Iraq
Has Only Militants, No Civilians
By
Dahr Jamail
27 November,
2007
TomDispatch.com
“Sometimes
I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up
close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” —
Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H
Name
them. Maim them. Kill them.
From the
beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks
by the U.S. military have only killed “militants,” “criminals,”
“suspected insurgents,” “IED [Improvised Explosive
Device] emplacers,” “anti-American fighters,” “terrorists,”
“military age males,” “armed men,” “extremists,”
or “al-Qaeda.”
The pattern
for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the early years
of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on October 23rd
of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The U.S. military
claimed it had killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside
bomb.” Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that
at least six of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that
those killed were farmers, that there were children among them, and
that the number of dead was greater than 11.
Here is part
of the statement released by U.S. military spokeswoman in northern Iraq,
Major Peggy Kageleiry:
“A
suspected insurgent and improvised explosive device cell member was
identified among the killed in an engagement between Coalition Forces
and suspected IED emplacers just north of Samarra…. During the
engagement, insurgents used a nearby house as a safe haven to re-engage
coalition aircraft. A known member of an IED cell was among the 11 killed
during the multiple engagements. We send condolences to the families
of those victims and we regret any loss of life.”
As usual,
the version offered by locals was vastly different. Abdul al-Rahman
Iyadeh, a relative of some of the victims, revealed that the “group
of men” attacked were actually three farmers who had left their
homes at 4:30 A.M. to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the
initial helicopter attack and the survivor ran back to his home where
other residents gathered. The second air strike, he claimed, destroyed
the house killing 14 people. Another witness told reporters that four
separate houses were hit by the helicopter. A local Iraqi policeman,
Captain Abdullah al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 — seven men,
six women, and three children, with another 14 wounded.
As often
happens, the U.S. military, once challenged, declared that an “investigation”
of the incident was under way.
And
So It Goes
On October
21st, two days before that helicopter strike near Djila, American soldiers,
again aided by helicopters, but this time in a heavily populated urban
neighborhood, claimed to have killed 49 “armed men” in a
“gun battle” in Sadr City, a sprawling Shi’ite neighborhood
in eastern Baghdad. Then, too, the military initially insisted “no
civilians were killed or injured.” A Shi’ite citizens’
council and other Shi’ite groups responded that many innocent
bystanders had died. Among the 13 dead mentioned in initial reports
by local Iraqi police were three children and a woman. Other Iraqi authorities
announced that 69 people had been injured.
The U.S.
military had no explanation for the widely varying American and Iraqi
tallies of casualties.
The official
American account went like this:
“The
operation’s objective was an individual reported to be a long
time Special Groups member specializing in kidnapping operations. Intelligence
indicates he is a well-known cell leader and has previously sought funding
from Iran to carry out high profile kidnappings. Upon arrival, the ground
force began to clear a series of buildings in the target area and received
sustained heavy fire from adjacent structures, from automatic weapons
and rocket propelled grenades, or RPGs. Responding in self-defense,
Coalition forces engaged, killing an estimated 33 criminals. Supporting
aircraft was also called in to engage enemy personnel maneuvering with
RPGs toward the ground force, killing an estimated six criminals. Upon
departing the target area, Coalition forces continued to receive heavy
fire from automatic weapons and RPGs and were also attacked by an improvised
explosive device. Responding in self-defense, the ground force engaged
the hostile threat, killing an additional estimated 10 combatants. All
total, Coalition forces estimate that 49 criminals were killed in three
separate engagements during this operation. Ground forces reported they
were unaware of any innocent civilians being killed as a result of this
operation.”
To be fair,
the military admitted that the target of this manhunt was not, in fact,
among those captured or killed.
After the
“operation,” television news outlets broadcast images of
grieving families in the streets of Sadr City. One man reported that
his neighbor’s 6-year-old child had been killed, and a 2-year-old
wounded. Arab television outlets caught scenes of ambulances with wailing
sirens carrying the injured to the Imam Ali hospital, the largest in
Sadr City, where doctors were shown treating the casualties, including
children.
