Finally, someone does the job that the US MSM should have done a long time ago: Robert Fisk's op-ed in The Independent is
frontpaged by the UK newspaper.
Even as video and photo evidence as well as a signed police report all seem to contradict the official US story, a military investigation into the alleged Ishaqi massacre has “cleared” the troops of misconduct. The whole explanation stinks, but the US MSM for the most part have no trouble accepting the official version without asking the tough questions, even though both the US military and the Bush administration a number of times previously have provided contradictory and false information about events occurring in Iraq.
Even as it has become clear that two dozen civilians in Haditha – men, women, children, elderly – were victims of a premeditated, bloody massacre which took many hours to unfold -- a massacre which the military subsequently lied about -- the US MSM still accept the premise that this is just a case of a few bad apples.
Robert Fisk and The Independent are not afraid to ask the questions that most of the US MSM will not.
(However, the full article is available at seattlepi.com, where the article’s title is “The way Americans like their war.)”
The way Americans like their war
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Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?
The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of the United States' army of the slums go further?
I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."
What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.
It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya.
We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.
Of course, the allegations of indiscriminate or unnecessary killings of civilians by US forces come not only from independent journalists, Iraqi police reports and countless eye witness accounts, but also from the Iraqi government. Additionally, there have been some claims from US veterans as well as deserters that they have been told to plant a shovel or AK-47 if innocent civillians are killed. This is what appears to have been done in the third case presently under investigation.
Iraq's new leaders have turned on their "liberators". Speaking in Baghdad yesterday, the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, lashed out at the conduct of foreign troops. He called on the Americans to account for what happened at Haditha. He described violence against civilians as commonplace and accused the foreign forces of behaving with no respect for citizens and killing "on a suspicion or a hunch". This is a long way from the gratitude George Bush and Tony Blair surely hoped for when they launched their ill-fated invasion three years ago.
When will the US MSM wake up to the possibilities that thousands of innocent people may have been slain because of a chosen lack of discrimination between “insurgents” and “civilians” – that even though a majority of soldiers and officers may keep a higher standard, such war crimes may indeed be the results of systemic features of the US military presence in Iraq?
What angers me too is the response made by many: "This is war. Such killings happen during war." Anyone who accepts that pathetic tautology as an argument should at least explain how it addresses the issues of morality, international law, and accountablility -- both in Iraq and in Washington. (Update: I should point out that I belive both political leaders, those individual soldiers who commit crimes, and the military as an institution are to blame. Wars do create monsters, but that doesn't mean that all armies have the same level of structural problems, nor that individuals are necessarily blameless.)
Thank you, Robert Fisk, for going further.
For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.
Update:
This paragraph from the
New York Times today, illustrates my point.
Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer.
The commanders have told investigators they had not viewed as unusual, in a combat environment, the discrepancies that emerged almost immediately in accounts about how the two dozen Iraqis died, and that they had no information at the time suggesting that any civilians had been killed deliberately.
So there you have it. Such discrepancies are both
common and viewed as
inconsequential details by military commanders.
If a building is obliterated because it's thought to shield a suspected insurgent, how can there be a crime?
If the frequent occurrence of discrepancies renders investigations unnecessary, how can there be a cover-up?