Sadly, the only people who will be punished for this are the ones who forgot to destroy the documents:
One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.
“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, said to investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.
The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s own internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not a single Marine was ever prosecuted. That is one of the main reasons that all American combat troops are leaving by the weekend.
But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.
Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.
Shit happens.
This is why, no matter how “right” some of you think US military action or involvement might be (Libya, for example), my default position is to simply oppose any use of force. No matter what the intentions or training, things break down and the innocent die. Bombs will go astray, intel will be bad, discipline will break down. It is inevitable.
Read the whole piece, and how many civilians were killed for getting too close to checkpoints because they were either illiterate and didn’t know to stop or because they didn’t have glasses and couldn’t even see they were near a checkpoint. The price for that was to be gunned down.
Palli
Amen. Please
Sasha
And no one of consequence will be held to account.
Makewi
Sadly in the case of Iraq, they were dying with or without our intervention.
gaz
I see your amen, and raise you one Halleluja, brother. Directed at comment #1, I see I was too slow. meh.
ChrisNYC
So you changed your position on the US going in to help the African Union and Uganda Army with the LRA?
BGinCHI
Any chance that report can be rolled into a cylinder and the entire thing shoved up Paul Wolfowitz’s ass?
Bitter Scribe
Let’s hope we don’t end up more hated in Afghanistan than the Taliban due to horrors like this.
Punchy
But The Hulkster may be gay, and Lindsay Lohan impressed her judge, so who cares about dead Brownies?
Support the troops, bitchez
Enhanced Voting Techniques
people go nuts from the horror of it all,…
That’s kind of the thing – you going to drag some private up for a court martial because he was exposed to the threat of dying violently for so long his brain had enough?
Villago Delenda Est
Those responsible for sending our military into this mess need to pay, with their lives, for that criminal act.
Special Patrol Group
I’ll take that omelet now, assholes.
WereBear
Exactly. It’s one thing to die for one’s country. It’s quite another to be tortured for it.
Snowball
Libya is not Iraq. We attacked Iraq despite world-wide opinion against it. In Libya, we simply assisted the rebels. If we hadn’t there would still have been enormous bloodshed. Khadaffi would slaughtered them.
Finally, I remember reading a newspaper article about the country of Sweden being very proud of having assisted the rebels in Libya. It was another sign of the world coming together against Khadaffi at the right time. That same situation didn’t exist in Iraq in 2003.
Rafer Janders
Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
This is, maybe, a sign that we should not be in that business to begin with.
Brachiator
No, you do not oppose any use of force. You merely oppose Americans doing the killing.
Not the same thing by a long shot. The Syrian government, for example, can kill civilians 24/7 and heh, not our problem.
I understand the non-interventionist principle. But don’t pretend it is a moral stance.
cathyx
What I don’t get is if the Military wants to keep this account a secret, why did they document the accounts in writing? Why not just do a verbal account and leave no evidence?
Chris
If U.S. Marines killing twenty Iraqi civilians was that “routine,” that kind of suggests there should be a hell of a lot more people than just the Haditha guys brought up on charges. Never happen, I know…
Roger Moore
War is evil. It may sometimes be a lesser evil, but it’s still evil.
cathyx
@Villago Delenda Est: No, President Obama said we need to look forward, not backward. And Nancy Pelosi agreed.
Raven
@Roger Moore: Maybe that’s because people posses that characteristic huh?
Anoniminous
Another stupid fucking war. Another generation of soldiers PT-fucking-SD fucked in the head. Direct human damage from this war will continue to reverberate until 2063 and the political/economic/social/blah-blah damage for who the hell knows how long.
God I’m sick of this.
gaz
@Brachiator: An interesting point.
But the conundrum of pacifism and proactive self-defense has always been a troublesome one. =) /half-snark, half-mean-it
as for me, I’m basically a non-interventionist. I won’t weigh my moral beliefs in this arena, because I cannot apply them to the theater of war, or even national defense. If I try, we’d be a toothless nation, and probably still speaking with a british accent.
In retrospect, I think I supported our actions in WWII. I’m also glad it was hard to push us to that point.
But I maintain that the cold war was a huge mistake.
China is a shining example of how I would have liked to see it solved. Trade.
