U.S. troops kill pregnant woman in Iraq - Yahoo! News

U.S. troops kill pregnant woman in Iraq - Yahoo! News

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday.

Jassim, the mother of two children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed and witnesses.

The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings.

"Shots were fired to disable the vehicle," the military said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. "Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds ... and one of the females may have been pregnant."

Jassim's brother, who was wounded by broken glass, said he did not see any warnings as he sped his sister to the hospital. Her husband was waiting for her there.

"I was driving my car at full speed because I did not see any sign or warning from the Americans. It was not until they shot the two bullets that killed my sister and cousin that I stopped," he said. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here. They have no regard for our lives." I have to agree with him. Its Pathetic.

He said doctors tried but failed to save the baby after his sister was brought to the hospital.

The shooting deaths occurred in the wake of an investigation into allegations that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in the western city of Haditha.

The U.S. military said the incident in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, was being investigated. The city is in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle and has in the past seen heavy insurgent activity.

"The loss of life is regrettable and coalition forces go to great lengths to prevent them," the military said.

The women's bodies were wrapped in sheets and lying on stretchers outside the Samarra General Hospital before being taken to the morgue, while residents pointed to bullet holes on the windshield of a car and a pool of blood on the seat.

Khalid Nisaif Jassim, the pregnant woman's brother, said American forces had blocked off the side road only two weeks ago and news about the observation post had been slow to filter out to rural areas.

He said the killings, like those in Haditha, were examples of random killings faced by Iraqis every day.

The killings at Haditha, a city that has been plagued by insurgents, came after a bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials, has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.

Military investigators have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said last week.

In his first public comments on the incident,

President Bush

President Bush said he was troubled by the allegations, and that, "If in fact laws were broken, there will be punishment."

Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi told the BBC that the allegations have "created a feeling of great shock and sadness and I believe that if what is alleged is true — and I have no reason to believe it's not — then I think something very drastic has to be done."

"There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable," said Pachachi, a member of parliament.

If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in

Iraq

Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the

Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which Bush said he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.

Once the military investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The incident has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.

"People in Samarra are very angry with the Americans not only because of Haditha case but because the Americans kill people randomly specially recently," Khalid Nisaif Jassim said.

I personally find the conduct of US military deplorable, once again. If that makes me a bad american, I'll take that as a compliment and an honor.

More Civilians Slaughtered.

Civilian Slaughter Update

On Tuesday, May 30 Truthout <http://www.truthout.org/> published my
article "Countles My Lai Massacres in Iraq
<http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000399.php#more>."

Here are a couple of recent pieces of information to augment that story.

Today the AP has just released this story:

2 Iraqi women killed by coalition troops
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060531/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_women_killed>

"BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two Iraqi women were shot to death north of Baghdad
after coalition forces fired on a vehicle that failed to stop at an
observation post, the U.S. military said Wednesday. Iraqi police and
relatives said one of the women was about to give birth."

And on May 29, Al-Shaqiyah TV reported
<http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/mideastwire/index.php?id=139> from Iraq:

"US forces killed five civilians and wounded two others in the city
[Ramadi] today. A source at Al-Ramadi State Hospital said that among the
dead were a child and a woman. An Iraqi officer in Al-Ramadi said that
the US forces were beefing up their presence on the periphery of
Al-Ramadi, noting that the city will soon come under siege 'ahead of an
all-out attack such as the one that targeted Al-Fallujah' in 2004."

The Haditha Massacre

The Haditha Massacre:

For background, see:
Marjorie Cohn | Setting the Conditions for War Crimes •

The Haditha Massacre
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 30 May 2006

They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.
- Observations of Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones after the Haditha Massacre

On November 19, 2005, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton allegedly killed 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in a three to five hour rampage. One victim was a 76-year-old amputee in a wheelchair holding a Koran. A mother and child bent over as if in prayer were also among the fallen. "I pretended that I was dead when my brother's body fell on me, and he was bleeding like a faucet," said Safa Younis Salim, a 13-year-old girl who survived by faking her death.

Other victims included girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3 and 1. The Washington Post reported, "Most of the shots ... were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, doctors at Haditha's hospital said."

The executions of 24 unarmed civilians were conducted in apparent retaliation for the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas when a small Marine convoy hit a roadside bomb earlier that day.

A statement issued by a US Marine Corps spokesman the next day claimed: "A US Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

A subsequent Marine version of the events said the victims were killed inadvertently in a running gun battle with insurgents.

Both of these stories were false and the Marines knew it. They were blatant attempts to cover up the atrocity, disguised as "collateral damage."

