Talk of the Town
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AN AMERICAN WAR CRIME
On November 19, 2005, a convoy of U.S. Marines was
travelling down a road in Haditha, a town on the Euphrates River in western
Iraq, when one of their Humvees hit an improvised explosive device. A Marine
was killed, and two were injured. The Marines had just pulled over a car
carrying five men on their way to a college in Baghdad; after the explosion,
they shot them to death. They then went into a nearby area and, in the course
of a few hours, killed at least nineteen more people—men, women, and children.
The oldest victim was a seventy-six-year-old grandfather; the youngest was a
three-year-old girl. Some of them were shot in the head at relatively close
range, inside their houses.*1
The events of that day came to be
known as the Haditha massacre, and, after they came to light, President George
W. Bush promised a full investigation*2. Four Marines were charged
with murder. The massacre was no secret: a report in Time had
helped bring it to public attention. But, in the end, only one of the Marines
was convicted, of the minor crime of negligent dereliction of duty. He served
not one day in prison. By the time that case ended, in 2012, few people had the
appetite to engage with the continuing legacy of the Iraq War.*3 The
country had moved on.
Four years ago, the “In the Dark” podcast,*4
produced by a team of six people led by the investigative reporter Madeleine
Baran, began looking into the Haditha massacre. They interviewed more than a
hundred sources, both Iraqis and Marines, and repeatedly sued the military for
the release of thousands of records, in order to learn why a well-documented
mass killing had gone virtually unpunished. Last year, “In the Dark”
joined The New Yorker, and this summer, in nine episodes, the team
laid out the maddening, appalling conclusions of their reporting. Though the
shooters had claimed that the victims included insurgents, the team found that
they were all civilians. The podcast features a lawyer in Haditha who lost
fifteen members of his family that day, and who has spent the past nineteen
years searching for justice.
In the calculus of modern warfare and international law,
killing a civilian is not necessarily a crime. But the podcast uses the events
in Haditha to underscore the inherent problem of the military using its own
legal mechanisms—an array of self-protective reflexes, presumptions, and
conditions—*5 to hold its members to account. Investigations were
conducted, and one was quite thorough, but, when it came time to bring the
Marines to trial, the inadequacy of the military-justice system was laid bare.
Only one of the Marines charged with murder was brought to trial; the charges
against the others were dropped. As in other such trials, the jury was made up
of fellow-Marines, and they made it plain that they would trust the testimony
of a Marine over that of an Iraqi.
In fact, “In the Dark” ’s reporting showed that much of
the Iraqis’ testimony was simply cast aside; survivors gave sworn depositions,
but they were not used in court. When the officer in charge of another
proceeding in the investigation was asked if he placed value on that testimony,
he told our reporter, “No.”*6 The victims were not even named during
the trial; instead, they were referred to by the numbers that Marines had
scrawled on their bodies, visible in photos taken in the aftermath of the
killings. (Last month, with the permission of the families, The New
Yorker published a
selection of these photos, to help expose the brutality of the incident.)*7
One of the Marines whose murder charges were dropped had
been accused of killing three men, unarmed civilians who were shot in the head.
The Marine Corps general who dismissed the charges, James Mattis, wrote to him,
“You willingly put yourself at great risk to protect innocent civilians.” In
2017, Mattis, who had become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, told The
New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, “You can’t criminalize every mistake.”*8
If this was the outcome of a widely publicized mass killing,
what happens to the incidents that don’t get mentioned by the President or
receive extensive media attention? In theory, reporters, members of Congress,
and others should be able to request the records of such cases, which each
branch of the military is required to keep. Yet, after repeatedly suing for
access, “In the Dark” found that one of the branches could not provide any
records; for others, only limited information was available, and much of that
was heavily redacted, making it nearly impossible to assess how the military
investigates allegations of war crimes.
