Iraq Vets speak out (WARNING: GRAPHIC MATERIAL)

Incredible article in the Nation by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. I am quite surprised - no, not really - that no major US media outlet has mentioned it so far. It is already hitting the international press (as in France for instance) and it is further annihilating whatever was left of the US reputation abroad

Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

These testimonies remind me of the controversy around www.nowthatsfuckedup.com - in the end the war/porn site was forced to shut down by US authorities. One of the reasons given for such swift action was that the Geneva Convention forbids showing pictures of dead enemies. This coming from those notorious sticklers for international human rights law Rumsfeld, Cambone and Douglas "dumbest fucking guy on the planet" Feith. [These unsavory characters, geniuses in their own rights - I mean Cambone holds a down-market Ph.D. from a notorious conservative outfit - are not just ridiculous, they are also war criminals of the the worst kind, the self-righteous type.]

The sick pictures from nowthatsfuckedup.com were all true. Random killings of civilians, goofing around with exploded skulls and dismembered bodies, it's all in the Nation's interviews.

One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

THESE CRIMES WERE KNOWN AND DOCUMENTED BACK IN 2005. You don't need to go very far, it only takes a google image search to find those pix. The wanton killing of Iraqi civilians seemed widespread, especially after a US convoy hit an IED.

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off.
[...]
Sergeant Flatt was among twenty-four veterans who said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported."

This is why the 'war' and the occupation are lost, and have been for quite a while. Granted, based on the stated goals of war, winning was always going to be a difficult proposition. But losing was not necessarily inevitable - that is, had the US government actually planned for a lengthy occupation, etc. etc. Well. On second thought. No, there was no way this could have been not lost, not with that crew in charge.

The crimes committed by US forces are just the sad, inevitable outcome of the lies, deceptions and disregard for the law that trickled down from the upper echelons of the chain of command. The sense that this war of election was shrouded in ulterior, questionable motives and hidden agendas, the sense that the legitimacy and indeed, legality of this enterprise was at best doubtful, weighed heavily on the chain of command. It is not very difficult to see how the necessity to dissimulate the lies and deceptions at the heart of this fateful adventure encouraged criminal behaviors all the way down. And don't get me wrong, I support the troop. But my support is conditional on them acting lawfully. And it is very difficult to act lawfully when the ultimate legality of the war is in doubt, and when the chain of command, by constantly pointing at other people, anyone but themselves, shifting blame and looking for scapegoats and bogeymen (the liberal media! the dead-enders! Iran!), very much acts like they know they have committed a crime. Case in point:

"During the summer of 2005, Sergeant Millard, who served as an assistant to a general in Tikrit, attended a briefing on a checkpoint shooting, at which his role was to flip PowerPoint slides.

This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. "This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"

Technorati Tags:George W. Bush, Iraq War, War Crimes, US Army, US Occupation, Douglas Feith, Stephen A. Cambone, Donald Rumsfeld, Geneva Convention, Nowthatsfuckedup.com