raises questions about what American officials might have known about the breakout."

2. December 24, 2006 - An off-duty Blackwater guard, drunk after a Christmas party, shot and killed a bodyguard of the Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi in the Green Zone. Blackwater immediately flew him back to the U.S. and says that they fired him. The story broke in the U.S. in mid-January; the company only admitted to it under questioning during a Congressional hearing in early February. The case was referred to the Justice Department, but there have been no charges nor any further reports from an investigation.

3. February 4, 2007 - Blackwater guards were involved in a shooting near the Foreign Ministry, in which Iraqi journalist Hana al-Ameedi died. [She is not in the Reporters sans Frontieres or Committee to Protect Journalists lists for 2007, but if she was shot in traffic by convoy gunspray or as a bystander, she might not make any of the tracking lists.] Update: 12:30 pm, 29 Sept - The name and date above were from the Interior Ministry's list of six incidents. A McClatchy report on what sounds like the same incident says that Suhad Shakir, with the Al Atyaf channel, was shot while driving to work and died outside the Foreign Ministry on February 2. Shakir is not on the RSF or CPJ lists, either.

4. February 7, 2007 - Blackwater operatives shot and killed three guards working for al-Iraqiya TV (government-owned), mistaking them for gunmen intending to attack a delegation guarded by Blackwater that was visiting the Justice Ministry building across the street in the al-Salihiya neighborhood of Baghdad.

5. February 14, 2007 - Blackwater staff smashed the windshields of Iraqis' cars by throwing bottles of ice water at them from their speeding SUV. Update: 12:45 pm 29 Sept - Throwing frozen water bottles appears to be a routine for Blackwater; it shows up in stories about at least four separate incidents, including their own account of the Nisour Square events ("to get the driver's attention").

6. May 24, 2007 - Blackwater guards shot and killed an Iraqi driver outside the Interior Ministry gate who "veered too close to their convoy." The day before, a Blackwater team reportedly came under attack, triggering a furious gun battle involving the security guards, U.S. troops and Apache attack helicopters in Baghdad's municipal center. [I believe at least one bystander was killed in this May 23 incident, too, but can't document that now.]

7. August 2007 - Blackwater guards led a convoy the wrong way down a Baghdad street. When a taxi driver failed to stop quickly enough as the convoy approached, the Blackwater guards opened fire, killing him.

8. September 9 - Killed five people and wounded 10 near the Baghdad municipality building. Update: 28 Sept - Harrowing details:

As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

9. September 12 - Severely wounded five people on Palestine Street in east Baghdad. [This and the previous two are sourced only to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which cited them among six previous incidents in explaining the government's reaction to the Nisour Square massacre.]

No one who knows, if anyone does, will say how many mercenaries are operating in Iraq. Estimates range from 20,000 (Pentagon) up to 50,000 (Int'l Contractors Assn.) in the close-to-200 private armies of Triple Canopy, DynCorp, Aegis, Custer Battles, Cohort International, Global Strategies, etc. Their behavior is only marginally better than Blackwater's; a video that's circulated on the net for the last two years shows Aegis mercs firing on civilians as they drive down a street. Who could have predicted this kind of behavior from heavily armed foreigners supporting a violent occupation, men who appear to be legally accountable to no one?

That question of accountability is murky at best. Much of the press coverage since the Nisour Square massacre has noted the decree issued by Paul Bremer in the waning days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004 that grants full immunity from Iraqi law for private contractors. The Iraqi government has just submitted a bill to its legislature to change that.

Doug Brooks, head of the mercs' trade association (the International Peace Operations Association -- nice Orwellian touch), said last week that private military in Iraq are subject to the Uniformed Code of Military Justice and to "MEJA, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which essentially says that a person working for a contractor can be brought back to the United States and tried for a felony." Presumably that's the basis on which charges could result from the supposed Justice Department investigation into the Christmas eve shooting. I'm not holding my breath.

Nor do I put much stock in anything Brooks says. A Congressional Research Service report this past July found that while mercenaries might technically be subject to the UCMJ, prosecution in military courts would raise constitutional questions, and logistical difficulties might inhibit U.S. civilian courts' ability to bring cases under the MEJA.

Rep. David Price (D-NC) has been trying for some time to bring the private military under federal law and increase oversight. The recent unpleasantness has also stirred rumblings in the Senate, where the defense spending bill is still being amended.

Update: 4:00 pm, Sept 25 - Edited, links and image added.

