(This story is also discussed in this diary by Arminius)
I guess our worst fears are coming to pass. In Haditha, the Iraq war now has its Mi Lai incident:
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon report on an incident in which U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
“There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people,” Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell.” […]
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
Subsequent reporting by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and shooting the occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
This is beyond sad, beyond outrage, beyond simple tragedy. I would hope that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation will feel the same way about this atrocity, for that is what it is. I also hope that in the future we all become less dismissive of reports in the Arab media which had this story correctly reported early on.
More importantly, I hope that the greatest blame gets apportioned on those who placed our soldiers in this situation in the first place. In all wars, atrocities occur, and especially so in guerilla wars like the one we are fighting in Iraq. No army, no matter how well trained, can avoid them. In war, they are as inevitable as the sun rising each day.
(Continued below the fold)
This is not to deny or diminish the crime these soldiers committed, but to suggest that they are the sole villains here would be ludicrous. It is Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a host of lesser lights inside and outside the official corridors of power who are far more to blame than these soldiers. They did not ask to be put in this horrible situation, where the enemy cannot be determined easily, and where the constant stress of fighting against an insurgency that can literally blend into the population cannot be underestimated. And no one can say what he or she would do in a similar situation where day after day you run the risk of death, where day after day you do not know which of your friends will meet extinction. I certainly cannot know what I would do, and I will not judge those who have endured such a terrible burden.
No, the ones who deserve our greatest scorn are President Bush and his coterie of warmongers, in and out of this Administration. They were the ones who chose this war for no other reason than their own grandiose dreams of conquest. They lied and distorted the facts about the threat Iraq posed, and happily exploited the fears of ordinary Americans, until far too many, in the media and in the general populace were all too eager to demand a crusade against Saddam. What they accomplished was the far greater crime: the prosecution of aggressive war. Literally the worst of all of the crimes against humanity first enunciated at the Nuremberg Tribunals, since what flows from its commission are the host of so many other crimes, of which Haditha is now only the most recent example.
No one will prosecute the war criminals in the White House, or those who willingly led the war cheers for them in the halls of Congress, on television and on the editorial pages of our newspapers. But their guilt far exceeds that of the soldiers who murdered these poor men, women and children in Haditha, a murder committed in fear and rage, out of a misplaced notion of vengeance. In a just world, Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and all the other architects of this dark design would stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court to answer for all the atrocities that flowed from their “war of liberation.” That will not happen, but it should.
It truly should.
i know what i would never have done and could never do: putting bullets into 3-year-old kids. high velocity military ordnance. at point-blank range. repeatedly.
that unit deserves to go straight to leavenworth. and the commander-in-chief to the hague.
Frankly I’d like to believe that about myself too. But I just don’t know what I would have done had I served in a war zone when I was 18-25.
Was it horribly wrong? Yes. Murder? Yes. Should all our anger be directed at the soldiers? No, not by a long shot.
What would I have done in the situation? I, too, would like to thing I could not kill. But if I did, I should be held accountable.
I know what you are saying about Bush and Cheney — and they have plently to answer for — but if we follow your logic, are not all politicians who authorized the war also responsible? Are the Americans who supported the war responsible? Are those of us who opposed it, but did not do enough to stop it responsible? The answer to all those questions is yes to varying degrees.
Nonetheless, those who deliberately killed civilians must accept the consequences of what they have done, both legally and emotionally.
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The Marine Corps originally claimed that a convoy from the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines …
On Nov. 13, 2004, a corporal with 3/1 was videotaped shooting what appeared to be a wounded insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, during the major U.S. operation to retake the city from insurgents.
Like the Haditha incident, the Fallujah shooting sparked outcries from human-rights groups regarding actions by U.S. forces against Iraqis.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
that’s an honest answer. There’s a reason he military likes 18-25 year olds. They are better at taking orders and they have very little fear of death. But, they also are not all that mature. So, add it all up and you can get some incidents like this one in Haditha. We were young once too, and who knows how we might have held up under the stress of Iraq?
i believe mine was an honest answer as well.
yes, i was young once, too. but i have always abhorred killing. no amount of stress could make me do what those soldiers did. you’d have to kill me first. that much i know.
“”i loathe none, but executioners.”
