October 19, 2007
The recent public outrage over the conduct
of Blackwater Security mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked
massacre of at least 17 Iraqi civilians in western Baghdad has
been heartening; unfortunately, there has been virtually no attention
a far more important concurrent development -- the ongoing collapse
of the military prosecution in the Haditha massacre.
Paul Bremer's decision at the
eleventh hour before his departure in June 2004 to set all private
contractors in Iraq above the law (they are not subject to Iraqi
law, U.S. military law, or U.S. civilian law) stands out as one
of the more cynical decisions of a war that has redefined cynicism,
and attention to that fact is a positive development.
At the same time, however,
all the attention is being focused on an extremely minor issue.
The U.S. military has possibly killed more civilians in a single
incident than all the mercenary companies operating in Iraq in
the last several years. According to Iraq Body Count, the first
U.S. Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004, claimed the lives
of at least 600 Iraqi civilians, out of a total of at least 800
people.
That number is actually cited
in a report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform regarding Blackwater, but its implications are hardly
appreciated.
According to the same report,
since January 1, 2005, Blackwater has been involved in 195 shooting
incidents -- other mercenary companies all together account for
a similar number.
This is the equivalent of a
couple of days' worth of shooting incidents for the U.S. military
in Iraq. Not only are there more of them than there are of private
mercenaries (roughly three times the number), mercenaries do
not go on offensive operations or do routine patrolling. Those
are the activities most likely to lead to shooting.
Even if U.S. soldiers are for
the most part genuinely more careful about rules of engagement,
the far greater volume of violent incidents means that it is
actually the conduct of the U.S. military, not of mercenaries,
that is the problem.
In that regard, consider the
evolution of the prosecution for the Haditha massacre, one of
the most iconic incidents of atrocity by the U.S. military.
The facts that are not in dispute
are these: On November 19, 2005, after an IED attack that killed
one of them, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment
killed 24 people. The first killed were five men in a car who
stopped, got out, and then were mown down. Afterwards, Marines
entered a house and killed 15 civilians, including three women
and seven children, ranging in age from 2 to 13.
In another house, four brothers,
all adults, were killed, three of them with handgun shots to
the head. Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, the killer, said that
they were armed and preparing to attack.
The Marines lied about what
happened, indicating at first that there had been a firefight
with insurgents and the others had been caught in the crossfire.
A series of higher-ranking
officers didn't bother to investigate.
Court-martial hearings did
not begin until this summer, almost two years after the incident.
Initially, 8 men were charged:
Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, Lance Cpl.
Justin Sharratt, and Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, for unpremeditated
murder, and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, Capt. Lucas McConnell,
Capt. Randy Stone, and 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, for dereliction
of duty and a series of more minor charges relating to not investigating
or to covering up.
The hearings have been a circus.
First of all, they were held in Camp Pendleton, California, rather
than in Iraq, so the Iraqis who witnessed the events couldn't
testify. Second, the families of the victims refused requests
by military interrogators to exhume the bodies for forensic evidence.
Third, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who presided over the hearings, has
been both excessively sympathetic to the defendants and excessively
concerned with the effect that the verdicts will have on future
Marine operations. Fourth, some rather odd plea bargains have
been made.
Most recently, Ware recommended
that all charges of murder (originally 13 counts) against Wuterich
be dropped and replaced with charges of negligent homicide only
for seven of the murdered women and children (many of them shot
in their beds) -- and has added that he doesn't think Wuterich
would be convicted on those charges either.
According to the testimony
of fellow Marines, a week before the incident, Wuterich said
that if something like that happened, they should kill everyone
in the vicinity. Wuterich himself admitted to ordering his men
breaking into the houses to "shoot first and ask questions
later." And, contrary to Wuterich's claim that the first
five men were running away after they got out of the car, Dela
Cruz testified that the men "were just standing, looking
around, had hands up."
Dela Cruz was given immunity
for his testimony, but he may have deliberately made a hash of
it, contradicting himself and at one time admitting that he was
lying; events conspired nicely to get him and Wuterich both off.
