USA Gunning Down Innocent People - No Remorse, No Responsibility

All American soldiers are supposed to believe--indeed have to believe, 
along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald 
Rumsfeld--that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over 
Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close 
allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of 
the equation), are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war 
on terror". Special forces soldiers are now being told by their officers 
that the "war on terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as 
if in some miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too 
how the Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability 
bracket--unless they can be described as "Baath party remnants", 
"diehards" or "deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.

Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. 
Ordinary Iraqis--many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein--are 
attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad 
area alone.

No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the 
streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about 
their own government.

when I suggested to a group of US military police near Abu Ghurayb they 
would be voting Republican at the next election, they fell about 
laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should never have been sent 
here," one of them told me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can 
tell me: why were we sent here?"

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys 
under attack--or who merely pass the scene of an American raid--are 
being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these 
killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers 
"obeyed their rules of engagement"--rules that the Americans will not 
disclose to the public.

The rot comes from the top.

Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces declined to 
take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We do not do body 
counts," General Tommy Franks announced.

Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster 
bombs on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a 
butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during 
the raid was not even transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The 
Pentagon then said there were "no indications" cluster bombs had been 
dropped at Hillah--even though Sky TV found some unexploded and brought 
them back to Baghdad.

I first came across this absence of remorse--or rather absence of 
responsibility--in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani.

They never even bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out the 
identities of the men they killed--an obvious step if they believed they 
had killed "terrorists"--and inform their relatives. Scenes like this 
are being repeated across Iraq daily.

Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian 
organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of 
the US army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account 
for their own role in killing civilians.

"It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in 
Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really 
incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths."

on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single 
soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians--even when the 
fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities.

part of the fantasy world inspired by the right-wing ideologues in 
Washington who sought this war--even though most of them have never 
served their country in uniform. They dreamed up the "weapons of mass 
destruction"

is it any surprise that American troops in Iraq understand neither their 
war nor the people whose country they are occupying?

Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the difference?
*
Gunned down with abandon*

* By Robert Fisk
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5743.htm
*
Feb 22, 2004: (The New Nation) Running the gauntlet of small arms fire 
and rocket-propelled grenades after check-in at Baghdad airportBaghdad, 
Iraq --I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I 
realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of 
the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks 
so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim 
Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home 
down the road--"Dreamland", the Americans call it--but this was not the 
extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked 
by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom 
fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain 
Cirino called them--and rightly so.

Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe--indeed 
have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary, 
Donald Rumsfeld--that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring 
over Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close 
allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of 
the equation), are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war 
on terror". Special forces soldiers are now being told by their officers 
that the "war on terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as 
if in some miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too 
how the Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability 
bracket--unless they can be described as "Baath party remnants", 
"diehards" or "deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.

Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. 
Ordinary Iraqis--many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein--are 
attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad 
area alone. And Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, 
where America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles 
and--no doubt--fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla war against 
American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect, are indeed 
themselves the "terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", 
the local cops--his first line of defence--would be very angry indeed.
No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the 
streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about 
their own government. US troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth 
their President or Secretary of Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters 
(who have about the same status in the eyes of the occupation 
authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US military police near 
Abu Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at the next election, they 
fell about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should never have been 
sent here," one of them told me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you 
can tell me: why were we sent here?"

Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own 
newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq 
suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, 
that US forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and 
brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and--eyewitness testimony is 
coming from hundreds of Iraqis--stealing money from houses they are 
raiding? No, this is not Vietnam--where the Americans sometimes lost 
3,000 men in a month--nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. 
Not yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of Saddam's 
henchmen. But human-rights monitors, civilian occupation officials and 
journalists--not to mention Iraqis themselves--are increasingly appalled 
at the behaviour of the American military occupiers.

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys 
under attack--or who merely pass the scene of an American raid--are 
being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these 
killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers 
"obeyed their rules of engagement"--rules that the Americans will not 
disclose to the public.

The rot comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of 
Iraq, US forces declined to take responsibility for the innocents they 
killed. "We do not do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So 
there was no apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the 
"Allies"--note how we Brits get caught up in this misleading 
title--bombed a residential suburb in the vain hope of killing Saddam. 
When US special forces raided a house in the very same area four months 
later--hunting for the very same Iraqi leader--they killed six 
civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and only 
announced, four days later, that they would hold an "inquiry". Not an 
investigation, you understand, nothing that would suggest there was 
anything wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in due course 
the "inquiry" was forgotten--as it was no doubt meant to be--and nothing 
has been heard of it again.
Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster 
bombs on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a 
butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during 
the raid was not even transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The 
Pentagon then said there were "no indications" cluster bombs had been 
dropped at Hillah--even though Sky TV found some unexploded and brought 
them back to Baghdad.