The team decided to create its own database. By combing
through thousands of old news stories, human-rights reports, and detainee-abuse
records, and by suing the military for additional information, they amassed
what appears to be the largest collection of possible war crimes investigated
by the U.S. military—seven hundred and eighty-one in all—from the conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The database, which will be published on newyorker.com
this week, allowed “In the Dark” to analyze how the military treats allegations
of war crimes. The findings are dismal. More than sixty-five per cent of
investigations were dismissed. In the remaining incidents—those which were
determined to be criminal—fewer than one in five perpetrators appeared to
receive any kind of prison sentence.
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq left more than two
hundred thousand civilians dead. It’s a numbing figure, almost impossible to
contemplate. Within this number, it’s easier to focus on specific events: the
battles for Falluja, in which more than a thousand civilians were killed; the
battle for Baghdad, in which an estimated several thousand Iraqis died. And
then there are the atrocities with smaller yet more vivid death tolls: in
Baghdad, U.S. soldiers bound and blindfolded at least four men, then brought
them to a field outside the city, shot them, and dumped their bodies in a
canal; in Mahmudiyah, five soldiers were involved in the rape of a
fourteen-year-old girl, after which they murdered her and her family, to cover
up their actions. Such incidents are often referred to as war crimes, a term
that, amid the horror of conflict, aims to outline the unthinkable. A nation is
judged in many ways; surely one is by how it deals with the war crimes it
commits.
“In the Dark” ’s reporting leaves little doubt that, in
the case of the Haditha massacre, the United States failed a grave moral test.
The killings were a tragedy. The aftermath may have been worse. ♦
* * * * * * * *
FYI, I was an activist with local KNOW group, Kalamazoo
Non-Violent Opponents of War. This Nyer front article is important and here are
my shouts from the peanut gallery:
*1 ~
Marines doing the Vietnam ‘Mi Lai’ mass murder of a lots of folks in
one small village – now Iraq, grrrrrrrrrrr
*2 ~ GW Bush promises? Why do I smell Dick Cheney?
*3 ~ Easy for you to say. One of our passionate
friends loyal to KNOW had lived in Baghdad for 20 years. She was a gem to most
who knew her, a bold and determined American Irish woman who went far.
*4 ~ podcast? Oh shit, I’ve never done it. More
radio? Probably wonderful stuff, but but - - $? Password? Mother’s maiden name
shit? I don’t do podcasts, X, Instagram,
etc. And I believe a podcast can be
valuable, the npr Ann Arbor played a whole podcast when that was a new thing,
it was a deep dig at the crimes of the “Dr.” who fingered his young women patients.
So glad the slimy ugly man is in prison. Well, this “In the Dark” sure looks
valuable. Keep reading.
*5 ~ “an array of self-protective …” Says it all, eh? Job #1 – cover our ass.
Teach young folks how to kill and guess what? Some really like it! Right on to
George Floyd’s slo-mo murder. Dude was sure he would be protected by his
upline. I gotta go puke.
*6 ~ Damn it, Nyer, how about a paragraph break
after this HUGE point? Or are you trying to bury it?
*7 ~ Too hard to give us the issue date?
grrrrrrrrrr
*8 ~ Sickening.
Really sickening. Mattis’ “you can’t criminalize every mistake” was horrible in
every way. Perfect Trumper. But deeper than any Trump association, Mattis and
probably every other top dog military are trained to cover the asses of our
murderers. MY govt killed those people, innocent people trying to get to
school, innocent people trying to live their lives (Mi Lai), and now the brass
finds ways to put a band aide over the murders. But again, again, again, all bow to the
military. Not me. I don’t thank strangers in military uniform for their work.
Maybe they were having fun at Abu Grabe? Oh, that was just a mistake. No wonder
we lose respect internationally. We got some sick dogs running the show. How
about this? How about an audit of Pentagon? Watch the top brass shit a brick!
Gotta pay $9,000 for that box of duct tape? Sold! Crimes, crimes, all around.
The rest of the piece gives details of what the folks who
did “In the Dark” researched, what they found, sickening, sickening, sickening.
Methinks: Here’s the worst part - the military who did commit crimes, got away
with it, get out of the military, then get jobs - - in our police forces? And
we wonder why so many of these careers have cold murderers? Duhh. I think that’s what the last sentence is
about:
“The aftermath may have been worse.”
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