Webb amendment

Watching this video of Jim Webb making the case for his amendment to require adequate time between deployments for troops serving in combat zones, I can forget for a few moments how furious I am with his FISA vote. He's direct, simple, and blunt (note he says "occupation", a word most pols won't use). Please take a look and do what he's asking.

I did. Here's my email, and as soon as I publish this post I'll make my phone call:

Dear Senator Warner,

Please announce your support for and vote for the Webb amendment to allow troops deployed to combat zones adequate "dwell time" before redeployment.

This is the absolute minimum that we owe to those serving. The crushing deployment schedules of the last several years violate the implicit contract that makes a volunteer armed forces possible.

Congress has the right and obligation, under Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, "To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." Your obligation is even greater, as you have acquired a reputation as someone with the trust and respect of the military.

This issue is not something to be treated as the subject of some political deal you are striking with the president. It is a core obligation to the country and the armed forces that serve it.

You voted for this amendment earlier. Withdrawing that support now sends the wrong message to your constituents about your party's respect for those serving and its ability ever to work across partisan lines.

Your relationship with the junior senator has appeared to be refreshingly cordial and mutually respectful up to now, unusual for today's highly partisan Congress. If you now abandon Webb's amendment, Virginians will be forced to conclude that even the most supposedly independent and moderate Republicans are more focused on their relationship with the White House than their commitment to the country.

I hope you will support the Webb amendment.

Update: 4:10 pm, 19 Sept - Within hours of my email to Warner's office, it became known that the silver-haired fraud is putting forward a toothless 'sense of the Senate' resolution to compete with Webb's amendment; it would recommend more time between deployments to the Great Decider. No notice to Webb, who found out the same way I did -- from McCain's comments on the Senate floor. Webb is handling it masterfully, hitting back on all the ridiculous GOP talking points (see here and here).

But now the Democratic leadership needs to back him up: If Warner's slimy maneuver means we don't win the cloture vote, then let the Republicans filibuster this for real. Bring. it. on. I can't imagine a better moment for Dems to stick a fork in the "all bills now require 60 votes" nonsense. (See this Daily Kos diary or Mark Kleiman {h/t Taylor Marsh via Digby} for more.)

Haditha check-in

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.

Haditha update: killer mindset, immunity deals

As I've noted before, also in a post about Haditha, the Washington Post editors like to put the strong stuff in the Saturday paper, the least-read edition of the week. So when they got hold of a copy of the report done a year ago by Army Gen. Bargewell on the Marines' coverup of the November 2005 massacre, they knew just the place for this kind of language from the general:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics. Statements made by the chain of command ..., taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

No shocker to anyone following the occupation closely, or to anyone who's observed U.S. foreign and military policy for the last fifty years with clear eyes. These attitudes underpin discussion of U.S. military action to such an extent that they're almost never stated explicitly.

Major-media coverage that does articulate these assumptions, much less that examines the consequences, is extremely rare. That's what cranky left-wing blogs are for. So I was all set to write about the connection between Bargewell's conclusions and the recent Marine massacre in Afghanistan. Imagine my amazement to find that the Sunday (!) New York Times had beaten me to it:

After it became clear last year that several marines had killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, following an attack on their convoy of Humvees, the Marine Corps, which had initially played down the massacre, began an offensive of a different kind.

Last May, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, went to Iraq to express deep concern to his marines and to reinforce what he called the "core values" that required them to respond to danger with thoughtful precision.

But almost a year later, marines killed at least 10 civilians in Afghanistan in an episode that bore some striking similarities to the Haditha killings and suggested that the lesson had not taken, even in a platoon of combat veterans wearing the badge of the elite new Marine Corps Special Operations forces.

On March 4, on a road near Jalalabad, a suicide bomber drove into the unit's convoy and exploded. As they sped away, the marines shot at everyone within reach: oncoming cars, women and children on the side of the road, people working in the fields. They killed ten to twelve unarmed civilians and wounded 35 more. Check out the picture accompanying the Times story.

After the usual official denials and minimization, which lasted long enough to keep the massacre from getting much play at home, the unit was ordered back to the U.S., and a criminal investigation has been opened. Some marines have been separated from the unit and may eventually be charged. But if it plays out as the Haditha case appears to be doing, those men may be able to count on Marine prosecutors to get them off the hook.