The Marine Corps paid $38,000 in compensation to relatives of the victims, according to a report in the Denver Post. These types of payments are made only to compensate for accidental deaths inflicted by US troops. This was a relatively large amount, indicating the Marines knew something was not right during that operation, according to Mike Coffman, the Colorado state treasurer who served in Iraq recently as a Marine reservist.

Congressman John Murtha, D-Pa., a former Marine, was briefed on the Haditha investigation by Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee. Murtha said Sunday, "The reports I have from the highest level: No firing at all. No interaction. No military action at all in this particular incident. It was an explosive device, which killed a Marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people."

The Haditha massacre did not become public until Time Magazine ran a story about it in March of this year. Time had turned over the results of its investigation, including a videotape, to the US military in January. Only then did the military launch an investigation.

These Marines "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results," a US official told the Los Angeles Times.

"Marines over-reacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," Murtha said.

Murtha's statement both indicts and exonerates the Marines of the crime of murder.

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Premeditation and deliberation - cold-blooded planning - constitute malice. Complete self-defense can be demonstrated by an honest and reasonable belief in the need to defend oneself against death or great bodily injury. The Marines might be able to show that, in the wake of the killing of their buddy Terrazas by an improvised explosive device, they acted in an honest belief that they might be killed in this hostile area. But the belief that unarmed civilians inside their homes posed a deadly threat to the Marines would be unreasonable.

An honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend constitutes imperfect self-defense, which negates the malice required for murder, and reduces murder to manslaughter.

Many of our troops suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, a Marine in Kilo Company, did not participate in the Haditha massacre. TJ Terrazas was his best friend. Briones, who was 20 years old at the time, saw Terrazas after he was killed. "He had a giant hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back up in his skull," Briones said of his buddy.

"A lot of people were mad," Briones said. "Everyone had just a [terrible] feeling about what had happened to TJ."

After the massacre, Briones was ordered to take photographs of the victims and help carry their bodies out of their homes. He is still haunted by what he had to do that day. Briones picked up a young girl who was shot in the head. "I held her out like this," he said, extending his arms, "but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs."

"I used to be one of those Marines who said that post-traumatic stress is a bunch of bull," said Briones, who has gotten into serious trouble since he returned home. "But all this stuff that keeps going through my head is eating me up. I need immediate help."

A key quote from a Marine officer could be used to show premeditation - and thus malice - in support of a possible murder charge against the shooters. An article in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune which is reprinted from the New York Times News Service, cites a report by "one Marine officer" that "inspectors suspected at least part of the motive for the killings was to send a message to local residents that they would 'pay a price' for failing to warn the Marines about insurgent activity in the area."

Curiously, that paragraph is missing from the same story in both the print and online editions of yesterday's New York Times. For some reason, the Times had second thoughts about that paragraph, and removed it, after the copy had been sent to other papers over the wire.

Regardless of how those who may ultimately be charged with murder fare in court, a more significant question is whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will be charged with war crimes on a theory of command responsibility.

Willful killing is considered a war crime under the US War Crimes Act. People who commit war crimes can be punished by life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if he knew or should have known his inferiors were committing war crimes and he failed to stop or prevent it.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are knowingly prosecuting a war of aggression in Iraq. Under the United Nations Charter, a country cannot invade another country unless it is acting in self-defense or it has permission from the Security Council. Iraq had invaded no country for 11 years before "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the council never authorized the invasion.

A war that violates the UN Charter is a war of aggression.

Under the Nuremberg Tribunal, aggressive war is the supreme international crime.

Hagee flew from Washington to Iraq last week to brief US forces on the Geneva Conventions, the international laws of armed conflict and the US military's own rules of engagement. He is reportedly telling the troops they should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful." This creates a strong inference that our leaders had not adequately briefed our troops on how to behave in this war.

This, combined with the evidence that US forces are committing torture based on policies from the highest levels of government, as well as reports of war crimes committed in places such as Fallujah, served to put Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on notice that Marines would likely commit war crimes in places such as Haditha. Our highest leaders thus should have known this would happen, and they should be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act.

Murtha told ABC there was "no question" the US military tried to "cover up" the Haditha incident, which Murtha called "worse than Abu Ghraib." Murtha's high-level briefings indicated, "There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled," he said.

"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha asked on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."

Murtha said the decision to pay compensation to families of the victims is strong evidence that officers up the chain of command knew what had happened in Haditha. "That doesn't happen at the lowest level. That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families."

