the invasion and war crimes.

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AlterNet / By Nicolas J.S. Davies

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10 Years After the Invasion: America Destroyed Iraq But Our War Crimes Remain Unacknowledged and Unpunished

The evil unleashed on the people of Iraq has been painstakingly obscured behind a tapestry of lies.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
Photo Credit: Cherle A. Thuriby/Dept. of Defense

March 15, 2013  |  

 

 

 

 

Since the end of the Second World War, American political leaders and opinion-makers have led the public to believe that the aggressive use of overt and covert military force are essential tools of US foreign policy.  As we reel from one military disaster to the next, sending our loved ones off to war, killing millions of innocent people and destabilizing one region after another, each new administration assures us that it has learned the lessons of the past and deserves our support and sacrifice for its latest military strategy.

But the web of myths, euphemisms and ever-growing secrecy behind which our leaders feel compelled to hide their war policies belies their claims to have learned the lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.  The brave efforts of Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning to let us honestly examine the record for ourselves and draw our own conclusions are met with vindictive terror in the halls of power.

As British playwright Harold Pinter said in his  2005 Nobel Speech, "…my contention here is that the U.S. crimes… have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all."

 

Pinter leads us to the central unmentionable problem of U.S. war policy, that it is in fact a crime, aggression, to attack or invade another country.  The judges at Nuremberg called aggression the  "supreme international crime", because, as they said, "it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."  The Iraq Inquiry in the U.K. has declassified documents showing that Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were warned consistently and repeatedly that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which their legal advisers called "one of the most serious offenses under international law."

The reality of the "accumulated evil" unleashed on the people of Iraq by the "supreme international crime" of aggression has been painstakingly obscured behind a tapestry of lies.  Our military leaders may be chronically unable to win a war in another country, but they sure know how to wage a propaganda war in America:

 

- Fantastical notions of the accuracy of "precision" weapons obscured the widespread slaughter and destruction of the invasion, which unleashed  29,200 bombs and missiles in the first month of the war and  killed tens of thousands of civilians.

 

 - Reports by the Iraqi Health Ministry in 2004 that occupation forces were killing far more civilians than were killed by "insurgents"  were efficiently suppressed.

 

- Epidemiologists who estimated that  650,000 Iraqis had died by 2006 were ignored or dismissed.  As the war went on, the number of dead  probably reached a million by 2008.

 

-  U.S. troops were brainwashed to link Iraq with September 11th and thus to see Iraqis resisting the illegal invasion and occupation of their country as terrorists like the ones who attacked New York and Washington.   A Zogby Poll in February 2006, three years into the war, found that 85% of U.S. troops in Iraq believed that their mission was "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks."

 

-  U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq flagrantly violated the laws of war.  They included:  "dead-checking" or killing wounded resistance fighters; orders to  "kill all military-age men" during some operations;  "360 degree rotational fire" on streets packed with civilians; standing orders to  "call for fire", meaning air strikes, even on villages or apartment buildings full of people; and Fallujah and other areas were designated  "weapons free" or "free fire" zones, where thousands of civilians were killed.

 

- Torture was more widespread and systematic in U.S. prisons than media reports about Abu Ghraib suggested.   A leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2004, based on 27 visits to 14 U.S. prisons in Iraq, and other human rights reports documented: mock executions; water-boarding; "stress positions", including excruciating and sometimes deadly forms of hanging; extreme heat and cold; sleep deprivation; starvation and thirst; withholding medical treatment; electric shocks; rape and sodomy; beatings with all kinds of weapons; burning; cutting with knives; injurious use of flexi-cuffs; suffocation; sensory assault and/or deprivation; and psychological torture such as sexual humiliation and threats against family members.

 

- Human Rights First's  "Command's Responsibility" report investigated 98 deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.  These included at least 12 people who were definitely tortured to death, 26 other cases of suspected or confirmed homicide and 48 more that escaped official investigation altogether.  HRF found that senior officers abused their positions of power to place themselves beyond the reach of the law even as they gave orders to commit terrible crimes.  No officer above the rank of Major was charged with a crime even though torture was authorized from the highest level, and the most severe punishment handed down was a 5 month prison sentence.  The paper trail already in the public record appears sufficient to convict Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their lawyers and senior military officers of capital offenses under the U.S.  War Crimes Act.

 

- The U.S. recruited, trained and deployed at least  27 brigades of Iraqi Special Police Commandos, who detained, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in 2005 and 2006.  At the peak of this campaign, 3,000 bodies per month were brought to the Baghdad morgue and an Iraqi human rights group matched  92% of the corpses to reported abductions by U.S.-backed forces.  U.S. Special Forces officers in  Special Police Transition Teams worked with each Iraqi unit, and a  high-tech command center staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel maintained U.S. command and control of these forces throughout their reign of terror.

 

- In 2006 and 2007, U.S. forces worked in tandem with the Special Police Commandos (by then rebranded "National Police" following the exposure of one of their  torture centers) in Operation Together Forward I & II and the so-called Surge to complete the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.  The U.S. occupation deliberately targeted the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq, eventually killing about 10% of Sunni Arabs and driving about half of them from their homes.  This clearly meets  the definition of genocide in international treaties.  We must therefore add the crime of genocide to the prospective charge sheet of American crimes in Iraq.

 

the ICJ's Eminent Jurists Panel, headed by former Irish President Mary Robinson, reached very definite conclusions on it. It found that U.S. leaders had confused the public by framing their counterterrorism campaign within a "war paradigm," and that the U.S. government was distorting, selectively applying or simply ignoring binding human rights laws. 

 

The ICJ panel concluded that that U.S. violations of international law were neither an appropriate nor an effective response to terrorism, and that established principles of international law "were intended to withstand crises, and they provide a robust and effective framework from which to tackle terrorism."  

But it is also a well-established principle of international law that countries who commit aggression bear a collective responsibility for their actions.  Our leaders' guilt does not let the rest of us off the hook for the crimes committed in our name.  The United States has a legal and moral duty to pay war reparations to Iraq to help its people recover from the results of aggression, genocide and war crimes - this is a central demand of one very special group of Americans whose experiences and sacrifices make them uniquely qualified to press such a demand:  Iraq Veterans Against the War.

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