At least seven marines present during and after the Haditha massacre have been given immunity in order to provide testimony against Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who led the unit. But one of those is a defense witness, Lt. William Kallop, who arrived on the scene after Wuterich and Sgt. Sanick de la Cruz had ordered five unarmed men out of a nearby taxi and shot them where they stood. (Sgt. de la Cruz has also received immunity.)

Kallop reported to HQ that day, and to investigators later, that the unit came under fire from a nearby house and that he ordered them to "take the house." He also recommended a medal for Wuterich, who led his men in storming four houses, throwing in fragmentation grenades and then mowing down everyone inside. Wuterich's lawyer is basing his defense on Kallop's testimony, on the basis that the Staff Sgt. was following orders and observing the unit's rules of engagement. The higher officers being tried for covering up the massacre believe that Kallop's testimony should clear them, too, because they relied on his account.

It's one thing to offer immunity deals to help ensure the conviction of those believed most responsible for an atrocity; it's another to give a free pass to someone whose lies and orders make him at least as culpable. Kallop was never charged with anything, and is scheduled to redeploy to Iraq later this year. More on the unusual nature of the immunity deals here and here.

My previous Haditha posts: 22 March 2006 (mentioned as an aside to another atrocity), 18 May 2006 (Murtha statements predicting charges), 28 May 2006 (Gen. Mattis' many moods), 23 October 2006 (in passing among three other atrocities), 20 December 2006 (charges, and my most comprehensive review of events), 6 January 2007 (Naval Criminal Investigative Service report leaked to Post, with the only photo they intend to publish).

Why I say it's escalation, not a surge

And I say the hell with it.

[Previous U.S. commanders in Iraq] sought to accelerate both the training of Iraqi forces and American withdrawal. By 2008, the remaining 60,000 or so U.S. troops were supposed to be hunkering down in four giant “superbases,” where they would be relatively safe.

Under Petraeus’s plan, a U.S. military force of 160,000 or more is setting up hundreds of “mini-forts” all over Baghdad and the rest of the country, right in the middle of the action. The U.S. Army has also stopped pretending that Iraqis ... are in the lead ... And that means the future of Iraq depends on the long-term presence of U.S. forces in a way it did not just a few months ago.

The plan is to trap us there for another five to ten years.

Put aside for a moment the human lives that will be lost and blighted. Will we withstand the downing of a helicopter a week for the next year? The next five years?

Haditha report

On Saturdays, the front page of the Washington Post often features stories and pictures of a kind not set so boldly before its powerful readers on other days of the week. Today: the massacre in Haditha.

The Post acquired the Naval Criminal Investigative Service report that led to the recent charges of murder and coverup against eight Marines.

One major revelation is that Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad leader, was the one who shot the five men who had the misfortune to arrive on the scene in a taxi just after a roadside bomb killed a Marine and wounded two others. The screaming squad members ordered them out, and Wuterich shot them one by one "as they stood, unarmed, next to the vehicle approximately ten feet in front of him."

Result:

3000

The disaster in Iraq spins faster and faster out of control.

New year's resolution: bring 'em home.

Decade's resolution: put the criminals in the dock. Last night, at the ceremony for former President Ford at the Capitol, several of the most deeply blood-soaked and corrupt were walking together -- Kissinger, Cheney, Greenspan. Convenient for taking into custody, if we lived in a country that even began to live up to its ideals.

To a happier new year.

Haditha charges (updated)

It looks very likely that at least six Marines in Kilo Company will be charged tomorrow for their part in killing 24 Iraqis -- unarmed men, women, and children -- at Haditha a year and a month and a day ago.

It also seems possible that, for once, there will be some consequences for those who organized and/or turned a blind eye to the coverup. In particular, Capt. Lucas McConnell, commander of Kilo Company but not present that day, will probably be charged with dereliction of duty. I am most curious about what charge will be brought against 1st Lt. William Kallop, who

wasn't present when the civilians were killed, but went to the scene after the squad radioed in what had happened. He subsequently nominated Wuterich [the sergeant who led the killing squad] for a medal, saying he had "led a counterattack on the buildings to his south where his Marines were still receiving sporadic fire from. That counterattack turned the tide of the ambush and killed a number of insurgents still attempting to fight or attempting to flee the area."

