The Meaning of Haditha: US Terror/War Crimes In Iraq
Various | 02.06.2006 17:50 | Repression | Terror War | World
IT IS TIME TO SURROUND PARLIAMENT, AND DEMAND AN END TO THIS ILLEGAL WAR, AND THE PLANS FOR THE EXPANSION OF WIDER AGGRESSION!!!!
Make Summer plans to join a rotating protest.
Block Downing Street. Fill it with copies of the "Downing Street Minutes". Harass the media.
Do SOMETHING!!!
Make Summer plans to join a rotating protest.
Block Downing Street. Fill it with copies of the "Downing Street Minutes". Harass the media.
Do SOMETHING!!!
June 2, 2006
The Meaning of Haditha
Murderous depravity and empire-building go hand-in-hand
by Justin Raimondo
The Haditha massacre, as it will doubtless be known, tells us something about this war we are fighting, and something about ourselves as Americans – or, rather, as creatures who have become a little less American in the post-9/11 era. What that something amounts to, according to your view of the war and of U.S. foreign policy, varies, but not that much. Both ostensible critics of the war and those neoconservatives who still see it as a noble cause derailed by defeatists and lack of will assume the essential goodness of American troops, both as individuals and as a unit. It's only a few "bad apples" who are the problem. This view was given voice in a National Review editorial decrying the designation of war critic John Murtha as a recipient of the "Profiles in Courage" award handed out by the JFK Library. In a display of breathtaking nerviness, the weenies over at NR – who have never gotten closer to a U.S military facility than driving past one – attacked war hero Murtha for supposedly dissing the troops:
"Even if the allegations against the Marines are true, Murtha's rhetoric is imbalanced: He declines to emphasize that the vast majority of soldiers perform their duties honorably and that those who break the rules are severely punished, choosing instead to cite the actions of a few sadists as though they were representative of the military."
Surely this could be said about most armies in the history of human warfare: the overwhelming majority do not commit war crimes. They're too busy just trying to stay alive. But what this has to do with the cold hard fact that these U.S. Marines did commit a number of especially horrible atrocities is not at all clear. Aside from that, they have Murtha all wrong. He is full of excuses for American soldiers who murder children as young as 1 year old:
"They were so stressed out, they went into houses and killed children, women and children. 24 people they killed. Now this is the kind of stress they are under. Listen, I don't excuse it, but I understand what's happening and the responsibility goes right to the top. This is something that should not have happened, that should have been investigated, they've already relieved three commanding officers … but this is the kind of stuff … stress is going to cause these kind of things. That's why I'm so upset about it."
"Stress," my a**. We are not talking about National Guard units, here: these are U.S. Marines, highly-trained killing machines who know the rules of war, know the difference between a woman with a baby in her arms and a group of insurgents, and know, furthermore, that the war they are fighting is supposed to be against terrorism. Would they succumb to "stress" like some housewife who's run out of vacuum-cleaner bags, go ballistic, and slaughter 24 innocents, including women and very young children, if they didn't think they could get away with it? In short, would they have done it if it wasn't policy – directed, encouraged, and condoned by their commanders?
Hell, no.
Yes, Murtha is right: those Marines aren't going to take the fall all by themselves, the responsibility does go right to the top – but they, as individuals, are not absolved. They pulled the trigger, they slaughtered children, fer chrissake, executed them in cold blood. So they're responsible – right? If they were Iraqis, there wouldn't be any question about that: we wouldn't be talking about "stress," now would we? Does the fact that they're Americans somehow ameliorate their crimes? I don't think so.
Last year, I wrote about the "El Salvador option" – the emerging strategy of this administration in fighting a losing war, which amounts to throwing off all constraints and simply terrorizing the Iraqi people into cowed submission. We are now seeing the results of this policy of desperation in practice. Haditha is not just an "isolated incident," but evidence of a new strategic orientation by the U.S. military – a scorched-earth policy designed to stave off the humiliating prospect of impending defeat.
Further evidence of this new orientation is the revelation of yet another massacre, this time in the village of Abu Sifa, about 600 miles north of Baghdad. Of course, it isn't a revelation to readers of Antiwar.com and this column, where we covered it in detail back in March. The Times of London reported it, most of the American media ignored it, and the news dropped like a stone, clear out of sight and out of mind – except that, as in the case of Haditha, a videotape has come out that vividly documents American atrocities.
