U.S. Soldiers Commit War Crimes at One-Ninth the Price

Private security companies in Iraq have come under political attack after mercenaries for Blackwater USA fired upon unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 and wounding 24. Angry Iraqis, including collaborationist officials of the U.S.-backed occupation regime, have complained that swaggering rent-a-soldiers operate with callous disregard for the safety of Iraqis. A 27-year-old ex-paratrooper for Blackwater even stands accused of–but faces no possibility of prison time for—shooting, while in a drunken frenzy, a man who was guarding Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi.

A media pile-on has ensued.

Condi Rice, whose State Department is a major Blackwater client, ordered cameras mounted on vehicles in the company’s convoys. The House of Representatives, normally so divided it can’t agree that torture is bad or that sick kids need doctors, came together as one–389 to 30–to pass a bill that would subject mercenaries to criminal prosecution when they blow away foreigners in a war zone. Now the presidential contenders are weighing in.

“We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors,” said Barack Obama. “To add insult to injury, these contractors are charging taxpayers up to nine times more to do the same jobs as soldiers, a disparity that damages troop morale.”

Obama may be onto something. Why pay for employed by private corporations, when you can get the same cowboy antics at one-ninth the price?

Pundits and politicians are scapegoating Blackwater and other private security firms to help sell the continuation of the Iraq War. Some mercenaries shoot at anything that moves. They endanger locals with crazy practices like speeding down jammed highways on the wrong side. (Memo to Secy. Gates: Ban screenings of “Ronin.”) Rein in these Rambo wannabes or fire them, the argument goes, and Iraqi commuters will warm to their friendly public-sector replacements in the United States Armed Forces. A thousand roses will bloom. Soon we’ll be awash in that staple of postwar gratitude, Iraqi war brides.

But it isn’t just Blackwater. Official U.S. soldiers are no less stupid or vicious or trigger-happy than their private counterparts.

In 2003 U.S. troops manning a checkpoint in Karbala repeatedly fired a 25-millimeter cannon at a Toyota containing 13 people trying to flee the fighting. At least seven people, including five children age five or under, were killed. “You just f—ing killed a family because you didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough,” a captain radioed to his platoon leader moments later. Checkpoint shootings of innocent civilians became a daily occurrence, due to rules of engagement that placed more value upon the lives of American troops than those of the Iraqis they were supposedly there to liberate.

Often the “checkpoints” were invisible to Iraqi motorists. American soldiers would hide in buildings near an intersection and fire “warning shots” at the engine blocks of approaching vehicles. Assuming that they were being ambushed by bandits, Iraqi drivers would floor the accelerator. Soldiers then treated them as potential suicide bombers, turning them into Swiss cheese. “Many U.S. officials describe…the military’s standard practice of firing at onrushing cars from their checkpoints in Iraq,” reports The Washington Post.

“We fired warning shots at everyone,” said one soldier. “They would speed up to come at us, and we would shoot them. You couldn’t tell who was in the car from where we were. We found that out later. We would just look in and see they were dead and could see there were women inside.”

That’s what happened to Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari. After obtaining the release of a journalist from insurgents who had held her hostage for one month, Calipari accompanied her to a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. U.S. soldiers opened fire. The warning shot missed the engine block. Calipari died; the reporter was wounded. Though their Iraqi driver insists that he was driving their Toyota Corolla (memo to travelers to Iraq: consider a Honda) under 25 miles per hour, the Pentagon said he was “speeding.”

A lot of professional U.S. soldiers have screamed their contempt for Iraqis since the beginning of the war. “For almost a year,” reported the East Bay Express in 2005, “American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to [a pornographic website]. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.”

If you’ve just eaten, stop reading now.

The Express describes the photos: “A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as U.S. Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.”

There’s more.

“[A] person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, ‘What every Iraqi should look like.’ One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection ‘DIE HAJI [a racist slur for Iraqis used by U.S. soldiers] DIE.'”

Google the Express story. It gets even uglier.

Blackwater’s hired goons are exempt from prosecution. So, apparently, are real soldiers. Atrocity after atrocity goes unpunished or rewarded with a slap on the wrist.

Specialist Jorge Sandoval, 22, was acquitted of murdering two Iraqis, one on April 27, the other on May 11 near Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad. However, a military court-martial found him guilty of planting detonation wire on the first victim to make him look like an insurgent. If he was innocent, why did he try to cover up the shooting?

