Psyche, Science, and Society

Wikileaks adds evidence to claims of Americans tortured by US forces in Iraq

One of the cases that clearly indicated the extent to which prisoner abuse by US forces was rampant  in Iraq was the case of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, two US whistleblowers who discovered that their employer was bribing troops to obtain arms that were then sold locally. They were held against their will by their employer. When they were rescued by US troops and told US officials of their suspicions, they were themselves imprisoned and tortured in Camp Cropper, one of the notorious US prisons in Iraq. Vance and Ertel are now suing Donald Rumsfeld for authorizing the torture regime to which they were subjected.

An Iraqi blogger pouring over the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs release has found a document that confirms much of Vance and Ertel’s story. Maximilian Forte, at Zero Anthropology has an account. After describing the Vance-Erbil case, he explais the role of the Wikileaks document:

[T]he Wikileaks Iraq War Logs contain a document that lends weight to their claims. That document states that two American civilians were being held captive in a compound and were rescued by coalition forces, and that a large weapons cache had also been found. These two Americans are identified as employees of Shield Group Security, held by SGS against their will. The document also states that the weapons cache belonged to SGS–there is no mention of any suspicion that wrongly connected Vance and Ertel with that stockpile, like their later accusers would allege. SGS is classed in the document by the U.S. Embassy as a “bad employer.”

Forte goes on to conclude:

Perhaps even more shocking and unbelievable is that anyone would dare to argue that the Wikileaks disclosures were a “bad” thing, when such critical information about various crimes–as must be disclosed, and prosecuted–is now receiving attention. Arguing against the leaks is arguing to cover up crimes.

November 14th, 2010

Was Iraqi torture part of US plan?

Reflecting on the recently released Wikleaks Iraq War Logs, Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service argues:

Torture Orders Were Part of US Sectarian War Strategy

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON – The revelation by Wikileaks of a U.S. military order directing U.S. forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the U.S. military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger U.S. strategy of exploiting Shi’a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war.

And Gen. David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shi’a and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi’a and Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show.

That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shi’a rule and was a major contributing factor to the rise of al Qaeda’s influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shi’a violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians – mainly Sunnis – were killed.

The strategy of using primarily Shi’a and Kurdish military and police commando units to suppress Sunni insurgents was adopted after a key turning point in the war in April 2004, when Civil Defense Corps units throughout the Sunni region essentially disappeared overnight during an insurgent offensive.

Two months later, the U.S. military command issued “FRAGO [fragmentary order] 242″, which provided that no investigation of detainee abuse by Iraqis was to be conducted unless directed by the headquarters of the command, according to references to the order in the Wikileaks documents.

The order came immediately after Gen. Petraeus took command of the new Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq (MNSTC-I). It was a clear signal that the U.S. command expected torture of prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi military and police operations against Sunni insurgents.

Petraeus knew that it would take more than two years to build a competent Iraqi military officer corps, as he told Bing West, author of the “The Strongest Tribe”, in August 2004. Meanwhile, he would have to use Shi’a and Kurdish militias.

In September 2004, Petraeus adopted a plan to establish paramilitary units within the national police.

The initial units were from non-sectarian former Iraqi special forces teams. In October, however, Petraeus embraced the first clearly sectarian Shi’a militia unit – the 2,000- man Shi’a “Wolf Brigade”, as a key element of his police commando strategy, giving it two months of training with U.S. forces.

In November 2004, after 80 percent of the Sunni police defected to the insurgents in Mosul, the U.S. command dispatched 2,000 Kurdish peshmurga militiamen to Mosul, and five battalions of predominantly Shi’a troops, with a smattering of Kurds, were to police Ramadi. But a few weeks later, after the completion of its training, the Wolf Brigade was also sent to Mosul.

Hundreds of Shi’a troops from Baghdad and southern areas of the country were also sent into Samara and Fallujah.

It did not take long for the Wolf Brigade to acquire its reputation for torture of Sunni detainees. The Associated Press reported the case of a female detainee in Wolf Brigade custody in Mosul who was whipped with electric cables in order to get her to sign a false confession that she was a high-ranking local leader of the insurgency.

But an official of the U.S. command later told Richard Engel of NBC that the Wolf Brigade had been a very effective unit and had driven the insurgents out of Mosul.