Haditha is likely the tip of the iceberg in Bush's illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

"We have a Haditha every day," declared Muhanned Jasim, an Iraqi merchant. "Were [those killed in Haditha] the first ... Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" asked pharmacist Ghasan Jayih. "We're used to being killed. It's normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day."

"We have a Fallujah and Karbala every day," Jasim added, referring to the 2004 slaughter by US forces in Fallujah and bombings by resistance fighters in the Shiite city of Karbala.

In Fallujah, US soldiers opened fire on houses, and US helicopters fired on and killed women, old men and young children, according to Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein.

"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Senator John Warner, R-Va., head of the Armed Services Committee, pledged to hold hearings on the Haditha killings at the conclusion of the military investigation. "I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib," he told ABC News.

Warner's pledge provides little solace to those who seek justice. Congress has yet to hold our leaders to account for the torture by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison. Only a few low-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted. The Bush administration has swept the scandal under the rug.

During the Vietnam War, the US military spoke of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. But in 1968, US soldiers massacred about 400 unarmed elderly men, women and children in the small village of My Lai. A cover-up ensued, and it wasn't until Seymour Hersh broke the story that it became public.

"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "US troops are very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."

Graffiti on one of the Haditha victims' houses reads, "Democracy assassinated the family that was here."

So much for winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

We must pull our troops out of Iraq immediately, and insist that our leaders be held to account for the war crimes committed there.

---

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.
She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.

Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq

By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 30 May 2006

The media feeding frenzy around what has been referred to as "Iraq's My
Lai" has become frenetic. Focus on US Marines slaughtering at least 20
civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent of the media spasm
around the "scandal" of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004.

Yet just like Abu Ghraib, while the media spotlight shines squarely on
the Haditha massacre, countless atrocities continue daily, conveniently
out of the awareness of the general public. Torture did not stop simply
because the media finally decided, albeit in horribly belated fashion,
to cover the story, and the daily slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US
forces and US-backed Iraqi "security" forces has not stopped either.

Earlier this month, I received a news release from Iraq, which read, "On
Saturday, May 13th, 2006, at 10:00 p.m., US Forces accompanied by the
Iraqi National Guard attacked the houses of Iraqi people in the
Al-Latifya district south of Baghdad by an intensive helicopter
shelling. This led the families to flee to the Al-Mazar and water canals
to protect themselves from the fierce shelling. Then seven helicopters
landed to pursue the families who fled . and killed them. The number of
victims amounted to more than 25 martyrs. US forces detained another six
persons including two women named Israa Ahmed Hasan and Widad Ahmed
Hasan, and a child named Huda Hitham Mohammed Hasan, whose father was
killed during the shelling."

The report from the Iraqi NGO called The Monitoring Net of Human Rights
in Iraq (MHRI) continued, "The forces didn't stop at this limit. They
held an attack on May 15th, 2006, supported also by the Iraqi National
Guards. They also attacked the families' houses, and arrested a number
of them while others fled. US snipers then used the homes to target more
Iraqis. The reason for this crime was due to the downing of a helicopter
in an area close to where the forces held their attack."

The US military preferred to report the incident as an offensive where
they killed 41 "insurgents," a line effectively parroted by much of the
media.

On that same day, MHRI also reported that in the Yarmouk district of
Baghdad, US forces raided the home of Essam Fitian al-Rawi. Al-Rawi was
killed along with his son Ahmed; then the soldiers reportedly removed
the two bodies along with Al-Rawi's nephew, who was detained.

Similarly, in the city of Samara on May 5, MHRI reported, "American
soldiers entered the house of Mr. Zidan Khalif Al-Heed after an attack
upon American soldiers was launched nearby the house. American soldiers
entered this home and killed the family, including the father, mother
and daughter who is in the 6th grade, along with their son, who was
suffering from mental and physical disabilities."

This same group, MHRI, also estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 Iraqi
civilians were killed during the November 2004 US assault on Fallujah.
Numbers which make those from the Haditha massacre pale in comparison.

Instead of reporting incidents such as these, mainstream outlets are
referring to the Haditha slaughter as one of a few cases that "present
the most serious challenge to US handling of the Iraq war since the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal."

Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, told reporters recently, "What
happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder. The Haditha massacre
will go down as Iraq's My Lai."

Then there is the daily reality of sectarian and ethnic cleansing in
Iraq, which is being carried out by US-backed Iraqi "security" forces. A
recent example of this was provided by a representative of the Voice of
Freedom Association for Human Rights, another Iraqi NGO which logs
ongoing atrocities resulting from the US occupation.