Time's Baghdad reporter's investigation and story on the third anniversary of the invasion forced the massacre into awareness outside Iraq, and the Time story was itself instigated by video shot by a Haditha resident. Now, the editors appear to be trying to distance themselves from the magazine's role. One of their Washington staff has written an article on the military's investigation of the role of Marine Corps higher-ups that concludes with this bit of self-parody:

Many observers and politicans have already decided those involved are guilty ... Others have asserted that civilian casualties are a tragic reality of a morally confusing battlefield. The truth, as it always is in the fog of war, is likely somewhere in between.

I swear I didn't make that up. For reporting of command responsibility issues aimed above the ten-year-old level, try here.

Update: 21 Dec 10:15 pm - Charges. Four members of Kilo Company are charged with unpremeditated murder:

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, 12 individual murders, a thirteenth count for ordering his squad to kill six people in one house, and one count each of making a false official statement and soliciting another sergeant to make false official statements. The Reuters reporter is the only one so far to raise my question: why is Wuterich not charged with the deaths of all 24 people killed?

Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz, five murders (the men in the taxi), and making a false official statement with intent to deceive (reporting that Iraqi troops shot the men?). Dela Cruz was on his second tour; during the first, he was part of the battle in the Najaf cemetery in August 2004.

Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, three murders.

Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, two murders, as well as negligent homicide of four Iraqi civilians and assault on two others. Tatum was on his second tour, and took part in the assault on Fallujah in November 2004. [Kilo Company revved up for the destruction of Fallujah with a chariot race, reported by Newsweek this past June.]

"The reporting of the incident up the chain of command was inaccurate and untimely," said the officer announcing the charges.

For that, four other Marines are being charged with failing to properly report or investigate the incident (dereliction of duty). The highest ranking of those is Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani; the others are 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, Capt. McConnell and Capt. Randy Stone. Kallop seems to have skated. Witness for the prosecution?

Sickeningly, the defense is planning simply to stick to the coverup story:

Defense lawyers dispute the Iraqi witnesses' version of events and say the men from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division were engaged in a furious battle in Haditha after the bomb exploded and the civilians may have been killed during the chaos.

The very first cover story, issued in a press release a day after the killings, was that 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by a roadside bomb and that Marines and Iraqi army soldiers killed eight insurgents in a subsequent firefight.

"We now know with certainty ... that none of the civilians were killed by the explosion," said the spokesman. In fact, we've known that with certainty since February, when the military in Iraq put out a revised story in which the Haditha civilians were killed only in a firefight. By that time, Time had alerted the brass to the video and results of interviews with survivors, with an implicit threat to publish.

Bush was briefed then, according to Tony Snow, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation that led to today's charges was begun. The investigation into the coverup didn't begin until after Time published the story in March.

Within a few months the NCIS investigation had turned up enough evidence to make it clear that Haditha was a massacre, not a firefight. Lt. Col. Chessani and Capt. McConnell were relieved of command, officially not for Haditha but for a variety of command failures. Members of Congress were briefed in May, and Murtha took huge heat for relaying the bad news. Yet it took another six months to bring charges. I'm sure there were no political considerations...

Truth

It can be painful to hear, and it too often results in pain for those who tell it. But lately I've had my fill of smoothing things over. At least two people in Iraq are facing up to reality and asking the rest of us to do the same:

An Iraqi citizen:

One angry Shiite man yelled at police officials investigating the scene [of the mass kidnaping at the Education Ministry in Baghdad 14 November]: "Now you will say the militias did this. You will never be brave enough to say policemen did this."

A U.S. soldier:

[W]e are doing no good here. There is nothing we can do at this point to end the fighting. It has become systematic throughout the country. ... now all I want is for us to get out as soon as possible. I do not speak in isolation. Nearly every military and civilian I work with feels the same aimless drift here. ... We all know that this is a fight not worth fighting and with no possible chance for “victory”. ...[T]he best thing for us to do is to pull back. We have no good options and that is the least bad for us. ... [J]ust being here, without much of a goal and knowing that this is near the end is devastating to morale.

Accountability for atrocity: eyes averted

Here's a story from last week that sank like a stone, or, rather, like three stones placed in a sack and eased gently into the water:

U.S. service members will face military trials in three separate cases for the murders of Iraqi civilians, including the gang rape and murder of a teenage girl and the killing of her family in their home in Mahmudiya, the military said on Wednesday.

An Army general ordered the court-martial of four soldiers in the Mahmudiya case and said two of the four could face death if found guilty. One of the accused will testify against the others, according to his Washington attorney, David Sheldon.

