U.S. War Crimes

Actions of U.S. military in Fallujah assailed by world; human rights officials want accounting of siege

By Christopher Bollyn

Dearborn, Michigan—During the first 18 days of April the majority of the 117 U.S. military personnel who lost their lives in Iraq died in a brutal offensive on the Sunni city of Fallujah. The U.S. media, however, has largely avoided discussing the details of the costly three-week-old siege.

European and Arabic news outlets, on the other hand, have produced daily reports during the siege, which began in the first week of April. Many of these foreign reports contain first-hand information from people in the besieged city, which suggest that war crimes have been committed.

“More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah since Marines began a siege against Sunni insurgents in the city a week ago, most of them women, children and the elderly, the head of the city’s hospital said Sunday,” the Associated Press reported on April 11.

“Bodies were being buried in two soccer fields filled with row after row of graves,” AP reported. There were also “reports of an unknown number of dead being buried in people’s homes.” There have been numerous reports that U.S. forces seized the city’s main hospital during the opening days of the siege, and prevented injured people from being treated.

CNN reported on April 20 that negotiations in Fallujah could result in the city’s population getting access to the hospital and being allowed to bury their dead, which implies that for three weeks they had not been able to do so.

While U.S.-based CNN International reported on April 11 that 480 Iraqis had been killed in the fighting in Fallujah, it provided no photos or reports from the city. During the next 10 days, as the death toll continued to grow, CNN remained clueless in Fallujah—failing to report about what was actually happening in the besieged city.

CNN, however, was aware of the legal questions concerning the U.S. offensive. On April 5 CNN’s web site carried a lengthy article by legal scholar Phillip Carter about international law and the killing of the four “contractors” from Blackwater Security Consulting in Fallujah on March 31.

Members of a privately contracted army of irregular soldiers in Iraq, the four Blackwater employees carried weapons but wore no uniforms. Carter wrote that the four slain soldiers-of-fortune were “agents of the U.S. government” and could be considered “combatants for the purposes of international law.”

The desecration of the corpses is a war crime, Carter wrote, although it was committed by a leaderless mob of angry Iraqi citizens.

“We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city,” U.S. Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said prior to the military’s planned response to the killings. “It’s going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming.”

International law prohibits any kind of reprisal against the civilians of Fallujah, Carter wrote, but the U.S. military could respond if three principles of international law were met: necessity, proportionality and distinction.

To be legal, the U.S. response “must not intentionally or negligently kill noncombatants,” Carter wrote. “No atrocity may be used to justify an act of retribution against non-combatants.”

After CNN published Carter’s article, however, reports from the foreign press suggest the U.S. response in Fallujah took its heaviest toll among the city’s civilian population.

On April 21, American Free Press asked Carter what he thought about the three-week-old siege of Fallujah. “This is a bloody fight,” Carter said. The American offensive had been “fairly precise,” he said, with “no obvious violations.” Carter said his main sources of information were leading U.S. newspapers.

Asked how the Gatling guns and cannons of an Apache helicopter or the huge AC-130 Spectre gunship firing on a city of 300,000 could distinguish a combatant from a civilian, Carter said: “They are very precise weapons.”

Carter said the people of Fallujah have no right to resist U.S. occupation.

Despite Iraq’s long history of occupation, with Britain being the most recent occupier (from 1914 until 1955), Carter rejected the idea that Iraqis have the right to resist a foreign occupation.

Asked if he would turn his weapons over to foreign troops occupying California, Carter refused to answer.

“Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in Fallujah yesterday,” Dr. Najeeb al-Ani told Jack Fairweather of Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “There is no law on Earth that can justify what the Americans have done to innocent people.”

“I never saw a more despicable and evil action by the Americans,” Dr. Tariq Atham told United Press International. “Even Sharon or Saddam is better. They [U.S. troops] shot children and women in the face and neck every time.”

Dr. Jamal Taha, a doctor at Al Yarmuk hospital, told The Telegraph: “The U.S. is the most developed country in the world, but in Iraq they are barbarians.”

By April 13, Fallujah hospital officials reported 508 Iraqi dead, with 1,224 injured. Of those killed 298 were women and children—58 under the age of five.

“When you see a child five years old with no head, what can you say?” a doctor in Fallujah asked Pacifica Radio.

American Free Press spoke with Mohammed Al Omari, media director from the Southfield, Michigan-based organization Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations (FAAIR) about the events in Fallujah and how the Iraqi people view the siege. Dearborn is home to the largest Iraqi population in the United States.

“It is against the best interest of the United States. It will only build hatred,” Al Omari said from FAAIR’s Baghdad office.