"The representative . visited Fursan Village (Bani Zaid) with the Iraqi
Red Crescent Al-Madayin Branch. The village of 60 houses, inhabited by
Sunni families, was attacked on February 27, 2006, by groups of men
wearing black clothes and driving cars from the Ministry of Interior.
Most of the villagers escaped, but eight were caught and immediately
executed. One of them was the Imam of the village mosque, Abu Aisha, and
another was a 10-year-old boy, Adnan Madab. They were executed inside
the room where they were hiding. Many animals (sheep, cows and dogs)
were shot by the armed men also. The village mosque and most of the
houses were destroyed and burnt."

The representative had obtained the information when four men who had
fled the scene of the massacre returned to provide the details. The
other survivors had all left to seek refuge in Baghdad. "The survivors
who returned to give the details guided the representative and the Red
Crescent personnel to where the bodies had been buried. They [the
bodies] were of men, women and one of the village babies."

The director of MHRI, Muhamad T. Al-Deraji, said of this incident, "This
situation is a simple part of a larger problem that is orchestrated by
the government . the delay in protecting more villagers from this will
only increase the number of tragedies."

Arun Gupta, an investigative journalist and editor with the New York
Indypendent newspaper of the New York Independent Media Center, has
written extensively about US-backed militias and death squads in Iraq.
He is also the former editor at the Guardian weekly in New York and
writes frequently for Z Magazine and Left Turn.

"The fact is, while I think the militias have, to a degree, spiraled out
of US control, it's the US who trains, arms, funds, and supplies all the
police and military forces, and gives them critical logistical support,"
he told me this week. "For instance, there were reports at the beginning
of the year that a US army unit caught a "death squad" operating inside
the Iraqi Highway Patrol. There were the usual claims that the US has
nothing to do with them. It's all a big lie. The American reporters are
lazy. If they did just a little digging, there is loads of material out
there showing how the US set up the highway patrol, established a
special training academy just for them, equipped them, armed them, built
all their bases, etc. It's all in government documents, so it's
irrefutable. But then they tell the media we have nothing to do with
them and they don't even fact check it. In any case, I think the story
is significant only insofar as it shows how the US tries to cover up its
involvement."

Once again, like Abu Ghraib, a few US soldiers are being investigated
about what occurred in Haditha. The "few bad apples" scenario is being
repeated in order to obscure the fact that Iraqis are being slaughtered
every single day. The "shoot first ask questions later" policy, which
has been in effect from nearly the beginning in Iraq, creates
trigger-happy American soldiers and US-backed Iraqi death squads who
have no respect for the lives of the Iraqi people. Yet, rather than
high-ranking members of the Bush administration who give the orders,
including Bush himself, being tried for the war crimes they are most
certainly guilty of, we have the ceremonial "public hanging" of a few
lowly soldiers for their crimes committed on the ground.

In an interview with CNN on May 29th concerning the Haditha massacre,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace commented,
"It's going to be a couple more weeks before those investigations are
complete, and we should not prejudge the outcome. But we should, in
fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our
troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them
are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we
expect of them."

This is the same Peter Pace who when asked how things were going in Iraq
by Tim Russert on Meet the Press this past March 5th said, "I'd say
they're going well. I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it, but I
would say they're going very, very well from everything you look at ."

Things are not "going very, very well" in Iraq. There have been
countless My Lai massacres, and we cannot blame 0.1% of the soldiers on
the ground in Iraq for killing as many as a quarter of a million Iraqis,
when it is the policies of the Bush administration that generated the
failed occupation to begin with.

The Children of Guantanamo Bay

The Children of Guantanamo Bay

The 'IoS' reveals today that more than 60 of the detainees of the US camp were under 18 at the time of their capture, some as young as 14

