Witnessing War
Crimes
By Paul Rockwell
03 April, 2005
Online
Journal
Aiden Delgado, an Army Reservist in the
320th Military Police Company, served in Iraq from April 1, 2003 through
April 1, 2004. After spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq,
he spent six months helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison
outside of Baghdad. The handsome 23-year-old mechanic was a witness
to widespread, almost daily, U.S. war crimes in Iraq. His story contains
new revelations about ongoing brutality at Abu Ghraib, information yet
to be reported in national media.
I first met Delgado
in a classroom at Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, where
he presented a slide show on the atrocities that he himself observed
in Southern and Northern Iraq. Delgado acknowledged that the U.S. military
did some good things in Iraq. "We deposed Saddam, built some schools
and hospitals," he said. But he focused his testimony on the breakdown
of moral order within the U.S. military, a pattern of violence and terror
that exceeds the bounds of what is legally and morally permissible in
time of war.
Delgado says he
observed mutilation of the dead, trophy photos of dead Iraqis, mass
roundups of innocent noncombatants, positioning of prisoners in the
line of fireall violations of the Geneva conventions. His own
buddiesdecent, Christian men, as he describes themshot unarmed
prisoners.
In one government
class for seniors, Delgado presented graphic images, his own photos
of a soldier playing with a skull, the charred remains of children,
kids riddled with bullets, a soldier from his unit scooping out the
brains of a prisoner. Some students were squeamish, like myself, and
turned their heads. Others rubbed tears from their eyes. But at the
end of the question period, many expressed appreciation for opening
a subject that is almost taboo. "If you are old enough to go to
war," Delgado said, "you are old enough to know what really
goes on." It is a rare moment when American students, who play
video war games more than baseball, are exposed to the realities of
occupation. Delgado does not name names. Nor does he want to denigrate
soldiers or undermine morale. He seeks to be a conscience for the military,
and he wants Americans to take ownership of the war in all its tragic
totality.
Aiden Delgado did
not grow up in the United States. His father was a U.S. diplomat. Aiden
lived in Thailand and Senegal, West Africa. He spent seven years in
Cairo, Egypt, where he became fluent in Arabic and developed a deep
appreciation of Arab culture.
On September 11,
2001, completely unaware of the day's fateful events, Delgado enlisted
in the Army, expecting to serve two days a month in the Reserves. When
he turned on the television, he realized instantly that his whole world
had changed.
After he joined
the Army, Delgado began to read the Sutras. He became a Buddhist, a
vegetarian, and eventually became a Conscientious Objector. Delgado
was honorably discharged when he returned home. Delgado earned four
service medals which, he says, are standard awards. He faced criticism
from the Army when he began to speak out about military conduct in Iraq.
Don Schwartz, spokesman for the Army in Washington, D.C., said that
Delgado should have reported any wrongdoing to Army personnel. "He
should have reported first to his boss, his commander. That is the standard
way the chain of command works."
When I interviewed
Delgado recently, he expressed his deep love of his country, but he
also insisted that racisma major impetus to violence in American
historyis driving the occupation, infecting the entire military
operation in Iraq.
Delgado's testimony
tends to confirm the message of Chris Hedges, The New York Times war
correspondent who wrote prior to the invasion of Iraq: "War forms
its own culture. It distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects
everything around it. . . . War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks
not far below the surface within all of us. Even as war gives meaning
to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists." Here is
Aiden Delgado story.
Q: When did you
begin to turn against the military and the war?
DELGADO: From the
very earliest time I was in Iraq, I began to see ugly strains of racism
among our troopsanti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiments.
Q: What are some
examples?
DELGADO: There was
a Master Sergeant. A Master Sergeant is one of the highest enlisted
ranks. He whipped this group of Iraqi children with a steel Humvee antenna.
He just lashed them with it because they were crowding around, bothering
him, and he was tired of talking. Another time, a Marine, a Lance Corporala
big guy about six-foot-twoplanted a boot on a kid's chest, when
a kid came up to him and asked him for a soda. The First Sergeant said,
"That won't be necessary Lance Corporal." And that was the
end of that. It was a matter of routine for guys in my unit to drive
by in a Humvee and shatter bottles over Iraqis heads as they went by.
And these were guys I considered friends. And I told them: "What
the hell are you doing? What does that accomplish?" One said back:
"I hate being here. I hate looking at them. I hate being surrounded
by all these Hajjis."
