Features » January 7, 2008

The Fog of War Crimes (cont’d)

Of the other four charged with the lesser offense of failing to report the incident, or obstructing the investigation—only two remain under indictment. One of them, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, is the most senior U.S. servicemen to face a court martial for action in combat since Vietnam. He is not being charged for allowing the crimes to happen, but for violating a lawful order and willful dereliction of duty for failing to report and investigate the deaths.

In cold blood?

The cases will hinge not on what happened or why, but how: Was it a rage-induced rampage or a by-the-book operation? The answer to that question depends on which side of the gun you’re on.

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who chairs the Subcommittee on Defense in the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters in May 2006 that the investigations would reveal that “our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”

But soldiers are not supposed to kill in cold blood. “War is not a license,” wrote Telford Taylor, a lead-prosecutor at Nuremberg, in Vietnam, an American Tragedy. “It does not countenance the infliction of suffering for its own sake or for revenge.”

Thabet, the Iraqi journalism student who filmed the aftermath at Haditha, saw rage, telling Time: “They not only killed people, they smashed furniture, tore down wall hangings and when they took prisoners, they treated them very roughly. This was not a precise military operation.”

Not so, says Wuterich. “We reacted to how we were supposed to react to our training and I did that to the best of my ability,” he told “60 Minutes.” “The rest of the Marines that were there, they did their job properly as well. We cleared these houses the way they were supposed to be cleared.” Lt. William Kallop ordered Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich to “clear” one of the homes. He was granted immunity from future prosecution in exchange for his testimony.

Another Marine, Lance Cpl. Humberto Manuel Mendoza, who was not indicted, told investigators that he shot at least two people: “I was following my training that all individuals in a hostile house are to be shot.” Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, whose murder charges were dropped in exchange for his testimony against Wuterich, testified that after riddling dead bodies with automatic fire, he urinated on the head of one corpse. “I know it was a bad thing what I done, but I done it because I was angry T.J. was dead.”

‘I was just following orders’

Justifying crimes with assertions that “we reacted to how we were supposed to react to our training” is not new. It echoes Befehl ist Befehl—I was just following orders—words Nazi leaders accused of war crimes used to justify their actions. The Nuremberg Tribunals following World War II found many of them guilty, sentencing them to death or life in prison.

The tribunals placed the conscience of the individual above the will of military superiors. “In the military, there is a culture of compliance, fear, blind obedience, silence,” says Camilo Mejía, 32, who joined the Army when he was 19 and went to prison rather than return to Iraq. Mejía served in the Florida National Guard and went to Iraq as staff sergeant in 2003. “Behavior is suggested and implied. The expectation is that if everyone else is doing it, you should do it.”

At a detention facility in Al Assad, Mejía’s unit was responsible for keeping prisoners awake for long periods of time in preparation for interrogation. In an interview, he described their job as “sleep deprivation with loud sounds, mock executions, treating them as sub-humans.” His unit performed this long enough to “see that this was a systematic problem from the very top,” says Mejía. “They had set the tone and the work. We just followed suit. No one sat us down and said, ‘We want you to commit war crimes.’ But they communicated what we were supposed to do, and that was war crimes.”

In June 2004, Mejía told CBS’s “60 Minutes II” about the 12 or 13 Iraqis he and his men killed in Ramadi, mostly civilians caught in the crossfire. “Whether you want to admit it or not to yourself, this is a human being,” Mejía. “And I saw this man go down and I saw him being dragged through a pool of his own blood and that shocked me.”

In war, Mejía says, “committing war crimes is what you are expected to do.”

Hamdaniya

The month after the Haditha massacre became news, the Marines found themselves shamed by another atrocity. On April 26, 2006, Marines based in Hamdaniya dragged Hashim Ibrahim Awad, a 52-year-old man and father of 11 children, from his home in the middle of the night, bound his hands and feet and shot him to death. The Marines’ plan was to snatch a suspected insurgent said to be behind a rash of roadside bombings and who had been repeatedly captured but released. When the Marines could not find him, they kidnapped and killed the man’s neighbor instead. Later, they stole an AK-47 and staged the scene so that it appeared that Awad was caught while deploying a roadside bomb.