“Using F-16’s to bomb houses and mosques is completely unjustified,” he said. “The people want the U.S. forces to leave the city. The U.S. attacks are antagonizing them.”

Asked about reports of the massacre of mourners in a cemetery by an Apache helicopter, Al Omari said, “That’s true. Then they cordoned off the cemetery.”

Frank Patterson, spokesman for the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, said, “Anybody [in Fallujah] who walks in the street is in danger.”

Asked about the reports of Marine snipers shooting women and children, Patterson said the Marines are trained to shoot “only people with weapons.”

Reports about the newly trained Iraqi forces refusing to join the fight for Fallujah are not accurate, Al Omari said. The only element of the U.S.-trained force that refused to attack the people of Fallujah was the “volunteer” group, which is comprised of Sunni Arabs.

Shiite fighters belonging to militia groups controlled by Ahmed Chalabi and Mr. Hakim of the U.S. appointed governing council did join the battle of Fallujah, as did Kurdish fighters, Al Omari said.

Al Omari said the story was spun to prevent the Iraqi people from learning that Chalabi’s fighters and others from the U.S.-trained Iraqi forces had joined the fight in Fallujah on the side of the Americans. If Iraqis knew this, Al Omari said, the new Iraqi army and its leaders would be rejected by the population. Al Omari said he has unconfirmed reports that U.S. soldiers had dismembered bodies in Fallujah to avenge the mutilation of the corpses of the Blackwater mercenaries.

The U.S. attack against Fallujah had included the use of cluster bombs, he said.

Though official estimates place the number of U.S. troops killed in Fallujah at dozens, Al Omari claimed that “losses on the U.S. side in Fallujah have been in the hundreds.”

The U.S. requested a ceasefire, Al Omari said, after Iraqi fighters cut off their supply lines and a group of U.S. forces in Fallujah was surrounded. Al Omari’s claim is supported by reports in the mainstream media

Urban warfare: Is Iraq a rehearsal for US hoods*?

San Francisco Bay View
National Black Newspaper of the Year

San Francisco, April 21, 2004

[*US slang: Black neighbourhoods]

by Mike Davis

THE young American Marine is exultant. "It's a sniper's dream," he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah.

"You can go anywhere, and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are."

"Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies. Then I'll use a second shot."

"To take a bad guy out," he explains, "is an incomparable adrenaline rush." He brags of having "24 confirmed kills" in the initial phase of the brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of 300,000 people.

Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate terror. According to independent journalists and local medical workers, they have slaughtered at least 200 women and children in the first two weeks of fighting.

The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the "key battlespace of the future" - the Third World city.
The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: "Militarized Operations on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately, a National Defense Panel review in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World.

As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions. "The future of warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared, "lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world."

Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics -- especially the sophisticated coordination of sniper and demolition teams with heavy armor and overwhelming airpower -- so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

Artificial cityscapes -- complete with "smoke and sound systems" -- were built to simulate combat conditions in densely populated neighborhoods of cities like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine Corps Urban Warfighting Laboratory also staged realistic war games ("Urban Warrior") in Oakland and Chicago, while the Army's Special Operations Command "invaded" Pittsburgh.

Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are graduates of these Urban Warrior exercises as well as mock combat at "Yodaville," the Urban Training Facility in Yuma, Arizona, while some of the Army units encircling Najaf and the Baghdad slum neighborhood of Sadr City are alumni of the new $34 million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

THIS tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine has been accompanied by what might be called a "Sharonization" of the Pentagon's worldview. Military theorists are now deeply involved in imagining how the evolving capacity of high-tech warfare can contain, if not destroy, chronic "terrorist" insurgencies rooted in the desperation of growing mega-slums.

To help develop a geopolitical framework for urban war-fighting, military planners turned in the 1990s to the RAND Corp.: Dr. Strangelove's old alma mater. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for war-gaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping plan the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

These days RAND does cities -- big time. Its researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city public health and the privatization of public education. They also run the Army's Arroyo Center, which has published a small library of recent studies on the context and mechanics of urban warfare.

One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early 1990s, has been a major study of "how demographic changes will affect future conflict." The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization of world poverty has produced "the urbanization of insurgency" -- the title, in fact, of their report.

"Insurgents are following their followers into the cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine, nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban counterinsurgency." As a result, the slum has become the weakest link in the American empire.

The RAND researchers reflect on the example of El Salvador, where the local military, despite massive U.S. support, was unable to stop FMLN guerrillas from opening an urban front. Indeed, "had the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the cities earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United States could have done to help maintain even the stalemate between the government and the insurgents."

More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal. "Rapid urbanization in developing countries," writes Capt. Troy Thomas in the spring 2002 issue, "results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned."