Typically
with such incidents, those 49 dead “criminals” turned back
into civilians when local police began checking, including two (not
three) children in their final count.
Iraqi Prime
Minister Nour al-Maliki vowed an investigation for which U.S. military
officials offered to form a joint committee; but, as is so often the
case in such “investigations,” there have been no follow-up
reports. In this “incident,” the U.S. military, as far as
we know, still stands by its assertion that no civilians were killed
or wounded.
Two months earlier, in a similar incident, the U.S. military claimed
32 “suspected insurgents” killed during an air strike, also
in Sadr City, a claim disputed by Iraqis in the neighborhood, followed
by the usual promise of an investigation — of which, once again,
nothing more was heard.
“Tactical
Perception Management”
For perspective,
let me take you back to Iraq in November 2003. I had been there less
than a week on my first visit to that occupied country when the U.S.
military reported a raging firefight between American forces and 150
of Saddam Hussein’s former Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. According
to General Peter Pace, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
American soldiers, on being attacked by the group, had responded fiercely
and killed 54 of them. “They attacked and they were killed, so
I think it will be instructive to them,” General Pace had smugly
observed.
Most of the
Western media simply chalked up the number of “insurgent”
dead at 54 and left it at that. Local media in Baghdad, as well as outlets
like Al-Jazeera, were, however, citing very different figures taken
directly from the hospital in Samarra where the wounded were being treated.
Doctors there announced a count of eight killed in the incident, including
an Iranian pilgrim, and 50 Iraqis wounded.
I traveled
to Samarra that week, visited the morgue at Samarra General Hospital,
spoke with wounded Iraqis at the hospital, and interviewed one of the
leading sheikhs of the city as well as several eyewitnesses to the event.
What I found was general agreement that a U.S. patrol had, in fact,
come under attack — but by only two gunmen while delivering money
to a downtown bank. Jumpy American soldiers had responded with a spray
of fire that had killed neither of the attackers, but eight civilians,
while wounding 50 others. The streets in the city center, where the
firing took place, were riddled with bullets.
The military,
nonetheless, stood by their figure — 54 dead — and insisted
that the enormous force of “insurgents” had attacked with
mortars, grenades, and automatic weapons.
A man I interviewed,
who had been in his tea stall in the vicinity and witnessed most of
the incident, summed up the local reaction this way:
“The
Americans say the people who fought them are al-Qaeda or fedayeen. We
are all living in this small city here. Why have we not seen these foreign
fighters and strangers in our city before or after this battle? Everyone
here knows everyone, and none have seen these strangers. Why do they
tell these lies?”
Another man,
at the scene had drawn my attention to a parked car scarred with 112
bullets. As I was photographing it, a man with two children at his side
approached. They were, he said, the children of his brother who had
been killed by the gunfire.
“This
little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who will
take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will
feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason?
Nobody told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they
shoot him? They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because
they wanted to shoot a man? That’s it? This is the reason? Why
didn’t anyone talk to me and tell me why they have killed my brother?
Is killing people a normal thing now, happening every day? This is our
future? This is the future that the United States promised Iraq?”
My life as
an independent reporter in his country was just beginning and his questions
felt like so many blows to the gut. Of course, I was the only American
reporter there to hear him and I was then writing for an email audience
of under 200. This is what it means, in Pentagon terms, to dominate
not only the battlefield, but the media landscape in which that battlefield
is reported. And that sort of domination was, it turned out, very much
on Pentagon minds in that period.
Within days
of the incident, for instance, the New York Times published
an article about how the Pentagon had awarded a contract to SAIC, a
private company, which was to investigate ways the Department of Defense
could use propaganda for more “effective strategic influence”
in the “war on terror.” The Pentagon referred to this potential
propaganda blitz (which would eventually come back to haunt Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) as a “tactical perception management
campaign.” The title of the document SAIC produced was “Winning
the War of Ideas.”
On December 2, 2005, the U.S. military would admit that the Lincoln
Group, which described itself as “a strategic communications
& pubic relations firm providing insight & influence in challenging
& hostile environments,” had been hired by the Pentagon to
plant pro-American good-news articles in the new Iraqi “free”
press that the Bush administration was just then touting. This was exposed
during a briefing with Senator John Warner of Virginia, head of the
Senate Armed Services Committee.
