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A Tale of Two Atrocities -- Blackwater and Haditha
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 EmpireNotes.org. He has been to occupied Iraq twice and reported from the first assault on Fallujah in April 2004. His most recent book is "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond" (Seven Stories Press). He can be contacted at rahul@empirenotes.org.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllAmericans in Iraq, whether U.S. armed forces personnel or private contractors are probably very vulnerable to psychological and emotional burn-out, no matter how professional they attempt to be.
The statistics released about U.S. troops experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder are undoubtedly mirrored in private contractors.
Food for thought on this in the article ...
"American troops are cracking under horrors, deception and lies of Iraq war"
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=10640
Hammo: Have you seen any footage of 'average' American soldiers cheering as they call in an air strike, calling the people within 'Muj mutha-******s'?
The troops may be cracking. Maybe. But many are happy to be there, raping killing, dealing drugs, and killing those of their own who threaten to reveal their atrocities.
The so-called 'private contractors' are MERCENARIES!!! They kill for money! THAT'S WHAT THEY DO! THAT'S ALL THEY DO!! And Blackwater makes a company policy of hiring soldiers who have washed out of elite military units for psycholoical reasons, especially those who are psychopaths.
Jack London wrote a hundred years ago in IRON HEEL:"Another great institution that had taken form and was working smoothly was the Mercenaries. This body of soldiers had been evolved out of the old regular army and was now a million strong, to say nothing of the colonial forces. The Mercenaries constituted a race apart. They dwelt in cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they were granted many privileges. By them a large portion of the perplexing surplus was consumed. They were losing all touch and sympathy with the rest of the people, and, in fact, were developing their own class morality and consciousness."
Like a lot of his other writings we are seeing he knew what he was talking about.
Hoa binh
"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."
Twenty-seven US soldiers acted this way? All they got was a slap on the wrist? US soldiers were enjoying the sound of someone screaming in pain? They liked it when he screamed, "Allah," in pain? They're representing my country in this war? Me, actually?
I really don't know what passes for justice in the military, but in civilian life torture-murder begets the death-penalty.
Considering the savagery, and the brutality of their offenses the death-penalty should have been applied to them, as well.
Why not? They applied it to somebody else? Slowly, painfully, and over a period of time-just for fun!
Animals like this, do not represent me; nor have they truly faced justice-but believe me, they need to.
I think that the number of mercenaries is about equal to the number of US forces in Iraq and not the number stated in the article. I have read it many times in many articles recently, although it is true that the number of mercenaries actually carrying weapons is much lower, as the others are performing other duties normally done by our men in uniform.
What worries me is that companies such as Blackwater have no incentive for violence to end, otherwise they would go out of business. I also see a frightening change taking place here in the USA where Blackwater is used to maintain order. New Orleans is the first example of this. Again, the National Guard should be doing this - not some "private" company the taxpayers are paying for.
And the difference in pay and equipment must cause friction between the US military and these mercenaries. Either re-institute the draft or get out of Iraq.
Also, who was responsible for the attack on Fallujah? Blackwater. They sent some of their men into a dangerous area without proper maps or protection. Four were killed and dragged through the streets and ultimately strung up along the street. That's what kicked off the attack on Fallujah and all the subsequent horror that followed, with hospitals being bombed and white phosphorous used.
We shouldn't need any help from mercenaries when we decide to start a war. Our own armed forces should be the ones doing the fighting, but since the second world war, the use of mercenaries has risen steadily, until today it is a "Booming" industry.
What worries me the most is that groups like Blackwater aren't going to go away. They will soon be patrolling our streets here in the US. Jack London's precient book "The Iron Heel" describes almost exactly what is happening today in America.
Futhermore, as these rejects and psychotics are loosed upon the cities of the USA, we are going to see some very bad times indeed. As I said, these "christian" soldiers have no motive to seek peace. Their paychecks depend on continued violence and civil unrest.