A pattern emerges: Haditha, Abu Sifa, Abu Ghraib, and all the others now bound to come out in horrifying detail. These place names will become the new slogans of the Iraqi insurgency, which will be fueled as never before – and perhaps immeasurably strengthened by rising Shi'ite anger. As we said in the beginning – nay, before the beginning – the occupation of Iraq will soon take on all the familiar earmarks of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Both Iraqis and Americans will be locked in a deadly embrace of indignities that will soon escalate into everyday atrocities. The Iraqis, like the Palestinians, will become captives in their own land, and their jailers will get progressively more abusive and cruel as a matter of sheer necessity. Iraq is the occupied territories writ large, and we are well on our way to becoming as hardened, as self-exculpatory, and as ruthless as our Israeli allies.
"A few sadists" – or a nation of sadists? That's what this whole question boils down to: have we become so corrupted by ambition and blinded by self-righteousness that we have spawned an army of baby-killers? And are we going to make weak excuses for them – by crying over the amount of "stress" the poor dears have to endure – or will we face the truth, about ourselves as well as them?
The ugly truth is that we have been corrupted by dreams of empire: our foreign and military policy of "preemption" is the doctrine of a swaggering bully. To claim preeminence on every continent, to strut and preen on the world stage and demand applause at gunpoint, this is evidence of a collective mania, a severe psychological affliction, and, I might add, a mortal sin – the sin of hubris.
We imagine that we are, like Nietzsche's "overman," beyond good and evil: acts that would be judged harshly if done by others become, in ourselves, evidence of unsurpassed virtue. Yes, our soldiers commit atrocities – but they are being investigated and prosecuted, aren't they? Well, that remains to be seen, but, in any event, what this argument misses is that our policy of untrammeled aggression requires terroristic tactics. If we don't have the stomach to kill women and children, then we had better turn back now. Because there is no nice way to be a global hegemon. We either give up the role, or else resign ourselves to many more Hadithas.
Back in October 2002, in a speech at Missouri's Washington University, as the likelihood of an American invasion of Iraq grew into a certainty, I warned about the "corruption of empire" that would inevitably infect every aspect of our culture. I spoke of "what is new – or so old that it seems new – about Gulf War II," and said:
"The mask has been dropped, and now we see the face of the monster revealed in all its shameless, leering ugliness. It's as if Dorian Gray has hauled his portrait out of the locked attic and hung it over his mantelpiece."
If we can look into the monster's face unflinchingly and recognize it as our own, then we have the wherewithal to implement our imperial foreign policy. If not – if we retain enough of our humanity to recoil in horror – then perhaps we ought to find ourselves another line of work, and get out of the empire-building business for good.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9081
- Note to the media. When videotape evidence of a US massacre exists, it is unnecessary to place the words in quotation marks, intended to raise doubt in the minds of readers.
New 'Iraq massacre' tape emerges
A still from the video footage obtained by the BBC
New footage
The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5039420.stm
The military (which at first tried to hide the atrocity by claiming the victims died when their building collapsed on them) now claims they will punish the soldiers who killed the innocent civilians.
But when do we punish a President who lied to the people and the Congress to invade an innocent nation?
And what of the US Mainstream media who helped him do it?
U.S. accused in more Iraq civilian deaths
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer 32 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A third set of allegations that U.S. troops have deliberately killed civilians is fueling a furor in
Iraq and drawing strong condemnations from government and human rights officials.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060602/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_civilians_killed
Children. The US troops are gunning down CHILDREN!
And all of this is the result of President Bush LYING to the people and to the UNITED STATES' CONGRESS to start this war in the first place.
The Meaning of Haditha
Murderous depravity and empire-building go hand-in-hand
by Justin Raimondo
The Haditha massacre, as it will doubtless be known, tells us something about this war we are fighting, and something about ourselves as Americans – or, rather, as creatures who have become a little less American in the post-9/11 era. What that something amounts to, according to your view of the war and of U.S. foreign policy, varies, but not that much. Both ostensible critics of the war and those neoconservatives who still see it as a noble cause derailed by defeatists and lack of will assume the essential goodness of American troops, both as individuals and as a unit. It's only a few "bad apples" who are the problem. This view was given voice in a National Review editorial decrying the designation of war critic John Murtha as a recipient of the "Profiles in Courage" award handed out by the JFK Library. In a display of breathtaking nerviness, the weenies over at NR – who have never gotten closer to a U.S military facility than driving past one – attacked war hero Murtha for supposedly dissing the troops:
"Even if the allegations against the Marines are true, Murtha's rhetoric is imbalanced: He declines to emphasize that the vast majority of soldiers perform their duties honorably and that those who break the rules are severely punished, choosing instead to cite the actions of a few sadists as though they were representative of the military."