Q: They refer
to Iraqis as "Hajjis"?
DELGADO: "Hajji"
is the new slur, the new ethnic slur for Arabs and Muslims. It is used
extensively in the military. The Arabic word refers to one who has gone
on a pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is used in the military with the same
kind of connotation as "gook," "Charlie," or the
n-word. Official Army documents now use it in reference to Iraqis or
Arabs. It's real common. There was really a thick aura of racism.
Q: Were there
any significant incidents besides racial slurs and casual violence against
civilians?
DELGADO: The last
mission I ran in the South before we were redeployed North was strange.
I was told to drive way out into the desert, off the road. When we got
there, we found Kuwaitis excavating a mass grave site (from the Saddam
era). Kuwaiti engineers wanted to identify and repatriate the remains.
It was a solemn affair. I was with the First Sergeant. he said: "Give
me that skull. I want to hold the skull in my hands." He picked
up the skull, tossing it to himself. Then he turned to me and said:
"Take my picture." It was taken while he was standing by a
mass grave. This was a very surreal, dark time for me in Iraq. It was
tough for me to see brutality coming out of my own unit. I had lived
in the Middle East. I had Egyptian friends. I spent nearly a decade
in Cairo. I spoke Arabic, and I was versed in Arab culture and Islamic
dress. Most of the guys in my unit were in complete culture shock most
of the time. They saw the Iraqis as enemies. They lived in a state of
fear. I found the Iraqis enormously friendly as a whole. One time I
was walking through Nasiriyah with an armful of money, nadirs that were
exchanged for dollars. I was able to walk 300 meters to my convoya
U.S. soldier walking alone with money. And I thought: I am safer here
in Iraq than in the States. I never felt threatened from people in the
South.
Q: What happened
when you moved North, before you reached Abu Ghraib?
DELGADO: We were
a company of 141 Military Police. We gave combat support, followed behind
units to take and hold prisoners. I was a mechanic. I fixed Humvees.
We followed behind the Third Infantry division. It was heavily mechanized
with lots of tanks and scout vehicles. We could trace their path by
all the burned-out vehicles and devastation they left behind. The Third
pretty much annihilated the Iraqi forces. Iraqis did not have much of
an organized military. They had civilian vehicles, and they resisted
pretty valiantly, given how much we outclassed them. The Third Infantry
slaughtered them wholesale. We took so many prisoners, we couldn't carry
them all. Large numbers of civilians were caught in the crossfire.
Q: How were the
civilians killed?
DELGADO: It was
common practice to set up blockades. The Third Infantry would block
off a road. In advance of the assault, civilians would flee the city
in a panic. As they approached us, someone would yell: "Stop, stop!"
In English. Of course they couldn't understand. Their cars were blown
up with cannons, or crushed with tanks. Killing noncombatants at checkpoints
happened routinely, not only with the Third Infantry, but the First
Marines. And it is still going on today. If you check last week's MSNBC,
they dug out a father and mother and her six children. We were constantly
getting reports of vehicles that were destroyed (with people in them)
at checkpoints.
Q: Your unit,
the 320th Military Police, was stationed at Abu Ghraib for six months.
Who were the prisoners at Abu Ghraib? Where did they come from? Do you
have any new information not yet reported in the media?
DELGADO: There were
4,000 to 6,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I got to work with a lot of
officers, so I got to see the paperwork. I found out that a lot of prisoners
were imprisoned for no crime at all. They were not insurgents. Some
were inside for petty theft or drunkenness. But the majorityover
60 percentwere not imprisoned for crimes committed against the
coalition.
Q: How did so
many noncombatants get imprisoned?
DELGADO: Every time
our base came under attack, we sent out teams to sweep up all men between
the ages of 17 and 50. There were random sweeps. The paperwork to get
them out of prison took six months or a year. It was hellish inside.
A lot of completely innocent civilians were in prison camp for no offense.
It sounds completely outrageous. But look at the 2005 Department of
Defense Report, where it talks about prisoners.
Q: When you arrived
at Abu Ghraib, what did you see, beyond what we all learned from the
scandal in the news? And how were you affected?
DELGADO: I was becoming
disillusioned. I expected brutality from the enemy. That was a given.
But to see brutality from our own side, that was really tough for me.