Army Maj. Gen. Thomas Turner also ordered military trials for four other soldiers accused of murdering three Iraqi detainees during a raid on a suspected insurgent camp near Thar Thar Lake, southwest of Tikrit.

In the third case, three U.S. Marines will be tried on murder charges in the death of an Iraqi grandfather kidnapped from his house in Hamdania in the middle of the night, the U.S. Marine Corps said.

... The killing of 24 people in Haditha ... is still being investigated and no Marines have been charged.

Hardly a ripple. It appears that the news, which the Army and Marines put out by press relase on Wednesday, Oct. 18, made it into the print edition of only one national paper, the LA Times (apparently because of the Camp Pendleton connection to the Hamdaniyah case). The story also ran on NPR; there's no sign of it having been mentioned on any national television news.

Reuters and AP stories ran briefly on the web editions of many media outlets, and the AP story was picked up by local papers, mostly in areas near bases or the hometowns of the accused. Lacking NEXIS-LEXIS access, I can't be absolutely sure that the coverage was as skimpy as it seems, and welcome any information to the contrary. The news has also gone almost completely unblogged.

These decisions are the equivalent of indictments in the civilian legal system. Like their civilian counterparts, military prosecutors use severe charges as a tool to reach plea agreements, as noted in this rare bit of additional reporting from a Pennsylvania paper.

Update: 27 Oct midnight - First plea agreement not long in coming. Pfc. Joe Jodka will testify next month on the Hamdaniyah murder.

We could all use a vacation

Off to the s.o.'s family reunion tomorrow, and away from the computer for long stretches of time. So, thankfully, not many updates for a few days on the unhappily developing story of the 1st Platoon, B Company and their victims and enemies.

But having followed along from early in the reporting of the Mahmoudiyah crimes, I'm compelled to note today's NY Times story:

Insurgents posted an Internet video on Monday showing the mutilated bodies of two American soldiers abducted in June and found murdered days later during a search by American and Iraqi forces south of Baghdad. A message with the video says the soldiers were killed out of revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl in March, a crime in which at least six American soldiers are suspects.

My previous posts: June 30, July 5, July 7 (with many updates from following days).

On the bright side, the Sunnis in the Iraq assembly will resume attending, based on a promised release of their kidnaped colleague. The figleaf of unity threatened to shred completely a few days ago, when there was no word of her or her bodyguards (also taken), and the Sunni bloc vowed to pull its four ministers out of the government. This link covers those events and some grimmer ones.

Thought for the day

Every day. This ribbon is for sale here. I'd prefer it were from United for Peace with Justice or another organization whose politics I support, but this says what needs saying.

And here's Brooooce, saying what needs saying with a fine twenty-piece band behind him. (Save the downloaded video to a new file to enjoy it whenever you like.) Another version here (audio, Real Media).

Geography of atrocity

In the interest of context, the image is part of an encarta.com map, edited by me to highlight the locations of the two incidents that may (or may not) be connected.

Update: 1:30 pm, 8 July - "a military official disclosed Friday that three other soldiers still under investigation [for the Mahmoudiyah crimes] include a sergeant, a specialist and a private first class. ... all four men were in the same platoon." NYTimes

Update 2: 1:00 pm, 9 July - Reuters reports three were charged yesterday with rape and murder, and another soldier with dereliction of duty for failing to report the crime. No names or information on rank. The man accused of dereliction is almost certainly the one who stayed behind at the checkpoint. AP reports four charged with rape and murder, one with dereliction. One of the two accounts is wrong; how hard is it to report the actual text of the military's statement?

Update 3: 3:25 pm, 10 July - Soldiers charged are: Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard, murder, rape, and obstruction of justice. Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, dereliction of duty and making a false official statement. Apparently I was wrong about Yribe being the checkpoint stay-behind; according to the general who ran today's press conference he "was not there that day, but afterwards had some tacit knowledge." [Results give AP the nod over Reuters in yesterday's reading comprehension contest.]

Update 4: 3:45 pm, 10 July - According to locals in Mahmoudiyah, relatives of the Hamzas asked resistance fighters to take revenge for the crime, and the Youssufiyah checkpoint kidnaping and murder were part of that revenge.

Update 5: 4:05 pm, 10 July - The human rights minister of Iraq announces plans to ask the U.N. to end immunity from local law for U.S. troops. The minister is correct in her assessment that a climate of impunity fosters more violations. I have plans to ask Congress to end the climate of impunity that surrounds our President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense. They are about as likely to meet with success as the human rights minister's plans. But good luck to both of us.

