Doug Lorimer
"Word that US Marines may have killed two dozen Iraqi civilians in 'cold-blooded' revenge after an insurgent attack has shocked Americans but many Iraqis shrug it off as an every day fact of life under occupation", Reuters reported on May 28, adding: "Despite US military denials, many Iraqis believe the killing of men, women and children at the hands of careless or angry American soldiers is common."
The allegation that last November marines deliberately killed 24 unarmed civilians in the western town of Haditha is the subject of an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and a separate US military probe into the cover-up of the massacre.
The investigations were initiated after Time magazine presented US military officials in Baghdad in January with the findings of its own investigation, based on survivors' accounts and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha's hospital and inside victims' houses. Time published the results of its investigation on March 19, a week after the NCIS investigation was initiated.
On November 20, Marine Corps spokesperson Captain Jeffrey Pool issued a statement claiming that a "US marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha". However, Time found that the Iraqi civilians, including children as young as three, were not killed by a roadside bomb, but in execution-style murders during a three to five hour sweep of houses by a dozen marines.
Even after Time published its account, the Marine Corps command claimed that all of the Iraqi men who were killed in the incident were armed "insurgents", and blamed the deaths of the unarmed women and children on Iraqi resistance fighters because they had "placed non-combatants in the line of fire as the marines responded to defend themselves".
At a May 17 news conference in Washington, US member of Congress John Murtha, a former marine colonel and a Vietnam War veteran, announced that sources within the US military had told him that the NCIS investigation would show that there had been no firefight with Iraqi guerrillas and that the marines had killed the 24 Iraqis "in cold blood" after a member of a marine convoy had died as a result of a roadside bomb.
"An IED [improvised explosive device] exploded. It killed one marine", Murtha said. "And then a taxi drives up. When the taxi comes up, there's four or five people in it. And [the marines] shoot those four or five people, unarmed. And then, they go on a rampage throughout the houses and kill people in cold blood."
US military sources have subsequently told journalists that Murtha's account of the NCIS investigators' findings was substantially accurate, and that at least three marines are likely to face murder charges.
"As US commentators talk of 'Iraq's My Lai' and wonder if Haditha could have a similar effect as the 1968 massacre in Vietnam on public attitudes to the military and the war, few Iraqi leaders have mentioned the incident in a town 220km northwest of Baghdad where Sunni rebels were very active", Reuters reported.
At a barber shop in Baghdad's bustling Karrada commercial district, Ahmed Abdel Rahman told Reuters he could not recall a single one of his customers mentioning Haditha. One of them, Salah Mohammed, said: "This sort of thing just isn't unusual."
In Ramadi, 110 kilometres west of Baghdad, where US warplanes have bombed whole residential blocks in an unsuccessful attempt to crush Iraqis' armed resistance, lawyer Abd Mohammed Falah told Reuters: "The US forces have committed more crimes against the Iraqi people than appears in the media. The US defence secretary and his generals should be sent to court instead of two or three soldiers who will be scapegoats."
In an interview with Yes! magazine published last December, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges described the circumstances that make Haditha-type massacres an inevitable result of the US war in Iraq: "It's very similar to what soldiers and marines experienced in Vietnam ...
"You have an elusive enemy ... So you very rarely see your attacker, and this builds up a great deal of frustration. This frustration is compounded by the fact that you live in an environment where you are almost universally despised. Everyone becomes the enemy. And after your unit suffers — after, for instance, somebody in your unit is killed by a sniper who melts back into the slums where the shot was fired from — it becomes easy to carry out acts of revenge against people who are essentially innocent ..."
Hedges added: "One of the frustrating things for those of us who have spent so much time in war zones is to come back and see how those who are guiltiest — those who pushed the country into war, who told the lies that perpetuated the war — are never held accountable."
From Green Left Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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