I first came across this absence of remorse--or rather absence of 
responsibility--in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two 
men had run a new American checkpoint--a roll of barbed wire tossed 
across a road before dawn one morning in July--and US troops had opened 
fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle 
burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men were burned inside, 
the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded their 
armoured vehicles and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit 
the hospital mortuary to find out the identities of the men they 
killed--an obvious step if they believed they had killed 
"terrorists"--and inform their relatives. Scenes like this are being 
repeated across Iraq daily.

Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian 
organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of 
the US army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account 
for their own role in killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US 
soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's 
Joe Stork said. "But it is really incredible that the US military does 
not even count these deaths." Human Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi 
civilians killed by Americans in the capital. The organisation also 
criticised American forces for humiliating prisoners, not least by their 
habit of placing their feet on the heads of prisoners. Some American 
soldiers are now being trained in Jordan--by Jordanians--in the 
"respect" that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the 
culture of Islam. About time.

But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a 
single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians--even when 
the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. 
No action has been taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a 
single shot through the window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his 
translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd 
Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in Fallujah in 
April. (Captain Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops who 
shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of low 
morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for example, the 
"Coalition Provisional Authority"--which is what the occupation 
authorities call themselves--have instructed local money changers not to 
give dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers: too many Iraqi 
dinars had been stolen by troops during house raids. Repeatedly, in 
Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that 
they were robbed by American troops during raids and at checkpoints. 
Unless there is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide scale by Iraqis, 
some of these reports must bear the stamp of truth.

Then there was the case of the Bengal tiger. A group of US troops 
entered the Baghdad zoo one evening for a party of sandwiches and beer. 
During the party, one of the soldiers decided to pet the tiger 
who--being a Bengal tiger--sank his teeth into the soldier. The 
Americans then shot the tiger dead. The Americans promised an 
"inquiry"--of which nothing has been heard since. Ironically, the one 
incident where US forces faced disciplinary action followed an incident 
in which a US helicopter crew took a black religious flag from a 
communications tower in Sadr City in Baghdad. The violence that followed 
cost the life of an Iraqi civilian.
Suicides among US troops in Iraq have risen in recent months--up to 
three times the usual rate among American servicemen. At least 23 
soldiers are believed to have taken their lives since the Anglo-American 
invasion and others have been wounded in attempting suicide. As usual, 
the US army only revealed this statistic following constant questioning. 
The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad--up to 50 in a night--go, 
like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling back from Fallujah 
to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer 
fire around 13 American bases--not a word of which was later revealed by 
the occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month, five mortar 
shells fell near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding 
passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with my own eyes. That same 
afternoon, General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, 
claimed he knew nothing about the attack, which--unless his junior 
officers are slovenly--he must have been well aware of.

But can we expect anything else of an army that can wilfully mislead 
soldiers into writing "letters" to their home town papers in the US 
about improvements in Iraqi daily life.

"The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely 
restored, and we are a large part of why it has happened," Sergeant 
Christopher Shelton of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment bragged in a 
letter from Kirkuk to the Snohomish County Tribune. "The majority of the 
city has welcomed our presence with open arms." Only it hasn't. And 
Sergeant Shelton didn't write the letter. Nor did Sergeant Shawn Grueser 
of West Virginia. Nor did Private Nick Deaconson. Nor eight other 
soldiers who supposedly wrote identical letters to their local papers. 
The "letters" were distributed among soldiers, who were asked to sign if 
they agreed with its contents.

But is this, perhaps, not part of the fantasy world inspired by the 
right-wing ideologues in Washington who sought this war--even though 
most of them have never served their country in uniform. They dreamed up 
the "weapons of mass destruction" and the adulation of American troops 
who would "liberate" the Iraqi people. Unable to provide fact to 
fiction, they now merely acknowledge that the soldiers they have sent 
into the biggest rat's nest in the Middle East have "a lot of work to 
do", that they are--this was not revealed before or during the 
invasion--"fighting the front line in the war on terror".

What influence, one might ask, have the Christian fundamentalists had on 
the American army in Iraq? For even if we ignore the Rev Franklin 
Graham, who has described Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion" 
before he went to lecture Pentagon officials--what is one to make of the 
officer responsible for tracking down Osama bin Laden, 
Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, who told an audience in 
Oregon that Islamists hate the US "because we're a Christian nation, 
because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian and the enemy 
is a guy called Satan". Recently promoted to deputy under-secretary of 
defence for intelligence, Boykin went on to say of the war against 
Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia--in which he participated--that "I knew 
my God was bigger than his--I knew that my God was a real God and his 
was an idol".

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said of these extraordinary remarks 
that "it doesn't look like any rules were broken". We are now told that 
an "inquiry" into Boykin's comments is underway--an "inquiry" about as 
thorough, no doubt, as those held into the killing of civilians in Baghdad.

Weaned on this kind of nonsense, however, is it any surprise that 
American troops in Iraq understand neither their war nor the people 
whose country they are occupying? Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's 
the difference? 

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the 
Nation.

-- 
Spokane  -  www.AT7.us  -  Easy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For A Better World For Everyone - People and Nature
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