by Severin Carrell

The notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay has been hit by fresh allegations of human rights abuses, with claims that dozens of children were sent there - some as young as 14 years old. Lawyers in London estimate that more than 60 detainees held at the terrorists' prison camp were boys under 18 when they were captured. They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured. The disclosures threaten to plunge the Bush administration into a fresh row with Britain, its closest ally in the war on terror, only days after the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, repeated his demands for the closure of the detention facility. It was, he said, a "symbol of injustice". Whitehall sources said the new allegations, from the London-based legal rights group Reprieve, directly contradicted the Bush administration's assurances to the UK that no juveniles had been held there. "We would take a very, very dim view if it transpires that there were actually minors there," said an official. One child prisoner, Mohamed el Gharani, is accused of involvement in a 1998 al-Qa'ida plot in London led by the alleged al-Qa'ida leader in Europe, Abu Qatada. But he was 12 years old at the time and living with his parents in Saudi Arabia. After being arrested in Karachi in October 2001, aged 14, he has spent several years in solitary confinement as an alleged al-Qa'ida-trained fighter. One Canadian-born boy, Omar Khadr, was 15 when arrested in 2002 and has also been kept in solitary confinement. The son of a known al-Qa'ida commander, he is accused of killing a US soldier with a grenade in July 2002 and was placed top of the Bush administration's list of detainees facing prosecution. "It would surely be really quite stupid to allow the world to think you have teenagers in orange jumpsuits and shackles, spending 23 hours a day locked up in a cage," a source added. "If it's true that young people have been held there, their cases should be dealt with as a priority." British officials last night told the IoS that the UK had been assured that any juveniles would be held in a special facility for child detainees at Guantanamo called Camp Iguana. But the US admits only three inmates were ever treated as children - three young Afghans, one aged 13, who were released in 2004 after a furore over their detention. The row will again focus attention on the Bush administration's repeated claims that normal rules of war and human rights conventions do not apply to "enemy combatants" who were al-Qa'ida or Taliban fighters and supporters. The US insists these fighters did not have the same legal status as soldiers in uniform. Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director of Reprieve and lawyer for a number of detainees, said it broke every widely accepted legal convention on human rights to put children in the same prison as adults - including US law. "There is nothing wrong with trying minors for crimes, if they have committed crimes. The problem is when you either hold minors without trial in shocking conditions, or try them before a military commission that, in the words of a prosecutor who refused to take part, is rigged," he said. "Even if these kids were involved in fighting - and Omar is the only one who the military pretends was - then there is a UN convention against the use of child soldiers. There is a general recognition in the civilised world that children should be treated differently from adults." Because the detainees have been held in Cuba for four years, all the teenagers are now thought to have reached their 18th birthdays in Guantanamo Bay and some have since been released. The latest figures emerged after the Department of Defense (DoD) in Washington was forced to release the first ever list of Guantanamo detainees earlier this month. Although lawyers say it is riddled with errors - getting numerous names and dates of birth wrong - they were able to confirm that 17 detainees on the list were under 18 when taken to the camp, and another seven were probably juveniles. In addition, said Mr Stafford Smith, they had credible evidence from other detainees, lawyers and the International Red Cross that another 37 inmates were under 18 when they were seized. One detainee, an al-Jazeera journalist called Sami el Hajj, has identified 36 juveniles in Guantanamo. A senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt Commander Jeffrey Gordon, insisted that no one now being held at Guantanamo was a juvenile and said the DoD also rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantanamo detainees. "There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations... Age is not a determining factor in detention. [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us."

War Crimes: My Lai is a Lesson from History

War Crimes: My Lai is a Lesson from History

The killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has reminded America of another massacre that tarnished its reputation 38 years ago.

by Rupert Cornwell

To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam. A November 2005 video still provided to Reuters by Hammurabi Human Rights group shows covered bodies, which Hammurabi says, are of a family of 15 shot dead in their home in Haditha, in western Anbar province, Iraq. U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, a defence official said on Friday. REUTERS/Hammurabi Organisation via Reuters TV At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound. No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville). A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war. Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of military age," one participant later confessed). Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82. My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle, where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi insurgents in Haditha today. An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago. The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom. Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar? Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam. In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress. Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq War. A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details. The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late. If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land. Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge. Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American people." And so it would ultimately prove. But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last Thursday. Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing America more harm than good. Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first thought. "This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib." For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.

Marines Accused in Haditha Massacre, US Braced for Scandal

Marines Accused in Haditha Massacre, US Braced for Scandal

The Associated Press

Sunday 28 May 2006

Baghdad, Iraq -- The U.S. military is bracing for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha -- charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.

And while the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could enflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts by moderate Sunni Arab leaders to reach out to their community -- the bedrock of the insurgency.

U.S. lawmakers have been told the criminal investigation will be finished in about 30 days. But a Pentagon official said investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.

With a political storm brewing, the top U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."

Haditha is not the only case pending: On Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement gave no further details except that "several service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending the results of the criminal investigation."

Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir al-Sumaidaie, accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin in cold blood during a search of his family's home in Haditha, a city of about 90,000 people along the Euphrates River 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The military ordered a criminal investigation but the results have not been announced.

Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which Bush cited Thursday as "the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq."

