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Talking War Crimes

By Ben Chitty

Last month the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War brought over 200 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the National Labor College in Silver Spring, MD to testify about their military experiences. IVAW called this event "Winter Soldier – Iraq and Afghanistan," partly to claim the legacy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and their Winter Soldier hearings in 1971, and partly to echo the words of New Rochelle's Thomas Paine, writing during the dark days of December 1776. The mainstream media mostly ignored Winter Soldier, as it mostly ignores the war altogether these days. VVAW means to spoil that silence. But we also mean to accomplish something more revolutionary. We do want to end this war; we also want to prevent this kind of war from happening again.

To do that we have to understand some things about the kind of war our country is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Consider the treatment of detainees. Everyone has seen the Abu Ghraib pictures, though the worst were never released, and the CIA does admit waterboarding three detainees. But forget the interminable debate whether waterboarding is really torture or whether Abu Ghraib is an isolated instance. Between August 2002 and February 2006 almost 100 detainees died in US custody, at least 34 of them ruled homicides by military medical examiners. Military commanders failed to report deaths; investigators failed to interview witnesses or collect and keep evidence; records were lost or never kept at all; overlapping criminal and administrative investigations compromised one another; relevant information has been classified and withheld from investigators. Only 12 of these murders have resulted in the punishment of any US official, and none of them employees or contractors for the CIA

Consider the rules of engagement. The Iraqi town of Haditha was under insurgent control in November 2005, when marines from the 1st Division's 3rd Battalion killed 24 civilians including 11 women and children as they cleared streets and houses near where a roadside bomb had just killed one of their comrades. Maybe this just happens in war? Or just happens in this kind of war? Maybe the marines had poor leadership? Maybe it was partly because of defective rules of engagement – respond with deadly force to every perceived threat. These are the same rules given the Marines for the two-week-long assault on Fallujah in November 2004, where they used white phosphorus explosives, a tactic they called "shake and bake." Fifty US troops were killed. 300,000 people fled the city. An estimated 1,200 dead Arabs were counted as insurgents. Arabs charred beyond recognition must be insurgents, right?

What about air power? The number of close air support strikes in Afghanistan in 2007 is nearly 13,000, almost twice the number three years earlier. The number of bombing runs in 2007 is around 2,300, more than thirty times the 2004 number. Last year in Iraq there were almost 18,000 close air support strikes, about 25% more than in 2004, and more than a thousand bombing runs, almost four times the 2004 number. The use of unmanned Predators with Hellfire missiles doubled over the first ten months of 2007. In just ten days this January the US dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farm district south of Baghdad.

The use of air power against insurgents means civilian casualties. The official review of US air strikes in Afghanistan during 2002 concluded that over-reliance on air strikes combined with misinformation from informants on the ground led to hundreds of unnecessary civilian casualties. Five years later this still happens: a strike last April in West Afghanistan killed 57 villagers, half women and children; last June's attack on a madrassa in Datta Khel in Pakistan's North Waziristan killed 30 people; a strike near Kandahar last November killed 31 people from a nomadic clan. The suspected presence of an insurgent or a terrorist turns an entire neighborhood into a free-fire zone.

All of these incidents violate the Geneva conventions; all these policies permit or encourage the commission of war crimes.

War crime allegations raise two different but related issues.

First is the relation of criminal acts to military policy. How can the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib be the result of poor training and leadership when even more deadly abuse was inflicted on prisoners in Bagram and elsewhere. How can "shoot on suspicion" be exceptional at Haditha but not in Fallujah or every checkpoint in Iraq? How can extensive and unnecessary civilian casualties in air strikes continue to occur years after they were identified, if not as the result of policy?

Second is command responsibility. Commanders are always responsible for the actions of subordinates. Where a commander suspects a crime has been committed, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as international law, the commander must investigate the report. When the criminal action is the result of a direct or standing order, the investigation must proceed up the chain of command to determine who gave the order which permitted or directed the criminal act.

The rules of military life are mostly straightforward – the West Point motto "duty, honor, country" sums them up well enough. A soldier's duty is to fellow soldiers. Just as one crooked cop makes the work of every honest cop harder, one soldier's criminal behavior makes life harder and more dangerous for good soldiers. An honorable soldier accepts responsibility for his or her actions. And every soldier owes the truth to the country he or she serves.

IVAW's winter soldiers tell us the truth about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we do with the truth is up to us.

First we have to understand that generals and politicians don't lie about wartime atrocities to hide them from the enemy. The enemy already knows. Generals and politicians don't lie to hide atrocities from the soldiers. The soldiers know too. Generals and politicians lie to hide these crimes from us, the citizens they serve. They lie to avoid disgrace, to keep their jobs and their pensions, to stay out of prison.

Second we have to understand how a culture of impunity works in the military. Lower ranks are scapegoated. Higher ranks never question orders. And the people who make the policies are never brought to justice.

Some of the many war crimes committed in my war in Vietnam occurred during a six-month campaign in the central highlands by a unit of the 101st Airborne Division called "Tiger Force." This unit was designed, in the words of its first commander, "to out-guerilla the guerillas." The Army investigated these allegations for four and a half years, and finally turned in a report recommending that eighteen soldiers be charged with crimes ranging from killing civilians to torturing prisoners to scalping the dead, and worse. When that report landed on the desk of the Secretary of Defense, Gerald Ford was President. Behind the desk was Ford's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The report disappeared. Three decades later Rumsfeld does not remember that report or whether he discussed it with the White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney. This is a text book case of impunity.

And if we let these folks get away with it again, we will condemn our soldiers – our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends – to serve in this kind of rogue military, and to fight this kind of criminal war again, and again, and again.