[NYTr] A Tale of Two Atrocities - Blackwater and Haditha

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan10182007.html

Blackwater and Haditha

A Tale of Two Atrocities

By RAHUL MAHAJAN

The recent public outrage over the conduct of Blackwater Security
mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked massacre of at least 17 Iraqi
civilians in western Baghdad has been heartening; unfortunately, there
has been virtually no attention a far more important concurrent
development -- the ongoing collapse of the military prosecution in the
Haditha massacre.

Paul Bremer's decision at the eleventh hour before his departure in
June 2004 to set all private contractors in Iraq above the law (they
are not subject to Iraqi law, U.S. military law, or U.S. civilian law)
stands out as one of the more cynical decisions of a war that has
redefined cynicism, and attention to that fact is a positive
development.

At the same time, however, all the attention is being focused on an
extremely minor issue. The U.S. military has possibly killed more
civilians in a single incident than all the mercenary companies
operating in Iraq in the last several years. According to Iraq Body
Count, the first U.S. Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004, claimed
the lives of at least 600 Iraqi civilians, out of a total of at least
800 people.

That number is actually cited in a report by the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform regarding Blackwater, but its
implications are hardly appreciated.

According to the same report, since January 1, 2005, Blackwater has
been involved in 195 shooting incidents -- other mercenary companies
all together account for a similar number.

This is the equivalent of a couple of days' worth of shooting incidents
for the U.S. military in Iraq. Not only are there more of them than
there are of private mercenaries (roughly three times the number),
mercenaries do not go on offensive operations or do routine patrolling.
Those are the activities most likely to lead to shooting.

Even if U.S. soldiers are for the most part genuinely more careful
about rules of engagement, the far greater volume of violent incidents
means that it is actually the conduct of the U.S. military, not of
mercenaries, that is the problem.

In that regard, consider the evolution of the prosecution for the
Haditha massacre, one of the most iconic incidents of atrocity by the
U.S. military.

The facts that are not in dispute are these: On November 19, 2005,
after an IED attack that killed one of them, Marines from Kilo Company,
3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment killed 24 people. The first killed were
five men in a car who stopped, got out, and then were mown down.
Afterwards, Marines entered a house and killed 15 civilians, including
three women and seven children, ranging in age from 2 to 13.

In another house, four brothers, all adults, were killed, three of them
with handgun shots to the head. Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, the
killer, said that they were armed and preparing to attack.

The Marines lied about what happened, indicating at first that there
had been a firefight with insurgents and the others had been caught in
the crossfire.

A series of higher-ranking officers didn't bother to investigate.

Court-martial hearings did not begin until this summer, almost two
years after the incident.

Initially, 8 men were charged: Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, Sgt.
Sanick Dela Cruz, Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, and Lance Cpl. Stephen
Tatum, for unpremeditated murder, and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, Capt.
Lucas McConnell, Capt. Randy Stone, and 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, for
dereliction of duty and a series of more minor charges relating to not
investigating or to covering up.

The hearings have been a circus. First of all, they were held in Camp
Pendleton, California, rather than in Iraq, so the Iraqis who witnessed
the events couldn't testify. Second, the families of the victims
refused requests by military interrogators to exhume the bodies for
forensic evidence. Third, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who presided over the
hearings, has been both excessively sympathetic to the defendants and
excessively concerned with the effect that the verdicts will have on
future Marine operations. Fourth, some rather odd plea bargains have
been made.

Most recently, Ware recommended that all charges of murder (originally
13 counts) against Wuterich be dropped and replaced with charges of
negligent homicide only for seven of the murdered women and children
(many of them shot in their beds) -- and has added that he doesn't
think Wuterich would be convicted on those charges either.

According to the testimony of fellow Marines, a week before the
incident, Wuterich said that if something like that happened, they
should kill everyone in the vicinity. Wuterich himself admitted to
ordering his men breaking into the houses to "shoot first and ask
questions later." And, contrary to Wuterich's claim that the first five
men were running away after they got out of the car, Dela Cruz
testified that the men "were just standing, looking around, had hands
up."

