U.S. Brutalities Upon Retreating Iraq Forces in Gulf War

The following are excerpts from the book, Iraq, Lies, Cover-Ups, and Consequences, authored by Captain Rodney Stich, one of over 20 books in the Defrauding America book series.

U.S. Forces Needlessly Killing Thousands of Retreating Iraqis In Gulf War

The Gulf War was from August 2, 1990 to February 28, 1991, to attack Iraq after it invaded and annexed Kuwait. It was, codenamed Operation Desert Shield . Operation Desert Storm was the actual attack, from January 17, 1991, to February 28, 1991.

As Iraqi military personnel retreated from its invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. war machine needlessly slaughtered thousands of retreating Iraqis, including those who were willing to surrender.An article in The Guardian (February 14, 2003) stated:

How the Mass Slaughter of a Group of Iraqis Went Unreported.

Reporter Patrick Sloyan stated that U.S. Infantry Division Big Red One “had attacked an estimated 8,000 Iraqis with 3,000 Abrams main battle tanks.” Daniel wondered what happened to the estimated 6,000 Iraqi defenders who had vanished. “Where are the bodies?” he finally asked the First Division’s public affairs officer, an army major. What bodies?” the major replied.

Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the dead had eluded eyewitnesses, cameras and video footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them fired their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradley’s pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.

“I came through right after the lead company,” said Colonel Anthony Moreno. “What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands.”

Most of the grisly photos from Desert Storm seen today were the work of independent journalists who raced to the “Highway of Death” north of Kuwait, where war planes had destroyed thousands of vehicles in which Iraqi soldiers had fled after the start of the ground war. The area was free of the military handlers who routinely interrupted interviews to chastise soldiers into changing their statements while reporters stood back, or forcibly removed film from cameras that captured images deemed offensive by an Army public affairs officer.

The media was more duped than cowed. Cheney won over some people with the promise that places in the pool would give them an advantage over competitors.

For independent journalists, life was much more difficult. More than 70 operating outside the pool system were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint or chased from the front line. Army public affairs offices made nightly visits to hotels and restaurants in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraqi border. Reporters and photographers would bolt from the table. The slower ones were arrested.

Women and Children Also Fell Victims of U.S. Military

In the 1991 attack upon Baghdad, U.S. warplanes fired two missiles into the Amariya bomb shelter on February 13, 1991, killing 403 civilians cringing in a shelter, most of who were women and children. Body parts of women and children were strewn throughout the shelter. Iraq, properly, made it into a memorial showing the deaths brought by the United States. Reporters viewing the scene reported charred bodies of women, children, and men being pulled from the shelter. Eleven years later, the floor of the shelter was still stained from incinerated bodies.

The French publication, Le Monde (February 12, 2003) made reference to German Foreign Affairs Minister, Joschka Fischer, who said that the Bush plan would risk plunging the entire region into a “chaos from which no one knows what will emerge.” The head of German Diplomacy’s fear was that the Americans will get “in an operation without equal since the Vietnam War,” leaving the region devastated by unforeseeable reactions.

Invasion of Iraq Killed Thousands of Iraqi Civilians

The invading U.S. military killed thousands of innocent Iraqis. After President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, many being women, children, and infants. The invasion, in addition to the deaths, resulted in massive looting of private and government buildings, murders, looting, general anarchy. Iraqi and Kurds, those from other political and religious group, different tribes, were settling old scores. A formally relatively stable (for that region with its history of civil strife) country was converted overnight to anarchy and civil war.

The treasures from the National Museum of Iraq were looted, many of which came from the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia over 7,000 years earlier. Over 170,000 artifacts were looted. The New York Times stated the looting “is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.” Even hospitals were looted of medications, equipment, and air conditioners. These were obviously not the actions of a people ready for a democratic form of government.

Humanitarian Nightmare Inflicted Upon the Iraqi People

The serial lying by Bush administration officials, the cover-ups by the American media, and the naiveté—or arrogance—of the American people, caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis to be inflicted upon the Iraqi people.

The death toll of Iraqis was reportedly into several hundred thousand, with thousands of others wounded and maimed for life. Much of Iraq was converted into rubble. Several millions were displaced and many fled to squalid campgrounds in neighboring countries.

Referring to the orphaned children, a Unicef report stated, “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”

Figures on the dead or wounded are bland figures. The reality is that people’s bodies have been blown apart, limbs ripped off, third-degree burns covering large segments of bodies, and virtually no medical care.

Executive Director James Paul of Global Policy Forum stated in a report completed in August 2007, “This is the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in a long time.”

Despite all this, many Americans cavalierly thought it was proper for President Bush to order the start of the war, and for them to continue supporting that decision. Under these conditions, can anyone really blame the explosive growth of people throughout the world who want to kill Americans!

Iraqi Civilian Death Toll Topping 1 Million

As the invasion dragged on, the Iraqi death toll continued climbing. A Lost Angeles Times article (September 14, 2007), titled, “Survey says civilian Death Toll Since Start of War Tops 1 Million,” stated in part:

A new survey suggested that the civilian death toll from the war could be more than 1 million. The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed U.S. military statements earlier in the week defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its military strategy appear successful.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested the total number slain since the war began in March 2003 is more than 1.2 million. ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?”

According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war-related violence, and 22 percent of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48 percent of the victims were shot to death, and 20 percent died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.Last year, the medical journal, Lancet, put the number at 654, 965.

Despite all this, many U.S. politicians still supported their decision to go to war, including Senator Hillary Clinton who during her presidential campaign in 2007 stated she still supported her decision to authorize starting the war with Iraq. In September 2007, she even voted in support of an amendment by Senator Lieberman to allow President Bush to start a war with Iran. She voted to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization.

Bush’s Version of Utopia, No Where in Sight

The pictures and news stories (April 2003) of the U.S. invasion of Iraq showed a vastly different picture than the Bush administration stated would arise. Instead of freedom and democracy following the invasion, newspaper headlines read: “Looters shake Iraqi Cities; Iraq’s health-care system reels from looters; Troops watch as Baghdad is ransacked; Mobs Ransack Homes and Set Fire to Government Sites; Seeking Calm In the Chaos;” A New York Times articles (April 12, 2003) stated:

American troops seemed powerless before a fresh wave of looting and mayhem that flowed in. The city of Baghdad was the scene of frenzied rounds of looting, with mobs setting fire to government ministries and moving for the first time to ransack private homes rather than merely the symbols of Mr. Hussein’s power. With virtually every government ministry here in flames, the city of Baghdad and indeed the entire country is now operating essentially without a government, with no services or police protection.

The Bush administration appeared to have little prepared in the way of a quick response. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington, “You cannot do everything instantaneously.”

A person with street-smarts might think that in this type of culture that the dream of democracy might not be suitable.

Convolute Statements by Rumsfeld

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said (April 11, 2003) in a non-responsive response to a reporter’s question about the massive rioting and anarchy occurring in Iraq:

Well, I think the way to think about that if you go from a repressive regime that has—it’s a police state, where people are murdered and imprisoned by the tens of thousands, and then you go to something other than that, a liberated Iraq, that you go through a transition period. And in every country, in my adult lifetime, that’s had the wonderful opportunity to do that, to move from a repressed dictatorial regime to something that’s freer. We’ve seen in that transition period there is untidiness.

From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And you cannot do everything instantaneously.

Freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to commit mistakes, and to commit crimes. It is an untidiness that accompanies the transition from tyranny to freedom. Here is a country that is being liberated. Here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a dictator, and they’re free.

Referring to Rumsfeld statements about an “untidy war,” a San Francisco Chronicle editorial (April 15, 2003) stated:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deserves the award for “stupefying glibness” by comparing the nightmarish looting in Iraq as nothing more than a little “untidiness.” Rumsfeld seems to relish upsetting people with facile statements. Comparing the looting of Iraq’s national museum in Baghdad, with virtually all of its 170,000 objects dating back 7,000 years, to a messy teenager’s room takes the cake for audacity.

“Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” he declared. Oh really? He doesn’t explain his apparent unconcern for the looting of other vital institutions, such as hospitals, which will be essential for Iraq’s recovery. What makes Rumsfeld’ s bantering especially galling is that some of the chaos could have been prevented.

Juvenile U.S. Thinking that Democracy Could be Forced

The strong interests of the various religious groups in the Middle East, the lack of education, the absence of history of democratic activities, the many different religious and tribal groups, made any attempt to change the region into a democracy through an invasion by a foreign power obviously futile.

These many different groups among the 23 million Iraqis, including religious groups in the Middle East, were fanatic in their religions, and would even kill anyone trying to convert a member of their religious group to another religion. Remember the case of the naive young American woman who went to Afghanistan to convert people to her Christian faith and was condemned to death.

Iraq consisted of numerous clannish groups that had been fighting each other for years until Saddam Hussein’s regime brought relative peace to the country. Ethnic violence could be expected, and ethnic violence did occur, as repeatedly forewarned.

Whatever the real reason for President Bush to invade Iraq, ignoring his repeatedly articulated “rose-garden” democracy, he was na?ve to think it would happen. Basic requirements for a democracy include a well-educated and extensive middle class, a functioning economy based on trade, and a history of stability.

