'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Fallujah war crimes evidence

The Boston Globe's Anne Barnard was embedded with a task force from the Army's 1st Infantry Division throughout much of the battle of Fallujah. She had an account of her experiences in yesterday's paper that provides excellent, firsthand evidence of the issuing of commands that seem clearly to contravene the Geneva Conventions, especially in regard to the use of grossly disproportionate violence inside the city.

I note that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada's Louise Arbour, has already expressed her concern about the level of violence used by the US in Fallujah. I can't remember if she also said she'd like some form of action to be taken on this? Frankly, I don't know what form such action might take. The US is, as we know, not a signatory of the ICC. The only other forms of legal-type action that could be taken would be a case brought by another state in the ICJ (but which state would do it? "Iraq"?? Ha-ha-ha) -- or, a prosecution from within the US military for contraventions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is supposed to include all the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

I guess political action inside the US is the only thing, at this point, that can rein these guys in.

Anyway, I'll just quickly take from Barnard's excellent account the four clearest points--most of them taken from before-action briefings that she attended-- where I see the laws of war apparently being contravened:

(1) To avoid booby traps and ambushes, battalion leaders told the men to fire at houses and buildings before entering them. That made for a trail of destruction. There was no way to know for sure if they were hurting noncombatants, even in a city where most residents had fled.

[Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]

(2) ''The first time you get shot at from a building, it's rubble," [Capt. Paul]Fowler told his platoon leaders. ''No questions asked."

(3) Suspected enemy buildings were to be ''cleared by fire" before troops entered. ''No boots on the ground unless you're looking for body parts," Fowler said.

(4) Guerrillas kept attacking the Iraqi troops as they tried to hold the hospital. A row of houses nearby was nearly demolished. ''We're just cleaning up the trash," Fowler said.
[Two possible serious violations here... One was that the --pro-US-- "Iraqi troops" had taken over the hospital and were apparently trying to use it as a military position: a clear violation, there. The other, the demolition of the whol row of houses... ]

Her account also provides some glimpses into the sense that some of these US fighting men had, that their actions were serious, and terrible-- and perhaps even either unproductive or politically quite counter-productive.

For example, when she writes:

The battle of Fallujah this month pitted the world's most powerful military force against fighters in tennis shoes wielding homemade rocket launchers. Military planners had decided to use the blunt instrument of heavy armor against an insurgency that they acknowledge cannot be defeated by force alone -- betting that the blow to the guerrillas would outweigh the resentment stirred by the attack. So the job fell to the soldiers from Task Force 2-2, who were accompanied by a Globe reporter.

Afterward, even as they took pride in their speed and sheer destructive power, grunts and officers alike reflected that their handiwork could cause a backlash -- and that the battle has yet to be won in the hearts of Fallujah's people.

''I think it's going to get hotter for a while, when people come back and see what we did," said Specialist Todd Taylor, 21.

US commanders gave the unit a contradictory task: Take back the city with minimal US casualties, but leave it as intact as possible. The latter proved difficult...

Or this:

The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Newell, said US forces could never apply a ''Fallujah method" to other insurgent hubs in Iraq, such as Mosul and Baqubah, where civilian life continues more normally amid rebel activity.

''This is the first time since World War II that someone has turned an American armored task force loose in a city with no restrictions," Newell said. ''Let's hope we don't see it again any time soon."

That point about "not being able" to apply a Fallujah method to other Iraqi cities is interesting. Firstly, I'm not sure that it's true. If the US hawks decided they "needed" to apply it to, say, Mosul or Latifiyyeh, what's to stop them?? All that it would take, I guess, would be a systematic campaign of some weeks prior to the assault, during which the US/Allawist decisionmakers would:

(1) Build up a huge campaign against the "nest of insurgents" inside the next-targeted city... perhaps with the added frisson that "Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi" was said to be hiding out there, and...

(2) Use every means possible to get as many of the city's civilian residents as possible to leave it. (Though mind you, once Fallujah's civilians start telling people what happened to the homes and properties that they left behind them, I'm not so sure that next time round, people will be so ready to leave.)

Additionally, if the US military is not, actually, planning to undertake any more "Fallujahs" inside Iraq, then the deterrent effect they evidently hoped to achieve by doing it there becomes a lot less credible...

Barnard ends with this:

Restless in the back of a Bradley, Sergeant John Cunningham, 37, of Boston, said it was ridiculous to label any particular war tactic inhumane.

''People shooting each other is inhumane. Let's find a better way to solve our problems," he said.

Then he added: ''Let's get this over with. The way home leads through Fallujah."

That's an interesting set of comments. At one level he's quite right that "'People shooting each other is inhumane", and that the fighting should end, with the US troops getting home as soon as possible.

But the idea that "The way home leads through Fallujah"? And that there is some kind of moral equivalency between Cunningham's massively destructive army going half way araound the world to impose its will on the citizens of another nation, and the pathetic, man-with-a-single RPG level of resistance that they encountered in Fallujah? I don't think so.

Anyway, we should now add Anne Barnard to Kevin Sites as examples of embedded journalists who have valuable information, some of which they are willing to share, about the laws-of-war contraventions they saw being practised by the forces they accompanied. I hope that people in the human-rights movement are contacting these and all other embedded journalists in order to have them make on-the-record statements that are as full and detailed as possible about all such contraventions.

[Note: I got his link, as many of the others I've been using recently, from the Comments threads in Yankeedoodle's great blog Today in Iraq. Yankee himself, who has kept his great compilation blog running for 18 months now, is having a bit of a burnout. But his commenters are still doing great. Tyhanks, all of you.]