Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians – including women and children cowering in their own homes – in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged "with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime," as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon's "military justice" system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday's announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.
Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself – and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the ki llings, now says "it's clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward." Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground – yet the incident was a "legal fiction" – "no massacre occurred."
The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq – a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:
Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.
Even the indictment of Wuterich contains
mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes,
alleges "that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a
residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted
to unlawful killing 'in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate
provocation.'"
"Adequate provocation" to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold
blood – or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, "the heat
of sudden passion."
Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24
innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha – now
confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources – to the infamous My
Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of
civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that
gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.
For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared
to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation – from
its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked
arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence – is a war crime of almost
unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single
day, year after year after year.
....Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the
carnage [at Haditha]. "One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child,
kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer," the Sunday Times reports.
"They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other
victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes."
The victims "included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,"
the Observer reports. "In one house an entire family, including seven
children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl
survived." A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the
attackers had "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership."
Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that
a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war.
There has indeed been a "total breakdown in morality and leadership" in
Iraq; but it's not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the
inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and
aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its
predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.
This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten
through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme
manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies – a majority of
U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show – and
sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on
knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation
of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why
then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the
many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against
the infected tide.
These massacres aren't just momentary outbursts of revenging anger;
they're learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were
veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There
they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since
World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a
cut-off of the city's water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war
crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city's
residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in
their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the
house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans' first
targets were the city's hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely
admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were
destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to
prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the
outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the
U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of
chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000
people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.
The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible
target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus
there was no real military purpose to the city's destruction, which had
been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a
collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole,
non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition
conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught
by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in
Haditha.
...Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few "bad apples"
but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an
outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite
detention, "extrajudicial killing," rendition and concentration camps
official national policy. This moral rot is Bush's true historical
legacy.
It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and
presidential candidate who fails to stand up – right now, today, and
every single day – and demand that this abomination come to an
immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of
justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama's "elevating rhetoric" or
Hillary's "tough fight-back" in New Hampshire – or any of the other
soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign – when this innocent
blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has
gripped this nation – and we are all of us, every single one, tainted
and corrupted by it...and are passing it on to our children. Who will
break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these
crimes?
Thats really bad .. i feel the culprits should be given the punishment of hang till death.
1
January 06, 2008
michaelcollins: This should be said over and over by all of us. Outstanding
One point for your consideration. I wrote this recently. A fair number of well informed people wrote and said they had no idea about the orphans or the level of death (1.2 mil.) and injured. I see the citizens in an "us versus them" situation. They lied non stop. They controlled the media which lied non stop. They used the most provocative lies to manipulate support for the war. Hence, almost all of the citizens who supported the war did so based on false information with limited alternatives in 2003. I'm hoping that the people, us, will display the appropriate sense of betrayal and bring them to justice, for the first time ever in our history.
Those tiny few who engineered the illegal invasion and the enablers in Congress who most certainly knew that this was a pack of lies well before the Iraq War Resolution are all guilty, in varying degrees, for this atrocity.
Thanks for this!
2
January 07, 2008
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