Former national security adviser under President George Bush senior, Brent Scowcroft, stated during a speech to the Norwegian Nobel Institute in April 2003 that the absence of functioning civic institutions and the animosity between the various religious and ethnic groups barred any sort of political pluralism. He stated, “What’s going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We’re surely not going to let them take over.”

“Plan for democracy in Iraq may be folly,” was the heading of a San Francisco Chronicle article (April 13, 2003):

Experts question U.S. ability to reform entire Middle East. “Democracy has emerged at times where it had never existed before,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has written extensively on the spread of democratic movements. “But Iraq lacks virtually every possible precondition for democracy. And the possibilities in the other Arab countries may be even lower.”

He said, for instance, there’s not a large, entrepreneurial middle class, almost no experience with free elections and neither a free press nor an open economy practically anywhere in the region.

Murhaf Jouejati, adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said it was obvious that most Iraqis were thrilled at throwing off the yoke of oppression, but that the looting and chaos that has followed provide an ominous sign of the kinds of violent forces the war has unleashed, and how hard it will be to contain them.

“There has not been a single day of democracy in Iraq in its history,” he said. “It is still a tribal and clan-oriented society. Democracy needs a social infrastructure that does not exist at all in Iraq.”

A State Department report prepared by its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, termed democracy in Iraq doubtful. A Los Angeles Times article (March 14, 2003) making reference to that report stated:

A classified State Department report expresses deep skepticism that installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a claim President Bush has made in trying to build support for a war, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report says that daunting economic and social problems are likely to undermine basic stability in the region for years, let alone prospects for democratic reform.

Iraq is made up of ethnic groups deeply hostile to one another. Ever since its inception in 1932, the country has known little but bloody coups and brutal dictators. Given such trends, “We’ll be lucky to have strong central governments (in the Middle East), let alone democracy,” said one intelligence official.

“Middle East societies are driven by political, economic and social problems that are likely to undermine stability regardless of the nature of any externally influenced or spontaneous, indigenous change,” the report said. The report cites “high levels of corruption, serious infrastructure degradation, overpopulation” and other forces causing widespread disenfranchisement. Middle East experts said there are other factors working against democratic reform, including a culture that values community and to some extend conformity over individual rights.

A Few U.S. Newspapers Reported the Gruesome Consequences

A few U.S. newspapers ignored the pressure to cover up for the consequences of the invasion and touched upon the consequences. A San Francisco Chronicle article (April 8, 2003):

The body bags have run out at the Al-Kindi Hospital, and morgue workers have to cut up big rolls of black plastic to wrap the war’s latest victims. A team of four skinny, middle-aged men worked all Monday afternoon, heaving and grunting as they rolled body after body into the new, rough-cut bags. Dozens of corpses lay stacked insider the refrigerated room—some on bunks, others in a pile on the floor.

When a group of foreign TV cameramen descended on the workers, one chased them angrily. “Why are you taking photos? For Bush?” he yelled, waving his arms. “Tell him to go to hell.” The journalists left, and the men returned to the bodies.

Hospital emergency rooms are being overwhelmed with civilian and military casualties. At the Al-Kindi in eastern Baghdad, far more than body bags have been depleted. Doctors have been carrying out some emergency surgery with only 800 milligrams of ibuprofen instead of anesthesia. In the United States, that’s the standard prescription-strength dosage for muscle pain.

In the past week, the government has stopped updating numbers of the civilian dead and wounded, seemingly unable to keep up with the ever-climbing statistics. After U.S. troops established a presence in Baghdad Monday, the World Health Organization reported that city hospitals were seeing about 100 combat casualties per hour.

“We’re now getting not just shrapnel wounds, but pieces of people,” said Dr. Mohammed Kamil, a surgeon at Al-Kindi. “These are wounds from missiles and rockets. They are amputations. They require more urgent surgery.” [With Ibuprofen for anesthesia!]

The Bush administration has come under increasing international criticism in recent days since admitting the use of cluster bombs in Iraq. The ordnance cause widespread small shrapnel injuries. There is no denying the heart-wrenching reality of the suffering of patients and their relatives. In ward after hospital ward Monday, pain and grief were raw.

“Feran! Feran!” screamed one woman as she collapsed on the floor. “Tell me where he is!” Her son tried to console her, telling her that his brother Feran was just wounded and would be OK.

“No, you’re lying, show me Feran!” the woman screamed, tearing her hair and twisting on the ground. “He used to pray every day, he was mine, he did nothing wrong!” In fact, 12-year-old Feran had just been declared dead on arrival, disemboweled and with severe head wounds, the apparent result of an American air strike on their neighborhood.

Surrounded by such suffering, Kamil and other doctors take a dim view of the U.S. war conduct. “They should focus, know there are civilians in Baghdad,” he said. “Do they want to kill everyone in Baghdad?”

Many of the foreign medical experts now in Iraq are veterans of horrific wars and famines in other nations. “It’s bad, very bad,” said Dr. Jacques Beres, a neurosurgeon who is director of International Medical Aid, a French group that works in poor, war-torn nations. A veteran of African conflicts, he has been in Iraq for two weeks, conducting surgery daily.

“I like their way of trying to help,” he said, referring to his Iraqi colleagues. “Even their way of speaking to patients, softly, gently. After I did one surgery to a child, a nurse came up to me and said something in Arabic, which I didn’t understand. I got it translated, and it meant, ‘Long life to your hands.’ I like that,” he continued. “It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me as a doctor.”

“I don’t know how I’ll tell him.”

A New York Times (April 14, 2003) article referred to the great human sufferings resulting from the attacks:

“I don’t know how I’ll tell him,” Sindous Abbas said today. At her back was a window, which looked out to the sidewalk where her husband, Saad, sat in pain and ignorance. He had been out of the hospital for just two days. She spoke inside so he would not hear. “It wasn’t just ordinary love,” Ms. Abbas said. “He was crazy about them.

It wasn’t like other fathers.” What all his neighbors and relatives and his own wife have not yet been able to say to him is that three of his daughters—Marwa, 11, Tabarek, 8, and Safia, 5—did not survive the missile that punched down into their apartment on the third night of American air strikes. No one has any reason to believe it was anything other than an American missile.

This evening, Mr. Abbas, sitting with his broken heel propped up on a chair, with scabs and cuts from the shrapnel that blasted into chest, legs and arms, told how his apartment filled with smoke that night and how he dragged three of his children out. He rushed back into the apartment for the other three. Then the missile exploded. “I still have three more children in the hospital,” Mr. Abbas said. That is what everyone has been telling him.

In the old Awa section of Baghdad, with its narrow streets and balconies and mostly poor Shiite Muslim families, Mr. Abbas’s relatives climbed to the roof of his home to show where the missile hit. It sheared through a thick metal bar of a rooftop sheep pen, through an iron feeding tray, then through the roof and into Mr. Abbas’s small home.

Inside the apartment, the missile ricocheted off a wall, then smashed into the floor, near where his four daughters were sleeping. Mr. Abbas rushed out with his two sons and one daughter, whose leg was smashed. He did not see the shell, which exploded when he ran back inside for the rest of his family.

[Daughter’s leg hanging from the ceiling fan.]

Today, the walls of the home were still spattered with blackened pieces of flesh. One of the girl’s legs had blown off and was suspended that night from the top of the ceiling fan.

Thia Rashid, one of Mr. Abbas’s cousins, who is also a neighbor who helped clear the apartment, said: “There is no reason for this. It’s a criminal act.” It is clear that several hundred died and many more were wounded both from bombs and from Soldiers firing on suspected combatants.

“Young children with arms and legs blown off.”

An article in the Boulder Daily Camera (April 5, 2003) described the observation of a Boulder neurosurgeon at a U.S. hospital in Germany. Referring to the maiming of U.S. soldiers—many from “friendly” fire, the article stated:

The daily White House press briefings and fuzzy real-time TV reports fall far short of conveying the brutality of war, says Boulder neurosurgeon Gene Bolles. “We have had a number of really horrific injuries now from the war. They have lost arms, legs, hands, they have been burned, they have had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I don’t feel that people realize that.”

He spent three hours in the operating room one morning last week removing bullet fragments, blood and brain matter from two young soldiers who each has been shot in the head. One will recover nicely; Bolles said the other will have permanent neurological damage. Another of his patients, wounded in a grenade battle, died on the operating table. “These are young children; 18, 19, 20 with arms and legs blown off. That is the reality,” said Bolles.

Red Cross Horrified by Piles of Dead and Mutilated Bodies

Canada’s CTV Television in Ottawa aired a segment (April 4, 2003) titled, “Red Cross Horrified by Numbers of dead civilians,” stating:

Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw “incredible” levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.

Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometers south of Baghdad. “There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla,” Huguenin said in an interview by satellite telephone.

“We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening. In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror.”

Red Cross staffs are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad. Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto, N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary. The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope.

“Grieving Kin Wield Shovels to Bury Their dead.”

