OT - The U.S. Army Is One Big Death Squad (And They Still Can't Win a Fucking Battle)

Return to Ishaqi: The Pentagon's Shaky Self-Exoneration
by Chris Floyd
3 June 2006

It seems that the Pentagon, that veritable fount of veracity, has
probed itself for the alleged execution-style slaying of civilians in
the village of Abu Sifa in the region of Ishaqi, and found that the
operation -- which left 11 civilians dead, including five children
under the age of five -- was in fact an exemplary feat of arms,
strictly by the book.

Everything happened pretty much the way they originally said it
happened: soldiers seeking an al-Qaeda operative took fire during the
pursuit and responded with heavy force: air power and ground assault on
the suspect's redoubt, which just happened to be someone's house. In
the course of the textbook op, which we're told killed the al-Qaednik
and a local bombmaker, there were also three "noncombatant" deaths, and
an estimated nine "collateral deaths." (The difference between these
two categories is not explained. And of course it doesn't matter to the
innocent people killed; whether they are "non-combatants" or
"collaterals," they're still just as dead. No doubt there are strict
bureaucratic guidelines behind these distinctions.) These deaths are
regrettable, of course, but such things happen as unintended
consequences of noble causes, and no doubt there will be a bit of loose
change doled out to the innocent victims' families.

So that's that then. Nothing to see here, time to move on... And you
know, I really wish we could. No one here takes any pleasure or
satisfaction from reports of yet another egregious failure of the human
spirit, yet another eruption of the bestiality that lies buried in the
mud of our brains. This is true in any case, anywhere, but it is doubly
true if the crimes are done in the name of your own country. And any
time that such a report turns out to be mistaken is a cause for joy.

By the way, this is what the powerful -- and their sycophants -- always
fail to understand: no genuine dissident is happy about dissenting. You
dissent because you see injustice, crime, corruption and needless death
being wrought by the power structures of your own society. You dissent
because so many lies have been forced down your throat, and you just
want to know the truth, as far as it can be known, you just want to
speak the truth, whatever it may be. You dissent because of the reality
that you see. And this is a painful thing; it's like watching a family
member go bad, like learning your own father is a killer, that your
mother is thief. No one wants to believe evil of their own country,
their own society; but sometimes the very ideals that you were given by
your society -- a commitment to justice, to truth, the belief in the
inherent worth and moral agency of every individual human being --
compels you to confront the reality of the crimes and corruption of the
leaders and institutions of that same society.

It isn't fun; there's no pleasure in it. Especially if, with
Dostoevsky, you believe that "each is responsible for all," that you
yourself are implicated in every failure of humanity. Bob Dylan
captured the essence of this kind of dissent well when he sang of the
great iconoclast, Lenny Bruce:

He fought a war on a battlefield
Where every victory hurts.

So yes, it would be nice to be able to accept at face value the
Pentagon's exonerating version of the incident at Ishaqi. (Relatively
speaking, of course; that is to say, in the murderous context of the
vast atrocity that is the Iraq war itself, it would be better to accept
the Pentagon's assertion that the deaths of up these innocent people
were simply the inevitable and unintended by-product of urban warfare,
rather than the more grisly alternative. It would be good to have this
slight mitigation of the general horror.) But a commitment to the truth
-- and a refusal to succumb to historical amnesia -- prevents such an
automatic acceptance.

For this is the same Pentagon that whitewashed the Haditha killings not
once, but twice (with two different stories) after the massacre there
last year. This is the same Pentagon whose innumerable investigations
into itself during these crimeful Bush years have only managed to peel
a few "bad apples" plucked from the bottom of the barrel, despite the
extraordinarily vast and systematic nature of the regimens of torture
and atrocity established by the Bush Administration, as Amnesty
International has pointed out in an important new study. Such elaborate
systems cannot have been constructed and operated without orders --
direct and implied -- from the very highest reaches of government and
the military command. Yet the Pentagon has employed oceans of whitewash
to protect the brass, while grudgingly throwing a few bits of cannon
fodder and trailer trash -- as the Bushist elite would see them -- on
the fire to serve, in the words of Breaker Morant, as "scapegoats of
the empire."

