Iraq's My Lai

[Faithless]

The Pentagon, confirmed the unthinkable of some of our Marine troops in Iraq:

A group of enraged Marines entered several homes in Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. A video of the aftermath -- showing that the residents were unarmed when they were shot at point-blank range -- was obtained by Time.

I've heard that this sort of attrocity was aided by a way over extended tour of duty in Iraq. Is that a fair explanation?

Or should we expect our soldiers to be above this sort of thing in all instances?

The long article also talks about a book called “Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military,” and from the book, there is One Excellent Reason Not to Join the Military: You May be Ordered to Kill Civilians.

I think Bush now has an even bigger mistake to atone for.

Iraq's My Lai

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 27, 2006.

A group of enraged Marines entered homes in Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. And it's not an isolated incident.

Last month, the details of a horrific atrocity emerged from Haditha, a town in Anbar province -- known as a hotbed of the Iraqi resistance.

In November, a roadside bomb killed Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a 20-year-old Texan, on a road not far from Haditha. According to Time magazine, "The next day a Marine communiqu from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that 'gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire,' prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents." Another military official later said the military command in Baghdad "knew of no civilian deaths in the engagement."

Marine officials have now confirmed that those accounts were false. What really happened, according to reports confirmed by the Pentagon, was this: A group of enraged Marines entered several homes in Haditha and murdered their occupants, including children, in cold blood. A video of the aftermath -- showing that the residents were unarmed when they were shot at point-blank range -- was obtained by Time.

According to MSNBC, the video was confirmed by the Marines' own investigation: "Military officials say Marine Corps photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style." Women and children were among the 24 civilians murdered: "One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials. …"

Last week, Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., told reporters that "sources within the military" told him that "there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

According to the Marine Corps Times, up to a dozen soldiers face possible court-martial. Three officers were relieved of duty in April.

The media, hectored by the administration's charges that they don't report the illusory "good news" from Iraq, has shown little stomach for the story. In March, the Washington Post ran two brief stories on pages 10 and 15, respectively, about how the military was investigating an incident in which "civilians were killed in the cross-fire," and last week another on page 17. The New York Times reported the military's preliminary account about the "IED attack" back in November and ran a short piece on page 10 last week.

Most of the reporting has focused on Murtha, a former hawk who has become a vocal opponent of the war. It's a tidy storyline that reduces the horrific images of innocent children being blown away by vengeful Marines to a palpable and familiar partisan squabble.

But there's more going on than just the usual simplistic he said/she said reporting; the media's uncritical acceptance of the Iraq hawks' spin -- with notable exceptions like Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau -- makes them complicit in crimes like those alleged in Haditha. The editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times have the victims' blood on their hands, and they have no interest in turning Haditha into the Iraq war's My Lai.

The storyline has provoked the expected reaction from the war's dwindling number of supporters. As writer Steve Benen, perusing the right-wing blogs, noted:

"Some are calling Murtha 'dishonorable.' Others labeled him a 'traitor' and recommended that he be sent to 'jail.' Another added, 'Murtha has no honor left, no dignity, and will never be considered as a Marine except by his liberal buddies, who would hate him for wearing that uniform in the first place.'"

The other wholly predictable reaction was voiced by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who told reporters that the Haditha massacre was a case of a few bad apples, an isolated incident -- just as he had said after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed. "I don't want the actions of one squad in one city on one morning to be used to symbolize or characterize or tar the actions of our great troops," he said.

But the truth is that the story is unique only in that the evidence that a terrible crime took place appears to be too great for "plausible deniability."

Consider just a few reports:

# A team of eight Amnesty International staffers reported on a host of abuses by coalition forces, including the killing of two unarmed kids -- one 12 years old -- during house to house searches.

"Many of the coalition soldiers and military police engaged in law enforcement do not have basic skills and tools in civilian policing," Curt Goering, a member of the Amnesty team in Iraq, noted.