An article in the New York Times (April 15, 2003) stated:

The old man stood waist deep in the grave. Black flies swarmed around his ankles and scattered whenever his plunged his shovel into the dirt. The body of his brother lay at his feet—mangled, rotting, unrecognizable as human. On a nearby headstone sat a white plastic bag. It held what was left of his sister-in-law, his two nephews and his two young nieces. This is the first time I have dug a grave myself,” the old man, Khali Abbas Ali, said. His relatives died five days ago when an American missile struck their car.

Baghdad is a city without the simplest public services. Even the gravediggers no longer show up for work. Although the town is awash with corpses, there is no one here to put them in the ground. Their mournful survivors must wield their shovels on their own. Some have buried their loved ones on the grounds of the hospitals where they died. Others have buried them at home.

To spend an hour or two at Boratha is to see where grief meets work. Old women in long black robes shriek over open graves, then quickly help their husbands claw through the dirt. One man, his face contorted by weeping, carried a dead baby wrapped in a bed sheet toward a hole in the ground. His relatives had dug it themselves only a half-hour before. Everywhere there is the stench of death.

Addressing the tragedies with the headline, “Thousands are dead, and thousands are missing!” was an article in the Christian Science Monitor (May 22, 2003):

Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country. Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. [Where the dead toll was over one million!] “Thousands are dead, thousands are missing,” says Haidar Taie, head of the tracing department for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad. “It is a big disaster.”

By one measure of violence against noncombatants, as compared with resistance faced by soldiers, the war in Iraq was particularly brutal.

A Focus on cluster bombs

Dr. Brigety and his colleagues in Baghdad say they are especially concerned by the wide use of cluster bombs during the war in Iraq. They say they have found evidence of “massive use of cluster bombs in densely populated areas,” according to Human Rights Watch researcher Marc Galasco, contradicting [White House] claims that such munitions were used only in deserted areas.

Dispersing thousands of bomblets that shoot out shards of shrapnel over an area the size of a football field, such weapons become indiscriminate and thus illegal under the laws of war, if used in civilian neighborhoods, Human Rights Watch has argued during past conflicts.

Mourning his children

Mahmoud Ali Hamadi, hugging his 18-month-old son, Haidar, to his breast for comfort, he cannot hold back his sobs as he recounts how a US missile that landed by his front gate killed his wife and three elder children on the night of April 5.

“My children were the brightest in the whole school,” he recalls, looking fondly at an old family photograph through is tears. “Eleven years I spent raising them, and in one instant I lost them.

Mr. Hamadi’s family died in Rashidiya, a village of palm groves and vegetable plots on the banks of the Tigris, half an hour north of Baghdad. Nearly 100 villagers were killed by US bombing and strafing on April 5, including 43 in one house, for reasons that they do not understand. “There was no military base here,” says Hamadi. “We are not military personnel. This is just a peasant village.”

Thousands of Iraqi Civilians Killed by U.S. Forces

A study by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, a research team in Baltimore, released a report (October 28, 2004) stating that over 100,000 Iraqi have died since t he start of war activities by the United States. The London-based medical publication, The Lancet, placed the research on line because of the gravity of the problem. The article described the teams of researchers who traveled throughout Iraq in mid-September, 2004, interviewing people throughout Iraq. An article in the International Herald Tribune (October 28, 2004) stated:

“We were shocked at the magnitude but we’re quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate,” said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins team. Dr. Burnham said the team excluded data about deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, because that city was the site of unusually intense violence.

In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths sin their families since the conflict started. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by American-led forces, mostly air strikes, and most of those killed were women and children. The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers reported.

The team included researchers from the John Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies and included doctors from Al Mustansiriya University Medical School in Baghdad.

“I am emotionally shocked but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed, “ said Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, who works on the www.iraqbodycount.net project. That project, which collates only deaths reported in the news media, currently put the maximum civilian death toll at just under 17,000. “We’ve always maintained that the actual count must be much higher,” Mr. Lipscomb said.

Although the teams relied primarily on interviews with local residents, they also requested to see at least two death certificates at the end of interviews in each area, to try to ensure that people had remembered and responded honestly.

The study is scientific, reserving judgment on the politics of the Iraq conflict. But Dr. Roberts and his colleagues are critical of the Bush administration and the Army for not releasing estimates of civilian deaths.

One of Many Weapons of Mass Destruction That
Literally Meets That Definition: U.S. Cluster Bombs

More accurately meeting the definition of weapons-of-mass-destruction, the U.S. dropped huge bunker buster bombs, and cluster bombs, into residential areas, knowing that innocent people would be and were being killed. Thousands of laser guided missiles were fired into Iraqi cities, killing huge numbers of men, women, and children, with many suffering arms and legs being ripped off.

An Associated Press article (April 13, 2003) revealed the effects of the cluster bombs rained down upon Iraq’s residential area:

Steely, silent and menacing they are just about everywhere—in Najah Jaffar’s garden, on Ahmad Hussein’s doorstep, hanging from palm trees along the shop-lined sidewalks of Khairala Tilfah street. People who live in Dura, a southeastern Baghdad neighborhood, have been treading gingerly through their street and in some cases staying away from their homes since what appear to be cluster bombs fell upon them—but didn’t explode—during a wave of U.S. bombardment Monday.

“They come, all of a sudden, from the sky. They came down, and they scattered everywhere,” Jaffar said Saturday, looking down a street studded with the unexploded bombs. They say they don’t understand why the United States dropped the bombs in their area; there are no targets nearby, they insist.

Human rights groups have criticized Americans’ use of cluster bombs. They contain 200 or more small bombs, each of which can explode into hundreds of metal fragments. Many fail to explode on impact, and opponents have been emphatic about the need to deal with the dangers that unexploded ones pose to civilians. “I think many people will be injured. Many bodies, many children will be killed without reasons. They are no coming for peace. This is no peace,” Jaffar said.

With bombs in his garden and bombs in his garage, he still cannot return home. Another man has the opposite problem: He is trapped inside his house until the explosives are taken away. Even Khairala Tilfah, the main street running through Dura, is studded with unexploded bombs.

Harm from US Use of Depleted-Uranium Shells

Despite the delayed and lingering harm suffered by U.S. service personnel from the U.S. use of shells containing depleted uranium, the United States continued to use them in Iraq. A Christian Science Monitor article (May 15, 2003) titled “Remains of toxic bullets litter Iraq,” described the harm to people’s health for years thereafter. The uranium presents a major health hazard through people picking up the shells or bullets or inhaling dust and sand carrying the radiation.

While the White House politicians were accusing Iraq of having biological weapons—which did not exist—the White House politicians approved the use of radioactive and toxic depleted-uranium-tipped munitions that would inflict harm for years to come.

General McCaffrey Said American Public Must be
Proud of What They Made Possible in Iraq

A rare television showing on a CNBC television broadcast (April 14, 2003), described dozens of bombed automobiles throughout the city, many with rotting bodies in them. On that same program, retired general Barry McCaffrey, described the brilliant performance of the U.S. military, and that the American public must be proud of what the U.S. military personnel were doing.

Majority of Americans Praised Bush for Invading Iraq

In the face of this horror, most Americans supported and praised President Bush for his decision to invade Iraq; they even reelected him, knowing the carnage inflicted upon innocent people, and the pattern of serial lying that would have justified his immediate impeachment—if sanity and a conscience had existed within the United States.

Maybe Mexico Should be On Guard

Judging the basis used by the Bush group—and their supporters—for invading Iraq, even Canada and Mexico would be justifiable targets for invasion! Maybe this isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds! That also applies to over fifty countries that do not have democratically elected government, as President Bush uses the U.S. military to force his thinking through gunboat diplomacy.

American Public Approved the Slaughter They Financed

Newspaper polls showed the majority of the American public approved Bush’s invasion of Iraq. A Wall Street Journal article (April 14, 2003) reported on the newspapers’ poll, titled “Poll Shows President Gains on Issues on Home Front and Abroad.” The poll showed 63 percent agreed with the U.S. policy of pre-emptive strikes. Seventy one percent approved of the job President Bush was doing. That made them complicit.

A typical Wall Street Journal editorial, reflecting the editor’s support of President Bush’s actions, slanted their editorials with blatantly false statements:

With the war [invasion] less than a month old, we’ve learned that Iraq and terrorism have the same address. Now that virtually all of Iraq is under coalition control, we’re likely to find out much more about its links to terror—if the CIA is willing to look.

No a single shred of evidence indicated Iraq had any connection to terrorism, and the evidence was overwhelming in showing no such link. But Wall Street Journal editorials had been overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and against its neighbors. That is the same editorial policy that covered up for many of the criminal activities revealed by government insiders, including the drug smuggling by the CIA and other corrupt activities that I write about in Defrauding America and Drugging America. I was so incensed about the Wall Street Journal’s cover-ups of criminal activities implicating people in key government offices that I filed a lawsuit against the newspaper.

Approval in America; but in Iraq, Burying the Dead

While most Americans approved Bush’s invasion or Iraq, in Iraq, people were busy burying the dead. In the United States the media described the plans for parades to honor the brave returning U.S. military personnel. These “heroes” included military personnel in offshore naval vessels firing missiles from far beyond the range of the limited number of primitive World War II type weapons possessed by Iraq.