Earlier, Ware recommended dropping
all charges against Sharratt, accepting his claim that the execution-style
killings of the three men shot in the head occurred in self-defense
in the heat of combat. He also wanted charges dropped on Tatum,
even though fellow Marine Lance Cpl. Humberto Mendoza testified
that Tatum had ordered him to shoot the seven women and children,
even after being informed of their identity and that they posed
no threat.
Charges were dropped against
the two captains, Grayson is still under investigation, and Ware
recommended that Chessani be charged with dereliction of duty,
although with none of the actual murderers on trial, apparently,
he was derelict in investigating nothing.
Major General Eldon Bargewell's
scathing outside report on the incident, which, though unclassified,
has not been publicly released because of the ongoing hearings,
found that "All levels of command tended to view civilian
casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the
natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," adding,
"Statements made by the chain of command during interviews
for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi
civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths
are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need
to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes." He also
found that found that "virtually no inquiry at any level
of command was conducted," that officers looked at reports
of civilian casualties as pro-insurgent propaganda to suppress
and spin, and that reports filed by senior officers were "forgotten
once transmitted."
Even so, no higher officers
faced criminal charges; three were reprimanded.
Of course, not every court-martial
in the Iraq war has been such a farce. The men who raped 14-year-old
Abeer Hamza in Mahmudiyah, killed her family, then killed her
and set her corpse on fire got severe sentences. In the Hamdaniyah
case, where a squad of Marines murdered an innocent man and then
planted a shovel on him to suggest that he was placing an IED,
Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was actually sentenced to 15 years, although
it remains to be seen if he will serve his time; most of his
accomplices got slaps on the wrist and are already out of jail.
The Haditha case is different
from the others. It is not essential to U.S. military strategy
in Iraq to leave soldiers free to rape and murder little girls
or even to murder the wrong man when you're looking for insurgents;
in fact, the military has an interest in discouraging such behavior.
Aggressive house raids in which soldiers feel free to "shoot
first and ask questions later," have been, however, fundamental
to U.S. practice in Iraq; even Lt. Col. Ware, departing from
his ostensible role as prosecutor, expressed concern about the
chilling effect convictions would have on Marines operating in
Iraq.
Overall, the record of accountability
for atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers is pathetic. Soldiers
who kill prisoners in custody routinely get administrative punishment;
missing a troop movement gets a court-martial, but murdering
a helpless man rarely does. In the particularly brutal killing
of two young men in Bagram prison, in which soldiers testified
that they used to assault one of them, Dilawar, a 22-year-old
taxi driver, just because they liked to hear him scream "Allah!"
in pain, nobody was charged with murder, on the incredibly specious
reasoning that, since 27 different people used to enjoy torturing
him, there was no way to determine which "unlawful knee
strike" caused him to die. Try using that defense if you're
a young black kid holding up a 7-11 when one of your accomplices
shoots the clerk. Contractors may be subject to no law, but the
law soldiers are subject to is rarely much better than nothing.
During the course of this trial,
we learned that Marine rules of engagement allowed them to shoot
in the back unarmed people running away from the scene of a car
bomb explosion, even if there was no reason to connect them with
the attack. We learned that in the second assault on Fallujah
(in November 2004), approved procedure was to "clear"
rooms by tossing in fragmentation grenades blind -- even though
initial estimates were that perhaps as many as 50,000 civilians
remained in the town -- and that many Marines used the same technique
afterward in other areas. We learned about the routine practice
of dead-checking -- if a man is wounded, instead of offering
him medical aid, shoot him again, on the principle that "If
somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice."
One of the Marines testified in the hearings that they were taught
this practice in boot camp.
A sleepwalking nation paid
little attention to these revelations. When future histories
of the war are written, it will probably accept statements that
the hearings proved the Haditha massacre was a hoax.
But we will all remain united
in righteous indignation against peripheral targets.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire
Notes, with regularly updated commentary on U.S. foreign
policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the American
Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah
during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He can
be reached at rahul@empirenotes.org