The Wolf Brigade was then sent to Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, where the Association of Muslim Scholars publicly accused it of having “arrested imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump…”

The Wolf Brigade was also deployed to other Sunni cities, including Ramadi and Samarra, always in close cooperation with U.S. military units.

The war logs released by Wikileaks include a number of reports from Samarra in 2004 and 2005 describing how the U.S. military had handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for “further questioning”. The implication was that the Shi’a commandos would be able to extract more information from the detainees than would be allowed by U.S. rules.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, who succeeded Petraeus as the commander responsible for training Iraqi security forces in September 2005, hinted strongly in an interview with Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News three months later that the U.S. command accepted the Wolf Brigade’s harsh interrogation methods as a necessary feature of using Iraqi counterinsurgency forces.

Dempsey said, “We are fighting through a very harsh environment… these guys are not fighting on the streets of Bayonne, New Jersey.” Contrary to the Western notion of “innocent until proven guilty”, he said the view in Iraq was “close” to the “opposite”.

Vargas reported, “For Dempsey, a big part of building a viable police force is learning to accept, if not embrace, the cultural differences.”

A second stage of the strategy of sectarian war against the Sunnis came after the new Shi’a government’s takeover of the Interior Ministry in April 2005. The Shi’a minister immediately filled the Iraqi police – especially the commando units – with Shi’a troops from the Badr Corps, the Iranian-trained forces loyal to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Within days the Badr Corps, along with the Wolf Brigade, began a campaign of mass arrests, torture and assassination of Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere that was widely reported by news agencies.

The U.S. command responded to that development by issuing a new version of the previous order on what to do about Iraqi torture, according to the Wikileaks documents. On Apr. 29, 2005, the U.S. command issued FRAGO 039 requiring reports through operational channels on Iraqi abuse of prisoners using a format attached to the order. But no follow-up investigation was to be made unless directed by higher headquarters.

The former Minister of Interior, Falah al-Naquib, later told Knight-Ridder correspondent Tom Lasseter that he had personally warned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials about the sectarian violence by Badr police commandos against Sunnis. “They didn’t take us seriously,” he lamented.

In fact, the U.S. military and the U.S. Embassy were well aware of the serious risk that the strategy of relying on vengeful Shi’a police commandos to track down Sunnis would exacerbate sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi’a. In May 2005, Ann Scott Tyson wrote in the Washington Post that U.S. military analysts did not deny that the U.S. strategy “aggravates the underlying fault lines in Iraqi society, heightening the prospects of civil strife”.

In late July 2005, when Petraeus was still heading the command, an unnamed “senior American officer” at MNSTC-I was asked by John F. Burns of the New York Times whether the U.S. might end up arming Iraqis for a civil war. The officer answered, “Maybe.”

The U.S.-sponsored Shi’a assault on the Sunnis gave al Qaeda a new opportunity. In mid-2005, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, announced the creation of a special unit, the Omar Brigade, to combat the Shi’a commando torture and death squads. That led to the massive sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad in 2006, when thousands of civilians were dying every month.

1 comment November 2nd, 2010

Britain training troops to abuse prisoners

The Guardian reports [h/t Jeff Kaye] that British forces are being trained to abuse and degrade their captives in violation of the Geneva Conventions:

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. “Get them naked,” it says. “Keep them naked if they do not follow commands.” Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that “Cpers” – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are “valid operational reasons”. It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

The 1949 Geneva conventions prohibit any “physical or moral coercion”, in particular any coercion employed to obtain information.

The revelations come after the Guardian published US military documents leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks revealing details of torture, summary executions and war crimes in Iraq.

[...]

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. “Get them naked,” it says. “Keep them naked if they do not follow commands.” Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that “Cpers” – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are “valid operational reasons”. It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

The 1949 Geneva conventions prohibit any “physical or moral coercion”, in particular any coercion employed to obtain information.

The revelations come after the Guardian published US military documents leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks revealing details of torture, summary executions and war crimes in Iraq.

This revelation provides further evidence that wars of occupation inevitably breed abuses as resistant populations are abused and terrorized.

October 26th, 2010

Iraq War Logs: Early highlights

The Wikileaks release of the Iraq War Logs on Friday has rightly aroused great interest. There has been excellent coverage in English by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (apparently sort of a British version of ProPublica in the US), Aljazeera, and the Guardian. The New York Times also had coverage, some of which was useful, but, as so often with the Times, their presentation was too influenced by official US military perspectives.