Don’t get me started on Iraq, and Afghanistan. All I’ll say about that, is it’s the best thing that ever happened for Al-Queda
Also, Too: We’d be in much better shape if we renamed the DoD back to the Dept of War. I think theirs a missed opportunity here, to use optics to help take care of our runaway MIC
AA+ Bonds
For me it’s that we have to have national interest in the thing worth risking this business, and I honestly couldn’t point to a U.S. war within my lifetime that qualifies, good going boomers by the way! Unfortunately, you can’t build integrity into a generation by attempting to stage World War II over and over again, whether yours or mine.
El Tiburon
But for the grace of God go I.
Hard to say how twitchy I would be. Or how willing to stop a fellow soldier from going off.
God how I wish Bush and his minions would be tried for war crimes. Obama as well. Also too Clinton, Bush I, Reagan’s rotted skull and quite possibly Jimmy Carter. (Did Carter invade anyone? Don’t remember.)
Fuck we Americans love to get our war on.
Chris
@AA+ Bonds:
A retired Marine General (Anthony Zinni) wrote a book in the mid-2000s in which he pointed out that in his opinion, one of the biggest problems with the military was its institutional obsession with re-fighting World War Two. When all the evidence said that the future of warfare would probably involve mostly murky, unclear, poorly-defined, operations-other-than-war that would probably look a lot more like Vietnam-1970 than Europe-1944.
(After all, who’s stupid enough to take us on in a conventional war these days? The only countries who could hold their own in one all have nukes).
Roger Moore
@Raven:
Yes, people are capable of evil. A war is an organized attempt to force people to do evil things. It may sometimes be carried out with good intentions, and even more rarely may achieve them, but the process is evil.
greenergood
Go look up Fallujah – makes Haditha look like a picnic.
AA+ Bonds
It is going to be hard as fuck to out-troll Brachiator on this thread :(
AA+ Bonds
The problem with counterinsurgency strategies is that, in general, we shouldn’t be fighting insurgencies. Our practical inability to do so is just insult on top of injury.
carpeduum
Surprised Cole got through that whole thing without once mentioning drones. Other than that, typical childishly simplistic Cole opinion about war.
Jay B.
@Brachiator:
Yes, Doug seems to be in favor of the Syrian government’s brutal crackdown. It’s obvious.
You’re right. We should bomb them immediately. It’s the only way to show we care.
You’ve puked out about a half-dozen fallacies here, but let’s start with “non-interventionist principle”. Is armed invasion and occupation your only definition of intervention? Is there nothing else you can think of? Is it the responsibility of the U.S to bomb Syria? Is it more or less moral to kill more people in order for a government to be overthrown?
AA+ Bonds
Look, it would be neat if we could jump in and just create modern civic political systems for other people who never had them using enough money, but we don’t have the technology yet.
AA+ Bonds
Many American policymakers, and almost all American “experts”, are largely motivated by the lingering effects of Americans’ virulent racism against the Japanese, which allowed us to concoct a fantasy about World War II where we vaporized a bunch of chief-worshiping savages and then invented koenkai.
AA+ Bonds
And finally, liberal interventionism involves either wholesale assaults on illiberal native cultures or the abandonment of liberal principles, thus all the opposition among Libyan rebels that got disappeared or just straight up assassinated around when our buddies took Tripoli, thank you, good night
Catsy
@Brachiator:
Do you not grasp the distinction between opposing something where one nominally has some input and shared moral responsibility (such as how our country uses its military), and opposing something over which we have no control and for which we have no kind of moral responsibility (such as what some other country’s government does in their own name)?
I refuse to believe anyone is stupid enough to think that was a meaningful challenge to John’s position on use of force.
magurakurin
I know I sound like a harpy, and I know most of the people here know your history, Cole. But someone reading this for the first time wouldn’t from this post. So, I changed it. I can forgive those who supported the Iraq war to a point. But, I’m sorry, this most recent post made it sound like you were opposed to Iraq. And it is quite possible that NOT all of us here know that.
sorry to be a dick about it, but…
TBogg
But.. but.. Scott Beauchamp was a liar, remember?