# The Associated Press reported that "Iraq's U.N. ambassador accused U.S. Marines of killing his unarmed young cousin in what appeared to be 'cold blood'" during another house search in Anbar province. The ambassador, Samir Sumaidaie, wrote that the troops had smiled after the "killing of an unarmed innocent civilian." He believed it was "a crime that may be repeated up and down Al-Anbar."

# In early 2004, senior British commanders condemned "American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate." One officer told reporters "the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen." (The Brits have been accused of their own share of crimes in Iraq.)

# In April of 2004, there were widespread reports -- in the foreign press -- that civilians were targeted during the "Siege of Fallujah." The Pentagon was outraged when journalists reported the number of civilians killed in the city. One report quoted Dr. Rafa Hayad al-Issawi, director of the city's main hospital, saying "the dead mostly included women, children and elderly." The Iraqi minister of health, Khudair Abbas, confirmed that U.S. forces had shot at ambulances -- in Fallujah and elsewhere -- and condemned the acts as possible war crimes. Snipers who served in Fallujah told the Los Angeles Times that "there might not have been such a 'target-rich' battlefield" since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.

# In March, Knight-Ridder reported that senior Iraqi police officials had accused U.S. soldiers of executing 11 Iraqi civilians, including four children and a 6-month-old baby, in a raid near the city of Balad. The local police chief, Col. Farouq Hussein, said that the civilians had all been shot in the head. "It's a clear and perfect crime," he said.

Journalists like Dahr Jamail and Robert Fisk have all reported on other instances of civilians caught in the sites of American gunners. And these stories don't capture the "collateral damage" done by bombs and missiles.

None of this is to suggest that U.S. troops are a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs. These are America's sons and daughters, members of the most highly trained military in the world. They've been put into a situation where they're under constant threat in a country where it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. They've seen 20,000 of their buddies killed or injured, and according to a recent poll, almost nine out of 10 believe the war in Iraq is "retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11."

Ultimately, after Iraq's civilian population, those troops will pay the price for this war. Paul Rockwell, who interviewed a number of U.S. soldiers who claim to have committed atrocities in Iraq for the book "Ten Excellent Reasons Not To Join The Military," wrote that American troops are not only "expected to follow unlawful orders, they are also expected to bear lifelong burdens of shame, guilt and legal culpability for the arrogance of their own commanders -- who dispense life and death from an office computer."

Incidents like those alleged in Haditha, Ramallah and Fallujah are entirely predictable. In World War I, about four in 10 deaths were civilians; by World War II, civilians made up more than half of those killed; and in the post Cold-War era, about eight in 10 combat deaths have been among civilians. The ultimate moral tragedy is that while some number of soldiers may face prosecution, the real culprits won't be punished. There are just too many of them.

The guilty include not only the Bush administration's hardliners who conjured up this war, but also the Democratic hawks who enabled them and the media that spun their glorious war narrative and convinced so many ordinary citizens to jump on board. It's the Tom Friedmans and Kenneth Pollacks and Peter Beinarts, who only realized the Iraq war was a mistake when it proved to be as disastrous as every other "war of choice." They promised us a clean war; smart bombs would spare the innocent, a high-tech military would be finished in a fortnight and casualties on both sides would be limited.

Those of us who said that the war would be hell on Iraqis were called "pacifists" and "appeasers." The hawks got their war. Now we know that it's not a video game or glowing green explosions on CNN -- it's a bloody and uncontrolled mess and civilians are paying the price, as they always do.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

[LaiSteve66]

Did you have to use the word My Lai, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[Player 0]

Personally i'm surprised things like this aren't more common.

[Fly_Away_M]

I thought of My Lai too....I mean, I know there'll most likely never be a draft in our lifetime, but stuff like this is just another reason people have reasons to be scared of one.

[Faithless]

Will this thing grow out-of-proportion? Or will it be a significant down-side to our involvement in Iraq?

Murtha: Iraqi killings worse than Abu Ghraib

Sun May 28, 2006 8:01pm ET

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines has done more damage to America's aims in Iraq than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, a Democratic congressman and vocal war critic said on Sunday.

Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a decorated retired Marine, told ABC News there was "no question" that the U.S. military tried to cover up the killing of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians last year in the town of Haditha.