Seven Marines and a Navy corpsman—who became known as the Camp Pendleton Eight—were charged in the case. During the Article 32 hearings, defense attorneys said the Marines’ superiors told them they were too soft. They had witnessed their superiors beating Iraqi suspects and felt pressured to be more aggressive in an environment where roadside bombs and attacks were constant and assailants melted in and out of the civilian population. Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington testified that the men were “sick of” their rules of engagement and decided “to write our own rules to keep ourselves alive.”

Trent Thomas, a corporal from East St. Louis charged in the case, appeared on “Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees.” When asked if he was ordered to kill Awad: “I really can’t say,” Thomas responded, but later allowed, “I think your leadership plays a huge factor in what you do. That’s all I can say.”

Thomas was demoted to private and received a bad conduct discharge.

Only two of the Camp Pendleton Eight remain in prison. Pennington is expected to serve eight years on a 14-year sentence after a plea agreement, and Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was sentenced to 15 years. But Gen. James Mattis—the same convening authority who made determinations in the Haditha killings—is reportedly considering reducing both sentences.

Abu Ghraib

The world learned about Abu Ghraib from the photos. Piles of naked bodies. A man leashed like a dog. A hooded figure standing on a box with wires hanging from him. A menacing dog inches from a cringing man’s face.

Assertions that the torture was the result of sadistic, bored or under-supervised soldiers have been widely discredited. “There is no way that a handful of low-ranking soldiers could have invented techniques all by themselves that, curiously enough, were used at Guantánamo and at other places in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist at Texas A&M University.

After months of cover-up, the blame was laid at the feet of several low-ranked soldiers, pictured grinning and giving the thumbs-up. Pvt. Lynndie England and Spc. Charles Graner were tried, convicted and sentenced to three and 10 years, respectively. Seven others have been sentenced for abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Only 54 military personnel—a fraction of the more than 600 U.S. personnel implicated in detainee abuse cases throughout Iraq and elsewhere in the war on terror—have been convicted by court martial. And only 40 have been sentenced to prison time, many for less than a year, according to a 2006 analysis by the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project. No U.S. military officer has been held accountable for criminal acts committed by subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility.

International law limps into the breach

Military prosecutors have won convictions against soldiers and Marines in more than 200 cases of violent crimes, including murder, rape and assault against Iraqi civilians, according to a July 27, 2007 New York Times analysis. In some cases, these convictions may come with severe sentences. Federal prosecutors are said to be seeking the death penalty for former Pvt. Stephen Green, who is accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, as well as slaying her parents and younger sister. He will be tried as a civilian because he was discharged before the crimes came to light. This horrific crime is the subject of Brian de Palma’s new movie Redacted.

But seeking the death penalty for Green, sentencing Hutchins to 15 years or court-martialing Wuterich for multiple unpremeditated murders is not the same as seeking justice for war crimes. These three should be held responsible, but the scales of justice are tipped toward scapegoating the convenient foils. They have committed awful and criminal acts, but their guilt cannot be easily separated from those who are the architects of the war.

In November 2006, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a nonprofit legal and educational organization, filed a criminal complaint, asking a German federal prosecutor to open “a criminal prosecution that will look into the responsibility of high-ranking U.S. officials for authorizing war crimes in the context of the so-called war on terror,” according to a CCR statement. On behalf of 12 Iraqi citizens whom the U.S. military detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib, the complaint names former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking U.S. officials. The German court dismissed the case in April 2007, ruling that a U.S. court should hear the charges. But CCR—along with other groups—have filed similar charges in Sweden, Argentina and France.

“This is a case of universal jurisdiction,” says Belinda Cooper, editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg and a professor of human rights and international law at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, “It’s brought under the theory that any country can take jurisdiction of particularly heinous crimes, especially if the country that would normally prosecute them is unlikely to do so.” She continues: “But can you imagine Bush being tried in the U.S. or Putin in Russia for, say, torture of detainees during their administrations? The new international criminal court is not going to touch a Putin or a Bush.”