Specialist James Barker, 23, of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, admitted that he held down a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in 2005 while another soldier raped her, then shot her several times in her Mahmudiya home. He dowsed her with kerosene and set her on fire. According to CNN, “he was not sure if he penetrated the girl, because he was having trouble getting an erection.” He and five fellow soldiers also murdered her parents and her 7-year-old sister. Thanks to a plea bargain, said The New York Times, “he could be released on parole in 20 years.”

The same crime committed in the U.S. would earn life in prison, or the death penalty.

A Marine Staff Sergeant charged in the massacre of 24 people in Haditha, The New York Times reports, will not face murder charges because investigating civilian deaths isn’t a military priority. “Prosecuting the Haditha case has posed special challenges because the killings were not comprehensively investigated when they first occurred,” says the Times. “Months later, when details came to light, there were no bodies to examine and no Iraqi witnesses to test.”

The 2005 Express piece contains this tragicomic gem: “[Disrespect for Iraqi deaths] could become an international public-relations catastrophe.” Internationally, the “war porn” scandal was merely one of a string of stories that confirmed our reputation as brutal neocolonialists. Here in the United States, however, “supporting the troops” means turning a blind eye to their actions–or blaming them on private contractors.

A nation’s leaders choose peace, setting aside years of distrust. Forgiving decades of political subversion and economic sabotage, they send emissaries to request full diplomatic relations from their once and present nemesis. They persist, even though they’re repeatedly rebuffed. When war breaks out, they offer military assistance–to their “enemy.”
The nation is Iran. And the reaction is ridiculous.

“The Evil Has Landed,” shrieked the headline of the New York Daily News on the occasion of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches at the United Nations and Columbia University. A “madman,” Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post spat, setting the tone for a week of Bizarro News. On “60 Minutes,” the Iranian president said there was no reason his country and ours couldn’t be friends–even the best of friends.

“La la la la–we can’t hear you” was the response.

“Is it the goal of your government, the goal of this nation to build a nuclear weapon?” CBS News’ Scott Pelley asked Ahmadinejad.

He replied: “You have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb. We don’t need that. What need do we have for a bomb?”

Pelley followed up: “May I take that as a ‘no,’ sir?”

Ahmadinejad: “It is a firm ‘no.'”

Some Americans would pay good money to hear an answer as honest and straightforward as that from their leaders. Yet, minutes later, Pelley kept badgering: “When I ask you a question as direct as ‘Will you pledge not to test a nuclear weapon?’ you dance all around the question. You never say ‘yes.’ You never say ‘no.'”

Weird. Is Pelley hard of hearing? But what I really can’t figure out is how Iran qualifies as our–Very Big Word coming–“enemy.” We’re not at war with Iran. Neither are our allies. What gives?

Capitalizing on the reliable ignorance of the American public and the indolent gullibility of its journalists, the Bush Administration regularly conflates its numerous targets of regime change, pretending they love each other to death and are united only in their desire to slaughter innocent American children. There are gaping chasms in this narrative, but they vanish into our national memory hole.

In 1998, three years before 9/11, while the U.S. was still sucking up to the Taliban, Iran nearly went to war against Afghanistan. Taliban guards burst into Iran’s consulate at Mazar-e-Sharif and murdered eight diplomats and an Iranian journalist. Iran massed 35,000 troops on its eastern border with Afghanistan before the U.N. stepped in to mediate.

After the 9/11 attacks turned the U.S. against the Taliban, U.S. media outlets put footage of a handful of jeering Palestinians on heavy rotation. Meanwhile, “In Iran, vast crowds turned out on the streets and held candlelit vigils for the victims. Sixty-thousand spectators respected a minute’s silence at Tehran’s football stadium.”

Wondering why you never heard that? The above quote comes from the BBC. Fox News didn’t report. American news consumers didn’t know, much less decide.

Finding an opportunity for rapprochement and a mutual foe in the Taliban, Iran became a silent America ally after 9/11. The Iranian military offered to conduct search and rescue operations for downed U.S. pilots during the fall 2001 war against the Taliban. It used its influence with the Afghanistan’s Dari population to broker the loya jirga that installed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan.

Everyone expected U.S.-Iranian relations to thaw. There was even talk about ending sanctions and exchanging ambassadors. A few weeks later, however, White House neocons had Iran named as a member of an “Axis of Evil” in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. “We were all shocked by the fact that the U.S. had such a short memory and was so ungrateful about what had happened just a month ago,” remembers Javad Zarif, now the Iranian ambassador to the U.N.