Much of the attention has focused upon reports of over 1,000 incidents of torture and detainee abuse by Iraqi government soldiers and police witnessed or reported to US troops. Rather than investigate or take action against Iraqi torturers, US troops were ordered to turn a blind eye to these abuses. In addition to ignoring the torture by Iraqi forces, the US was further complicit in that US forces knowingly turned over prisoners to Iraqi units known and expected to torture.  The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture has called upon the US to investigate these torture claims. The British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has also called for an investigation.

Clegg said: “We can bemoan how these leaks occurred, but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious. They are distressing to read about and they are very serious. I am assuming the US administration will want to provide its own answer. It’s not for us to tell them how to do that.”

Asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, he said: “I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need to be looked at.

“People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking.”

The War Logs also detail horrific and repeated attacks on civilians as well as other potential war crimes, including the killing of guerrillas attempting to surrender, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

CBS News has used the material in a different way. They took the comments made by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ad top generals during one week to the field reports from that week. In what will no doubt be a total surprise, they demonstrate that the US officials lied over and over.

Much has been made of the civilian deaths reported on the Logs. The NYT, true to form, emphasized that most of the reported deaths were Iraqi on Iraqi. This may be true. However, the Logs also provide evidence that many civilian deaths at the hands of US troops were either not reported or were misreported as being deaths of “insurgents.” Thus, in the October 2004 battle for Samarra, the Logs report no civilian deaths, whereas an AP reporter reported 23 women and 18 children among the dead and Iraq Body Count (IBC) reports 48 civilians dead in the battle. And in the brutal April 2004 battle for Fallujah, again, the Logs report not one civilian death while independent reports indicate that hundreds of civilians were killed; IBC estimated that 600 civilians died in that battle.

There are two possible explanations here. One is that the Logs were influenced by a deliberate policy to downplay civilian deaths. The other explanation would be that US troops really could not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Both possibilities are chilling.

These Logs are an amazing resource. They will allow us to systematically compare the war as experienced by US troops with the war as described by US officials, and the war as observed by Iraqis and by independent observers. These comparisons should help us understand, not just the Iraq war, but the very nature of modern counterinsurgency wars of occupation. Perhaps these Logs will help citizens of the US and of the world understand the barbarity of modern warfare and put an end to it.

October 25th, 2010

Wikileaks to unveil Iraq war field reports, hundreds of thousands of them

According to news reports, Wikileaks will soon release hundreds of thousands of Iraq field reports that should provide an amazing view into war as it is actually fought:

Whistleblower website Wikileaks is collaborating with print media in several countries and a number of major television networks, including one or more American media outlets, to release a large number of documents and military field reports related to the Iraq War, Newsweek reported on Thursday.

The release is certain to be larger than the 92,000 documents released that painted a dark picture of the U.S.-led conflict in Afghanistan, which caused significant international controversy and spurred a sharp criticism from nearly every relevant agency in the U.S. Government. Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, said that release will be several weeks from now but he declined to mention any of the media organizations participating in the project.

Overton defined the material held by Wikileaks as the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has happened in U.S. history, and possibly internationally as well. It’s understood that the media organizations participating in the project will be making financial contributions to “help meet production costs” and that each organization will come up with its own take on the material.

Wikileaks has “significantly learned from past experiences” regarding the disclosure of material that would put lives in danger, Overton said. He said that the organization won’t be posting raw U.S. government reports on the web, saying that he sees the group’s job as digging stories out of the raw material and not publishing it in the original form.

September 13th, 2010

Obama praises liar as “patriot”

In his unending campaign to push forward the Bush 3 administration, and to sicken those who voted for him,  Barack Obama  praised George W. Bush as a “patriot” for lying his way into the Iraq war.

In the address, Obama said that although it is widely known that the two disagreed about the war, no one could doubt Bush’s support for U.S. troops, his love for the U.S. and his commitment to the nation’s security.

Obama said there are patriots who supported the war and patriots who opposed it.

Presumably the lying just goes with the territory.

September 1st, 2010

Cockburn and Fisk: The empire’s defeat

As US “combat troops” leave Iraq, leaving only 50,000 troops there for combat, both Robert Fisk and Alexander Cockburn point out that the US suffered a massive defeat in this major test of its ability to “shock and awe” the world into submission.