"I will not excuse murder," Murtha said. "And this is what happened. There's no question in my mind about it."

The military is investigating the November 19 incident, a case some American media are comparing to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam when U.S. soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers.

The U.S. military has said 15 civilians were killed in Haditha, about 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. Other accounts put the number at around 24.

While a senior Republican senator vowed to hold hearings on the Marines' actions, Murtha said the killings hurt the United States' ability to push its political agenda in Iraq, and repeated assertions that the war cannot be won militarily.

"We're set back every time something like this happens," he said. "This is worse than Abu Ghraib."

In a separate case, several Marines have been sent back from Iraq and confined at a military base in California as officials investigate the killing of an Iraqi civilian in April, according to a military official.

A spokesman for Camp Pendleton, where the Marines are being held, said no charges had been filed. He would not say how many servicemen had been brought back from Iraq and referred questions to military officials in Iraq. A spokesman there could not be reached.

SENATE PROBE PROMISED

Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican, told ABC News the Senate committee he heads would probe the Haditha killings and the reaction of senior Marine officers.

"I can assure the American public this morning, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib," where detainees were photographed enduring abuse at the hands of their U.S. guards.

Warner, on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," said the Marine Corps was investigating the killings and the Army Central Command was analyzing how the incident was handled.

A U.S. defense official said on Friday that Marines could face criminal charges, possibly including murder, in what would be the worst case of abuse by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

A criminal probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which handles criminal inquiries involving Marines, has not been completed and no decisions on charges have been made, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

COVER-UP ALLEGED

The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators were expected to call for charges including murder, negligent homicide, dereliction of duty and filing a false report.

According to the Times, military investigators have concluded that a dozen Marines acted improperly in an incident in which U.S. troops responded to a roadside bomb that killed a Marine by killing unarmed civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover it up.

Marine Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas declined to comment on Murtha's charges, saying it could jeopardize those involved or compromise the investigation.

Murtha, who said he based his assertions on briefings he received from high-level military officials, added: "There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled."

Time magazine, whose report on Haditha in March sparked a first investigation, reported on Sunday that members of the 13-member Marine unit involved in the incident had begun "rolling on each other" as contradictions emerged in the initial accounts given by those soldiers and their superiors.

Three Marine officers, including the company commander and battalion commander, were relieved of duty in part for actions related to the Haditha killings, the weekly magazine said.

There are 21,000 Marines serving in Iraq in one of the most violent regions of the country. More than 700 have died since the war began.

[Player 0]

If the democrats are smart, they'll exploit this as much as possible, assuming they're smart, and assuming the majority of registered voters actually care.

[mizhi]

Originally Posted by Player 0

If the democrats are smart, they'll exploit this as much as possible, assuming they're smart, and assuming the majority of registered voters actually care.

How would this advantage the democrats? I think harping on this to score political points will make them look petty.

Marines and much of the military loathe Murtha because they feel he betrayed the Marines when he proclaimed the Marines guilty before they had a courts-martial.

Even military members are allowed a fair trial and are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Murtha made a public spectacle calling them guilty before (1) the investigation was complete and (2) they had their trial.

What the Marines and servicemembers are saying to eachother now is that Murtha should have either qualified his statements (e.g. alleged) or should have kept quiet until the courts-martial was complete.

IMHO, I think the investigation is pretty damning to the Marines involved, and they're probably guilty, but that's an opinion apart from the legal process.

Basically, I don't see how this can be used to the democrat's advantage without taking a huge hit from servicemembers and their supporters.

[younggiftedandblack]

Originally Posted by mizhi

How would this advantage the democrats? I think harping on this to score political points will make them look petty.

Marines and much of the military loathe Murtha because they feel he betrayed the Marines when he proclaimed the Marines guilty before they had a courts-martial.

Even military members are allowed a fair trial and are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Murtha made a public spectacle calling them guilty before (1) the investigation was complete and (2) they had their trial.

What the Marines and servicemembers are saying to eachother now is that Murtha should have either qualified his statements (e.g. alleged) or should have kept quiet until the courts-martial was complete.