Bush accused Shiite-majority Iran, a mortal enemy of Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda, of offering sanctuary to Al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan. “Iran must be a contributor in the war against terror,” Bush railed. “Either you’re with us or against us.” The allegation was BS. No one–not the CIA, not one of our allies, no one–believed that Iran would harbor, or had harbored, members of Al Qaeda. “I wasn’t aware of any intelligence supporting that charge,” says James Dobbins, Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan. But we never took it back.

In May 2003, Iran shook off its annoyance and again tried to make nice. The Iranian overture came in the form of a letter delivered to the State Department after the fall of Baghdad. “Iran appeared willing to put everything on the table–including being completely open about its nuclear program, helping to stabilize Iraq, ending its support for Palestinian militant groups and help in disarming Hezbollah,” reported the BBC.

U.S. officials confirm this overture.

“That letter went to the Americans to say that we are ready to talk, we are ready to address our issues,” says Seyed Adeli, an Iranian foreign minister at the time. Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the Bushies made a conscious decision to ignore it. “We don’t speak to evil,” he recalls that Administration hardliners led by Donald Rumsfeld said.

In the minds of the hard right, the case for Iran’s evilness rests on three issues: the 1979 hostage crisis, its opposition to Israel, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Readers of Mark Bowden’s “Guests of the Ayatollah” can’t help but sympathize with the American embassy staffers who spent 444 days in captivity from late 1979 to early 1981. But the right-wingers’ real beef over this episode concerns our wounded national pride.

What they fail to mention is that President Carter brought the mess upon himself, first by continuing to prop up the corrupt and brutal regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi long after it was obviously doomed, and then by admitting him to the U.S. for cancer treatment. Carter knew that his decision to coddle a toppled tyrant could stir up trouble.

“He went around the room,” said then-Vice President Walter Mondale,” and most of us said, ‘Let him [the Shah] in. And he said, ‘And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?’ And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did.”

Iran finances and arms Hezbollah, the paramilitary group-cum-nascent state based in Lebanon that wages sporadic attacks against Israel. If proxy warfare and funding Islamist terror organizations that despise Israel were a consideration, however, the U.S. would cut off relations with and impose sanctions against Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. (Can we stop talking to ourselves? We supported the Afghan mujahedeen.) It is possible to maintain friendly relations with nations that hate one another, and we do.

There are two points missing from most discussions of Iran’s nuclear energy program and whether it’s a cover for a weapons program. First, Iran ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Leaders of the Islamic Republic inherited the NPT from the Shah. The revolutionaries voluntarily chose to honor the agreement after they threw him out.

Second, the U.S. practices a double standard by threatening war against Iran while ignoring Israel’s refusal to obey a U.N. resolution calling for a nuclear-free Middle East passed in 1996. As of the late 1990s, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Israel to possess between 75 and 130 nukes. Iran has zero. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there’s even less evidence against Iran than there was against Saddam’s Iraq.

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize the government of Iran. They’re just a regional rival in the Middle East–another frenemy.
(C) 2007 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

White policemen patrol black neighborhoods, less as guardians of public safety than troops subduing occupied territory. They hassle young black men, subjecting them to “random” searches. Sometimes–too often–they shoot them. All-white juries acquit them, validating tall tales of squirt guns and wallets and shadows that look like guns.

Our prisons look like America–the part of America that’s downtown and predominantly African-American. Being born black means you’ll probably attend substandard, poorly funded schools, that you’ll earn less than if you’d been born another race. You’ll get sick more often and die sooner. Why aren’t these life-shattering, soul-crushing injustices, rather than the overzealous prosecution of the schoolyard thugs known as the “Jena 6,” attracting thousands of marchers?

I used to live on a street next to a strip of park created to separate my neighborhood–which was white–from Harlem. On my side of the park the New York ritual called “alternate side of the street parking” required motorists to move their cars daily. This cleared the way for street sweepers and garbage pickup. It was clean and safe. My morning walk down the park’s stairs to the subway illustrated the nature of systemic racism.

Each step was crumblier, more trash-strewn. On the east side of the park, where every face was brown, the garbagemen came once a week. Bags of refuse broke open, their contents whipped around in those little wind vortexes that spring up in urban spaces. When the light in a lamppost blew out on the Harlem side, it stayed out for months. Many of the buildings had been abandoned.

African-Americans live lives whose despair is amplified by petty nonsense. At our post office, the clerk always demanded that my black roommate show an ID to pick up his packages. She never asked me. (Racism is complicated. She was black.) Boutiques on Madison Avenue buzzed me in wearing ripped jeans and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt; they ignored him in a suit and tie. I’m not surprised that blacks are pissed off. The shock is that they haven’t burned down the whole country.