Hailed as Heroes for Success in Their Turkey-Shoot Invasion

U.S. soldiers engaging in a literal turkey-shoot, were hailed as heroes in U.S. media and by most of the America public that supported what they were doing in Iraq. Why not, in a country where ball players are referred to as heroes!

U.S. Killing Journalists Who Report the Slaughter

“World Media Turn Wary Eye on U.S.” stated a Wall Street Journal article (March 25, 2003):

The unprecedented access journalists from around the world have shared in covering the fighting in Iraq has produced starkly divergent accounts of the conflict, in a way that underscores continuing international skepticism about the U.S. mission there.

United Press International

A United Press International (UPI) article (April 8, 2003) described the deliberate shooting of journalists by U.S. military personnel:

Day 20 of the war in Iraq was a dark day for the hundreds of journalists struggling to ensure that coverage out of Baghdad would continue to flow. Tuesday’s first victim was Tariq Ayoub, a 34-ear-old Jordanian national and a reporter for al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite TV network. Ayoub and his cameraman Zuheir Iraqi, were wounded when U.S. missiles struck al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad.

The nearby office of Abu Dhabi TV, a rival of al-Jazeera, was also hit during the morning missile, but its journalists escaped unharmed. Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV were only media networks to operate from private offices outside the hotel.

Hours later, it was the turn of the Palestine Hotel which houses some 300 journalists. The 15th floor of the large hotel was hit by a U.S. tank shell, which struck the offices of the Reuters wire service. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Spanish cameraman Jose Couso, were killed. A Japanese cameraman working for Fuji TV, three other Reuter’s journalists and another Western reporters were also injured.

Two French and British journalists at the Palestine Hotel were quoted by Arab TV stations as strongly denying initial U.S. military claims that the tank was returning fire from inside the hotel. A reporter from Britain’s Sky News also working from the Palestine concurred that no outgoing fire was heard from the hotel.

Western journalists said they saw the tank pointing its barrel at the hotel and heard no explosion or fire prior to the attack.

Al-Jazeera reporter Taysir Allouni said the journalists at the Palestine Hotel were now almost certain that it was the U.S. military that fired at the balcony of the 15th floor where Reuters cameraman Protskyuk and other cameramen were filming. Allouni said Arab and Western journalists were in a state of anger, wondering what they should do.

“We are only witnesses of events we want to document and transmit to the world,” he said. “They [U.S. forces] want these witnesses to disappear so that no one can testify to the actions they commit, whether a small or big crime.”

Dozens of Jordanian journalists staged a sit-in outside the Jordan Press Association in the [Jordanian] capital, Amman, chanting anti-American slogans and calling for an end to the “massacres of journalists and civilians” in Iraq. The Jordanian syndicate accused U.S. forces of “targeting the media as part of an effort to block media coverage of the crimes, massacres and barbaric destruction these forces are committing.”

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud condemned the U.S. bombard-ment that targeted journalists in Baghdad, saying it was an attempt to prevent them from “transmitting the truth.”

Lebanese information Minister Ghazi Aridi also denounced the attacks saying, “the freedom the U.S. is talking about is the freedom of killing everyone without exception, especially journalists to prevent them from informing public opinion about massacres committed in Baghdad and Iraqi cities.”

Aridi reminded that U.S. State Secretary Colin Powell called on journalists to leave Baghdad before the war started 20 days ago “so that no witness remains to testify about the committed massacres.”

Shooting At and Imprisonment of Journalists

Shooting at journalists was compounded by imprisonment without charges. One example was detailed in a New York Times article (September 15, 2005):

Detention of Iraqi Employees Angers Western News Media

Baghdad. On April 5, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman for CBS News, was struck in the thigh by an American sniper’s bullet while filming the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Mosul. As he recovered in a military hospital, the Americans arrested him. They later said the film in his camera suggested he was working for insurgents.

More than five months later, Mr. Hussein is still in an American military prison. The Iraqi criminal authorities have reviewed his case and declined to prosecute him. Colleagues who were with him that day have produced affidavits supporting his innocence. The American military has not released any evidence against him, despite repeated requests for information by CBS producers, lawyers and even the network’s president, Andrew Heyward.

Mr. Hussein’s case exemplifies a quandary faced by Western news organizations here. Their own reporters are mostly confined to fortified compounds and military bases. As a result, they are forced to rely on Iraqis, who work in increasingly dangerous settings, where the line between observer and participant is not always clear.

One thing is clear: dozens of Iraqis who carry out assignments for the news organizations have been detained while on the job, and sometimes released weeks or months later with no explanation. American forces have mistakenly [?] killed a dozen others, including a soundman working for Reuters who was shot dead by a U.S. sniper on Aug. 28.

Western bureau chiefs say the military often seems to arrest their Iraqi employees merely for getting too close to the action—in effect, for doing their jobs too well. When journalists are killed, the bureau chiefs say, the military often does little more than a cursory investigation.

A number of Reuters Iraqi employees have been detained by the American military, including three who said after being released that they were abused by American interrogators while being detained in Falluja last year.

Iraqi employees with many other companies, including CNN, Associated Press Television News and Agence France-Presse have been detained for long periods in the past year. But some companies declined to comment about the detentions, saying they feared that doing so might harm their relations with the military.

Western bureau chiefs also say that after being detained by American forces, their Iraqi employees often disappear into a void, where nothing can be learned about the case against them and their legal status is unclear. Mr. Hussein, for instance, was initially scheduled for a hearing with the Combined Review and Release Board, a nine-member panel formed to review detention cases. It is made up of American military officials and six Iraqi government officials from the Justice, Human Rights and Interior Ministries.

On Wednesday, Iraq’s justice minister, Abdul Hussein Shandal, criticized the detentions of Iraqi journalists in an interview with Reuters, saying he wanted to change a United Nations resolution that gives American troops immunity from Iraqi law. He said journalists were not free to report on all sides of the conflict.

He also dismissed American claims that his ministry had an equal say in detentions, suggesting that the American military controlled the Combined Review and Release Board.

Americans’ Caviler Shooting at Anything That Moves

A newspaper article (New York Times, September 29, 2007) described the deadly air strike by trigger-happy U.S. forces upon an outdoor ball game:

Baghdad. For the battered working-class district of Abu Dshir, Ramadan evenings bring a rare air of festivity. Families stroll outdoors, and young men play nightly matches of a traditional Ramadan game called mihaidis, in which teams try to find a hidden ring. As the teams lined up for the game, neighbor residents said, a crowd of men gathered to watch. They lighted a large oil lamp which illuminated the street, a small shopping area where grocers and fruit vendors stay open late this time of year.

Two American helicopters hovered overhead, witnesses said. Moments later, the helicopters opened first on the crowd. Seven men were killed, Sayyid Malik Abadi, the head of the district security committee, who arrived at the scene shortly after the episode, said. He said perhaps an eight man had died as well, but too many body parts were scattered about to be certain exactly how many were killed.

“The helicopters watched, and they thought it was a gathering and fired on it,” Mar. Abadi said. They fired rockets. When people started to run, the helicopters machine guns began shooting at the people who were running.

On Friday morning, relatives and neighbors gathered to escort the men’s coffins to the neighborhood’s Shiite mosque. The coffins arrived at the mosque in the back of pickup trucks. A crow of men stood silently watching the trucks as they approached. Men from the family stood among the coffins. On one truck was a boy, crying hysterically. Mr. Abadi said three of the boy’s brothers had been killed.

“It was a real massacre of innocent people, without clear reasons, said Ahmed Abdullah, a taxi driver, who was also near the scene, confusion mixed with anger and grief. “I lost my brother in law, he was the father of three kids and he was just watching the game. May God revenge the bloodshed of those martyrs.”

Winning the Hearts and Minds of Iraqis, Bush Proclaimed!

As these murderous outrages were repeated hundreds of times over, President Bush and his shills continued to proclaim that they were seeking to win over the hearts and minds of Iraqis. And of course, most of the gullible Americans believed it!

Harbinger of Things to Come for All Americans?

The denial of due process and detention without any signs of having done anything wrong was a sampling of what the Bush administration had sought to legislate and bring about by administrative fiat. A federal district court judge held that people charged with being a terrorist can be detained indefinitely without charges being filed. Government bureaucrats can charge anyone with being a terrorist!

Humiliation and Rage Throughout the Arab World

Although Arabs generally despised Saddam Hussein, they recognized that due to his age he would not be Iraq’s ruler for many more years. Talal Salman, the publisher of the prestigious Beirut newspaper, Al-Safir, wrote:

What a tragedy again plaguing the great people of Iraq. They have to choose between the night of tyranny and the night of humiliation stemming from foreign occupation. They know that the Saddam Hussein regime will eventually end one day, he will die. With America you have a whole system, an entirely different system. The threat from America is far greater than the threat from a government that will disappear one day.

Pressure on the Press Not to Criticize U.S. Politicians

Two publications, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Extra, described the pressure on the press to support Bush’s policies:

With American flags adorning networks’ on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise “patriotic” news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and U.S. foreign policy are coming to seem Taboo.