"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "It has the potential to blow up in the U.S. military's face."

He said that "the Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.

The Haditha case involves both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19.

That day, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a Sunni Arab city considered among the most hostile areas of Iraq.

After the blast, insurgents attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol with small-arms fire, triggering a gunbattle that left eight insurgents and 15 Iraqi civilians dead, the Marines said in a statement issued the following day.

That version stood for four months until a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student surfaced, obtained by Time magazine and then by Arab television stations. The tape showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.

Although the tape did not prove Marines were responsible, the military began an investigation. Residents came forward with claims that Marines entered two homes and killed 15 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man -- more than four hours after the roadside bombing.

It isn't clear if questions have been raised about the eight slain people that the Marines described as insurgents.

In March, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said about a dozen Marines were under investigation for possible war crimes in the incident. Three officers from the unit involved have been relieved of their posts.

Such incidents have reinforced the perception among many Iraqis who believe American troops are trigger-happy -- a characterization U.S. officers strongly dispute. They are, they are burned out and frustrated. There is no justifiable point for this war, there never has been, and certainly now never will be with the exception of George Bush and Dick Cheney's OBSESSION for OIL. Thats not good enough.

"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," (some americans feel the same way, Shiek al-Aasaf) said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "U.S. troops are a very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."

Ayda Aasran, a deputy human rights minister, said Iraqis should be allowed to investigate such cases -- something the U.S. command has refused to permit.

Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents.

Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.

Haditha, site of a major hydroelectric dam, has long been considered a tough case. It is among a string of Euphrates Valley towns used by insurgents and foreign fighters to infiltrate from Syria to reach Baghdad and the Sunni heartland.

Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the Americans leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight.

Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.

An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.

Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law -- including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.

"This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy."

Some analysts, however, say the killings of civilians also reflect frustration among young troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight. They say these young fighters have been thrust into an alien culture for repeated tours in a war whose strategy many of them do not understand.

"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Easily Dispensable: Iraq's Children

By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 22 May 2006

/*Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society.*/
/- Joan Ganz Cooney/

If, as I would like to believe, the above quote suggests all children
and not merely those born in Western democracies, I am no longer certain
that we live in a civilized society.

That women and children suffer the most during times of war is not a new
phenomenon. It is a reality as old as war itself. What Rumsfeld, Rice
and other war criminals of the Cheney administration prefer to call
"collateral damage" translates in English as the inexcusable murder of
and other irreparable harm done to women, children and the elderly
during any military offensive.

US foreign policy in the Middle East manifests itself most starkly in
its impact on the children of Iraq. It is they who continue to pay with
their lives and futures for the brutal follies of our administration.
Starvation under sanctions, and death and suffering during war and
occupation are their lot. Since the beginning of the occupation, Iraqi
children have been affected worst by the violence generated by the
occupying forces and the freedom fighters.

While I had witnessed several instances of this from the time of my
first trip to Iraq in November 2003, I was shaken by a close encounter
with it, a year later, in November 2004.

In a major Baghdad hospital, 12-year-old Fatima Harouz lay in her bed
<http://209.97.202.24/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album18&id=1_G>,
dazed, amidst a crowded hospital room. She limply waved her bruised arm
at the flies that buzzed over the bed. Her shins, shattered by bullets
when American soldiers fired through the front door of her house, were
both covered in casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid
sat upon her abdomen, where she had taken shrapnel from another bullet.

She was from Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Three days before I
saw her, soldiers had attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us in
the hospital, said, "They attacked our home and there weren't even any
resistance fighters in our area." Her brother had been shot and killed,
his wife wounded, and their home ransacked by soldiers. "Before they
left, they killed all of our chickens," added Fatima's mother, her eyes
a mixture of fear, shock and rage. A doctor who was with us as Fatima's
mother narrated the story looked at me and sternly asked, "This is the
freedom . in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?"

The doctors' anger was mild if we consider the magnitude of suffering
that has been inflicted upon the children of Iraq as a direct result of
first the US-backed sanctions and then the failed US occupation.

In a report released by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on
May 2nd of this year, one out of three Iraqi children is malnourished
and underweight.

The report states
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/2f579a75641ad1b1b8ef750a7efb67ce.htm>
that 25% of Iraqi children between the ages of six months and five years
old suffer from either acute or chronic malnutrition. In addition, the
Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) press release on the
matter added, "A 2004 Living Conditions Survey indicated a decrease in
mortality rates among children under five years old since 1999. However,
the results of a September 2005 Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis
- commissioned by Iraq's Central Organization for Statistics and
Information Technology, the World Food Program and UNICEF - showed
worsening conditions since the April 2003 US-led invasion of the country."