Fisk:

Instead, the millions of American soldiers who have passed through Iraq have brought the Iraqis a plague. From Afghanistan – in which they showed as much interest after 2001 as they will show when they start “leaving” that country next year – they brought the infection of al-Qa’ida. They brought the disease of civil war. They injected Iraq with corruption on a grand scale. They stamped the seal of torture on Abu Ghraib – a worthy successor to the same prison under Saddam’s vile rule – after stamping the seal of torture on Bagram and the black prisons of Afghanistan. They sectarianised a country that, for all its Saddamite brutality and corruption, had hitherto held its Sunnis and Shias together.

And because the Shias would invariably rule in this new “democracy”, the American soldiers gave Iran the victory it had sought so vainly in the terrible 1980-88 war against Saddam. Indeed, men who had attacked the US embassy in Kuwait in the bad old days – men who were allies of the suicide bombers who blew up the Marine base in Beirut in 1983 – now help to run Iraq. The Dawa were “terrorists” in those days. Now they are “democrats”. Funny how we’ve forgotten the 241 US servicemen who died in the Lebanon adventure. Corporal David Breeze was probably two or three-years-old then.

But the sickness continued. America’s disaster in Iraq infected Jordan with al-Qa’ida – the hotel bombings in Amman – and then Lebanon again. The arrival of the gunmen from Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp in the north of Lebanon – their 34-day war with the Lebanese army – and the scores of civilian dead were a direct result of the Sunni uprising in Iraq. Al-Qa’ida had arrived in Lebanon. Then Iraq under the Americans re-infected Afghanistan with the suicide bomber, the self-immolator who turned America’s soldiers from men who fight to men who hide.

Anyway, they are busy re-writing the narrative now. Up to a million Iraqis are dead. Blair cares nothing about them – they do not feature, please note, in his royalties generosity. And nor do most of the American soldiers. They came. They saw. They lost. And now they say they’ve won. How the Arabs, surviving on six hours of electricity a day in their bleak country, must be hoping for no more victories like this one.

Cockburn:

No, the Empire Doesn’t Always Win

By Alexander Cockburn

“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all—it’s rebranding the occupation…. What is abundantly clear is that the US…has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of the Guardian on August 4.

Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, Uncle Sam still rules the roost in Iraq. They point to 50,000 US troops in ninety-four military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counterterrorism” missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq, swelling up from the present 100,000. “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.”

“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East?” Tariq Ali asked in New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously: “[Iraqis] have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.” But the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the US empire, with a “predominantly Shia army—some 250,000 strong…trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance.”

The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali, is oil. Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies.”

Is it really true that, though the US troop presence has dropped by almost 100,000 in eighteen months, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though US troops no longer patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the US Embassy—deployed in its Vatican City–size compound, mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California—cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs. Neither are the private contractors, whose military role should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like.

Is a Shiite-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani, denounced by Ali as America’s creature, who called Bush on his pledge of free elections in 2005, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunnis, who chose to boycott the elections anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance,” by which Ali means the Sunnis, why does the United States constantly invoke the menace of Shiite Iran and decry its influence in Iraq?

If the Sunni “resistance,” honored without qualification by Ali, ever had a strategy beyond a sectarian agenda, it wasn’t advanced by blowing up Shiite pilgrims and setting off bombs in marketplaces. Muqtada al-Sadr, lamented by Ali as sidelined by the United States and Sistani, has been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.

If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States. Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion–barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion–barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.

Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh…. Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’”

So either the all-powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking or the all-powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, the “war for oil” isn’t in very good shape.

Ali and Milne are being credulous in taking at face value declarations by US officials that the United States is not wholly withdrawing and will stay in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those officials don’t want to see their influence go to zilch, so they have to maintain that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by the steady reduction of troops.

The left—or a substantial slice of it—snatches defeat from the jaws of a decisive victory over US plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.” Yes, Iraq is in ruins—always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should hammer home the message that the US onslaught on Iraq, in terms of its proclaimed objectives, was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.

August 20th, 2010

More on Wikileaks-released video of 2007 US attack on Iraqi civilians

Here is a sample of news reporting and other video on the Wikileaks-released video of the July 2007 US Apache attack in Iraq. First, here is Democracy Now! discussing the video and the incident with Wikileaks‘ Julien Assange and Glenn Greenwald:

In this interview, :Assange gives background information on the fate of the children who were wounded:

But our team that was in Baghdad, we partnered with the Icelandic state broadcasting service, RÚV, found the children over the weekend, this weekend, and interviewed them and took their hospital records, and we have photographs of the scars of the stomach wounds and the chest wounds and arm wounds for those children. The boy, in particular, was extremely lucky to survive. He had a wound that came from the top of his body down his stomach, so very, very, very lucky.

