Page 2 of 2 Iraqi children are civilians
too By Dahr Jamail
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 President 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 killed by US 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 US 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 US, 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 have 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 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 2 of this year, all of the
charges against Sergeant 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 9, all
murder charges against Lance Corporal Justin
Sharratt and charges of failing to investigate the
incident against Captain Randy Stone were dropped
by Lieutenant General James Mattis, well known for
claiming of fighting in Afghanistan, "It's fun to
shoot some people."
On August 23, the
investigating officer suggested that charges
against Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum be dropped as
well. On October 19, Tatum's commanding officers
decided the charges should be lowered to
involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment
and aggravated assault. More recently, on
September 18, all charges against Captain Lucas
McConnell were dropped, and the investigating
officer recommended that charges be similarly
dropped against Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum.
On October 3, an investigating officer of
an Article 32 hearing (a proceeding similar to a
civilian grand jury) recommended that Staff
Sergeant 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 8, for
instance, Staff Sergeant 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 US soldiers. Fadil survived. He
testified that the soldiers, after forcing the two
into the water, had stood by laughing as Hassoun
drowned.
Sergeant 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 US 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 US-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 US 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 US 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 US military to bring to justice 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 18th 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."
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