Galen,
"Hammo: Have you seen any footage of 'average' American soldiers cheering as they call in an air strike, calling the people within 'Muj mutha-******s'"
Joshua Key's "The Deserter's Tale" details the shock & horror of a soldier at the barbarism he was beginning to take for granted & which other soldiers were revelling in the very first months of the occupation, long before the stresses became what they've since become. Likewise, the book "Generation Kill", from which I've only read excerpts.
Dichterfruend: Won't it just be a gas when all of these maladjusted psychos come home and start to practice what they learned in Iraq? It will be Charles Ng times 100,000. Fun, fun, fun.
One problem with an all-volunteer military is that these guys want to be there! Why would anyone want to be in that hell-hole? To protect our country? From what? These guys don't give a fuck about how this thing got started, they are whipped up into a furor against the evil muslims who, in their minds, include every man, woman and child in Iraq. Of course I know there are some decent men and women who don't see it this way and are trying to do what they think is right, however delusional this might be. But most are too ignorant to even try to reason this thing out. They are conditioned killing machines and baby that conditioning doesn't magically wear off once they are out of uniform. We are in for some very bad times indeed.
Is it any surprise that these guys, in the middle of insanity over there, are going insane? It's all part of the plan. I thought it interesting that soldiers who kill prisoners in custody get "administrative punishment" while those who miss troop movements are court-martialed. Kind of shows what's important to the brass.
"Dichterfruend: Won't it just be a gas when all of these maladjusted psychos come home and start to practice what they learned in Iraq? It will be Charles Ng times 100,000. Fun, fun, fun."
Take a gander at Michael L. Weinstein's book "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military".
Thanks for putting the slaughter in perspective, Rahul.
It's just as well that no one has said : how dare he , as an Indian, have the temerity to say all that he has. As the right to castigate or applaud is the exclusive privilege of Westerners .
Where is the MSM on this?
Rick: The MSM is too busy pre-digesting the Britany/Brangelina/latest Blackwater cover story for the stupified American public to swill down...
Thanks for th excellent article. The truth has no ethnic profile.
Remember that these Marines are young Americans who, if they survive, bring home their training in these rules of engagement and their deprogramming on the rules of our own society. Don't believe for a second the lie that we are fighting over there to avoid fighting over here - its coming home. America will deal with the results of these practices for decades to come in the form of broken families, homelessness, increasing violent crime, abuse of authority and overloaded prisons (sound familiar?). And as usual what is true for American families is true in spades for Iraqi families and Iraqi society. But if we have no compassion and empathy for our own children, especially if they are poor, how can we possibly have any for Families in a far away land?
As a Vietnam vet who works with Vets for Peace I see the results of the Vietnam conflict continue in the lives of vets, their families and society every day. We are about to do a stand down to help homeless vets who make up between 25 and 35 percent of homeless men. Just one example.
Mary Bahr
VFP member
Just a comment on the numbers of contractors versus US troops in Iraq. There are about 180,000 contractors compared with 170,000 US troops. About half the military force is support and half are combat troops. I do not know the percents on the mercenaries.
The proudest and the best, "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..."
I remember John Dear writing about the way marines would march by his private home early in the morning yelling, "Kill! Kill! Kill!"
I had a relationship with an x-marine a few years back who told me how his sergeant humiliated the young men as per the size of their penises. One kid tried to shoot himself in the head because the experience utterly destroyed him. And that's what militarism is about. It's about a conscious way to expunge all humanity from those who are being trained to be hired killers, a/k/a guns.
So long as a nation prizes aggression foremost, and I think there can be little argument with that contention given the sums hemorrhaged into war, the manufacture and design of new armaments, and propaganda aimed at designating ever new enemies into perpetuity, it will abide by Mars rules and protect its own. THANKFULLY our universe and its agents of karmic justice keep count. NO ONE gets away with killing. What they do "to the least of these" will return to them, if not in this life, then in future lifetimes.
The only way to break the seemingly endless circle of violence (evidence that makes it seem inevitable to human nature and the human condition) is through truly courageous people to agree to disagree, to find common ground, to forgive the other's trespasses. EVERY master has taught this, and yet irony of ironies in the NAME of these masters this latest egregious conflict is being waged.