Mahmoudiyah update

The arrest of former soldier Steven Green, and in particular the public filing of the FBI affidavit in federal court Monday to support the charge of murder and rape against him, makes it somewhat pointless to post the timeline I pieced together over the weekend. The Washington Post account is the best of those available. The Post's previous reporting on the neighborhood and family of the victims is also indispensable.

I didn't have the stomach to post about the case on the Fourth of July, much less to approach it from the angle that Billmon has. But now that many more facts in the case are out in the open, I'll take the opportunity to review the information that supports (and that undercuts) a connection between the Mahmoudiyah crimes and the kidnaping/murder/mutilation of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker. I'll also offer some further thoughts and questions.

First, and fundamentally, the Mahmoudiyah accused were part of the same platoon as Menchaca and Tucker: 1st Platoon, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry regiment. A platoon contains only 40 men or so. The 502nd is part of the 101st Airborne Division, based at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, but has been attached to the 4th Infantry Division during this deployment. Since at least late November 2005, B Company has operated in the 'Triangle of Death' area south and southwest of Baghdad.

Second, at least two non-participating members of the platoon had an idea of what had happened. Despite the participants' warning among themselves not to say anything about the events of that night ever again, it seems clear that some of them did. Sometime in April, Private Green, the apparent ringleader of the March crimes, was sent back to Ft. Campbell. On May 13, he was discharged for an unspecified "personality disorder." To those in the unit who knew or had heard rumors about the atrocity in Mahmoudiyah, Green's departure had to have been a reminder -- no matter how unrelated the events leading to his discharge. (To those who participated in the crime, Green himself was a daily reminder, so that his departure might well have been a relief: out of sight, out of mind.)

Third, some locals became aware that Abeer Hamza had been violated, although the immediate neighbors and relatives of the murdered family appeared to believe initially that the attackers were Shiite militia. The rape and killings took place only a few weeks after the destruction of the golden mosque in Samarra, which set off an intensified wave of sectarian attacks and prompted many families to move from mixed neighborhoods into solidly Shiite or Sunni ones; the Hamza family had only recently moved to the neighborhood. Mahmoudiyah is on the way from Baghdad to the cities of the south, and many Shiites have been killed there and in the area.

But the possibility of danger from the nearby U.S. troops was also known to the family and neighbors. Abeer was a pretty young woman of 15; her complaints about the repeated advances from the soldiers at the checkpoint, only 650 feet from the house, had led her mother to ask a neighbor the day before her death to let Abeer sleep at their house. The neighbor saw the aftermath of the crime, with Abeer's dress pulled up to her neck. Medical officials who handled the body knew she had been raped. The family did not have a public funeral.

Mahmoudiyah hospital officials say that a day or two after the killings soldiers came around to ask where the funeral was. If that's true, both the absence of a public funeral and the soldiers' visits are bound to have raised suspicions outside the family. There is also this, from the CBS/AP story of July 1:

Mahmoudiya police Capt. Ihsan Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi officials received a report March 13 alleging that American soldiers had killed the family.

There is a history of civilians killed by U.S. troops in the area; another police officer mentioned "a shooting at a checkpoint in April that left 11 Iraqis dead." However, I should note that statements from the Mahmoudiyah police have proven the least reliable of any of the original reporting on this story. Different officers, on the record, have given detailed, specific accounts to reporters, but the accounts are wildly incompatible with each other.

Fourth, the Mahmoudiyah perpetrators and Menchaca and Tucker were serving in very similar situations at the time of the events that made them notorious: manning a checkpoint in a small group, relatively isolated from their base and from other units. Three months after the Mahmoudiyah crime, when Spc. David Babineau was killed and the other two taken away in an attack on their checkpoint at Youssufiyah, the possibility that it was a revenge attack might have occurred to those who knew about it. On the other hand, attacks on U.S. forces are so common in the area that no connection may have been made at the time.

Fifth, kidnaping of U.S. soldiers has been extremely rare during this occupation. The scale and publicity of the hunt for Menchaca and Tucker was unlike anything B Company members had experienced in their time in Iraq. The discovery of the mutilated bodies in Youssufiyah on June 19 was wrenching enough, but the agony was prolonged by the length of time it took to disarm the many bombs laid along the path to the bodies, a process that killed another soldier and wounded several more.