Thus, in a general sense, you would be foolish to accept the result of
any of the Pentagon's self-investigations at face value, without
independent corroboration. This kind of cynicism is, again, painful and
unpleasant, but it has been forced upon us by the many, many lies that
have emanated from that five-sided fortress over many decades. This is
not to say that every Pentagon self-exoneration is false or incomplete,
or that there are not many honorable military investigators doing
sterling -- and thankless -- work. (The current Haditha probe --
although belated, and problematic in many respects, is an example of
this.) It's merely acknowledging the indisputable reality of history --
and certainly of the current war -- that the Pentagon brass habitually
lie and dissemble and look the other way when it comes to allegations
of atrocities by US forces. It's only prudent to reserve judgment on
any institution that investigates itself for wrongdoing. Or put it this
way: if you're ever charged with murder or bank fraud or dope dealing
or tax dodging, ask the cops if you can investigate yourself, and see
what they say.

But the Ishaqi exoneration warrants skepticism not only in this general
sense, but also in its particulars. From press accounts of the report,
it largely reiterates the Pentagon's original storyline, while
enlarging the death count from the original "four civilians, including
one child," which it had held to until this week, when the Haditha
story spilled out. And the report apparently just dismisses out of hand
the large amount of credible evidence that contradicts the Pentagon's
latest story.

First is the photographic evidence: pictures taken of the aftermath by
Agence France Presse, and a video that emerged this week on BBC. These
clearly dispute the Pentagon's account, which holds that the house was
first raked with gunfire, then attack by helicopter gunships, then
finally bombed by American jets: a massive barrage of firepower that
left the house in ruins. But the video shows that part of the house was
left standing. The photographs, which have been widely available for
months, show five dead children, one of them only a few months old.
They have been laid out by grieving relatives. Their bodies show no
signs of having been ripped up or damaged in the course of an all-out
air and ground assault; as the BBC's John Simpson points out, they had
not been crushed by the collapse of the house, as the Pentagon claimed.
Instead, they are unmarked, their clothes dusty but in most cases
untorn. In the photographs I saw, one child clearly has blood oozing
from the back of her head, while the baby has a hole in his forehead,
and other damage to his face. The other children are laid on their
back, with their wounds invisible, their bodies remarkably whole.
Simpson, shown viewing the film, said it was clear that the children
had been shot.

Second is the testimony of the villagers, and of two officials of the
U.S.-backed Iraqi police, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein.
These are men who risk their lives by their cooperation with the
Coalition. The villagers say soldiers entered the house and killed the
occupants; the house was later hit by the helicopter then bombed,
apparently to cover up the killings, some of the villagers surmised.
The Iraqi police said "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head."
Later, a Knight-Ridder reporter saw a preliminary report indicating
that the 11 victims had multiple wounds. This tallies with Simpson's
viewing, which showed that one of the dead children had been shot in
the side. Everyone who saw or examined the bodies agreed that the
victims had been shot, most likely by bullets from the large pile of
American-issue cartridges found inside the house, which can also be
seen on the video.

One of the world's top reporters, Neil Mackay of Scotland's Sunday
Herald, provides yet another important piece of evidence that was
shunted aside by the Pentagon probe: a high-level report by "senior
Iraqi security force officers" working in a joint operation with U.S.
forces. Mackay writes:

However, what gives the claims so much credence is the fact that an
official report has been compiled by senior Iraqi security force
officers at the Joint Co-ordination Centre (JCC) in Tikrit. The JCC is
a regional security centre set up by Iraqi police in partnership with
the US military.

The report on the killings reads: "American forces used helicopters
to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf [a 30-year-old man who
died in the raid]. The American forces gathered the family members in
one room and executed 11 people ... then they bombed the house."

Brigadier General Issa al-Juboori, the head of the JCC, said the report
was accurate and the officer who wrote it was thoroughly trusted,
adding: "He's a dedicated policeman and a good cop."

Officially, the US claims the raid was the result of a tip-off that an
al-Qaeda operative was at the house. Neighbours confirmed that an
al-Qaeda member had been at the house, which was owned by a relative,
but said the owner was a schoolteacher and he and rest of the family
had nothing to do with terrorism .

Local police commander Lt Col Farooq Hussain said autopsies "revealed
all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were
handcuffed". He said the killings were "a clear and perfect
crime".

Ibraheem Hirat Khalaf, the brother of Faiz Harat Khalaf, said he saw US
helicopters firing six missiles at the house as they left. Another
local man, Rasheed Thair, said: "We want the Americans to give an
explanation for this horrible crime which took the smile and the dream
of a spring night from 11 people and destroyed even the toys of
children."