IMHO, I think the investigation is pretty damning to the Marines involved, and they're probably guilty, but that's an opinion apart from the legal process.

Basically, I don't see how this can be used to the democrat's advantage without taking a huge hit from servicemembers and their supporters.

Good points. If the Dems are smart they won't touch this at all.

[mizhi]

Originally Posted by younggiftedandblack

Good points. If the Dems are smart they won't touch this at all.

That's a big "If"

After the past week with all the hubub about the Jefferson investigation and the tangential Abramoff investigation, my confidence in our "representatives" not to make fools of themselves has to be measured on the kelvin scale.

It's like watching a circus except there is no ring master and the clowns are in $5000 suits.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by Player 0

If the democrats are smart, they'll exploit this as much as possible, assuming they're smart, and assuming the majority of registered voters actually care.

I wouldn't want to make a political sport of it, either.

I would like to see heads roll all the way to the top, though, if that's what it comes down to.

I would like to find out if this means anything about extended tours of duty.

[mizhi]

Originally Posted by Faithless

I would like to find out if this means anything about extended tours of duty.

I personally know dozens of soldiers who had their tour extended multiple times. 16 months in country, 20 months mobilized. It was rough on them. They never snapped though.

I think your theory might be overly simplistic, and think it's wise to wait until the investigation is completed and read the findings. I hypothesize it's a combination of things, but might primarily be one of leadership problems.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by mizhi

I personally know dozens of soldiers who had their tour extended multiple times. 16 months in country, 20 months mobilized. It was rough on them. They never snapped though.

That's all and good, but I think that over simplifies how difficult it is to be out there.

Whether they snap by "going off" or snap by becoming mentally f'd up, there is a problem with extended tours of duty. No doubt.

Did Bush’s "Bring it On" Bravado Bring On the Haditha Massacre: Iraq’s My Lai?

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org | by Tom Turnipseed
...
Commenting on the prisoner torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, Bush said it was, “the biggest mistake that’s happened so far, at least from our country’s involvement in Iraq.” Bush said "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner", and it was "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people."

Since Bush is the commander in chief of all U.S. military forces, I wonder if such Rovian, red meat for red states, ranting by Bush might have "sent the wrong signal to people" like the U.S. Marines who are now under investigation for massacring two dozen innocent civilians, including women and children, last November in Haditha, Iraq.
...

[mizhi]

Originally Posted by Faithless

That's all and good, but I think that over simplifies how difficult it is to be out there.

No, it's providing a counter example to illustrate that the problem of soldiers snapping is not necessarily caused by extended tours of duty. I've not seen any indication, actually, that the marines had been extended. Maybe I didn't read closely enough.

Originally Posted by Faithless

Whether they snap by "going off" or snap by becoming mentally f'd up, there is a problem with extended tours of duty. No doubt.

I agree that extended tours of duty are pretty stupid at this point, there's a somewhat stable rotation going on. Those soldiers I mentioned have some issues such as PTSD, but they were also in country at the kick off of Iraq when there was alot of uncertainty.

The discussion was on soldiers snapping and committing warcrimes not on general mental problems caused by war.

[Player 0]

Western media are in the business of making money. What sells? Bad news, scandals, screw-ups, crimes etc. Since they are not owned by the state (mouthpiece like the VOA not included), the state can't control and censor them the same way the Chinese government does the Chinese media. That said, that does not mean they do not collaborate with the state. It's my impression that they often present news, events, stories and convey messages in a way that "coincides" with the POV and interests of the state. For example, the PRC is often portrayed as a rising power with a dynamic economy who is somehow challenging and threatening the west even though the Chinese themselves just want to have better lives.

[Faithless]

How's it that the conservatives are able to spin it so that Murtha is the bad guy.

Malkin's calling him a blabber mouth. But she cautions it by saying it's serious because toddlers are involved. That is bad, but I think the whole indiscriminate killing thing is pretty bad too.

What do the conservatives expect should have happened? That this thing be kept under wraps? Any civilian mass murder would have definitely been topic one for the disdain by FOX and company. This one should be no different.