Ishaqi Massacre Emerges in Wake of Haditha
The BBC has received video footage that appears to implicate US troops in the killing of 11 Iraqi civilians at Ishaqi on March 15, and in a subsequent cover-up attempt. The BBC report, and interviews with local police, along with the video, supplied by a Sunni religious group that opposes the US presence in Iraq, suggests the following narrative: The US military got a tip that an al-Qaeda (i.e. probably Salafi Jihadi) operative was in this house in Ishaqi. They went there, and appear to have shot up the inhabitants, thinking that they would be killing members of an al-Qaeda cell. The bullet wounds do not appear to be short-range ones. In fact, they killed a grandmother and 8 children, with 2 others. I presume that the GIs left the scene long enough for an Iraqi to come in and videotape.
It is alleged that the US troops then came back and collapsed the building. They reported that the building collapsed in the course of their assault on an al-Qaeda safehouse, killing 4 civilians. But the collapse appears to be after the fact and part of a cover-up. The killings themselves, bad as they are, are not as bad as what is reported from the previous November at Haditha, since the long-range bullet wounds may indicate that they went in, guns blazing, before they realized who they were killing. At Haditha, it appears that Marines were just taking revenge on civilians for the killing that morning of one of their own. What is scarey at Ishaqi, if the story is borne out, is the cover-up.
You wonder how many of the innocuous-sounding US military reports on casualties in such operations hide crimes and cover-ups. And, that the Ishaqi tape is getting play on the BBC is almost certainly a result of the revelation of the Hadith massacre. Scandal begets scandal. The Western mass media are now more predisposed to credit such evidence, which means they will likely receive more and more such evidence.
My estimation is that the number of Iraqis in Anbar Province who said it was all right to attack US troops doubled to 80 percent in 2006 from 40-odd percent in January of 2004. Doubled. And Ishaqi and Haditha and lots of similar such incidents are the reason for this doubling. The doubling, by the way, equals the loss of the counter-insurgency struggle in the Sunni Arab heartland. The errors and sometimes crimes were not just costly. They were fatal.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/02/2006 12:14:00 AM
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One aspect of the occupation that is especially offensive to Iraqis is the widespread and wanton violence inflicted by mercenaries. These hired soldiers are not under the command of US officers, they are supervised by corporate executives. There are over 3,500 US, British, Australian and South African mercenaries earning over $10,000 per month each. Then there are another 27,000+ Nepalese Ghurkas, El Salvadorans, Bengalis and others making about 20% of that rate. None of these well-armed and trigger-happy killers are answerable to the Iraqi Government. While they are supposedly subject to prosecution under the UCMJ through the Military and Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, not a single one has been.
Title 5 of the US Code, section 5108, known as the "Anti-Pinkerton Act," prohibits the US Government from hiring mercenaries.
If US public opinion could just gel around the simple step of getting rid of the mercenaries, as inconsistent with core American values, the situation would be much better for the IRaqi motoring public. Let's start there.
As a few of these many wanton massacres begin to see the light of day, we continue to see lived out what Solomon wrote - the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. Even when trying to do right by their lights the Americans can only be cruel: nothing is clearer in this whole Iraqi adventure.
And that wickedness is simply this: being full of their own superiority and virtue, and hence the inferiority of all others, who may therefore be treated with contempt in countless ways, wanton murder being only one. Justice and mercy can be done only by those who really want to know about their injustice and cruelty, just as good computer programs can only be written by those who really want to find the bugs in them. And that sure isn't the American people!
This is the Indian wars, the torture and rape of slaves, the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the Philippine-American War, the millions slaughtered in Indochina, and the hundreds of thousands through genocide by embargo in Iraq even before the invasion - since which it is of course much worse. That people can have such a history of bloody crimes is bad enough. But in the face of this history to be able to breezily judge themselves the most marvelous people the world has ever seen is way over the top. That a nation such as this has over 10,000 nuclear bombs which it keeps threatening to use, demonstrating that mentality through its radiological warfare with U-238 dust, is terrifying.
A nation in such shape must lose, and big, like Japan and Germany 60 years ago, if it is to find redemption. And oncoming climate change caused by its wanton luxury reminds us that there is a limit to how much more our civilization can take if that doesn't happen soon.
Any American success in Iraq will only make it someone else's turn. Who can dare to sentence millions of people to that and be called a decent human being?
The "few bad apples" defence is starting to look a little threadbare, even to US citizens raised on a diet of Pentagon propaganda. I just heard the highly reputable English journalist John Simpson say "things like this happen All The Time". You must have seen Dair Jamahl's recent piece, "Countless My Lais in Iraq", and now we hear the military leadership is threatening its grunts with additional morality and ethics training. What happens if they fail, do they get to be Congresscritters?