While these projects inch forward, soldiers are taking matters into their own hands. In March 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will convene new Winter Soldier hearings, modeled on the February 1971 meetings in a Detroit Howard Johnson’s. In the shadow of the My Lai massacre revelations, the hearings provided a platform to more than 125 Vietnam veterans to describe the atrocities they participated in and witnessed. This effort could once again give the United States a chance to listen to soldiers and Marines as they break the silence, hold themselves and each other accountable and demand the same from the architects of the war.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 40% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  War is Hell. That is why sensible leader’s avoid it.
  Bad things happen in wartime. Always has and always will. Especially in a situation where the “enemy” wears no uniform.
  We in the civilian world cannot accurately second guess the guys on the ground under fire. No doubt the Payback Factor is in play.
  This all goes back to a breakdown in leadership, starting at the highest level; the Commander-In-Chief. He mandated a war that had no basis in fact. His real reason ranged from payback, one-upping his daddy,  going after the oil, to just doing as the Shootist told him to do.
  Rummy shares a lot of the blame by refusing to let enough troops go in to really do the job. Tommy Franks has his share of blame for rolling over for Rummy.
  We can’t really blame the soldier. Soldier’s must follow orders. Otherwise we have an uncontrollable Army.
  There have been too many instances of rape and murder that can’t be blamed on the leader’s. Although, had the leader not placed the soldier in that region, it would not have happened.
  The legality of the orders issued to the soldier’s is another question. One that the lower ranks can’t address on their own.
  Major’s and higher ranks are expected to know the Code of Military Conduct and follow it. (All ranks have to follow it. But it is harder for anyone in the lower ranks to fight an illegal order)
  Major’s and higher would likely be dismissed from Service for calling an order Illegal. But they could fight that once they were back Stateside. Assuming that there is a Congress not beholden to Special Interests that want the war continued so they can profit from it.

  Posted by farmer on Jan 9, 2008 at 3:31 PM

  Here’s a useful non sequitar. Miltary suicides are on the increase…could there be a connection?

  This past week a number of civilian psychiatric patients were displaced in this area at local hospitals by a number of miltary personnel who were described as “suicidal”. I initially wondered why the GI’s weren’t sent to a VA.

  Then I remembered this story, heard earlier this week on NPR

  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17929487

  Why is the military seeking civilian psychiatric assistance at this time? Especially as we wonder how far our current fascism has brought us closer to the court in the Hague?

  Posted by minerva_jones on Jan 13, 2008 at 11:06 PM

  It is an unprecedented occurrence for a civilian hospital to suddenly have to accept GI patients, particularly of the psychiatric variety, in the middle of a war, and I think this is a story worth pursuing

  Posted by minerva_jones on Jan 14, 2008 at 12:57 AM

  It may be time for those who pose the political questions of our presidential candidates to ask the candidates when they will begin the process of holding to account those of our agencies personnel in CIA, FBI as well as local swat teams for their outrages against numerous civilians and the deaths they have caused.  Justice is being ignored by those we elect to preserve it.

  Posted by chibiabos on Jan 14, 2008 at 8:24 PM

• register a new account »Posting Security

  To participate in our forums, please register for a free account.

  Username Password

    Remember me
  

  Retreive lost password »

Also featured Empire’s Architecture
Lights! Camera! Collective Action!
Inside the Beast:

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Frida Berrigan

• Defense Budget Shell Game
  Behind the hoopla, military spending continues to rise.Posted on May 29, 2009
• We Arm the World
  The United States once again leads the world in exporting weapons. Posted on January 2, 2009
• 5 Minutes to Nuclear Midnight
  Sixty-three years ago this week, the United States was the first (and last,… morePosted on August 7, 2008
• What We Leave Behind
  From Kosovo to Lebanon, cluster bomb casualties continue to mount Posted on December 11, 2006
• Lawyers Fight for Habeas Rights
  The Military Commissions Act suspends Habeas corpus for foreign citizens accused of hostilities against the U.S.Posted on November 8, 2006