Surely this could be said about most armies in the history of human warfare: the overwhelming majority do not commit war crimes. They're too busy just trying to stay alive. But what this has to do with the cold hard fact that these U.S. Marines did commit a number of especially horrible atrocities is not at all clear. Aside from that, they have Murtha all wrong. He is full of excuses for American soldiers who murder children as young as 1 year old:
"They were so stressed out, they went into houses and killed children, women and children. 24 people they killed. Now this is the kind of stress they are under. Listen, I don't excuse it, but I understand what's happening and the responsibility goes right to the top. This is something that should not have happened, that should have been investigated, they've already relieved three commanding officers … but this is the kind of stuff … stress is going to cause these kind of things. That's why I'm so upset about it."
"Stress," my a**. We are not talking about National Guard units, here: these are U.S. Marines, highly-trained killing machines who know the rules of war, know the difference between a woman with a baby in her arms and a group of insurgents, and know, furthermore, that the war they are fighting is supposed to be against terrorism. Would they succumb to "stress" like some housewife who's run out of vacuum-cleaner bags, go ballistic, and slaughter 24 innocents, including women and very young children, if they didn't think they could get away with it? In short, would they have done it if it wasn't policy – directed, encouraged, and condoned by their commanders?
Hell, no.
Yes, Murtha is right: those Marines aren't going to take the fall all by themselves, the responsibility does go right to the top – but they, as individuals, are not absolved. They pulled the trigger, they slaughtered children, fer chrissake, executed them in cold blood. So they're responsible – right? If they were Iraqis, there wouldn't be any question about that: we wouldn't be talking about "stress," now would we? Does the fact that they're Americans somehow ameliorate their crimes? I don't think so.
Last year, I wrote about the "El Salvador option" – the emerging strategy of this administration in fighting a losing war, which amounts to throwing off all constraints and simply terrorizing the Iraqi people into cowed submission. We are now seeing the results of this policy of desperation in practice. Haditha is not just an "isolated incident," but evidence of a new strategic orientation by the U.S. military – a scorched-earth policy designed to stave off the humiliating prospect of impending defeat.
Further evidence of this new orientation is the revelation of yet another massacre, this time in the village of Abu Sifa, about 600 miles north of Baghdad. Of course, it isn't a revelation to readers of Antiwar.com and this column, where we covered it in detail back in March. The Times of London reported it, most of the American media ignored it, and the news dropped like a stone, clear out of sight and out of mind – except that, as in the case of Haditha, a videotape has come out that vividly documents American atrocities.
A pattern emerges: Haditha, Abu Sifa, Abu Ghraib, and all the others now bound to come out in horrifying detail. These place names will become the new slogans of the Iraqi insurgency, which will be fueled as never before – and perhaps immeasurably strengthened by rising Shi'ite anger. As we said in the beginning – nay, before the beginning – the occupation of Iraq will soon take on all the familiar earmarks of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Both Iraqis and Americans will be locked in a deadly embrace of indignities that will soon escalate into everyday atrocities. The Iraqis, like the Palestinians, will become captives in their own land, and their jailers will get progressively more abusive and cruel as a matter of sheer necessity. Iraq is the occupied territories writ large, and we are well on our way to becoming as hardened, as self-exculpatory, and as ruthless as our Israeli allies.
"A few sadists" – or a nation of sadists? That's what this whole question boils down to: have we become so corrupted by ambition and blinded by self-righteousness that we have spawned an army of baby-killers? And are we going to make weak excuses for them – by crying over the amount of "stress" the poor dears have to endure – or will we face the truth, about ourselves as well as them?
The ugly truth is that we have been corrupted by dreams of empire: our foreign and military policy of "preemption" is the doctrine of a swaggering bully. To claim preeminence on every continent, to strut and preen on the world stage and demand applause at gunpoint, this is evidence of a collective mania, a severe psychological affliction, and, I might add, a mortal sin – the sin of hubris.
We imagine that we are, like Nietzsche's "overman," beyond good and evil: acts that would be judged harshly if done by others become, in ourselves, evidence of unsurpassed virtue. Yes, our soldiers commit atrocities – but they are being investigated and prosecuted, aren't they? Well, that remains to be seen, but, in any event, what this argument misses is that our policy of untrammeled aggression requires terroristic tactics. If we don't have the stomach to kill women and children, then we had better turn back now. Because there is no nice way to be a global hegemon. We either give up the role, or else resign ourselves to many more Hadithas.