Bad apples, fog of war, break a few eggs to make a freedom omelet, etc….
taylormattd
@ChrisNYC: Not only that, but I’m unclear as to what this has to do with Libya, given U.S. troops didn’t invade there at all.
pluege
my default position is to simply oppose any use of force. No matter what the intentions or training, things break down and the innocent die. Bombs will go astray, intel will be bad, discipline will break down. It is inevitable.
Now you’re talking!!
physical violence has to be the moral Maginot line – cross it and everything breaks down, no more constraints on the boundless destructive capability of humanity.
War is the ultimate expression of violence: sterile, impersonal, indecent, immoral, ruthless – physical, mental, and economic devastation both immediate and lasting.
Omnes Omnibus
@cathyx:
Because the “Military” is not a monolith. Every military action is chronicled by, at the very least, an After Action Review (AAR) because commanders want to figure out what happened, good and bad, and why it happened. Also, I would not expect that every senior officer who touched upon the aftermath of this intended that there be a cover-up. Obviously, someone tried to bury (or burn) the results, but it doesn’t mean that everyone involved was in on a cover-up.
Rafer Janders
@WereBear:
Exactly. It’s one thing to die for one’s country. It’s quite another to be tortured for it.
Whoa, Nelly. You can’t compare the stress of being in combat to being tortured. For one thing, the soldiers are the ones with the guns and the body armor and the helmets and the air support and video chats to home and email. They’re not helpless naked prisoners crouched in a cell.
If we’re going to excuse American soldiers from responsibility for murdering innocent civilians because things got a little stressful, then we have to extend the same pardon to soldiers in all sorts of conflicts, including German soldiers in WWII Poland and Russia, Japanese soldiers in WWII China, the Philippines and the various island campaigns, Soviet soldiers in 1980s Afghanistan, Serbs in Bosnia, the Taliban, etc.
LT
Exactly fucking right. THIS is what war is. When Bush and Cheney and rest of the fuckers chose to start their (unnecessary and illegal) war in Iraq, they chose Haditha and thousands of similar incidents we’ll never hear about. It’s what war is. That is what makes Bush’s crime more deeply wrong than it seems even after several glances.
burnspbesq
@John Cole:
I think you’ve overreacted to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Consider the following hypothetical:
There is now confirmed satellite imagery of an operational Chinese aircraft carrier. In a couple of years, they will have the ability to conduct meaningful air operations from that carrier.
If we wake up one morning and find the Chinese carrier parked at the entrance to San Diego Bay conducting air operations against all of the juicy targets down there, would you still oppose the use of force?
Chuck Butcher
My default position is that you’d better be willing to understand and accept these outcomes as a result of military action or you’re a willfully blind POS. I’ll be damned if I’ll propose that nothing will ever come up that rises to that point, but as long as a large chunk of this nation thinks warfare is equal to some damned video game we’re morally and ethically sunk.
Yeah, I’m in a default position of “no” but that doesn’t mean I can’t be convinced. I’ll just go along with Cole on this.
LT
“This is why, no matter how “right” some of you think US military action or involvement might be (Libya, for example)…”
Like I just said, I agree with you, but this doesn’t make sense. WE started the Iraq War. That is so monumentally different than helping people who are getting slaughtered by their own military. (And I was one of the ones who publicly expressed confusion as to they they didn’t just get the approval from Congress.)
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@LT:
QFT.
Also, too, “no one comes home from war unwounded.” The Bush II administration have much to answer for; and it would appear that they will only have to answer to God.
Rafer Janders
@burnspbesq:
You ignorant ass. You can’t possibly have read him to mean that he opposes the use of force for self-defense, i.e. a Chinese attack against San Diego (a scenario which is incredibly far-fetched, but never mind, we all have our fantasies).
You’re being wilfully obtuse just to start an argument, aren’t you?
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
I think you need to read that a tiny bit more carefully. John is not saying he opposes the use of force under any circumstances, just that the assumption should be that we’re not going to blow people up. It should be the responsibility of the people who are in favor of war to prove that it’s the best available response, not the responsibility of the people who oppose it to prove it isn’t. Self defense would presumably cross the threshold of justified use of force in a way that intervening in somebody else’s fight wouldn’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore:
Quite frankly, this should be the standard adopted by any sane person. The devil, however, lies in the details. Self-defense, sure. Aggressive, unprovoked attacks, no. Now what? National interest? If yes, how vital? Humanitarian concerns? How much do our allies interest count as part of our national interest? Etc.
Brachiator
@Catsy:
Right. We have no control. No responsibility. We don’t sell weapons or have economic ties to anyone anywhere who might commit an atrocity.
As long as we can wash our hands of any taint of responsibility, the world can crucify itself.
Chuck Butcher
@burnspbesq:
And we really ought to build a shitload more nukes in case an Asteroid is headed our way and the ones we’ve got aren’t enough to do more than make it shiny…
and the sun rises in the west and we’re all fucked and…and…
Bill Arnold
@Roger Moore:
Yep. With the possible exception of medium and large scale genocide, war is the most evil thing that humans do in an organized fashion. IMO.
Are there any other “greater evils” in people’s lists?
Villago Delenda Est
@Bill Arnold:
Voting for a Republican.
Benjamin Franklin
The truly frustrating part of this sad tale, is the war criminals who pushed us into the war will never be brought to account.
Just Like Iran/Contra did not result in disincentives for future illegal/amoral acts
so too. there is none to stop the same actors from playing their parts in the stage of Iran.
Raven
@Bill Arnold: Oh, so there are exceptions?
Soonergrunt
@cathyx: Never underestimate the power of the bureaucratic impulse.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: Exactly. The sticking point for generally liberal-minded people will always be what to do about suffering innocents being victimized by someone else’s superior force. Should the US commit its own superior force to stop that force, or stand aside? Once entered, how best to exit? That’s where all the worst stickiness resides.
Saying that your default is No War… well, that’s the easy part. Your default in life is probably No Ass Kicking, but every once in a while, someone is going to deserve an ass-kicking, overriding the default. And that’s where the fiercest moral and ethical arguments will invariably occur.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t think you can do things that way. You have to weigh the potential good the war might do (including evil things it may avert) against the inevitable evil it will do. That’s not something where you can just come up with a nice list of rules about when war is acceptable and when it isn’t; each potential war has to be judged based on its own detailed circumstances.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: I don’t disagree. I was just naming some of the questions that need to be resolved. I do not believe there is a checklist.
Jason
@Chris: When all the evidence said that the future of warfare would probably involve mostly murky, unclear, poorly-defined, operations-other-than-war that would probably look a lot more like Vietnam-1970 than Europe-1944.
Vietnam (especially by 1970) was a hell of a lot more like “conventional” war then most people think. So was Southern Lebanon 2006. It would be more correct to say that, thanks to airpower and precision artillery, the classical clearly defined front-line has become obsolete, and the fluid Vietnam situation based on infiltration tactics, raiding and ambushing using highly concealable forces /is/ what conventional warfare has evolved into, and the US military refuses to understand this yet.
Soonergrunt
This just in, the blindingly obvious is blindingly fucking obvious.
In related developments, most people are utterly clueless, some are sanctimonious, and others are simultaneously clueless and sanctimonious.
I would ask that people try to think about what they are saying and try to resist the impulse to make overwrought, facile statements that don’t do anything to actually increase knowledge or better yet, wisdom, but that boat sailed a while back.
Jerzy Russian
@BGinCHI:
Seconded.
Anne Laurie
@cathyx:
This question has also been asked about non-military mass murders / torture in situations as various as the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, Spain under Franco, South Africa during the apartheid era… Humans are inclined to set up hierarchies. A handful of grunts killing a bunch of ‘civilian’ peons is murder, but a carefully documented incidence of procedural failure resulting in non-standard loss of life is just another paperwork problem to be kicked upstairs. This is as much for the psychological benefit of all the non-involved ‘citizen bystanders’ as for the low-ranking serfs involved in those procedural failures & their bosses at the top of the chain-of-command. I was only following orders! became an instant meme because most of us, at some level, know that under the wrong circumstances we’re going to be “good Germans” and pretend we have no idea where all our former Jewish neighbors might have disappeared to, even if we’re not working at the crematorium just as we might at any other blue-collar / middle-management job. As long as the paperwork has been filed properly, the “fault” is disseminated so widely that nobody has to feel personally responsible.
Bill Murray
@taylormattd: Is sending war planes into another country’s airspace to attack their military not an invasion? It is certainly an act of war
AA+ Bonds
@burnspbesq:
^ this is when smart Americans start edging toward the door, when they hear this
AA+ Bonds
I mean, wasn’t that pretty much the Bush administration all the way down on Iraq, “consider the following hypothetical . . . “
mclaren
You’re all missing the bigger picture.
The real reason not to create a state of endless war in America is that when you place your entire society on a wartime footing forever against enemies who abound everywhere on earth…
…Very soon your own population becomes the enemy. And then police and DHS goons and the FBI start doing to innocent American citizens on U.S. soil what U.S. army soldiers have done to innocent Iraqi citizens overseas.
Welcome to the jungle, buckaroos. You’re about to enter Hobbes’ state of nature, where life is nasty, brutal, and short.
You’re not gonna like it.
After the killing is done and the fields of corpses have been revealed and the former heads of America’s police agencies and Department of Homeland Security and CIA and FBI have been frog-marched in orange jumpsuits past screaming mobs of victims whose fathers and brothers and children and sisters and aunts and uncles were murdered and tortured and thrown into secret prisons to rot until they died of malnutrition and hypothermia, Americans are going to get an education in the actual cost of throwing out the rule of law and the basic tenets of civilized society since the Magna Carta.
You think college tuition today is expensive?
Wait till you see the cost of this kind of education.
Joey Giraud
Oh how nice it would have been to have heard this kind of moral clarity in March 2003.
I remember arguing with friends and relatives about how no war is ever good, how innocents always die, and how we didn’t need to do this. And they were all swept up in the bullshit hurricane.
And now they all have excuses and I’ve stopped bringing up the topic because it’s damage done and game over and no need to rub stupid people’s noses in their own poop.
A Humble Lurker
I get your point Cole, but I don’t see what this has to do with Libya.
I mean, skepticism of Libya at the start of it due to the Iraq war was more than understandable, (and I think a lot of people were similarly worried) but I think it’s obvious by now the two turned out to be completely different.
Samara Morgan
@Bitter Scribe:
we already are. that is why the Taliban ARE WINNING.
@A Humble Lurker: In Libya the outcome was was successful because for once, America was on the side of the insurgents.
On the side of the Islamists.
The Global War on
TerrorIslam is over– and America lost.Cole was fretting about Libya because there was nothing in it for America. Unlike say…. propping Mubarak for 30 years to make nice with Israel.
Now its time to decide who we are. We have an insurgency right here in America– its called the occupy movement.
Will America go full-frontal fascist and start droning its own citizens? Or perhaps succumb to another bout of paranoia reflex and go to war on Iran….
That is the 14 trillion dollar question.
who can say?
Samara Morgan
@Soonergrunt: i listened to Obama’s speech….it was pretty damn good.
How do you apolo to America’s armed forces for putting them in an immoral, unjustifiable, unwinnable meatgrinder for 10 years without telling them the OBVIOUS…..that it was all for nothing, and WE WERE WRONG.
It was sorta Lincolnesque….a healing speech.
I love my president.
The best thing our better angels can do is get out the fucking vote.
If we dont, its gunna be wash, rinse, repeat in Iran.
Samara Morgan
@Bitter Scribe: i guess you missed the Afghan Kill Squad.
Samara Morgan
General Odierno on Colbert.
I love Steven Colbert too.
brettvk
Isn’t our myriad misuses of our armies the usual pattern of a dying empire?
Samara Morgan
@brettvk:
yes.
Draylon Hogg
It will all be OK when the mercenaries take over as they won’t be quite as diligent when it comes to record keeping.
Paul in KY
@Chris: The MI Complex always wants to fight any wars. WW II style wars give them more money, due to all the ordinance that implies. However, they are fine with assymetrical war as well.
Paul in KY
@Jerzy Russian: & then fill it up with rubbing alcohol. God, I hate that POS.
Singular
@Chris:
Nobody is stupid enough to take America on in conventional warfare (unless they are attacked of course…) because they are so badly outgunned. They need nukes to even the odds.
Taking the example of force projection via naval power – America could probably fight and win against the combined navies of the rest of the world. Gulp.
sparky
thanks for posting this.
not that it matters to the Empire.
until it’s an Empire no longer.