Thomas contrasts modern, "hierarchical" urban cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by "informal, decentralized subsystems, where no blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the system are not readily discernable." Using the "sea of urban squalor" that surrounds Pakistan's Karachi as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering challenge of "asymmetric combat" within "non-nodal, non-hierarchical" urban terrains against "clan-based" militias propelled by "desperation and anger." He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other potential nightmare battlefields.

However, Capt. Thomas -- whose article is provocatively entitled "Slumlords: Aerospace Power in Urban Fights" -- like RAND, is brazenly confident that the Pentagon's massive new investments in MOUT technology and training will surmount all the fractal complexities of slum warfare.

One of the RAND cookbooks, "Aerospace Operations in Urban Environments," even provides a helpful table to calculate the acceptable threshold of "collateral damage" -- aka dead babies -- under different operational and political constraints.

The occupation of Iraq has, of course, been portrayed by Bush ideologues as a "laboratory for democracy" in the Middle East. To MOUT geeks, on the other hand, it is a laboratory of a different kind, where Marine snipers and Air Force pilots test out new killing techniques in an emergent world war against the urban poor.

Iraqis Flee Fallujah Carnage, U.S. Troops Set to Storm

Report by Firas al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org
NewsFromtheFront.org

CAIRO (NFTF.org) -- Iraqi negotiators, who were trying to reach a lasting settlement with the U.S. military in the besieged city of Fallujah, told reporters in Baghdad that their protests of last night's intense shelling of the Golan district were met with silence. They claimed the U.S. negotiating team did not address any of the Iraqi grievances.

The U.S. military did not provide any comments.

Meanwhile, helicopter shelling of the Golan district - the train station, in particular - resumed at 2pm, Baghdad time, catching many of the city's residents by surprise since, they claim, no one has fired on U.S. forces in two days. The claim could not be independently confirmed.

Iraqi negotiators had said earlier that U.S. forces had cancelled an awaited patrol and told Fallujah's civic leaders that the patrols could resume on Thursday. U.S. forces, however, reported that one of their patrols came under sniper fire. Conflicting reports of cancelled patrols have not yet been confirmed.

The Al-Jazeera network, the only independent news service reporting from within Fallujah, quoted city residents who claimed that U.S. snipers were shooting at anything that moved. The residents said they were scared to remain indoors for fear of U.S. shelling.

Fallujah hospital staff said they could not reach the shelled areas and had no information about the dead and wounded.

Fallujah mosques were warning residents to brace themselves for a U.S. storming of the city and accused U.S. forces of betraying the ceasefire deals reached in the past week.

Fallujah police have said they handed over to U.S. forces a cache of heavy weapons surrendered by resistance fighters earlier in the week. The U.S. military denied the report.

In other parts of the country, angry demonstrators burned the proposed new flag and said they would never "sell our flag." In Mosul, several thousand high school and university students accused the Iraq Governing Council of betrayal. The new flag - a blue crescent fixed above two blue stripes and a yellow one in the middle - was rejected outright by many in Iraq. The yellow is said to represent the Kurdish minority; the color blue represents the two great rivers of Iraq - the Tigris and Euphrates. Middle East analysts have cast doubt that the flag will be accepted by Iraqis, citing that the only other regional flag with blue stripes, let alone the color blue, is Israel's. The flag was designed in Britain.

In related news, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the Al Mezzeh district of Damascus, Syria, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad told Al-Jazeera in an exclusive interview that the Iraqi resistance is legitimate as it expresses the frustrations and aspirations of a majority of Iraqis.

The terrorist attacks targeted a U.N. civilian compound. Two assailants were said to have been killed by Syrian security and two were captured. The Syrian foreign ministry blamed "external forces" but did not provide further detail.

Syrian security forces said they had found a cache of arms after intense interrogations with the captured men. Syria did not reveal the identity or nationality of the captured men.

YellowTimes.org correspondent Firas al-Atraqchi drafted this report.

New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'

US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com


To get a sense of what Iraqis were thinking a year after the overthrow of former dictator Saddam Hussein, researchers for the Gallup Organization, working with funding from CNN and USA Today, sat down with 3444 Iraqis in March and early April (before the latest outbreaks of violence). They conducted interviews that lasted as long as 70 minutes (often at great personal risk). And what they found does not bode well in the short-term for the US and its allies in Iraq, although it may bode well for the future of Iraq as a democracy.
The survey finds Iraqis mixed on the results of the invasion of Iraq, reports the Washington Post. Forty-two percent of Iraqis say their country is better off, while 46 percent say the US has "done more harm than good" in the past year. The survey also showed significant differences along ethnic/sectarian lines, with Sunnis being strongly negative towards the US-led coalition, Shiites being more positive but growing more negative, while the Kurds in the north were quite supportive of the US (95 percent of Kurds supported the US-led invasion of Iraq).