Some journalists have loudly proclaimed their support for the government and military action. CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was the most conspicuous, declaring on CBS’s “Late Show” with David Letterman (September 17, 2001): “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions, and you know, it’s just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call.”

“The Most Biased Name In News: Fox News Channel’s Extra-ordinary Right-wing Tilt.” Fox News Channel wraps itself in slogans of journalistic objectivity like “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide,” but FAIR has found a dramatic right-wing tilt in the network news.

Recent issues reported on USA Today (8/8/02) repeated a common myth about the history of U.S./Iraq relations. Reporter John Diamond wrote that “Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors four years ago and accused them of being spies.” But Iraq did not “expel” the UNSCOM inspectors; in fact, they were withdrawn by Richard Butler, head of the inspection team. It’s not just USA Today that gets this one wrong—the August 13 edition of ABCs Nightline claimed that Hussein “tossed out UN weapons inspectors. But all that is old news.”

A central tenet of Fox News Channel’s war reporting is the steadfast belief that dead Afghan civilians don’t merit much media attention. As Fox’s lead anchor Brit Hume told the New York Times (12/3/01), “The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? And is it news to be treated in a semi-straight-faced way? I think not.”

Women and Children Pleading for Their Lives—in Vain

One of many articles, this one in the Washington Post (May 27, 2006), titled, “In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre,” described how a group of U.S. Marines went from house to house, killing, including many women and children. The article stated:

BAGHDAD. Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. “I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: “I am a friend. I am good,” Fahmi said. “But they killed him, and his wife and daughters.”

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif”s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.

Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation, based on accounts of survivors and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha’s hospital and inside victims” houses.

An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged cover-up are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.

Haditha is one of a chain of farm towns on the Euphrates River where U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled foreign and local insurgents without resolution for much of the war. The first account of the killings there was a false or erroneous statement issued the next day, Nov. 20, by a U.S. Marine spokesman from a Marine base in Ramadi: “A U.S. Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.”“

The incident was touched off when a roadside bomb struck a Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment supply convoy. The explosion killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, who was on his second tour of duty in Iraq.

Insurgents planted the bomb on a side road off one of Haditha”s main streets, placing it between two vacant lots to try to avoid killing, and further alienating, Haditha”s civilians, residents said. It went off at 7:15 a.m. Terrazas was driving the Humvee, and he died instantly. Two other Marines in the convoy were wounded.

The descriptions of events provided to The Post by witnesses in Haditha could not be independently verified, although their accounts of the number of casualties and their identities were corroborated by death certificates.

In the first minutes after the shock of the blast, residents said, silence reigned on the street of walled courtyards, brick homes and tiny palm groves. Marines appeared stunned, or purposeful, as they moved around the burning Humvee, witnesses said.

Then one of the Marines took charge and began shouting, said Fahmi, who was watching from his roof. Fahmi said he saw the Marine direct other Marines into the house closest to the blast, about 50 yards away.

It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. Although he had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years ago, Ali was always one of the first on his block to go out every morning, scattering scraps for his chickens and hosing the dust of the arid western town from his driveway, neighbors said.

In the house with Ali and his 66-year-old wife, Khamisa Tuma Ali, were three of the middle-aged male members of their family, at least one daughter-in-law and four children: 4-year-old Abdullah, 8-year-old Iman, 5-year-old Abdul Rahman and 2-month-old Asia.

Marines entered shooting, witnesses recalled. Most of the shots in Ali”s house and two others were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, physicians at Haditha”s hospital said.

A daughter-in-law, identified as Hibbah, escaped with Asia, survivors and neighbors said. Iman and Abdul Rahman were shot but survived. Four-year-old Abdullah, Ali and the rest died.

Ali took nine rounds in the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back, according to his death certificate.

The Marines moved to the house next door, Fahmi said. Inside were 43-year-old Khafif, 41-year-old Aeda Yasin Ahmed, an 8-year-old son, five young daughters and a 1-year-old girl staying with the family, according to death certificates and neighbors.

The Marines shot them at close range and hurled grenades into the kitchen and bathroom, survivors and neighbors said later. Khafif”s pleas could be heard across the neighborhood. Four of the girls died screaming. Only 13-year-old Safa Younis lived, saved, she said, by her mother’s blood spilling onto her, making her look dead when she fell, limp, in a faint.

Townspeople led a Washington Post reporter this week to the girl they identified as Safa. Wearing a ponytail and tracksuit, the girl said her mother died trying to gather the girls. The girl burst into tears after a few words. The older couple caring for her apologized and asked the reporter to leave.

Moving to a third house in the row, Marines burst in on four brothers, Marwan, Qahtan, Chasib and Jamal Ahmed. Neighbors said the Marines killed them together.

Marine officials said later that one of the brothers had the only gun found among the three families, although there has been no known allegation that the weapon was fired.

Meanwhile, a separate group of Marines found at least one other house full of young men. The Marines led the men in that house outside, some still in their underwear, and away to detention.

The final victims of the day happened upon the scene inadvertently, witnesses said. Four male college students, Khalid Ayada al-Zawi, Wajdi Ayada al-Zawi, Mohammed Battal Mahmoud and Akram Hamid Flayeh, had left the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah for the weekend to stay with one of their families on the street, said Fahmi, a friend of the young men. A Haditha taxi driver, Ahmed Khidher, was bringing them home, Fahmi said.

According to Fahmi, the young men and their driver turned onto the street and saw the wrecked Humvee and the Marines. Khidher threw the car into reverse, trying to back away at full speed, Fahmi said, and the Marines opened fire from about 30 yards away, killing all the men inside the taxi.

After the killings, Fahmi said, more Americans arrived at the scene. They shouted among themselves. The Marines cordoned off the block; then, and for at least the next day, Marines filed into the houses, looked around and came out.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha”s hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs’ Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. “Democracy assassinated the family that was here,” graffiti on one of the houses declared.

The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said it sent copies of the journalism student’s videotape to mosques in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, using the killings of the women and children to recruit fighters.

After Haditha leaders complained, the Marines paid compensation put variously by townspeople at $1,500 or $2,500 for each of the 15 men, women and children killed in the first two houses. They refused to pay for the nine other men killed, insisting that they were insurgents. Officials familiar with the investigations said it is now believed that the nine were innocent victims. By some accounts, a 25th person, the father of the four brothers killed together, was also killed.

As the official investigations conclude and fresh information continues to surface in Haditha, several aspects of the incident remain unclear or are in dispute. For example, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, which helped break the news that spurred the military investigation, said he had been told by Marine officers that the rampage lasted three to five hours and involved two squads of Marines.

[Lying by the Marines]

Although Marines’ accounts offered in the early stages of the investigation described a running gun battle, those versions of the story proved to be false, officials briefed by the Marines said. Also, one member of Congress who was briefed by Marines said in Washington that the shooting of the men in the taxi occurred before the shootings in the houses.

Another point of dispute is whether some houses were destroyed by fire or by airstrikes. Some Iraqis reported that the Marines burned houses in the area of the attack, but two people familiar with the case, including Hackett, the lawyer, said warplanes conducted airstrikes, dropping 500-pound bombs on more than one house.

That is significant for any possible court-martial proceedings, because it would indicate that senior commanders, who must approve such strikes and who would also use aircraft to assess their effects, were paying attention to events in Haditha that day.

The Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines have rotated back home, to California. Last month, the Marine Corps relieved Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani of command of the 3rd Battalion. Two of his company commanders were relieved of their commands, as well. Authorities said a series of unspecified incidents had led to a loss of confidence in the three.

In Haditha, families of those killed keep an ear cocked to a foreign station, Radio Monte Carlo, waiting for any news of a trial of the Marines.

“They are waiting for the sentence, although they are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who killed a dog in the United States,” said Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer preparing a file for Iraqi courts and the United Nations, if the U.S. trial disappoints. “Because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans.”“

Marines Protecting Their Own Murderers

Further showing the contempt for Iraqi lives and the fondness of the Marine Corps for its killers, a New York Times article (October 4, 2007) stated:

A military investigator as recommended dropping murder charges against a Marine infantryman charged with killing 17 apparently unarmed Iraqis in the volatile city of Haditha nearly two years ago … The investigator recommended that if the case proceeded to court-martial, the marine, Staff Sgt, Frank D. Wuterich, be charged only with negligent homicide for the deaths of seven women and children killed in a home assaulted by a marine squad … The investigator recommended that no charges be filed against Sergeant Wuterich in the deaths of the other 10 Iraqis he was originally accused of killing.

The investigator, Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware, a Marine lawyer, has sent his recommendation to the commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, who will decide whether to try the case by court martial.

Colonel Ware has presided over evidentiary hearings for all three enlisted men charged with murder in the Haditha episode and last summer recommended dropping all charges against the previous two, citing a lack of evidence. The commanding general, James N. Mattis, has dismissed the charges against some of the other enlisted men but has not ruled on the other case.

In his 37-page report on Sergeant Wuterich’s case, Colonel Ware3 again struck a skeptical tone about the evidence presented by prosecutors, and seemed inclined to give the accused combat infantryman the benefit of the doubt.