Back in October 2002, in a speech at Missouri's Washington University, as the likelihood of an American invasion of Iraq grew into a certainty, I warned about the "corruption of empire" that would inevitably infect every aspect of our culture. I spoke of "what is new – or so old that it seems new – about Gulf War II," and said:
"The mask has been dropped, and now we see the face of the monster revealed in all its shameless, leering ugliness. It's as if Dorian Gray has hauled his portrait out of the locked attic and hung it over his mantelpiece."
If we can look into the monster's face unflinchingly and recognize it as our own, then we have the wherewithal to implement our imperial foreign policy. If not – if we retain enough of our humanity to recoil in horror – then perhaps we ought to find ourselves another line of work, and get out of the empire-building business for good.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9081 - Note to the media. When videotape evidence of a US massacre exists, it is unnecessary to place the words in quotation marks, intended to raise doubt in the minds of readers.
New 'Iraq massacre' tape emerges
A still from the video footage obtained by the BBC
New footage
The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5039420.stm The military (which at first tried to hide the atrocity by claiming the victims died when their building collapsed on them) now claims they will punish the soldiers who killed the innocent civilians.
But when do we punish a President who lied to the people and the Congress to invade an innocent nation?
And what of the US Mainstream media who helped him do it?
U.S. accused in more Iraq civilian deaths
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer 32 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A third set of allegations that U.S. troops have deliberately killed civilians is fueling a furor in
Iraq and drawing strong condemnations from government and human rights officials.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060602/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_civilians_killed Children. The US troops are gunning down CHILDREN!
And all of this is the result of President Bush LYING to the people and to the UNITED STATES' CONGRESS to start this war in the first place.
Various
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Haditha is Not an Aberration
03.06.2006 20:25
More, Lots More
By MIKE FERNER
Would somebody please tell me that the corporate news media is talking about U.S. war crimes in Iraq besides just the civilians killed in Haditha?!
I can only hope that my fellow citizens are not being told that this latest outrage tumbling out of Iraq is some isolated incident; that Herr Rumsfeld will diligently investigate it, and dispense timely justice to all guilty parties (below the rank of Lieutenant, of course).
JUST in case your Uncle Bob or Aunt Sophie has been asking you "Exactly what the hell is going on in Iraq?" and you're looking for hard facts to help them get off the fence, here you are.
Keep in mind these are just a few instances compiled by one citizen sitting in Toledo with an old computer connected to the internet an indication that there just might be even more going on.
Keep in mind also, that the following acts are criminal violations of the law not just because they are really horrid inhumanities, but because Congress, the U.S. Constitution, and international law (yes, there are international laws binding on the U.S.) explicitly prohibit the very kinds of atrocities now rotting at the feet of George W. Bush. Each section below begins with the relevant law or treaty violated in Iraq or Afghanistan. Every one of them, and more, are documented at the Veterans For Peace website
Nuremberg Tribunal Charter
Principle VI: "The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(b) War crimes: murder, ill-treatmentof civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of warplunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages
Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports.
At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials
In Fallujah, 40% of the buildings were completely destroyed, 20% had major damage, and 40% had significant damage. That is 100% of the buildings in that city.
(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, exterminationand other inhuman acts done against any civilian populationwhen such acts are donein execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime."
"We were tied up and beaten despite being unarmed and having only our medical instruments," Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi, a doctor who was present during the U.S. and Iraqi National Guard raid on Fallujah General Hospital told reporters later. She said troops dragged patients from their
beds and pushed them against the wall. "I was with a woman in labour, the umbilical cord had not yet been cut," she said. "At that time, a U.S. soldier shouted at one of the (Iraqi) national guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver."
Abu Hammad said he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. "The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore," he said. "Even if some of them were holding white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot."
Hammad said he had seen elderly women carrying white flags shot by U.S. soldiers. "Even the wounded people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed."
The Geneva Conventions
Protocol I, Article 75:
"(1)persons who are in the power of a Party to the conflictshall be treated humanely in all circumstances(2) The following acts are and shall remain prohibitedwhether committed by civilian or by military agents: (a) violence to the life, health, or physical or mental well-being of persons(b) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assaultand threats to commit any of the foregoing acts."
The investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that "intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel" included the following:
Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet
Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees
Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing
Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time
Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear
Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being videotaped
Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them
Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture
Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture
A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee
Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee
Protocol I, Art. 70:
"The Parties to the conflictshall allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded passage of all relief consignments, equipment and personneleven if such assistance is destined for the civilian population of the adverse Party."