The admission
would not, as one might have expected, prove a step towards deterrence.
Not only did the Lincoln Group get further contracts, but a wide range
of similar tactics continue to be employed by the military in Iraq today
with even greater impunity. In Iraq, the propaganda and misinformation
have, in fact, been continual and on a massive scale. And, of course,
the regular announcements of Iraqi “insurgent” or “criminal”
deaths in American operations have never stopped, nor have the announcements
of “investigations,” when those claims are seriously challenged
on the ground — investigations which, except in a few cases, are
never heard of again. All this is a reminder of something George W.
Bush once
said: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating
things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind
of catapult the propaganda.”
The
Military Wrist is Slapped
Even when
one of those investigations did lead somewhere, that somewhere was almost
invariably a dead end. Take Haditha. Witnesses told reporters that,
on November 19, 2005, in the western town of Haditha, 24 Iraqi civilians
had been slaughtered by U.S. Marines. It was no secret that the Marines
had shot men, women, and children at close range in retaliation for
a roadside bombing that killed one of their own.
The Washington
Post quoted Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who was watching
from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of
three families. He had heard Younis Salim Khafif, his neighbor across
the street, 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.”
A Post special
correspondent and U.S. investigators in Washington reported that some
of the dead were women attempting to shield their children. According
to death certificates, the girls killed in Khafif’s house were
aged 14, 10, 5, 3, and 1.
After the
news broke in the U.S., the military ordered a probe of the incident.
An Iraqi had actually managed to film the interiors of the blood-soaked
houses as well as scenes of the wounded at the Haditha hospital, and
had recorded statements of eyewitnesses to the massacre.
Even now,
two years after the massacre, investigations continue. Anonymous Pentagon
officials having admitted to reporters that there is an abundance of
evidence to support charges against the accused Marines of deliberately
shooting civilians, including unarmed women and children. Currently,
Marine Corps and Navy prosecutors are reviewing the evidence, and will
likely ask for further probes.
As for the
charges levied against the soldiers involved in the massacre, on April
2nd of this year, all of the charges against Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz,
who was accused of killing five civilians, were dropped
as part of a decision that granted him immunity to testify
in potential courts-martial for seven other Marines charged in the attack
and in its alleged cover-up. On August 9th, all murder charges against
Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt and charges of failing to investigate the
incident against Capt. Randy Stone were dropped by Lt. Gen. James Mattis,
well-known for claiming
of fighting in Afghanistan, “It’s fun to shoot some people.”
On August 23th, the investigating officer suggested that charges against
Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum be dropped as well. On October 19th, Tatum’s
commanding officers decided the charges should be lowered to involuntary
manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and aggravated assault. More recently,
on September 18th, all charges against Capt. Lucas McConnell were dropped,
and the investigating officer recommended that charges be similarly
dropped against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum.
On October 3rd, an investigating officer of an Article 32 hearing (a
proceeding similar to a civilian grand jury) recommended that Staff
Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths
of two women and five children, and that the murder charges for his
involvement in the killing of 17 innocent civilians, be dropped. In
other words, so far, no one has gone to jail for the massacre in Haditha.
It is now
commonplace for such investigations, regarding heinous crimes against
Iraqi civilians, to drag on for months or even years. Equally commonplace:
On completion of these investigations, the low-level soldiers, who are
charged with the crimes, are often either cleared entirely or given
laughably light sentences by military courts.
On November
8th, for instance, Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley, a sniper, was found not
guilty by military judges on three charges of premeditated
murder for killing three Iraqi civilians. He was instead convicted only
of placing an AK-47 rifle with the remains of a dead Iraqi during one
of his missions — as evidence that the man was an “insurgent.”
In January
2004, 19 year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, and his cousin Marwan Fadil were
forced off a ledge into the Tigris River in Samarra at gunpoint by U.S.
soldiers. Fadil survived. He testified that the soldiers, after forcing
the two into the water, had stood by laughing as Hassoun drowned.