In particular, Colonel Ware found testimony from the main prosecution witness, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, to be “wholly incredible.” The case against Staff Sergeant Wuterich, that he committed murder, is simply not strong enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” Colonel Ware wrote.

On Nov. 17, 205, Sergeant Wuterich, a squad leader, was the senior enlisted man in a group of marines that attacked four homes after the roadside bombing of their convoy. Over the course of hours, the marines killed 24 people, including five men in a car that pulled up near the scene of the explosion, and about 10 women and children in the nearby homes.

Sergeant Dela Cruz had testified that he saw Sergeant Wuterich kill the five men near a car while their hands were up.

Inside the homes where 15 other Iraqis were killed, including the 7 women and children, Sergeant Wuterich was accused of killing, marines used grenades and rifle fire to “clear” the structures of any enemy fighters. No weapons were found in the two homes of the people whom Sergeant Wuterich was accused of killing. In the report, Colonel Ware said he believed that a jury would probably decline to convict Sergeant Wuterich of any crime other than dereliction of duty, for failing to ensure his men followed the rules of engagement when they fired their weapons.

“I believe after reviewing all the evidence no trier of fact can conclude that Staff Sgt. Wuterich formed the criminal intent to kill. The evidence is contradictory, the forensic analysis is limited, and almost all the witnesses have an obvious bias or prejudice,” Colonel Ware wrote.

Last December, following three military investigations of the Haditha killings, the Marine Corps charged four infantrymen with murder and four officers, including the company and battalion commanders, with dereliction of duty for failing to properly investigate the episode. Investigators have recommended tossing out all charges against the company commander and a battalion lawyer.

Are They That Stupid!

“Wining the hearts and minds of the Iraqis,” said President George W. Bush and his shills, numerous times while the Iraqis were brutalized by the U.S. invasion of their country.

Routine Murders of Children and Other
Civilians by U.S. Forces in Vietnam as in Iraq

The brutality associated with the U.S. invasion of Iraq was similar to the brutality of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. One of the most publicized examples of murders by U.S. military personnel in Vietnam was the murder of women and children at Mai Lai. The mass murder of from 347 to 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, by U.S. military personnel in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, became known as the My Lai Massacre and also the Song My Massacre. .

Before the slaughter, Colonel Oran K. Henderson urged his officers to “go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good.” Including women and children.

Upon arriving at the village the soldiers didn’t find any fighters. One platoon, led by 2nd Lt. William Calley, ordered his men to fire indiscriminately into all of the primitive structures. After the initial killing of civilians, the soldiers started firing at anything that moved, including animals, using shotgun fire, grenades and bayonets.

Charlie Company photographer Ronald Haeberle later said, “Some of the people were trying to get up and run. They couldn't and fell down. This one woman, I remember, she stood up and tried to make it, she tried to run with a small child in her arms. But she didn't make it.”

Britian’s BBC News described the killings by U.S. military that happened at Mai Lai:

Soldiers went berserk, gunning down unarmed men, women, children and babies. Families, which huddled together for safety in huts or bunkers, were shown no mercy. Those who emerged with hands held high were murdered. Elsewhere in the village, other atrocities were in progress. Women were gang raped; Vietnamese who had bowed to greet the Americans were beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some victims were mutilated with the signature “C Company” carved into the chest. By late morning word had got back to higher authorities and a cease-fire was ordered. My Lai was in a state of carnage. Bodies were strewn through the village.

Dozens of people were herded into a ditch and executed with automatic weapons; a large group of about 60 to 80 villagers, rounded-up by the 1st Platoon in the center of the village, was executed personally by the platoon leader Calley, and by the soldiers he ordered to shoot. Calley also machinegunned three other large groups of civilians with a weapon taken from a soldier who refused to kill anymore

After the initial “sweeps” by the 1st and the 2nd Platoon, the 3rd Platoon was sent in to deal with any “remaining resistance.” They immediately began killing every still-living human and animal they could find, including shooting the Vietnamese who emerged from their hiding places, and finishing-off the wounded found moaning in the heaps of bodies

Only one American soldier was injured in My Lai, he shot himself in the foot. The first reports claimed “128 Vietcong” and 22 civilians were killed in the village during a “fierce fire fight.” General William Westmoreland, MACV commander, congratulated the unit on the “outstanding job.”

One helicopter pilot radioed, “It looks like a bloodbath down there! What the hell is going on?”

Helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., saw many dead and dying people, including infants, children, women, and old men. He saw a a woman being kicked and shot at point-blank range by Captain Medina.

Thompson radioed for help for the wounded, and then landed his helicopter in a ditch that were jammed with bodies, some of which were moving in extreme angony.He asked a Sergeant to help the wounded get out of the ditch. Instead, the Sergeant fired bullets into the bodies of those who seemed to be still alive.

Becoming airborne, Thompson saw soldiers approacjhing a group consisting of children, women and old men.

Thompson landed and told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers. Thompson later testified that he spoke with a Lieutenant (identified as Lieutenant Calley) and told him there were women and children in the bunker, and asked if the Lieutenant would help get them out.

According to Thompson, “he [the Lieutenant] said the only way to get them out was with a hand grenade.” Thompson testified he then told Calley to “just hold your men right where they are, and I'll get the kids out.” He found 12-16 people in the bunker, coaxed them out and led them to the helicopter, standing with them while they were flown out in two lots

Returning to My Lai, he and other air crew noticed several large groups of bodies. Spotting some survivors in the ditch he landed again and one of the crew entered the ditch and returned with a bloodied but apparently unharmed child who was flown to safety. The child was thought to be a boy, but later investigation found that it was a 4 year old girl. Thompson then reported what he had seen to his company commander, Major Watke, using terms such as “murder” and “needless and unnecessary killings.” His reports were confirmed by other pilots and air crew members.

In 1998, three former U.S. servicemen who stopped their comrades from killing a number of villagers, significantly reducing casualties at My Lai, were awarded the Soldier's Medal awards in Washington D.C. The veterans also contacted with the survivors of My Lai

What America Does Best: Cover-Up!

The intial “investigation” into the massacre by U.S. military personnel was under Commanding Officer Henderson and Assistant Commanding Officer Brigadier General George H. Young. Their report stated that 22civilians were inadvertently killed during the military operation, and continued the Army’s definition that My Lai was a military victory that resulted in 128 deaths of enemy combatants.

About six months later a soldier, Tom Glen wrote a letter to the overall commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, accusing the U.S. military of routine and pervasive brutality against Vietnamese civilians. The highly detailed letter repeated what other soldiers had said in the past.

Colin Powell: Whitewashing the Widespread Atrocities

U.S. Army Major Colin Powell was assigned to investe trhe charges. Powell, in his report, stated: "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."

Years later, while appearing on CNN’s larry King show, Power tried to explain away his cover-up: “I mean, I was in a unit [the Americal Division] that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again.”

Continued Cover-Up by Most Members of Congress and Others, Similar to What I Repeatedly Experienced

A young gunner on a helicopter, Ronald Ridenhour, heard of the massacre from friends while serving in Vietnam, and proceeded to gather evidence from other soldiers. Upon returning to the United States, in March 1969, a year after the massacre, he wrote letters to 30 members of Congress, to Pentagon officials, to President Richard Nixon, to the State Department, and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single one answered, except for Arizona Congressman Morris Udall. Udall provided the publicity needed to circumvent the universal cover-up.

It was investigative journalist Seymour Hersh who broke the Mai Lai story (November 1969), with his story appearing in in November in Time, Life, and Newsweek magazines. CBS

The sheer horror of the pictures made available to the public prevented government officials to continue the cover-up.

Ccomments made in a 1969 telephone conversation between United States National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, made available by the National Security Archive, showed them stating that the photos of the murdered civilians were too shocking to stage an continue the cover-up. Secretary of Defense Laird is heard to say, “There are so many kids just lying there; these pictures are authentic

In September 1969, Lt. Calley and 25 other military personnel were eventually charged with several counts of premeditated murder. However, just as was occurring with U.S. personnel murdering Iraqis, the charges were eventaully dropped against all of the killers except for Brigade commander Colonel Oran K. Henderson. He was acquitted on December 17, 1971.

Lt. William Calley and Captain Ernest Medina were convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. But two days later, President Richard Nixon ordered Calley released from prison. Calley was later sentenced to four months in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, during which time he was allowed unrestricted visits, including his girlfriend.

When ist was all over, the only one of the murderers convicted was Calley, and that was only for four months.

The same rules of law that caused Nazi and Japanese war criminals to be executed, that should have resulted in the same punishment for those in the Mai Lai masacure, were ignored.

An article in Time (January 25, 1971) described the statements given by some of the killers:

“It was murder. I wasn't happy about shooting all the people anyway. I didn't agree with all the killing, but we were doing it because we had been told.” With those stark words, Sergeant Charles Hutto told an Army investigator what he had done at My Lai. He followed orders, Hutto said; the orders, by all accounts, had been to kill every living thing in the small village.