Convoys sent by the Iraqi Red Crescent to aid the remaining population (in Fallujah) have been turned back.
Marked ambulances were repeatedly shot at by U.S. troops during the April, 2004 siege of Fallujah and troops prevented the distribution of medical supplies.
In Saqlawiyah, Dr Abdulla Aziz told IPS that occupation forces had blocked any medical supplies from entering or leaving the city. "They won't let any of our ambulances go to help Fallujah," he said. "We are out of supplies and they won't let anyone bring us more."
Protocol I, Art. 35:
"In any armed conflict, the right of the Partiesto choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimitedIt is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the environment."
On April 1, 2003 the residential al-Hilla outskirts of Babylon were hit with an undetermined number of BLU-97 A/B cluster bombs. Each bomb releases 202 bomblets which scatter over an area the size of two football fields, with a dud rate of 5%-7%. Immediate reports stated that at least 33 civilians died and around 300 were injured in the attack. Amnesty International condemned the attack, saying that "the use of cluster bombs in an attack on a civilian area of al-Hilla constitutes an indiscriminate attack and a grave violation of international humanitarian law."
On March 22, 2003, reporters from CNN and the Sydney Morning Herald - Melbourne Age embedded with the 1st Battalion 7th Marines at Safwan Hill near Basra reported air strikes dropping napalm.
Convention III, Art. 5:
"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy (are prisoners of war under this Convention), such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention
until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
President Bush issued an order on February 7, 2002, specifying that the U.S. would not apply the Third Convention to members of Al Qaeda. That order set forth policies that led to the willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment; and great suffering or serious injury to body or health, of prisoners in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay.
Need more documentation? Try the 1996 War Crimes Act; the U.S. Constitution's Supremacy Clause, Article VI (par. 2); or the above-mentioned treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, U.N. General Assembly resolutions, and others.
Just as the news media's fascination with Abu Ghraib was way after the fact and limited in scope, so too, is its present fascination with the Haditha killings. As they used to say during WWII, "There's a war on, ya know!" Exactly what do Americans think happens when their nation goes to war?
Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychologist with years of experience treating Vietnam vets with PTSD and author of the seminal "Achilles in Vietnam," gave his prescription for preventing that disease and preventing the breakdown of character that would likely happen to any of us in combat. It wasn't better training, or better diagnoses, or better drugs. He said "Abolish war." It's time we took his advice seriously.
Mike Ferner served as a Navy Corpsman during Vietnam and is a member of Veterans For Peace, whose slogan is "Abolish War!" He can be reached at:
The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha Print E-mail
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Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 31 May 2006
Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha – now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources – to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.
For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation – from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence – is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.
Details of the Haditha killings are finally emerging after months of official cover-up and heated denunciations of anyone who questioned the shifting, conflicting stories issued by the Pentagon following the November 2005 incident. The horror speaks for itself: a unit of Marines from Kilo Company, thirsting for revenge after a roadside bomb killed a comrade, broke into homes near the blast area and systematically executed the civilians they found there, along with five men who happened to be passing by in a taxi, Time Magazine reports.
Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage. "One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer," the Sunday Times reports. "They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes." The victims "included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy," the Observer reports. "In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived." A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership."
Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a "total breakdown in morality and leadership" in Iraq; but it's not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.
This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies – a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show – and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.
These massacres aren't just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they're learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city's water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city's residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans' first targets were the city's hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.
The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city's destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.
No doubt these lessons are being applied throughout Iraq. In March, we reported here on an eerily similar incident in the Isahaqi region, when 11 civilians, including five children under the age of five, were killed during a house raid by U.S. troops. [See the flash film, Children of Abraham.] Local police said the victims had been shot execution-style, although none of them were connected to the insurgency. Photographs of the scene – by Agence-France Presse – confirmed the attack and the children's deaths, with indications that they had indeed been shot in the head. Pentagon officials, despite the photographic evidence, would confirm only four civilian deaths: unfortunate collateral damage of a firefight with an al-Qaeda operative, they said. The idea that U.S. troops could execute civilians in cold blood was preposterous, they said.
Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few "bad apples" but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, "extrajudicial killing," rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush's true historical legacy.
New BBC coverage of Ishaqi killings below. (Note: the tranliteration of the village's name was given as "Isahaqi" in most early accounts; the BBC is now going with "Ishaqi.")
Overthrow The Criminal Regime - Do Not Accept Less