Marine Testifies: All Iraqi Men are the Enemy
Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 12:21:38 PM PDT
Absolutely chilling testimony in the general court-martial of Marine corporal Trent D. Thomas.
Thomas was one of five Marines charged in the killing of an Iraqi civilian in April 2006. Tasked with finding and killing a suspected insurgent leader, they were unable to locate their target. Instead, they found another man, 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad, dragged him from his home, killed him, and then planted a weapon near the body to make it look as though he had engaged them in a firefight. Five other servicemen have already entered guilty pleas on various charges resulting from the killing.
One of Thomas's Marine comrades testified yesterday that he saw nothing wrong with the killing.
According to Marine corporal Saul H. Lopezromo, the orders came down from Marine Corps officers: "We were told to crank up the violence levels ... We beat people, sir." According to Cpl. Lopezromo, all Iraqi men are considered by Marines to be part of the insurgency. The killing, he said, wasn't an execution; it was merely "killing the enemy." Lopezromo's thinking may reflect Thomas' own. The two men not only served together, but Lopezromo was one of the co-defendants in a prior assault incident arising from a patrol in which three Iraqi men were allegedly beaten, although charges in that case were later dropped.
The thinking leads to horrific results: according to Lopezromo, the Marines in his unit routinely engaged in a practice he called "dead-checking." Rather than take a wounded enemy prisoner and provide medical care, the Marines would fire rounds into the man to make sure he died. "If somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice," Lopezromo said.
This reasoning, of course, ensures two things: one, that the putative "enemy" will never have a chance to establish his status as an innocent noncombatant, and two, that the actual enemy knows that, even when badly wounded, he might as well fight to the death.
Humane treatment of prisoners isn't something we do to tie our own hands, or just to make ourselves look good; it encourages the enemy to give up even before they've expended their last round of ammunition, and it encourges the civilian population, whose intelligence regarding the actual insurgents is often better than our own, to cooperate with our soldiers.
That cooperation will be hard to come by when they know it condemns their countrymen to a second round when wounded. It's even harder when, as the corporal testified, our soldiers regard everyone as "the enemy."
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