Also this month, on May 15th , a news story
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DAH517137.htm> about the same
UN-backed government survey highlighted that "people are struggling to
cope three years after US-forces overthrew Saddam Hussein." The report
added that "Children are ... major victims of food insecurity," and
described the situation as "alarming." The story continued, "A total of
four million Iraqis, roughly 15 percent of the population, were in dire
need of humanitarian aid including food, up from 11 percent in a 2003
report, the survey of more than 20,000 Iraqi households found.. Decades
of conflict and economic sanctions have had serious effects on Iraqis.
Their consequences have been rising unemployment, illiteracy and, for
some families, the loss of wage earners."

/*But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel
beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.*/
/ - Carson McCullers/

Iraq's ministries of Health and Planning carried out the survey with
support from the UN World Food Program and UNICEF. A spokesman for
UNICEF's Iraq Support Center in Amman, Jordan, David Singh, told Reuters
that the number of acutely malnourished children in Iraq had more than
doubled, from 4% during the last year of Saddam's rule to at least 9% in
2005. He also said, "Until there is a period of relative stability in
Iraq we are going to continue to face these kinds of problems." UNICEF's
special representative for Iraq, Roger Wright, commenting on the dire
effects of the situation, said, "This can irreversibly hamper the young
child's optimal mental/cognitive development, not just their physical
development."

This past March, an article titled "Garbage Dump Second Home for Iraqi
Children <http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-31-03.asp>"
addressed the appalling situation in the northern, Kurdish-controlled
Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah where young children assist their families in
searching the city garbage dumps. It said that children as young as
seven often accompany their parents to the dumps before school, in order
to look for reusable items such as shoes, clothing and electrical
equipment which is then resold in order to augment the family income.

This disturbing news is not really news in Baghdad. Back in December
2004 I saw children living with their families
<http://209.97.202.24/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album27&id=100_3505>
in the main dump of the capital city.

Poverty in Iraq has plummeted acutely during the invasion and
occupation. Those who were already surviving on the margins due to years
of deprivation have sunk further, and the children of such families have
recourse to no nutrition, no health care, no education, no present and
no future. Those from less unfortunate backgrounds are now suffering
because the family wage earner has been killed, detained, or lost
employment. Or the source of the family's income, a shop, factory or
farm have been destroyed, or simply because it is impossible to feed a
family under the existing economic conditions of high costs and low to
nil income in Iraq.

As execrable as the current situation is for Iraqi children, most of the
world media, appallingly, does not see it as a story to be covered. Even
back in November 2004, surveys conducted by the UN, aid agencies and the
interim Iraqi government showed that acute malnutrition among young
children had nearly doubled since the US-led invasion took place in the
spring of 2004.

A Washington Post story
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html>,
"Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos," read, "After the rate of acute
malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4
percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to
a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's
Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development
Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children
suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea
and dangerous deficiencies of protein."

Not only is the US occupation starving Iraq's children, but occupation
forces regularly detain them as well. It is common knowledge in Iraq
that there have been child prisoners in the most odious prisons, such as
Abu Ghraib, since early on in the occupation. While most, if not all,
corporate media outlets in the US have been loath to visit the subject,
the Sunday Herald in Scotland reported
<http://www.sundayherald.com/43796> back in August 2004 that "coalition
forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib.
Witnesses claim that the detainees - some as young as 10 - are also
being subjected to rape and torture."

The story read, "It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says
he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 'The kid was hurting very bad and they
covered all the doors with sheets,' he said in a statement given to
investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. 'Then, when I heard
the screaming I climbed the door . and I saw [the soldier's name is
deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Hilas, who was himself
threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Ghraib, then described
in horrific detail how the soldier raped 'the little kid.'"

The newspaper's investigation at that time concluded that there were as
many as 107 children being held by occupation forces, although their
names were not known, nor their location or the length of their detention.

In June 2004 an internal UNICEF report, which was not made public, noted
widespread arrest and detention of Iraqi children by US and UK forces. A
section of the report titled "Children in Conflict with the Law or with
Coalition Forces," stated, "In July and August 2003, several meetings
were conducted with CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) . and Ministry
of Justice to address issues related to juvenile justice and the
situation of children detained by the coalition forces . UNICEF is
working through a variety of channels to try and learn more about
conditions for children who are imprisoned or detained, and to ensure
that their rights are respected."