— albert camus
I believe you. Some people are not cut out to be soldiers. And it appears these Marines were also not cut out to be soldiers.
But I have to call bullshit here. This was the work of a group of soldiers….am I to honestly believe that out of this whole group none was fit to be a soldier? Everybody has a point when they snap EVERYBODY. Soldiers are human beings….they are not robots and to even desire the kind of soldier you imply here is too scary. They wouldn’t have access to a whole bunch of their feelings but only able to follow orders to the “T” and sideline all feelings for as long as they needed to be sidelined until the mission was completed. Our soldiers make their best attempt to do this too, but thank the heavens above they are only able to do what is “humanly possible” in that department. Someone who could be as successful at it as you imply they should be after enduring how many Iraq rotations and violence is a very very fucking scary person with a gun because all one has to do is convince them that their order is the proper lawful order and with no access to any of their own feelings they would without question just open fire. Time and again so many people want soldiers to be something better than they themselves are. They want them to protect them and even kill if that is what is necessary to protect the nation, all the while they want to stand up and say that they themselves would never kill. They desire to send their soldiers to wars and stand around and debate the lawfulness of the war and the lawfulness of the acts of their soldiers while people in the war zone are blowing the fuck out of each other. It’s all bullshit and even attempting to say that some flesh and blood human being should be able to serve in Iraq and do so without humanity enough to feel his/her own pain of what they are trying to survive….you aren’t talking about human beings Boobaby – that is some sort of “thing” in a uniform! Our soldiers are human beings thank you God and all that is happening here is that everybody is learning about the price of war and that NOBODY FUCKING WINS…..THERE ARE ONLY DEGREES OF LOSS. To have an Army that never snapped would be wonderful too until some fucking evil president took office….then he would just take out the world with his military that never felt anything and never left service because it was all completely manageable and who felt nothing when a friend is laying in pieces in the middle of the road.
yeah, I understand what you are saying. I wasn’t there. But, it seems to me that this particular group of soldiers suffered a spectacular loss of judgment. Somewhere within that group the leadership appears to have failed in a massive way.
I don’t want to try to point fingers. But we deserve to expect better than this, even if we can understand that these things happen in war.
It is true these men did suffer a massive massive loss of judgment. We don’t know anything about their command and we don’t know what their commander’s goals were or what their daily lives were like. Still to this day my husband displays very very dark humor about some of the soldiers in Iraq that he knew took an OER bullet. Janis Karpinski speaks of soldiers up the chain of command unwilling to say or do anything about torture at Abu Ghraib because when you are a commissioned officer War is time to get to promoted. For the power hungry in the military it’s like being a stock broker during a Bear market. The really power hungry officers volunteer the troops under them for every crazy mission in the book. Why? Well, officers write their own OER’s (Officer Evaluation Reports) and because my husband has done his own I know how it goes……an officer lists all of his fresh new accomplishments for the year behind bullets….hence an OER bullet. Commanding this dangerous mission and that dangerous mission looks real real good and now the crazy have to compete against each others commanded dangerous missions to get noticed. If your command agrees with your own self assessment they sign off on the evaluation and these evaluations go into a little file that is pulled out and a board goes over it when it is promotion time……WHO KNEW THE MILITARY WAS DOING HIPPY GRADING THESE DAYS HUH? Commanders over in Iraq right now seeking to climb the power and glory ladder are volunteering their troops for everything and anything that is dangerous and giving no thought to how it could be harming their troops……they don’t care – they want Oak Leaves, they want ribbons, they want Stars. The sane command at the Pentagon has all been fired (retired) and we all know who Rumsfeld has appointed and promoted. Crazy breeds crazy breeds more crazy down the military chain of command and sane people have no OER bullets that any of these fuckers want to read. We know nothing of the command these soldiers were under or the amount of stress that had been liberally applied to them daily to make their commander look GREAT……we know nothing other than what they did in Haditha and it is perfectly conceivable that twenty years down the road one of them will bounce his grandchild on his knee and send him home and put a gun in his mouth and end his pain and turmoil that lives within himself and he will have been killed by an OER bullet or maybe even two.