Sgt. 1st
Class Tracy Perkins was the only soldier tried in the case. Defense
attorney Captain Joshua Norris suggested that Perkins could not be convicted
of manslaughter because there was “no body, no evidence, no death.”
He was, in fact, cleared of the involuntary manslaughter charge in a
military court on January 9, 2005 and instead was reduced in rank by
one grade and sentenced to six months in a military prison for assault.
Similarly, on June 6, 2006, three British soldiers were cleared of charges
of killing 15-year-old Ahmed Jabber Kareem in May 2003 by forcing him
into a Basra canal.
Iraqis
Dehumanized
None of this
— from the unending “incidents” themselves to the
way the Pentagon has dominated the reporting of them — would have
been possible without a widespread dehumanization of Iraqis among American
soldiers (and a deep-set, if largely unexpressed and little considered,
conviction on the American “home front” that Iraqi lives
are worth little). If, four decades ago, the Vietnamese were “gooks,”
“dinks,” and “slopes,” the Iraqis of the American
occupation are “hajis,” “sand-niggers,” and
“towel heads.” Latent racism abets the dehumanization process,
ably assisted by a mainstream media that tends, with honorable exceptions,
to accept Pentagon announcements as at least an initial approximation
of reality in Iraq.
Whether it
was “incidents” involving helicopter strikes in which those
on the ground who died were assumed to be enemy and evil, or the wholesale
destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004, or the massacre at Haditha,
or a slaughtered
wedding party in the western desert of Iraq that was also
caught on video tape (Marine Major General James Mattis: “How
many people go to the middle of the desert…. to hold a wedding
80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen
military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”), or killings at
U.S. checkpoints; or even the initial invasion of Iraq itself, we find
the same propaganda techniques deployed: Demonize an “enemy”;
report only “fighters” being killed; stick to the story
despite evidence to the contrary; if under pressure, launch an investigation;
if still under pressure, bring only low-level troops up on charges;
convict a few of them; sentence them lightly; repeat drill.
At the time of this writing, the group Just Foreign Policy has offered
an estimate of Iraqis killed since the U.S.-led invasion
and occupation. Their number: 1,118,846. Consider that possibility in
the context of the latest round of news from Iraq about lessening violence.
The estimate
is based on figures from a study conducted by researchers from Johns
Hopkins University in the U.S. and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad,
and published in October 2006 in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet,
which found 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American
invasion and occupation. The report methodology has been called “robust”
and “close to best practice” by Sir Roy Anderson, the chief
scientific advisor to Britain’s Ministry of Defense. Since that
time, in addition to Just Foreign Policy, the British research polling
agency Opinion Research Business has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million
deaths in Iraq. Based on this, veteran Australian born journalist John
Pilger wrote recently,
“The scale of death caused by the British and U.S. governments
may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest
single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century.”
It is an
indication of the success of an effective Pentagon “tactical perception
management campaign,” of the way the Bush administration has continued
to “catapult propaganda,” and of the dehumanization of Iraqis
that has gone with it, that the possibility of the number of dead Iraqis
being in this range has largely been dismissed (or remained generally
undealt with) in the mainstream media in the United States. Add to that
the refusal of the U.S. military to bring justice to those charged with
some of these heinous crimes, the lack of accountability, and an establishment
media which has regularly camouflaged the true nature of the occupation,
and we have the perfect setting for a continuance of industrial-scale
slaughter in Iraq, even while the news highlights the likes of Britney
Spears and Lindsay Lohan and their adventures in various rehab clinics.
In what could
reasonably serve as a summary of the American occupation of Iraq, the
eighteenth century philosopher Voltaire wrote, “It is forbidden
to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large
numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Dahr
Jamail. an independent journalist, is the author of the just-published
Beyond
the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied
Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied
Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey
over the last four years. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com, Inter
Press Service, Asia Times, and Foreign Policy in Focus. He has contributed
to The Sunday Herald, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Nation,
among other publications. He maintains a website, Dahr Jamail’s
Mideast Dispatches,
with all his writing.
Copyright
2007 Dahr Jamail
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