Another section of the report added, "Information on the number, age,
gender and conditions of incarceration is limited. In Basra and Karbala
children arrested for alleged activities targeting the occupying forces
are reported to be routinely transferred to an internee facility in Um
Qasr. The categorization of these children as 'internees' is worrying
since it implies indefinite holding without contact with family,
expectation of trial or due process." The report went on to add, "A
detention centre for children was established in Baghdad, where
according to ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) a
significant number of children were detained. UNICEF was informed that
the coalition forces were planning to transfer all children in adult
facilities to this 'specialized' child detention centre. In July 2003,
UNICEF requested a visit to the centre but access was denied. Poor
security in the area of the detention centre has prevented visits by
independent observers like the ICRC since last December [2003]."

A section of the report which I found very pertinent, as I'd already
witnessed this occurring in Iraq, stated, "The perceived unjust
detention of Iraqi males, including youths, for suspected activities
against the occupying forces has become one of the leading causes for
the mounting frustration among Iraqi youth and the potential for
radicalization of this population group."

On December 17, 2003, at the al-Shahid Adnan Kherala secondary school in
Baghdad, I witnessed US forces detain 16 children who had held a mock,
non-violent, pro-Saddam Hussein the previous day. While forces from the
First Armored Division sealed the school with two large tanks,
helicopters, several Bradley fighting vehicles and at least 10 Humvees,
soldiers loaded the children into a covered truck and drove them to
their base. Meanwhile, the rest of the students remained locked inside
the school until the US military began to exit the area.

Shortly thereafter the doors were unlocked, releasing the frightened
students who flocked out the doors. The youngest were 12 years old, and
none of the students were older than 18. They ran out, many in tears,
while others were enraged as they kicked and shook the front gate. My
interpreter and I were surrounded by frenzied students who yelled, "This
is the democracy? This is the freedom? You see what the Americans are
doing to us here?"

Another student cried out to us, "They took several of my friends! Why
are they taking them to prison? For throwing rocks?" A few blocks away
we spoke with a smaller group of students who had run from the school
(in panic). One student who was crying yelled to me, "Why are they doing
this to us? We are only kids!"

The tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles that were guarding the perimeter
of the school began to rumble down the street beside us, on their
passage out. Several young boys with tears streaming down their faces
picked up stones and hurled them at the tanks as they drove by. Imagine
my horror when I saw the US soldiers on top of the Bradleys begin firing
their M-16's above our heads as we ducked inside a taxi. A soldier on
another Bradley, behind the first, passed and fired randomly above our
heads as well. Kids and pedestrians ran for cover into the shops and
wherever possible.

I remember a little boy, not more than 13 years old, holding a stone and
standing at the edge of the street glaring at the Bradleys as they
rumbled past. Another soldier riding atop another passing Bradley pulled
out his pistol and aimed it at the boy's head and kept him in his sights
until the vehicle rolled out of sight.

One of the students hiding behind our taxi screamed to me, "Who are the
terrorists here now? You have seen this yourself! We are school kids!"

The very next month, in January 2004, I was in an area on the outskirts
of Baghdad that had been pulverized by "Operation Iron Grip." I spoke
with a man at his small farm house. His three year old boy, Halaf Ziad
Halaf, walked up to me and with a worried look
<http://209.97.202.24/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album06&id=100_1616>
on his face said, "I have seen the Americans here with their tanks. They
want to attack us."

His uncle, who had joined us for tea, leaned over to me and said, "The
Americans are creating the terrorists here by hurting people and causing
their relatives to fight against them. Even this little boy will grow up
hating the Americans because of their policy here."

The slaughter, starvation, detention, torture and sexual assault of
Iraq's children at the hands of US soldiers or by proxy via US foreign
policy, is not a recent phenomenon. It is true that the present US
administration has been brazen and blatant in its crimes in Iraq, but
those willing to bear witness must not forget that Bill Clinton and his
minions played an equally, if not even more devastating role in the
assault on the children of Iraq.

On May 12, 1996, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was
asked by Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" about the effects of US sanctions
against Iraq, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I
mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the
price worth it?"

In a response which has now become notorious, Albright replied, "I think
this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."

/*We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is
abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the
things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his
bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are
being developed. To him we cannot answer "Tomorrow." His name is "Today."*/
/- Gabriela Mistral/

To all Americans who, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary,
continue to believe that they are supporting a war for democracy in
Iraq, I would like to say, the way Iraq is headed it will have little
use for democracy and freedom. We must find ways to stop the immoral,
soulless, repugnant occupation if we want the children of Iraq to see
any future at all.

I second that.