who are living on peaceful soil because I was one of the outraged. Yet I live with a husband who is still taking medication after his one rotation in Iraq and I have seen what it did to him and he was safer and in a much more sane daily environment than these Marines were. These Marines were suffering from PTSD right that moment in Iraq. How I best understand this is that I face the fact that every single one of these Marines grew up and lived in this country and none of them had ever done anything like this before or they would never have gotten into the Marines. Before the Bush administration broke the military it was pretty tough to get into the military. You could not have a criminal record, hell, you couldn’t even have gang tattoos from your rebellious youth and some soldiers had them removed in order to even get in! You had to be a very stand up person. If these soldiers had not gone to fight a daily ground war like Iraq would they have ever been compelled to ever do anything like this? Not in America! Everybody has a dark side and when the going gets really tough we have all stood at that cross roads and made choices, but we were sane and people weren’t murdering other people including us around us. This is PTSD and this is what it is buying us having our troops on the ground everyday in Iraq now. They are mentally depleted and spiritually drained to the point of being bottomless pits. I think that people who have grown up in abusive homes where lots of physical violence occurred probably have an inkling of what has happened to these soldiers and for the rest of us just remember some of the more abusive people we all had to survive and the rage that it breeds and times that by 100 and now remove all of the safe places and love from our family and maybe friends we had away from those abusive people to recuperate our minds and spirits! This is why we must not abandon our soldiers during these dark dark hours. We must save them and we must do all that we can to restore them. They have been so utterly damaged and it wasn’t to stop a Hitler, it was mostly for oil. God Bless Them and please please please send them home now.
Didn’t we just hear about the powers that be sending troops back into combat after they’d been diagnosed with PTSD? Who’s really to blame here?
My Vietnam veteran friend suffered his whole life — and even on his deathbed was still tortured by some of the things he had to do. Shame, shame on the people who lie us into wars of choice.
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(The Nation) April 12, 2006 — As the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday, this much is known to be true: On November 19, after a roadside bomb killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 15 Iraqi civilians – including seven women and three children – were allegedly shot and killed by a unit of US Marines operating in Haditha, Iraq. Then, this past Friday, a battalion commander and two company commanders from the same unit were relieved of their duties.
US media coverage of the Haditha allegations has been startlingly limited. In addition to the Time investigation, AP reporter Bassem Mroue has followed the case and Knight-Ridder reporter Nancy A. Youssef has written an article as well. That’s it. Much has been written in the UK press and in English-language papers around the world.
● Aug. 3, 2005 – 14 Marines Killed in Haditha
● Iraqi Doctors Beaten and Arrested in Haditha Hospital
● U.S. Forces Destroy Eight Bridges over Euphrates
● Children of Abraham: Death in the Desert ◊ by Gandhi
≈ Cross-posted from my diary —
The Role Iran Is Planning in the Country – Baghdad Burning ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
From Captain’s Quarters:
Says it all, right there. Born a few decades too late.
what a moron.
Maybe he’s forgotten that we never hear about Tillman because he was an atheist who was killed by friendly fire. The truth of the incident was covered up by the military and the Bush Administration, both of which quickly stopped talking about him once the facts began to leak out. He doesn’t fit the lazy Mad-Libs style media narrative, so down the memory hole he goes.
If that winger asshole wants to blame anybody for Tillman not getting more recognition, he should direct his ire at his precious Bush Administration and a military brass that have sold out their oaths, their honors and their institutions to neocon ideology.
anythng wrong.
http://billmon.org/archives/002452.html
Billmon says it well.
For anyone might not think the soldiers should be locked up for a long long time let’s just try the Golden Rule.
If Iraqi’s were occupying the US trying to bring about ‘regime change’ and their soldiers were ‘snapping’ under the pressure or OUR occupation, how would you feel about those PTSD soldiers who slaughtered YOUR family?
The White House used a small band of Muslim fanatics to grab onto power. Muslims became evil doers. Soldiers were given free reign to kick ass.
Hubris and belief in their own propaganda from the Commander and Chief all the way down to the Marine platoon leaders blinded them to the consequences of a Christian invasion and occupation two Muslim countries. In the first, the mudjahedin freedom fighters had humiliated and defeated Soviet Union. In the second country invaded, the Iraqis had kicked out the British 80 years earlier.
Losing, blinded, and ill led; the torture and slaughter of civilians by youthful occupiers is assured.