Sixth, the disclosure of the crimes came about only days later, when soldiers in the 1st platoon were being counseled in the aftermath of the recovery of Menchaca's and Tucker's remains. The first to talk were two men who had not taken part but had heard about it. Whether or not the kidnaping/killings had been a revenge attack, the soldiers who revealed the Mahmoudiyah crimes made a connection between them. The Army criminal investigation began the next day. One of the participants still in Iraq admitted to his part; some stories said that he has been charged, but the Post reporting contradicts that, and there is no confirmation from the Army so far.

Questions small and large occur. On the small side: How did the men in Green's "fireteam" get access to alcohol, much less feel free to drink it while on duty? Where did they get the shotgun and rifles they carried to the Hamza house? Are active-duty soldiers allowed to keep non-military-issue weapons? Where is the base for B Company, and how far is it from Youssufiyah and Mahmoudiyah? Had Ryan Lenz, an AP correspondent embedded with the 520th until early June and the first to report the story, heard of the Mahmoudiyah crimes before the Army announcement on June 30?

But the main question that this horrifying crime raises is the same one that has been with me since March 2002, when I realized that this invasion and occupation was going to happen:
What the hell business do U.S. troops have being in Iraq?

Bring 'em home.

Update: 2:00 pm, 6 July - Thanks to elendil in comments, who pointed to this LA Times story, which says the military is investigating whether the two incidents are connected. My prediction is that they'll find the official answer to be 'no'.

Leaving the whole world blind

The embedded AP reporter goes to great lengths to bury the lead in his account of Army soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment being investigated for the rape of an Iraqi woman and the murder of her family in Mahmoudiyah, but here it is:

a soldier felt compelled to report the killings after his fellow soldiers' bodies were found.

That would be the bodies of the two soldiers from the same regiment platoon, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who were kidnapped at a checkpoint and killed earlier this month. 8000 U.S. and Iraqi troops participated in the search for them, and their grisly death was widely reported (and speculated about, since it is not yet clear how they were killed). But this story shows that the capture and killing of Menchaca and Tucker was quite possibly an act of revenge for the crimes committed by other members of their regiment platoon. The rape and killings in Mahmoudiyah

appeared to have been a "crime of opportunity," the official said. The soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.

Nothing justifies kidnaping and barbarity. But it's not something that comes out of the blue.

U.S. troops must leave Iraq. All of them. Starting now.

Update: 6:00 pm, 30 June - The linked AP story has changed substantially since I posted. (I'm glad I saved the version that was online at 10:30 this morning.) The current story (also saved) is much more detailed, and makes more explicit connections between the Mahmoudiyah crimes and the abduction and killing of Menchaca and Tucker.

Update 2: 12:30 pm, 1 July - As more media cover the story, conflicting details appear. At least two different military sources are speaking to the press anonymously. Two different Iraqi police have spoken on the record. The Washington Post story is on the front page (on Saturday of a holiday weekend). The CBS story online relies heavily on the AP report linked in the post, but contains some additional information. By the end of tomorrow, I'll post a timeline of 'facts as asserted', with sources.

Do the math

In comments at Obsidian Wings yesterday, I said:

I wonder if the DoD releases figures on how much has been paid out so far in "condolence payments" of up to $2500 per life ... For how many of those lives have the troops who killed them been punished in any way, including something as light as reprimands?

Within an hour of posting, I learned the answer to the first question, published that same day by the Boston Globe:

The amount of cash the US military has paid to families of Iraqi civilians killed or maimed in operations involving American troops skyrocketed from just under $5 million in 2004 to almost $20 million last year, according to Pentagon financial data.

The dramatic spike in what's known as condolence payments -- distributed to Iraqi families whose loved ones were caught in US crossfire or victimized during US ground and air assaults -- suggests that American commanders made on-the-spot restitution far more frequently...

That's almost 8000 civilian victims of U.S. military last year alone -- not a number we've heard much.

Now my second question -- how many servicemembers have been held accountable -- takes on more urgency. The Globe reporter may be trying to dig out an answer right now, but I imagine that will be much harder to extract. Call me cynical, but I'll be amazed if the number is as high as 400.

Update: The Scottish Sunday Herald reports:

Some 600 cases of abuse by GIs against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far been investigated by the Pentagon. Although around 230 soldiers have been disciplined, most military personnel found guilty of abusing civilians received “administrative” punishment such as being reduced in rank, loss of pay, confinement to base or extra duty. Out of 76 courts martial, only a few resulted in jail terms of more than a year.