Other telling findings of the survey were that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, 71 percent (and that figure rises to 81 percent if the Kurdish areas in the north are excluded), now see the US-led coalition as an occupying force and not as liberators. USA Today reports that a solid majority, almost 60 percent, want the US and its allies to leave immediately, even if it means the security situation will deteriorate.

US troops also took a hit in the survey. They are seen by most Iraqis as "uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect for the country's people, religion and traditions."

"One specific Iraqi complaint against US troops is the widespread perception – whether correct or incorrect – that they have been indiscriminate in their use of force when civilians are nearby," said Gallup's director of international polling, Richard Burkholder.
Except for the Kurds in the north, two-thirds of Iraqis say that US troops "make no attempt to keep ordinary Iraqis from being killed or wounded during exchanges of gunfire," while 60 percent say the troops conducted themselves "badly or very badly."
The Guardian reports that one reason that British commanders, for instance, have refrained from sending more troops to Iraq, especially following the withdrawal of troops from Spain, is that they are wary of "getting sucked into operations determined by heavy-handed American tactics."

They [British commanders]have also made no secret of their concern that British troops operating with the Americans elsewhere in Iraq could cause serious problems for troops in the British-controlled area centred on Basra in southern Iraq. "If we do it we'll do it differently," said a senior defense official, referring to the possible deployment of British soldiers elsewhere in Iraq. "We must be able to fight with the Americans. That does not mean we must fight as the Americans."
In an other incident that called into question the behavior of US troops in Iraq, Wednesday night CBS News showed pictures of alleged abuse against Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. According to the photos, US military police stacked naked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid, and "attached wires to one detainee to convince him he might be electrocuted." Last month the US Army announced that six US reservists serving as MPs face a court martial for allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Also, disciplinary actions has been recommended against the seven senior US officials who help run the prison, including Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Brigade.
The Baltimore Sun reports that one of the accused reservists, who is pleading not guilty to the charge, said the problem was with the way the prison was run.

"We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things ... like rules and regulations," said [Staff Sgt. Chip] Frederick, in a phone call with CBS from Baghdad. "And it just wasn't happening."
Al Jazeera reports that Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, US military spokesman in Baghdad, said he was "appauled by the behavior of the soldiers." But, he said in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes II", the few suspects were "not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here... Don't judge your army based on the actions of a few."

More than 50 percent of those surveyed in the Gallup poll said attacks on US troops were "justified" or "sometimes justified," while only a quarter said they were never justified. In the Sunni triangle north of Baghdad, and in Baghdad itself, the number of respondents who said attacks were justified was much higher than the rest of Iraq.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the US is sending more heavy tanks and armored vehicles to deal with the upsurge in attacks on its forces. On Thursday, ten more US troops were killed in Iraq, bringing the total to 126 soliders and marines killed in April alone, more than were killed during the actual invasion of Iraq.

Marines patrolling around Fallujah this week say they can feel the Iraqi anger every day, even when the two sides aren't shooting [reports USA Today]. Marine Lance Cpl. Wes Monks, 23, of Springfield, Ore., says that as he drives around the restive, mostly Sunni city, he sees Iraqis with a knowing, "sarcastic smile. You see it every day. ... We're always the last one to find out when we run over a mine." "I can see their point of view," says Marine Lance Cpl. Mathew Leifi, 20, of Orange, Calif. "If anyone rolled up on my street, I'd be p****d, too."
USA Today also reports that much of the anti-US animosity reflected in the poll is not coming from direct contact with coalition troops, but from watching incidents involving US troops on Arab satellite TV channels. And although most Iraqis can get the pro-US broadcast station, and only about one-third get Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, it's the Arab channels that viewers trust the most, and consider the most 'objective.' The report notes that few Iraqis trust western networks like CNN or the BBC.
The Gallup poll also showed that Iraqis remain optimistic about the future, even if they are copncerned about the present. CNN reports that Iraqis signaled a strong desire to have a democracy, and said that they supported the idea of a transition to an elected government of the kind being advocated by UN special envoy Lakdar Barahimi. Sixty-one precent also said getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth any hardship.

Finally, a new poll conducted by CBS News and The New York Times shows that American support for the war in Iraq has "eroded substantially" over the past few months and that Americans increasingly don't like the way President Bush is handling the conflict.

Asked whether the United States had done the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said it had, down from 58 percent a month earlier and 63 percent in December, just after American forces captured Saddam Hussein. Forty-six percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, up from 37 percent last month and 31 percent in December.
A spokeman for the White House questioned if the poll "accurately reflected public opinion.".