You have to wonder what Bush means by the term "win". If that were ever possible, the opportunities seem to recede every day, mainly as a result of uncontrolled mayhem and murder on the part of foreign invaders who should, and must, know better. It looks very much like the US is eliminating its own credibility and influence in the Middle East and right across the world day by day, bullet by bullet. The sooner some of that style of "democracy" and "freedom" comes home to roost, the better off we'll all be. Let's see who, if anyone, is held accountable for the latest round of tragedies.
The killings themselves, bad as they are, are not as bad as what is reported from the previous November at Haditha, since the long-range bullet wounds may indicate that they went in, guns blazing, before they realized who they were killing. (..) What is scarey at Ishaqi, if the story is borne out, is the cover-up.
This is only hypotheses, looks as if you were trying to find a "honorable" excuse for this killing. But if the US responsible troops felt the need to cover up the story, doesn't that show that they were more guilty than you pretend ? Further, since when can you assume that a house only contain "terrorists" and not innocent civilians from far away ? Looks like for the US you can kill ten innocent civilians provided there is the probability of one "terrorist" along.
These stories of US war crimes are getting more and more frequent recently. Since the beginning, the Iraqis have complained about the US troops "rules of engagement", a pudic wrapping of words for a blunt right to kill and which has caused many many innocent deaths since the beginning. War is always dirty and I've always wondered why we weren't getting more of that kind of reports.
But what we see recently is a real uggly turning in the war, where troops have lost all discipline and all moral.
Concerning the sinking support of the US public opinion for the Iraq war, it is welcome of course, although it is probably more a result of them realizing the quagmire, rather than them feeling guilty to have invaded a country which didn't threat them. They are changing their mind because the US isn't winning, not because of any moral reason. Yet, the preemptive war theory which they bought in 2002-2003, was the one used by Hitler. There are many striking analogies between the III Reich and the Neocon/Bushiest alliance : the way the propaganda was designed before/during the war (lies constantly repeated untill they become "truth", smearing and relentless attacks against any dissenting voice, stigmatizing of any opposer as unpatriotic, etc..), the preemptive war theory and last but not least, the "blitzkrieg" character of the invasion itself, which was completed in a few weeks. What I hope is that the US/UK authorities who have engaged in all these war crimes will be brought in front of a Court like the Nuremberg one and judged for what they did.
I wonder what evidence is currently being cited to suggest that the Ishaqi victims were killed at "long range." The incident was actually reported back in March by Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032006B.shtml
Recently interviewed on "Democracy Now" by Amy Goodman, Schofield reported that the Iraqi police are saying the victims had their hands bound in front with flexicuffs.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/30/1332253
The wounds also had a small entry but very large exit wounds, so that it was not possible to determine the caliber of bullet. It appears that some special bullet was being used that is not ordinarily issued to U.S. ground troops.
BBC today had a scathing report on this new massacre. A retired British captain was very critical of US military training for the current mission and pointed out differences in training and in point of view between British and American troops.
This is the most critical report by BBC that I have seen since the aftermath of the Hoon report.
The fatal flaw in Bush's plan for Iraq is reliance on the military. To paraphrase the war criminal Rumsfeld, "militaries do what militaries do," i.e. kill people who resist them. They were not the right type of force to combat the nascent insurgency that the U.S. was facing in the first year of occupation.
We don't know if Iraq even could have been salvaged, however doing so would have required making all the right moves instead of all the wrong ones. It's not "20/20 hindsight" to say that it was a mistake for Chalabi/Bremer to fire the Iraqi Army because many forcefully objected at that time. It doesn't take a consummately skilled diplomat to see that if you had wanted to win over the Iraqi people, all you had to do is get their buy-in by providing services, jobs and profits for Iraqis.
If the arrogant, greedy bastards had done all this, just maybe the resistance could have been allowed to flare up and burn itself out without massive military force. But I guess that is one of Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" that historians will study and argue about far into the future.
There was enough evidence coming out about the Ishaqi incident to make is very suspect right from the start. The Haditha was a cover up.
I don't think there is evidence that the bullet wounds are long distance - or at least, I have not seen it. The photos that came out about the Ishaqi deaths looked like close range wounds.
Lots of kids killed in that one.
There are news reports from the town of Ishaqi that claim the victims of the American shooting there were found with plastic flexicuffs on - even the children.
Which, if true, would indicate the shooting was pre-meditated.
I have seen lots of pictures of Iraqi children in their homes with plastic flexicuffs on while the US troops are there, so it is routine to do that I guess. Keep those kids under control.
What about those Agence France Presse photographs that supposedly showed the victims bound? Wouldn't that suggest that the U.S. troops (if they did kill the civilians) killed them at close range, rather than going into the house with guns blazing?
I admit making sense of these multiple stories, all with slightly different details, has me very confused.
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