It was hard to see the army fall so much in my esteem. The prisoners
were housed outside in tents, 60 to 80 prisoners per tent. It rained
a lot. The detainees lived in the mud. It was freezing cold outside,
and the prisoners had no cold-weather clothing. Our soldiers lived inside
in cells, with four walls that protected us from the bombardment. The
Military Police used the cold weather to control the prisoners. If there
was an infraction, detainees would be removed from their tents. Next,
their blankets were confiscated. Then even their clothing was taken
away. Almost naked, in underwear, the POWs would huddle together on
a platform outside to keep warm. There was overcrowding, and almost
everyone got TB. Eighteen members of our unit who worked closely with
the prisoners got TB, too. The food was rotten and prisoners got dysentery.
The unsanitary conditions, the debris and muck everywhere, the overcrowding
in cold weather, led to disease, an epidemic, pandemic conditions. The
attitude of the guards was brutal. To them Iraqis were the scum of the
earth. Detainees were beaten within inches of their life.
Q: Were any detainees
killed?
DELGADO: More than
50 prisoners were killed.
Q: What happened?
DELGADO: The enemy
around Baghdad randomly shelled our base. Under the Geneva Conventions,
an occupying power cannot place protected persons in areas exposed to
the hazards of war. More than 50 detainees were killed because they
were housed outside in tents, directly in the line of fire, with no
protection, nowhere to run. They were hemmed in by barbed wire. They
were trapped, and they had to sit and wait and hope they would survive.
I know what it was like because a single mortar round would flatten
a whole line of tires on the Humvees, a whole line of windshields. That's
how I thought about the damage because I was the mechanic who had to
replace the windshields. So the mortar bombardments killed and wounded
many prisoners.
Q: So your commanders
knowingly kept your prisoners in the line of fire? How many U.S. soldiers
were killed during the shellings?
DELGADO: There were
two U.S. soldiers killed during my stay.
Q: Were there
any other incidents?
DELGADO: The worst
incident that I was privy to was in late November. The prisoners were
protesting nightly because of their living conditions. They protested
the cold, the lack of clothing, the rotting food that was causing dysentery.
And they wanted cigarettes. They tore up pieces of clothing, made banners
and signs. One demonstration became intense and got unruly. The prisoners
picked up stones, pieces of wood, and threw them at the guards. One
of my buddies got hit in the face. He got a bloody nose. But he wasn't
hurt. The guards asked permission to use lethal force. They got it.
They opened fire on the prisoners with the machine guns. They shot twelve
and killed three. I know because I talked to the guy who did the killing.
He showed me these grisly photographs, and he bragged about the results.
"Oh," he said, "I shot this guy in the face. See, his
head is split open." He talked like the Terminator. "I shot
this guy in the groin, he took three days to bleed to death." I
was shocked. This was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He
was a family man, a really courteous guy, a devout Christian. I was
stunned and said to him: "You shot an unarmed man behind barbed
wire for throwing a stone." He said, "Well, I knelt down.
I said a prayer, stood up and gunned them all down." There was
a complete disconnect between what he had done and his own morality.
Q: Commanders
permitted use of lethal force against unarmed detainees. What was their
response to the carnage?
DELGADO: Our Command
took the grisly photos and posted them up in the headquarters. It was
a big, macho thing for our company to shoot more prisoners than any
other unit.
Q: When did all
this happen?
DELGADO: November
24th. The event was actually mentioned in the Taguba Report, under Protocol
Golden Spike. And there's more. Before our company transported the bodies,
the soldiers stopped and posed with the bodies and mutilated them further.
I got photos from the guy who was there, my friend. I have a photo of
a member of my unit scooping out the prisoner's brains with an MRE [meals-ready-to-eat]
spoon. Four people are looking on; two are taking photographs. If you
remember the Abu Ghraib stuff that came out on CNN, this kind of stuff
was common. You see guys posing with bodies, or toying with corpses.
It was a real common thing in the military, all because the guys thought
Arabs are terrorists, the scum of the earth. Anything we do to them
is all right.
Q; So far as
I know, no commanders have been held accountable for events at Abu Ghraib.
Your story implicates commanders in ongoing brutality. In one of your
presentations, you said: "Our command definitely knew about the
prisoners being shot. They posted the photos in their headquarters.
They knew all about prisoners being beaten." Did your commanders
try to prevent information from reaching the public?