The mother says that she has been offered no compensation for the death of her husband, who was the driver of that van, and no assistance with the medical expenses of her children. And she says that there are ongoing medical expenses related to the daughter.

The American commanders seemed to have a total disregard for any civilians injured in the course of their war.

Sunshine Press, the organizational support for Wikileaks, is distributing this video on the two children:

Aljazeera, a station familiar with US lies about journalists it has killed, broadcast this story on the release of the video, including an interview with Wikileak‘s Julien Assange. ssange describes the killing of six or more Iraqis family members by another US missile that day:

Aljazeera also broadcast this from a brother of Nabil Door-Eldeen, one of the Reuters journalists killed in Iraq that day:

1 comment April 6th, 2010

US military covering up civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan

The recent news brought news of two incidents in two countries where US troops killed civilians and then lied to cover up the evidence. These are but the latest of a steady stream of lies from military and Pentagon sources about the killing of civilians.

Afghanistan: Killing Pregnant Women and Government Officials

In Afghanistan, the military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February raid in which Afghan government officials were also killed, according to excellent reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London. They have, however, failed so far to account for their falsehoods spanning several months.

Previously the military had insisted that they killed “terrorists,”  and claimed that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid. But now it appears that the knife wounds may have been inflicted by the Special Forces troops excavating their bullets from the dead or dying women’s bodies. As The Times‘ Starkey reported Monday:

“US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.”

Military spokespersons went further in attempting to cover up the killing by attacking Starkey, the reporter who challenged the official story. As Starkey explained:

“[T]hey [US military] have… tried hard to discredit me, personally, for bringing this to the world’s attention. In an unprecedented response to my original story about the Gardez night raid they named me individually, twice, in their denial of the cover up.

“They claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record. When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said, do not exist.”

In this case, as in so many, one can only assume that there was a deliberate attempt to cover up US involvement in the killing. Otherwise, officials would long ago have admitted their error and, one hopes, taken action against those responsible for the combat errors and the lies that followed. One wonders, for example, who told military officials about the knife wounds? If those wounds were, in fact inflicted by Special Forces troops trying to cover their mistake, then someone is responsible for relaying this false information. Or was the information known all along to be false by those relaying this claim to the press? Were the officials just hoping that the press would tire of exploring the incident, allowing their falsehoods to stand?

Iraq: Shooting Photographers From the Air

The news also brings evidence of another civilian massacre, this time from a  July 27, 2007 incident near Baghdad in Iraq. Wikileaks released a video apparently showing a US helicopter crew firing upon a group of Iraqis hanging out on a street corner, and on a van that stopped to carry the wounded to the hospital. Over a dozen people, including two Reuters reporters, were killed and two children in the van were wounded.

As in the Afghan incident, the military initially denied that any error had taken place. The New York Times article on the incident was entitled 2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias, relaying the military’s false account in the headline. The article also relayed the US account in the text:

“The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”

In the video we see the incident from the perspective of the helicopter gunship. While those in the helicopter assumed those on the ground had weapons, there are no weapons apparent, though it is possible that one person may be armed, hardly a rare occurrence in Iraq. And, more important, there is no conflict and no shots or RPGs are fired at the Americans. Rather, there are the Reuters photographers hanging out with a relaxed group of other Iraqis making no attempt to hide until deadly fire is rained down upon them from the helicopter.

When a van pulls up, no attempt is made to identify the van or its occupants before they are blown away, with permission of an authority on the other end of the radio. Several men from the van were killed and two children

With the video, we see that the US military account, while perhaps believed by officials immediately after the incident, could not have been believed by anyone who examined the evidence.

Also apparent in the video is the glee with which the troops executed their attack, laughing as people were killed, cheering when a Bradley tank drives over a body, and blaming the Samaritans in the van who stopped to help the wounded for the wounded children:

” Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle. “ [From the transcript.]

After seeing the video, it is easy to explain why the military has for years refused Reuters permission to view it. The US military has been systematically lying, covering up the killing of over a dozen Iraqis.