Paul David Meadlo recalled the briefing his company received from Captain Medina the afternoon before the assault. Medina told the men, Meadlo testified, that all the My Lai villagers were “Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers, and we were supposed to kill everything there —women, children, livestock.” Three defense witnesses corroborated that.

Loaded Babies. As he had done on television more than a year ago, Paul Meadlo described how he and Calley shot more than 100 Vietnamese. Meadlo, who left the Army before the criminal investigation began and testified only after being assured his testimony would not be used against him, talked about his constant fear, even of babies in their mothers' arms: “They might have been loaded with grenades that the mothers could have throwed.” The image of an American soldier cringing before infants was in its own way as shattering as the massacre.

Financial Aid to Rebuild What the U.S. Military Destroyed in Afghanistan

After destroying much of Afghanistan’s structures, the Bush White House promised financial aid that would stabilize the country after the Taliban government was bombed out of existence. But years went by and meaningful aid never arrived., as reflected in an Associated Press article (April 8, 2003):

The soldiers and police who were supposed to be the bedrock of a stable postwar Afghanistan have gone unpaid for months and are drifting away. At a time when the United States is promising a reconstructed democratic postwar Iraq, many Afghans are remem-bering hearing similar promises not long ago.

Instead, what they see is thieving warlords, murder on the roads, and a resurgence of Taliban vigilantism. “It’s like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem,” said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his representative in southern Kandahar. “What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business.”

From safe havens in neighboring Pakistan, aided by militant Muslim groups there, the Taliban launched their revival to coincide with the war in Iraq and capitalize on Muslim anger over the U.S. invasion, say Afghan officials.

Karzai said the Taliban are allied with rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, supported by Pakistan and financed by militant Arabs. In the latest killing in southern Afghanistan, gunmen shot to death Haji Gilani, a close Karzai ally, on Thursday in southern Uruzgan province. Gilani was one of the first people to shelter Karzai when he secretly entered Afghanistan to foment a rebellion against the Taliban in late 2001.

Deceiving Spin and Lies Relating to Female Soldier:

The White House concocted a story about the female soldier, Private Jessica Lynch, who was allegedly saved from her Iraqi captives in a fierce military fight. The young female soldier later claimed she remembered nothing of the ordeal or her injuries. It turned out that there was a good reason she didn’t want to remember; she was made a pawn in the White House’s deceptive public relations. Columnist Robert Scheer, quoting a British BBC report, stated in a syndicated article (May 23, 2003):

In the 1998 film “Wag the Dog,” political operatives employ special editing techniques to create phony footage that will engender public sympathy for a manufactured war. Now we find that in 2003 the real-life Pentagon’s ability to manipulate the facts make Hollywood’s story lines look tame.

After a thorough investigation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has presented a shocking dissection of the “heroic” rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, as reported by the U.S. military and a breathless American press. “Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived,” the BBC concluded—the polite British way of saying “Liar, Liar, pants on fire.”

Though the Bush administration’s shamelessly trumped-up claims about Iraq’s alleged ties to al Qaeda and Sept. 11 and its weapons of mass destruction take the cake for deceitful propaganda, the sad case of Lynch’s exploitation illustrates that the truth once again was a casualty of war.

Sadly, almost nothing fed to reporters about either Lynch’s capture by Iraqi forces of her “rescue” by U.S. forces turns out to be true. Consider the April 3 Washington Post story on her capture, which reported, based on unnamed military sources, that Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds,” adding that she was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in.

It has since emerged that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, but rather suffered accident injuries when her vehicle overturned. A medical checkup by U.S. doctors confirmed the account of the Iraqi doctors, who said they had carefully tendered her injuries, a broken arm and thigh and a dislocated ankle, in contrast to U.S. media reports that doctors had ignored Lynch.

Where the manipulation of this saga really gets ugly is in the premeditated manufacture of the rescue itself. Eight days after her capture, American media trumpeted the military’s story that Lynch was saved by Special Forces who scooped her up and helicoptered her out.

However, according to the BBC, which interviewed the hospital’s staff, the truth appears to be that not only had Iraqi forces abandoned the area before the rescue effort but that the hospital’s staff had informed the United States of this and made arrangements two days before the raid to turn Lynch over to the Americans. “But as the ambulance, with Pvt. Lynch inside, approached the checkpoint, American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch,” the BBC reported.

“We were surprised,” Dr. Anmar Uday told the BBC about the supposed rescue. “There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. The U.S. forces cried, ‘Go, go, go,’ with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions,” Uday said. “They made a show for the American attack on the hospital—like action movies starring Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.”

The footage from the raid, shot by soldiers with night-vision cameras, was artfully edited by the Pentagon and released as proof that a battle had occurred when it had not. The Lynch rescue story will probably survive as the war’s most heroic moment.

If the movies, books and other renditions of “saving Private Lynch” were to be honestly presented, it would expose this caper as merely one in a series of egregious lies marketed to us by the Bush administration.

Paying for Lies

It has been a long-standing practice by Justice Department prosecutors to pay in one way or another for perjured testimony or false statements to insure convictions or insure the success of whatever scheme is being concocted. In the case of Private Lynch, the Iraqi lawyer who allegedly risked his life to reveal the location of Private Lynch and his statement that the female army private had been slapped around by Iraqi security guards was immediately flown with his family to the United States and granted political asylum. He refused all interviews upon arriving in the United States, except to enlarge upon Private Lynch’s convenient total loss of memory of all the events that occurred.

“Bring them on,” said Bush”—and Sure Enough, They Came!

During a news conference addressing attacks upon U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush said dared the Iraqis who were fighting the invading U.S. troops, “Bring them on.” It wasn’t long before they came, and they came from all over the world to fight the U.S. troops.

Another Form of American Culture: Torturing Detainees

Starting in 2004, certain media printed information about widespread abuse and torture of prisoners by U.S. forces in various prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, and particularly at a prison in Iraq known as Abu Ghraib. The torture was perpetrated by U.S. military and CIA personnel, and known to higher officials, including White House figures.

An article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker (May 10, 2004) described in great detail the torture of detainees by U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilian contractors:

American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go? In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison.

Most of the prisoners, however, by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers, were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition,” and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.

This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, included breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations. Taguba added “detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.” The photographs, several of which were broadcast on CBS’s 60 Minutes 2 last week, show leering G.I’s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses.

The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides.

In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other, it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said. Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men.

There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood. The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine-a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide.

Wisdom said: SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. I left after that. When he returned later, Wisdom testified: I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right. I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.” The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick.

Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”

After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick. Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence.

He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?” In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said: “I questioned some of the things that I saw. Such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell; and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.”

MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days. The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’ “

In November, Frederick wrote, “an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies, that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees, was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate control system,” Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”

There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews, “a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.”

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis.

She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.” Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section being made to do various things that I would question morally. We were told that they had different rules.”

Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said, he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’ ‘Make sure he has a bad night.’ ‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’ “Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick,” Davis said. “The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments, statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’ “When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing, “where the abuse took place,” belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.” Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this, “they needed to give me paperwork.”)

Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick. General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded.

The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “Cases of abuse may have been prevented.”

The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners. Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”

General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”

Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment. After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators. As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees.

Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority. The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.” Under the fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed.

Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantanamo. As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world. Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. “I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.”

International Red Cross Report of Torture by U.S. Personnel

A Red Cross report (May 2004) stated that international Red Cross observers (ICRC) witnessed U.S. personnel mistreating Abu Ghraib prisoners. The report of the International Committee of the Red Cross charged that the mistreatment by American personnel were widespread and not isolated acts, as President Bush sought to portray.

The Red Cross report described the variety of methods of torture used against the detainees. The report said that detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept “completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness.”

The Red Cross observers requested an explanation from the American and were told that the practices were part of the process.

Among the evidence of torture seen by the Red Cross observers were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with what the detainees had alleged. The report described the abuses as “tantamount to torture” including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of “imminent execution.” The Red Cross report state arrests followed a pattern:

These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an ‘intelligence value.’

Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, roughly waking up residents, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property.

Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting them, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the lack of proper supervision of battle group units.

Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represented a general pattern and were not limited to the prison at Abu Ghraib. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system,” he said. The report said that the abuse “suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by “coalition forces.”

Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, stated the Red Cross report was given to U.S. officials several months earlier, in February, and summarized what the Red Cross had been telling American officials between March and November of 2003 in either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions. The Red Cross regretted that it had to publicize the report but due to the lack of corrective action, that step was taken.

Graphic pictures of the torture, including those killed, were placed on the Internet for worldwide viewing, providing further information about the deep-seated American culture.

One conscientious Army enlisted man who first reported the torture was threatened and reviled by many other military personnel. At home, he was shunned and abused, providing even further evidence of how deeply this culture was in the American public.

Certain pro-war and pro-Bush pundits sought to minimize the scandal. Russ Limbaugh described the torture as simply high school hazing.

A number of the lower echelon military personnel were convicted in military courts martial and sent to federal prison, and others were given a dishonorable discharge. Army Specialist Charles Graner received a ten-year prison sentence and his girl friend, Specialist Lynndie England, received a three-year sentence. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer at the prison, who stated she had no knowledge of the torture and that she was not allowed into the interrogation rooms, was demoted to the rank of colonel.

