Blackwater and Haditha, A Tale of Two Atrocities

[JohnyCanuck]

Blackwater and Haditha
A Tale of Two Atrocities

By RAHUL MAHAJAN

The recent public outrage over the conduct of Blackwater Security mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked massacre of at least 17 Iraqi civilians in western Baghdad has been heartening; unfortunately, there has been virtually no attention a far more important concurrent development -- the ongoing collapse of the military prosecution in the Haditha massacre.

Paul Bremer's decision at the eleventh hour before his departure in June 2004 to set all private contractors in Iraq above the law (they are not subject to Iraqi law, U.S. military law, or U.S. civilian law) stands out as one of the more cynical decisions of a war that has redefined cynicism, and attention to that fact is a positive development.

At the same time, however, all the attention is being focused on an extremely minor issue. The U.S. military has possibly killed more civilians in a single incident than all the mercenary companies operating in Iraq in the last several years. According to Iraq Body Count, the first U.S. Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004, claimed the lives of at least 600 Iraqi civilians, out of a total of at least 800 people.


SNIP

Overall, the record of accountability for atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers is pathetic. Soldiers who kill prisoners in custody routinely get administrative punishment; missing a troop movement gets a court-martial, but murdering a helpless man rarely does. In the particularly brutal killing of two young men in Bagram prison, in which soldiers testified that they used to assault one of them, Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver, just because they liked to hear him scream "Allah!" in pain, nobody was charged with murder, on the incredibly specious reasoning that, since 27 different people used to enjoy torturing him, there was no way to determine which "unlawful knee strike" caused him to die. Try using that defense if you're a young black kid holding up a 7-11 when one of your accomplices shoots the clerk. Contractors may be subject to no law, but the law soldiers are subject to is rarely much better than nothing.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan10182007.html

[madokie]

1. how can any one person declare that what is illegal is not illegal

what or who's God gave bremmer the authority. they are only getting away with this shit because we and the rest of the world are allowing it. It will not go on forever trust me

[malaise]

2. Well the entire invasion and occupation is

illegal so I guess a minus and a minus make a plus in Bush math. :shrug:

[gratuitous]

3. "They liked to hear him scream"

Boy, I hope someone comes along to tell us all again what an honorable profession the military is. Twenty-seven torturers of a dead man, and nobody's responsible, nobody's charged, and nobody's going to jail. But remember the next time someone visits a little retribution on the United States for these atrocities that these unreasoning, out-of-control extremist terrorists hate us for our freedom, and surely not because of anything we've done to them or the larger world.

[JohnyCanuck]

4. For some toops, apparently, torture is fun,

especially when they happen to be the torturers and not the tortuees. Sounds like another fringe benefit of joining the military that's not highlighted in the recruiting brochures - you get to inflict at will pain and suffering on fellow human beings sub-human foreigners and enjoy watching them experience utter hopelessness and perpetual agony. Just because the Spanish Inquisition is no more, is no reason at all that troops should be deprived of entertainment.