Dela Cruz was given immunity for his testimony, but he may have
deliberately made a hash of it, contradicting himself and at one time
admitting that he was lying; events conspired nicely to get him and
Wuterich both off.

Earlier, Ware recommended dropping all charges against Sharratt,
accepting his claim that the execution-style killings of the three men
shot in the head occurred in self-defense in the heat of combat. He
also wanted charges dropped on Tatum, even though fellow Marine Lance
Cpl. Humberto Mendoza testified that Tatum had ordered him to shoot the
seven women and children, even after being informed of their identity
and that they posed no threat.

Charges were dropped against the two captains, Grayson is still under
investigation, and Ware recommended that Chessani be charged with
dereliction of duty, although with none of the actual murderers on
trial, apparently, he was derelict in investigating nothing.

Major General Eldon Bargewell's scathing outside report on the
incident, which, though unclassified, has not been publicly released
because of the ongoing hearings, found that "All levels of command
tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as
routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,"
adding, "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for
this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives
are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of
doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no
matter what it takes." He also found that found that "virtually no
inquiry at any level of command was conducted," that officers looked at
reports of civilian casualties as pro-insurgent propaganda to suppress
and spin, and that reports filed by senior officers were "forgotten
once transmitted."

Even so, no higher officers faced criminal charges; three were
reprimanded.

Of course, not every court-martial in the Iraq war has been such a
farce. The men who raped 14-year-old Abeer Hamza in Mahmudiyah, killed
her family, then killed her and set her corpse on fire got severe
sentences. In the Hamdaniyah case, where a squad of Marines murdered an
innocent man and then planted a shovel on him to suggest that he was
placing an IED, Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was actually sentenced to 15
years, although it remains to be seen if he will serve his time; most
of his accomplices got slaps on the wrist and are already out of jail.

The Haditha case is different from the others. It is not essential to
U.S. military strategy in Iraq to leave soldiers free to rape and
murder little girls or even to murder the wrong man when you're looking
for insurgents; in fact, the military has an interest in discouraging
such behavior. Aggressive house raids in which soldiers feel free to
"shoot first and ask questions later," have been, however, fundamental
to U.S. practice in Iraq; even Lt. Col. Ware, departing from his
ostensible role as prosecutor, expressed concern about the chilling
effect convictions would have on Marines operating in Iraq.

Overall, the record of accountability for atrocities committed by U.S.
soldiers is pathetic. Soldiers who kill prisoners in custody routinely
get administrative punishment; missing a troop movement gets a
court-martial, but murdering a helpless man rarely does. In the
particularly brutal killing of two young men in Bagram prison, in which
soldiers testified that they used to assault one of them, Dilawar, a
22-year-old taxi driver, just because they liked to hear him scream
"Allah!" in pain, nobody was charged with murder, on the incredibly
specious reasoning that, since 27 different people used to enjoy
torturing him, there was no way to determine which "unlawful knee
strike" caused him to die. Try using that defense if you're a young
black kid holding up a 7-11 when one of your accomplices shoots the
clerk. Contractors may be subject to no law, but the law soldiers are
subject to is rarely much better than nothing.

During the course of this trial, we learned that Marine rules of
engagement allowed them to shoot in the back unarmed people running
away from the scene of a car bomb explosion, even if there was no
reason to connect them with the attack. We learned that in the second
assault on Fallujah (in November 2004), approved procedure was to
"clear" rooms by tossing in fragmentation grenades blind -- even though
initial estimates were that perhaps as many as 50,000 civilians
remained in the town -- and that many Marines used the same technique
afterward in other areas. We learned about the routine practice of
dead-checking -- if a man is wounded, instead of offering him medical
aid, shoot him again, on the principle that "If somebody is worth
shooting once, they're worth shooting twice." One of the Marines
testified in the hearings that they were taught this practice in boot
camp.

A sleepwalking nation paid little attention to these revelations. When
future histories of the war are written, it will probably accept
statements that the hearings proved the Haditha massacre was a hoax.

But we will all remain united in righteous indignation against
peripheral targets.

[Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes, with regularly
updated commentary on U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and
the state of the American Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice,
and was in Fallujah during the siege in April. His most recent book is
Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He can be
reached at rahul at empirenotes.org ]