Not a single villager, not a single local police official or regional
security official agrees with the Pentagon version of the attack. The
only agreement seems to be that at some point, a man associated with
one of the groups claiming to be "al Qaeda in Iraq" was in the house.
Are all these Iraqis lying, even the "collaborators" with the
occupation? Not likely. Could they be confused or uncertain about the
exact sequence of events? Yes; the only Iraqis who know exactly what
happened in that house are dead. Are there discrepancies between the
early reports on the bodies' conditions, i.e., where they all shot in
the head, or were some shot in other parts of their bodies, and were
they all bound before they were shot, or just some of them, or perhaps
none of them? Yes, there are discrepancies. The video, seen in its
incomplete form on BBC, does not clearly bear out the charge that the
victims had been bound. The video doesn't show all the victims, but
those being pulled from the house do not appear to be bound, although
in the version I saw, some of the bodies shown had already been wrapped
in rugs or blankets.

But is there any disputing the photographic evidence that the victims,
particularly the children, were shot, not crushed by the collapsing
walls? No, this reality cannot be denied, despite the Pentagon's
report. Is there any disputing the evidence that the children were
killed by single shots, and not, say, riddled with bullets in the
course of a cross-fire between US forces and al Qaeda dastards? No,
this reality cannot be denied either. Someone fired a single shot into
the bodies of every child on display in the photographs, which were
taken by a Western news agency, and corroborated by a representative of
another Western news agency, Associated Press, who was also on the
scene after the attack.

What can we conclude from all this? That there was indeed a
Haditha-style execution of the innocent at Ishaqi? No; the limited
amount of evidence that we can gather on the incident -- at a distance,
from press reports -- does not on its face categorically prove a
deliberate massacre. To categorically prove such an allegation -- or
categorically disprove it -- would require a thorough, completely
independent investigation.

We can say that the available evidence gives many strong and deeply
troubling indications that some kind of atrocity indeed occurred at
Ishaqi. And we can say that key portions of the Pentagon's
self-exoneration are flatly contradicted by photographic evidence, and
also by the credible testimony from villagers, US-backed Iraqi
officials and Western news agencies (including Reuters, Knight-Ridder,
AFP and AP) as to the nature of the victims' fatal wounds.

The Pentagon's hastily-announced report on Ishaqi does not answer all
the questions and charges raised by the incident; indeed, it seems not
to have even addressed some of them. The whole truth of what happened
in the village will remain uncertain until it can be investigated by an
independent, impartial and authoritative agency. And we know this will
never happen.

Finally, let's put the incident in its proper context by quoting the
conclusion from our original post on Ishaqi:

We know that the American troops who caused the deaths of these
children - either by tying them up and shooting them, an unspeakable
atrocity, or else "merely" by storming or bombing a house full of
civilians in a night raid "with both air and ground assets" - were
sent to Iraq on a demonstrably false mission to "disarm" weapons that
did not exist and take revenge for 9/11 on a nation that had nothing to
do with the attack. And we now know that the White House - and George
W. Bush specifically - knew all along that the intelligence did not
and could not support the public case he had made for the war.

We know that the only reason that this dead baby has his arm frozen to
his lifeless face is that three years ago this week, George W. Bush
gave the order to begin the unprovoked, unjust and unnecessary invasion
of Iraq. He hasn't fired a single shot or launched a single missile; he
hasn't tortured or killed any prisoners; he hasn't kidnapped or
beheaded civilians or planted bombs along roadsides, in mosques or
marketplaces. Yet every single atrocity of the war - on both sides
- and every single death caused by the war, and every act of
religious repression perpetrated by the extremist sects empowered by
the war, is the direct result of the decision made by George W. Bush
three years ago. Nothing he says can change this fact; nothing he does,
or causes to be done, for good or ill, can wash the blood of these
children - and the tens of thousands of other innocent civilians
killed in the war - from his hands.

UPDATE: The BBC reports that the Iraqi government has officially
rejected the Pentagon's investigation into the Ishaqi killings.
Excerpt:

The Iraqi government has rejected the findings of a US military
investigation into the deaths of 11 civilians in the village of Ishaqi,
north of Baghdad.A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said
the report, which cleared the US soldiers of wrongdoing, was unfair.
The government will demand an apology and compensation, the spokesman
said.

.