A 60 Minutes II broadcast (April 2004) hosted by Dan Rather, which depicted the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by U.S. personnel. On the show, Dan Rather interviewed Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt, who was the deputy director of Coalition Operations in Iraq. Kimmitt stated:

The first thing I’d say is we’re appalled as well. These are our fellow soldiers. These are the people we work with every day, and they represent us. They wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down... and if we can’t hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect … We can’t ask that other nations do that to our soldiers as well...So what would I tell the people of Iraq? This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here. I’d say the same thing to the American people... Don’t judge your army based on the actions of a few.|

I’d like to sit here and say that these are the only prisoner abuse cases that we’re aware of, but we know that there have been some other ones since we’ve been here in Iraq.

Appearing on the show, former Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowaan stated: “We went into Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage.”

Interviewing Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, whose civilian job was as a corrections officer at a Virginia prison, and who participated in the abuse and torture, Frederick stated:

“We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations,” says Frederick. “And it just wasn’t happening.”

Referring to one prisoner who died from the torture, he said: “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. The next day the medics came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake I.V. in his arm to suggest he died under medical care and took him away. This prisoner was never processed and therefore never had a number.”

“Military Intelligence has been present and witnessed such activity. MI has encouraged and told us we were doing a great job and that they were getting positive results and information.”

White House Politicians Promoting Torture

Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker magazine (May 24, 2004), referred to a secret Pentagon operation called Copper Green, that was approved to use torture upon detainees. Hersh stated that “several past and present American intelligence officials” had told him of the secret operation. Hersh wrote that the operation “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq” He wrote that the torture directive received “across-the-board approval from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld andfrom Condoleezza Rice” Hersh said the operation was atthe “roots of the Abu Ghraib” torture scandal.

President George Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at first denied that torture occurred and issued other statements that were contradicted by documents later discovered. A full-page article in the New York Times (October 4, 2007) revealed documents showing the lying by President Bush and members of his administration. The article, titled, “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations,” stated:

Justice Department Said to Back Harshest Tactics After Declaring Torture ‘Abhorrent. When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

[“Ashamed”]

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current andformer officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

[Rebellion at the Justice Department]

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

Interrogation Wars

After a rebellion inside the Justice Department in 2004, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales moved to bring the elite Office of Legal Counsel back into the White House orbit on interrogation and other issues. “The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror. The office became an advocate for the president’s policies,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

In February 2002, Mr. Bush says Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions does not apply to Qaeda captives. Article 3 prohibits “mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” and “humiliating and degrading treatment” of detainees. The following three decisions were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel while John Ashcroft was Attorney General:

In August 2002, Jay S. Bybee, head of the office, issues a memo that says the C.I.A. has the authority to use harsh interrogation techniques. The memo, drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, defines torture narrowly and argues physical torture “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” [That statement was meaningless, since pain usually does snot accompany organ failure.]

In June 2004, Jack Goldsmith, Mr. Bybee’s replacement as the head of the office, rescinds the 2002 memo—days after it becomes public—with the support of then Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Mr. Goldsmith submits his resignation on the same day.

In December 2004, Daniel Levin, the new acting head, issues a new memo denouncing torture and broadening its definition. The memo is posted on the department’s Web site one week before the Senate holds confirmation hearings for Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and the nominee for attorney general.

Then, as Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General, the following document was issued:

In early 2005, over the objections of Mr. Comey, Steven G. Bradbury—appointed acting head in February 2005—signs a secret opinion that justifies combining different interrogation techniques. Mr. Bradbury is formally nominated for the permanent job in June 2005, but Democrats block his confirmation. In a second secret opinion, Mr. Bradbury finds that even the C.I.A.’s harshest tactics are not “cruel, inhuman or degrading,” the restriction soon to be imposed by Congress.

In December 2005, Congress passes the Detainee Treatment Act, which bans “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world. Members voting on the bill do not know the Justice Department has already effectively exempted the C.I.A. techniques in the opinions signed by Mr. Bradbury.

In June 2006, the Supreme Court rules that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all American detainees.

In November 2006, Congress passes the Military Commissions Act, which makes illegal several broadly defined abuses of detainees, while leaving it up to the president to establish specific permissible interrogation techniques.

In July 2007, Mr. Bush signs an order that allows the C.I.A. to use some interrogation methods banned for military interrogators but that the Justice Department has determined do not violate the Geneva strictures.

Next in Decades of U.S. Brutalities
Renditions and Torture

The next form of torture by U.S. personnel that was publicized worldwide was called “rendition,” where people were seized in one country and then secretly flown to another country that routinely engaged in torture. When this form of torture was publicized, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated (April 2006) that the United States did not transfer people to places that engaged in torture. That statement was as false as the many statements she had made prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Considerable evidence surfaced showing that CIA proprietary airlines had seized people in different European and Middle East countries and flown them to such places as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and Morocco, where they were tortured. The media referred to these victims as “ghost detainees,” outside of judicial protection.

Several government and other groups in Europe conducted investigations and prepared reports on their findings, including the European Union (EU). The European Union is composed of twenty-seven member states located in Europe. Included in the Union are such institutions as the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the European Court of Justice.

After considerable investigations, the European Union issued a June 2006 report stating that over one hundred people had been kidnapped by CIA personnel in various European locations and secretly flown to other countries, or “black sites,” where they were then tortured, as part of the U.S. secret rendition program. The report identified 1,245 flights that they stated violated Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The report stated that several European countries, including Poland and Romania, cooperated in the rendition program, and criticized the individual countries for refusal to cooperate in the investigation.

“Black sites” are defined as secret prisons outside of the United States that are controlled by the CIA or other U.S. government agency. These sites violate, for instance, the Intelligence Oversight Act that provides for congressional oversight.

President George W. Bush first denied that such flights existed. But during a September 6, 2006 speech, Bush admitted the existence of secret prisons. Secretly working with U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales, Bush issued a presidential directive authorizing the rendition and the withholding of information from the public or Congress.

Another report was issued by Swiss politician Dick Marty in January 2006 that stated that an additional one hundred people had been kidnapped in Europe and secretly flown to other countries where they were tortured.

Italy’s Indictment of 26 CIA Agents

Italy conducted their own investigation, and issued arrest warrants for 26 CIA operatives, including the CIA chief of station, Jeffrey W. Castelli. Their investigation focused on the kidnapping of Imam Rapito in Milam, Italy on February 17, 2003, and then flown to the Aviano Air Base in Egypt where he was tortured. An Egyptian court held that his imprisonment was illegal and ordered him release.

Imam Rapito is also referred to as Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, or Abu Oman, an Egyptian cleric, living in exile in Italy. He belonged to a group known as al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, which was dedicated to overthrowing the Egyptian government. The United States considered that group a terrorist organization, and considered illegal by the Egyptian government.

Indicted and forced to resign in November 2006 was General Nicolo Pollari and his second-in-command, Marco Mancini, in Italy’s national military intelligence agency (SISMI). Extradition requests for the CIA agents were sent to the Italian Ministry of Justice.

CIA Station Chief Jeffrey Castelli was the station chief in Rome when the forged documents surfaced that sought to show that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain “yellowcake” and other uranium compounds for the production of enriched uranium, and thereby use it in a nuclear weapon.

Castelli’s position raises the possibility that the CIA station chief was responsible for the false document about Saddam’s seeking of “yellowcake” in response to an order from the Bush administration.

Adding another puzzling aspect to the CIA’s kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric was that he was reportedly a key informant for the CIA. An article in the Chicago Tribune (July 3, 2005), titled, “Abducted Imam Aided CIA Ally,” and stated:

Among the multiple mysteries swirling around the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr in Italy, one stands out as by far the most perplexing. Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA’s most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?

As a result of his kidnapping, Italian-American relations are at their lowest point in years; 13 Americans are fugitives from Italian justice, and Milanese prosecutors and police, who had been closely monitoring Abu Omar and knew nothing about his planned abduction, are furious.

“Instead of having an investigation against terrorists, we are investigating this CIA kidnapping,” a senior prosecution official fumed last week.

According to the prosecutor’s application for the 13 warrants, when Abu Omar reached Cairo on a CIA-chartered aircraft, he was taken straight to the Egyptian interior minister. If he agreed to inform for the Egyptian intelligence service, Abu Omar “would have been set free and accompanied back to Italy,” the document said. Alternatively, the senior official said, the Americans may have hoped the Egyptians could learn something by interrogating Abu Omar about planned resistance to the impending war on Iraq.

Abu Omar refused to inform, according to the document, and spent the next 14 months in an Egyptian prison facing “terrible tortures.” After a brief release in April 2004, he was imprisoned again. [Possibly the reason the CIA kidnapped a former key informant was to please Egyptian authorities.]

Lying Again, or Just Plain Stupid

President George W. Bush, in response to the congressional investigations into torture, stated (October 5, 2007), in direct contradiction to government documents and statements by Department of Justice officials, said, “This government does not torture people.”

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