Iraq War: War crimes

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

I have a couple of items here related to war crimes by Americans in Iraq.  First, I'm going to make a couple of framing comments that I would think should be taken for granted.  But I know that in the US, they are often not.  So:

The US has laws of war and rules of engagement.  Violations of them are violations that need to be addressed in the appropriate way.  Pointing out those violations and/or insisting that they be dealt with properly is exactly that.  It's not a criticism of the soldiers who do not commit those actions.  Conversely, laws of war and rules of engagement are not the same as the laws governing "aggressive" or "preventive" wars and their planning.  Whether initiating the war was legal or illegal, just or unjust, does not make the  laws of war and rules of engagement of any less force or any less legitimacy.

There are also international laws and customs of war that apply to all combatants.  The apply whether or not the other side is observing them.  In Iraq, the insurgents and the sectarian combatants are violating the laws and customs of warfare on a large scale with random killings of noncombatants and by torturing and murdering prisoners.  Many of them are brutal and sadistic killers.  None of that exonerates any Americans for committing war crimes, especially premeditated one.  There is no excuse for insurgents to capture two Americans, torture them and murder them.  There is no excuse for American soldiers going to a farm house, raping a 15-year-old girl and murdering her and three members of her family.

If the blowhard war fans don't like that, then they should channel their passions into football or baseball.  That way they can cheer mindlessly for their side and not have it get our soldiers killed or make hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world hate the United States.

This report is from Sunday:  U.S. Military Braces for Flurry of Criminal Cases  in Iraq by Robert Worth 07/09/06

No American serviceman has been executed since 1961. But in the past month, new cases in Iraq have led to charges against 12 American servicemen who may face the death penalty in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians. ...

As investigators complete their work, military officials say, the total of American servicemen charged with capital crimes in the new cases could grow substantially, perhaps exceeding the total of at least 16 other marines and soldiers charged with murdering Iraqis throughout the first three years of the war. ...

The incidents are far from the only ones in which American forces killed Iraqis. But serious criminal charges in such cases have been rare until now. In many earlier cases, the killings have been found to be justifiable, and the soldiers or marines in question have often been handled through administrative or nonjudicial processes.

The last soldier to be executed was John A. Bennett, hanged in 1961 after being convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl. ...

This guy from the Lexington Institute seems to be trying to minimize such crimes:

"This is a war in which soldiers and civilians are constantly mingling, and they often don't understand each other," said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. "The enemy has a conscious strategy of demoralizing U.S. forces by disorienting and confusing them. Against that backdrop, the number of alleged atrocities is quite low compared with other conflicts in the past."

In Vietnam, a much longer conflict, 95 American soldiers and 27 marines were convicted of killing noncombatants. ...

In the heaviest penalty yet issued in the Iraq war, Sgt. Michael P. Williams was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of premeditated murder last year in the killing of two Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The sentence was later reduced to 25 years.

"I think there's a recognition that these are weird environments," said Eugene R. Fidell, a specialist in military law. "The danger is, carried to an extreme, that can mean throwing the law books out."

Steve Gilliard (Slow motion collapse 07/09/06) reminds us that these cases are reflections of serious strains being placed on the Army, that's likely to leave long-term organizational damage:

We're watching the Army collapse in front of our faces.  Taking 40 year old grunts, people in Cat IV, people who cannot function in a high stress combat environment and shouldn't be asked to.  Well, this is what happens[.]  Years of combat, untreated PTSD, emotional issues at home caused by deployment.

The whole dirty story will come out, how Rummy ruined the Army out of indifference.  But it may be men like Green [the ex-soldier accused in the rape-murder at Mahmoudiyah] who pay at  the end of a needle[.]

This report, also from Sunday, add some detail to what was widely suspected already in the Mahmoudiyah rape-murder case:  Two dead soldiers, eight more to go, vow avengers of Iraqi girl's rape by Akeel Hussein in Mahmoudiyah and Colin Freeman London Telegraph 07/09/06. 

The American soldiers accused of raping an Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family may have provoked an insurgent revenge plot in which two of their comrades were abducted and beheaded last month, it has been claimed.

Pte Kristian Menchaca, 23, and Pte Thomas Tucker, 25, were snatched from a checkpoint near the town of Yusufiyah on June 16 in what was thought at the time to be random terrorist retaliation for the killing of the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike two days earlier.

Now, however, residents of the neighbouring town of Mahmoudiyah have told The Sunday Telegraph that their kidnap was carried out to avenge the attack on a local girl Abeer Qassim Hamza, 15, and her family. They claim that insurgents have vowed to kidnap and kill another eight American troops to exact a 10-to-one revenge for the rape and murder of the girl. ...

US army officials have already begun a separate inquiry into possible links between the two cases, although they insist at this stage that it is purely "speculation". However, locals in Mahmoudiyah, a Sunni market town in the heart of the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, say relatives of the dead girl's family with contacts to insurgent groups asked them to take a "blood for blood" revenge.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05