The Jena 6 hype is bizarre, while countless innocent African-American men rot in prison–some on death row–unjustly convicted because they couldn’t afford decent lawyers.

According to a website set up for their legal defense fund, “The Jena Six are a group of black students who are being charged with attempted murder for beating up a white student who was taunting them with racial slurs, and continued to support other white students who hung three nooses from the high school’s ‘white tree’ which sits in the front yard.” (The charges have since been reduced to aggravated assault.) The implication is obvious: “hate speech” justifies physical assault.

Justin Barker, 17, was beaten unconscious and then kicked repeatedly. A sturdy sort, he spent three hours in the emergency room before attending the school’s Ring Ceremony later the same day. The accused, members of the school football team, claim that Barker had made fun of one of them for having himself been beaten up by a group of white students at an earlier event, one of a string of racially-charged incidents in the small town. Barker denies it.

“Young white males involved in the racial incidents received slaps on the wrist, at most, while young blacks received school expulsions or criminal charges,” wrote Clarence Page in The Chicago Tribune. One of the Jena 6 remains in jail despite having had his conviction overturned. That’s wrong. But, said Justice Department attorney Donald Washington, “There was no connection between the September noose incident and December attack [on Barker].” Furthermore, reports the Associated Press, “the three youths accused of hanging the nooses were not suspended for just three days–they were isolated at an alternative school for about a month, and then given an in-school suspension for two weeks.”

“They haven’t always been fair in the courthouse with us. If you’re black, they go overboard sometimes,” says Jena High School janitor Braxton Hatcher, 62, who is black. That’s easy to believe. Then he repeats the standard talking point: “I think this was just a fight between boys. I don’t think it was attempted murder.”

Six against one isn’t a schoolyard fight. I’ve been in more than my fair share of schoolyard fights, so I know. Fights are one on one. Six on one is attempted murder. Kicking someone after they’ve passed out is attempted murder. Nothing Barker said, no matter how foul, can justify such a vicious assault by bullying jocks. This is the stuff of Columbine.

Symbolic hate speech, even as vile as nooses in the context of the recent history of the Deep South, pales next to actual physical violence. The real problem is that there’s a perception that attempted murder charges wouldn’t have been filed had the races of the students involved in the Barker beatdown been reversed.

Indeed, the Urban League finds that the average black man convicted of aggravated assault–the charge pending against five of the Jena 6–faces 48 months in prison if convicted, a term about one-third longer than if he’d been white. And the Justice Department says black men who get arrested are three times more likely than whites to end up in prison.

What white apologists call the legacy of racism–does a continuing phenomenon leave a legacy?–wrecks the lives of millions of Americans. Consider the following:

“Statistically,” reports The Los Angeles Times, “black males in America are at increased risk for just about every health problem known. African Americans have a shorter life expectancy than any other racial group in America except Native Americans, and black men fare even worse than black women…It is possible, [researchers now] believe, that the ill health and premature deaths can be laid–at least in part–at the feet of continuous assaults of discrimination, real or perceived…The reaction contributes to a chain of biological events known as the stress response, which can put people at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and infectious disease, says Namdi Barnes, a [UCLA] researcher…for many African Americans, these responses may occur so frequently that they eventually result in a breakdown of the physiological system.”

In short, racism kills.

As one wag observed, the Jena 6 are no Rosa Parks. In the face of the intractable challenge of a nation so racist that it literally makes people ill, however, what passes for a civil rights movement finds that it’s easier to set its sights low.

(C) 2007 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

Antiwar Left Shuns Iraqis

“What non-violent antiwar activists are unable to realize,” writes Peter Gelderloos, “is that the most important resistance, probably the only significant resistance, to the occupation of Iraq is the resistance being waged by the Iraqi people themselves.” This comes from a relatively tangential passage in a thought-provoking book, “How Non-Violence Protects the State,” that will get a more detailed look in a future column.

Although its appearance in The Nation guaranteed it would receive scant notice, a July 30 essay by Alexander Cockburn was one of the first to seriously address the most troubling internal contradiction of the anti-Iraq War left. War, everyone knows, is a zero-sum game. For one side to win, the other has to lose. If you “support our troops” you hope, at minimum, for their safe return. But each day a U.S. soldier survives at the front means another day he will occupy Iraq and another day he can kill Iraqi resistance forces. Supporting the troops, as right-wingers say, requires supporting their mission. Which means opposing the guys who are trying to kill them.

Cockburn quoted antiwar activist Lawrence McGuire: “The grand taboo of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less admiration. But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the U.S. soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, then surely you should also [my emphasis] sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland.” (An intellectually honest person would substitute “instead” for “also.”)