DELGADO: After the
Abu Ghraib scandal broke on CNN and TV, commanders came out to us and
said: "We are all family here. We don't wash our dirty linen in
public. This story doesn't need to go on CNN. Nobody needs to find out
about this." There was a sort of informal gag order.
Q: You enlisted
in the Army Reserve in good faith. Now you are a conscientious objector.
Once in the Army Reserve, how did you become a C.O.?
DELGADO: After advanced
training, I became serious about Buddhism. I read translations of the
Sutras. I became a vegetarian. Later, when I met Iraqi prisoners firsthand,
I saw the people who were supposed to be our enemies. I did not feel
any hatred for them. They were young, poor guys without an education,
like us. They had to fight us. And our guys were the same; they had
to fight them. And I said: "What am I doing here, fighting poor
people?" I went to my commander, turned in my rifle, and said;
"Look, I will stay in Iraq. I will finish my tour as a mechanic.
I will do my job, but I am not going to kill anyone."
Q: You still
served the whole tour in Iraq. How did your command respond to your
request to become a C.O.?
DELGADO: As soon
as I told them, they became hostile. They first took away my hard, ballistic
plates that go into my vest. They said: "You are not going to fight,
so you won't need body armor."
Q: The plates
protect you from bullets and mortars. They are needed for safety, right?
Were you still vulnerable?
DELGADO: Yes I was.
They also took away my home leave, saying: "You won't come back."
I was supposed to be promoted, but they said we can't promote you. The
command tried a lot of things to get me to recant. I was ostracized.
But the more they did to me, the more obstinate I became. I made trouble
for my command. I didn't shave. I threatened to get my congressman involved.
I called Buddhist organizations and the ACLU. They finally relented.
Q: I would like
to review your observations. Your account does not focus on one or two
bad individuals. Essentially, you are describing the brutality of a
group, a collective loss of restraint, a complete breakdown of moral
order within the military. I am sure that your Christian buddy, a typical
American youth, would never shoot an unarmed person in private life.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr tells us that, with the sanction of
the state, driven by nationalism, moral, decent individuals become killers
and torturers in groups. You attribute the breakdown of restraint to
racism. When did the process of dehumanization of Arabs begin? Did basic
training influence the consciousness of our soldiers?
DELGADO: I went
to Fort Knox for basic training. It was known to be harsher than other
bases. The training was mentally taxing, and there was already some
anti-Arab sentiment.
Q: Like what?
DELGADO: In the
early stages I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants
had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing
the Taliban.
Q: What did the
chants say?
DELGADO: It was
three years ago. I can't tell the exact words, but the sentiment was
to burn turbans and kill ragheads. That was the phraseology. Our drill
sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit.
The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight
Arabs.
Q: All this was
before you even went to Iraq?
DELGADO: Yes. My
own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches. Before we were deployed
to the Middle East, he said, "Now don't go tell the media that
you're going over there to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans."
Everybody laughed, and he laughed with them. I remember standing there
in formation, having grown up in Egypt. And I was thinking: "Oh,
my God, this is going to be a disaster. Our commander has this anti-Arab
attitude even before we go over." The commander would give lectures
about Islam. He said that Muslims advocate a holy war against us, that
Islam promotes perpetual war. I've been surrounded by Muslims for a
decade, exposed to their culture. He is wrong.
Q: In the 1980s
the U.S. military made a lot of reforms. It is widely believed that
racism in the military is now a thing of the past.
DELGADO: I have
two answers. First,have we overcome racism in the sense that blacks
and whites are banded together in the hatred of Arabs? That's not progress.
Second, we had an incident in our unit with a black specialist. He was
a nice guy, really popular in the unit. There was no physical fight,
but there was a dispute over him dating this white girl, having a relationship
with a white girl. Two white guys took a piece of rope, tied a noose,
and put a hangman's noose on his bed. He found out who it was and went
to his black sergeant. They went to the equal opportunity representative.
The issue was effectively stifled.
Q: After your
long ordeal,how do you feel about your country, and what do you want
from the American people?
DELGADO: I still
love my country. I love the idea of America. But I became disillusioned.
Now I want to let the American people know what they're signing on for
when they say they support the war in Iraq. And I want Americans to
recognize the racial undertones of the occupation and to understand
the human costs of war.
Paul Rockwell is
a columnist for In Motion Magazine. Contact him at [email protected]
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