Occupation

In neither the Afghan nor Iraqi incidents is there reason to believe that the killings of civilians were intentional. What is more disturbing is that, in both cases, they seem to be, rather, the result of routine actions. These deaths are the expectable result of occupations by foreign troops who view the citizens of the occupied country as potential enemies. Such situations are inevitably going to lead to dehumanizing of the occupied population, who may, after all, harbor “enemies” at any moment. In Iraq, the Iraqis are called “hajis” by the occupiers. One is less careful about killing “hajis” than one would be when killing one’s peers.

These types of incidents, and the dehumanizing attitudes behind them, are facilitated by the “force protection” concept underlying the occupation. Military and political leadership know that domestic support for the occupation cannot be sustained if US casualties grow too rapidly. Thus, an emphasis is put on protecting US troops in ambiguous situations, increasing the risk to  civilians.

The troops involved are less to blame than are those who sent them to occupy another people’s land. For the dangers of dehumanization in war are well known, as are its increased risk in counterinsurgency situations. Every occupation, indeed, virtually every war has its massacres. Those in charge know this while pretending otherwise to the people back home. Hence the need for lies, lies, and lies. Unfortunately, they usually get away with their deceit. And, in only a few instances is there any accountability for the lies.

Thankfully, in the two instances recently in the news, brave reporters risked personal attacks and threats to ferret out the truth. But how many such incidents can they investigate? Despite their efforts, occupation and lies will continue to exist together. While accountability for the liars should be sought, it is even more important to pull our troops out of these foreign lands they do not understand.

Note: The video was released through the intensive efforts of Wikileaks staff. Unfortunately, the Wikileaks web site has not been operating at full capacity for several months due to a financial shortage. Why not contribute to help them remain available to uncover future abuses. As the traditional investigative media collapse, we need sites like Wikileaks more than ever.

April 5th, 2010

Anthopologists oppose counterinsurgency use of knowledge

TIME covers the controversy in anthropology around the military’s use of social scientists in its Human Terrain Systems program. Unlike the situation in psychology, where the American Psychological Association is totally in bed with the military-intelligence establishment, anthropologists have taken an ethical stand. Interestingly, the authors of the American Anthropological Association report condemning the HTS program includes several anthropologists who work with the military. [The AAA has links to additional press accounts of this issue on their web page announcing the report's release.]:

Social Science vs. The Pentagon: Should Anthropologists Go to War?

By Christopher Shay

Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief, or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the frontlines. For the last two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the army’s cultural IQ. But last week, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that both in concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System has been placing social scientists in every army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and one army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan by 60-70%. As President Barack Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 more soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America’s war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land. “We’re pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama administration],” says Fondacaro.

But if the military’s program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation’s top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic Oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month’s 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather; some anthropologists involved in the report say it’s already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martins University in Washington and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy, which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code. One Human Terrain anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t worried if the information she provided was used to kill or capture an insurgent. “The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” she said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.” Price and other critics see this as proof that the anthropologists don’t have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. “The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn’t even try to protect the people being studied,” says Price. “I don’t think it’s accidental that [the Pentagon] didn’t come up with ethical guidelines.”

HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program “is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence.” But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a masters in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject,” Wintersteen says. “There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field.”

Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA’s decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization’s ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. “It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings,” Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.Ds — many of the others came from a military background. Because of the AAA, “there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program.” HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is “very rare,” but, he argues, HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.

HTS is not the first time anthropologists have become involved with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administrate and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to allow the Japanese Emperor’s reign to continue as part of Japan’s surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighers — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation’s Japanese occupiers.

But the relationship between the military and anthropology soured during the ’60s and early ’70s. In 1964, the U.S. army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. army “assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems” such as in Chile, the project’s test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist’s office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military funded programs. Over the last 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, “the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower.”

AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military — a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate’s larger point stands: For the last few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they’ve once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline’s checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. “Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation,” says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the military from asking for their help. “What’s been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts,” Fondacaro says. The traditional army, he says, is good at treating “the symptoms of insurgency” — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but “what HTS is focused on is the disease. There’s a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence.” That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure.

When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academia and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan, one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty, says “the emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory,” but now, “the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory.” HTS is a clear indication that the Pentagon has realized in order to win the wars of the 21st century, cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

December 13th, 2009