It kills me to say this, but neocon madman William Kristol was correct when he wrote in The Weekly Standard: “What mattered to the left was that it was dangerous politically not to ‘support the troops.’ Of course the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing…So ‘supporting the troops’ meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to.”

The 2004 discussion over U.S. soldiers who bought their own body plates, and resorted to “hillbilly armor” to protect their Humvees from roadside bombs, was a case in point. Antiwar pundits, including me, tried to drive a wedge between the Bush Administration and the military by pointing out that the Pentagon was pinching pennies at the expense of soldiers’ lives. But what if you’re an Iraqi? You risk your own life every time you place an IED along the “Highway of Death” between Baghdad and the airport. The more Americans you blow up, the closer you come to achieving your goal of liberating Iraq. The last thing you need is “antiwar” Americans agitating for stronger armor plates!

A parallel to World War II, “the good war” depicted in countless movies, is useful. You’re a German citizen living in Berlin, and you hate the Nazis. You’re against the war. Do you pray for the SS? Or the French Resistance? You can’t do both. (Well, you could–but you’d be an idiot.)

The moral quandry forced upon the left is epitomized by Phyllis Bennis, an in-the-box wonk for the Institute for Policy Studies. “Certainly,” she allows, “the Iraqi people have the right to resist an illegal occupation, including military resistance.” Which is, as they said in the 1970s, mighty white of her. “But as a whole,” she continues, “what is understood to be ‘the Iraqi resistance’ against the U.S. occupation is a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions, in which the various often-antagonistic armed movements (including some who attack Iraqi civilians as much as they do occupation troops) hold pride of place. There is no unified leadership that can speak for ‘the resistance,’ there is no NLF or ANC or FMLN that can claim real leadership and is accountable to the Iraqi population as a whole.”

For most of World War II, the same was true of the French Resistance (history grants them the upper-case “R”) too. Communists, socialists and even monarchists fought the Germans–and each other–until Charles de Gaulle’s center-right faction prodded, bullied and ultimately muscled out his (more popular and more progressive) rivals. There were, as in Iraq today, French criminal gangs who fought solely for money. If this was 1943 and Bennis and other mainstream liberals were anti-Nazi Germans, would they “support what is called ‘the French resistance'”?

As their Iraqi counterparts do today, the Free French carried out what the press of the period called “terrorist attacks.” Kidnappings, assassinations and bombings were usually directed at government officials, German troops, and French collaborators–but civilians were also killed. So why does the antiwar left find the Iraqis distasteful?

Gelderloos argues that the post-Vietnam American left is hard-wired with reflexive pacifism, denying that violent militancy can ever be a valid tactic, even when faced with horrific oppression. Liberals frequently express disapproval of protestors who smashed windows at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and the Earth Liberation Front’s (ELF) torching of SUVs at auto dealerships–even though no one got hurt.

Knee-jerk non-violence partly explains the left’s reluctance to embrace the Iraqi resistance. Nationalism/patriotism is another factor. Who wants to see more funerals of American soldiers? And who wants to be smeared as the next “Hanoi Jane”?

When “asked who I think will then take power [after U.S. forces leave Iraq],” Bennis writes, “the only thing I can anticipate with any confidence is that first, I probably won’t like them very much because they’re likely to have a far more religious orientation than I like but that second, it’s not up to me to choose who governs Iraq.”

The Islamist and/or totalitarian ideology of many of Iraq’s anti-U.S. factions is a turn-off to the secular American left. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland worried aloud in late 2003, when the war against the occupation of Iraq heated up: “Not all of Iraq’s resistance will fit [a] romantic, maquis image. Some will be Baathist holdouts, Saddamites who once served as henchmen to a murderous dictator. No progressive should want to see these villains land a blow on British or American forces.” This year, in the socialist New Politics, Stephen Shalom noted that “to give our automatic support to any opponent of U.S. imperialism means we should have supported the Taliban in 2001 or Saddam Hussein in 2003.”

Since war is a zero-sum game, it’s our guys or theirs. “Support the troops by bringing them home” is an empty slogan that belies reality. With both political parties supporting the war, U.S. troops are not going to come home any time soon. As Gelderloos writes: “The approach of the U.S. antiwar movement in relation to the Iraqi resistance does not merely qualify as bad strategy; it reveals a total lack of strategy, and it is something we need to fix.” It also exposes an ugly truth about antiwar lefties. They don’t believe in national self-determination any more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “America Gone Wild,” which includes a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the most controversial political cartoons of the post-9/11 era.)

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL