G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomdispatch: Dahr Jamail on How to Control the Story, Pentagon-style
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Nov 26 2007 - 12:23pm
- from TomDispatch [1]
Acts matter. Here's how Dahr Jamail, a young mountain guide and volunteer
rescue ranger in Alaska (who did freelance writing in the "off-season")
describes his rash decision, back in 2003, to cover George W. Bush's Iraq
War in person: "I decided that the one thing I could do was go to Baghdad to
report on the occupation myself. I saved some money, bought a laptop, a
camera, and a plane ticket, and, armed with information gleaned via some
connections made over the Internet, headed for the Middle East." That was
it. The next thing he knew he was driving through the Iraqi desert from
Amman, Jordan, toward Baghdad and directly into the unknown. He had few
contacts; no media organization to back him; no hotel/office [2] with
private guards to return to at night; no embedded place among American
forces for protection; not even, on arrival in Baghdad, any place to write
for.
Call that a shot in the dark. The result? A singularly remarkable running
account of what Iraq actually felt like, of what life for Iraqi civilians
actually was like after the shock-and-awe onslaught of March 2003 devolved
into the endless occupation/catastrophe we all know so well. Jamail, who has
written regularly for Tomdispatch these last years, has now published a book
on his time on (and always very close to) the ground in Iraq, Beyond the
Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq [3].
Unnerving as it is to come, once again, upon the real face of the American
occupation, largely seen through Iraqi eyes, Jamail's new book is also a
gripping adventure to read, the odyssey of a neophyte becoming a journalist
under the pressure of events.
In reviewing the book for Mother Jones magazine [4], Nick Turse recently
wrote:
"I suspect Jamail's account will prove an enduring document of what really
happened during the chaotic years of occupation, and how it transformed
ordinary Iraqis. To paraphrase one of the Vietnam War's finest
correspondents, Gloria Emerson, writing about Jonathan Schell's exceptional
accounts of that conflict: If, years from now, Americans are willing to read
any books about the war, this one should be among them. It tells
everything."
Don't miss it -- or Jamail's latest below.
-- Tom
Iraq Has Only Militants, No Civilians: "Tactical Perception Management" in
Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
"Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody
up close and get to know him before you can shoot him." -- Colonel Potter,
M A S H
Name them. Maim them. Kill them.
From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and
attacks by the U.S. military have only killed "militants," "criminals,"
"suspected insurgents," "IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,"
"anti-American fighters," "terrorists," "military age males," "armed men,"
"extremists," or "al-Qaeda."
The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the
early years of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on October
23rd of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The U.S.
military claimed it had killed 11 among "a group of men planting a roadside
bomb." Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that at least six
of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that those killed were
farmers, that there were children among them, and that the number of dead
was greater than 11.
Here is part of the statement released by U.S. military spokeswoman in
northern Iraq, Major Peggy Kageleiry:
"A suspected insurgent and improvised explosive device cell member was
identified among the killed in an engagement between Coalition Forces and
suspected IED emplacers just north of Samarra.... During the engagement,
insurgents used a nearby house as a safe haven to re-engage coalition
aircraft. A known member of an IED cell was among the 11 killed during the
multiple engagements. We send condolences to the families of those victims
and we regret any loss of life."
As usual, the version offered by locals was vastly different. Abdul
al-Rahman Iyadeh, a relative of some of the victims, revealed that the
"group of men" attacked were actually three farmers who had left their homes
at 4:30 A.M. to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the initial
helicopter attack and the survivor ran back to his home where other
residents gathered. The second air strike, he claimed, destroyed the house
killing 14 people. Another witness told reporters that four separate houses
were hit by the helicopter. A local Iraqi policeman, Captain Abdullah
al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 -- seven men, six women, and three
children, with another 14 wounded.
As often happens, the U.S. military, once challenged, declared that an
"investigation" of the incident was under way.
And So It Goes
On October 21st, two days before that helicopter strike near Djila, American
soldiers, again aided by helicopters, but this time in a heavily populated
urban neighborhood, claimed to have killed 49 "armed men" in a "gun battle"
in Sadr City, a sprawling Shi'ite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. Then,
too, the military initially insisted "no civilians were killed or injured."
A Shi'ite citizens' council and other Shi'ite groups responded that many
innocent bystanders had died. Among the 13 dead mentioned in initial reports
by local Iraqi police were three children and a woman. Other Iraqi
authorities announced that 69 people had been injured.
The U.S. military had no explanation for the widely varying American and
Iraqi tallies of casualties.
The official American account went like this:
"The operation's objective was an individual reported to be a long time
Special Groups member specializing in kidnapping operations. Intelligence
indicates he is a well-known cell leader and has previously sought funding
from Iran to carry out high profile kidnappings. Upon arrival, the ground
force began to clear a series of buildings in the target area and received
sustained heavy fire from adjacent structures, from automatic weapons and
rocket propelled grenades, or RPGs. Responding in self-defense, Coalition
forces engaged, killing an estimated 33 criminals. Supporting aircraft was
also called in to engage enemy personnel maneuvering with RPGs toward the
ground force, killing an estimated six criminals. Upon departing the target
area, Coalition forces continued to receive heavy fire from automatic
weapons and RPGs and were also attacked by an improvised explosive device.
Responding in self-defense, the ground force engaged the hostile threat,
killing an additional estimated 10 combatants. All total, Coalition forces
estimate that 49 criminals were killed in three separate engagements during
this operation. Ground forces reported they were unaware of any innocent
civilians being killed as a result of this operation."
To be fair, the military admitted that the target of this manhunt was not,
in fact, among those captured or killed.
After the "operation," television news outlets broadcast images of grieving
families in the streets of Sadr City. One man reported that his neighbor's
6-year-old child had been killed, and a 2-year-old wounded. Arab television
outlets caught scenes of ambulances with wailing sirens carrying the injured
to the Imam Ali hospital, the largest in Sadr City, where doctors were shown
treating the casualties, including children.
Typically with such incidents, those 49 dead "criminals" turned back into
civilians when local police began checking, including two (not three)
children in their final count.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki vowed an investigation for which U.S.
military officials offered to form a joint committee; but, as is so often
the case in such "investigations," there have been no follow-up reports. In
this "incident," the U.S. military, as far as we know, still stands by its
assertion that no civilians were killed or wounded.
Two months earlier, in a similar incident, the U.S. military claimed 32
"suspected insurgents" killed during an air strike, also in Sadr City, a
claim disputed by Iraqis in the neighborhood, followed by the usual promise
of an investigation -- of which, once again, nothing more was heard.
"Tactical Perception Management"
For perspective, let me take you back to Iraq in November 2003. I had been
there less than a week on my first visit to that occupied country when the
U.S. military reported a raging firefight between American forces and 150 of
Saddam Hussein's former Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. According to General
Peter Pace, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, American
soldiers, on being attacked by the group, had responded fiercely and killed
54 of them. "They attacked and they were killed, so I think it will be
instructive to them," General Pace had smugly observed.
Most of the Western media simply chalked up the number of "insurgent" dead
at 54 and left it at that. Local media in Baghdad, as well as outlets like
Al-Jazeera, were, however, citing very different figures taken directly from
the hospital in Samarra where the wounded were being treated. Doctors there
announced a count of eight killed in the incident, including an Iranian
pilgrim, and 50 Iraqis wounded.
I traveled to Samarra that week, visited the morgue at Samarra General
Hospital, spoke with wounded Iraqis at the hospital, and interviewed one of
the leading sheikhs of the city as well as several eyewitnesses to the
event. What I found was general agreement that a U.S. patrol had, in fact,
come under attack -- but by only two gunmen while delivering money to a
downtown bank. Jumpy American soldiers had responded with a spray of fire
that had killed neither of the attackers, but eight civilians, while
wounding 50 others. The streets in the city center, where the firing took
place, were riddled with bullets.
The military, nonetheless, stood by their figure -- 54 dead -- and insisted
that the enormous force of "insurgents" had attacked with mortars, grenades,
and automatic weapons.
A man I interviewed, who had been in his tea stall in the vicinity and
witnessed most of the incident, summed up the local reaction this way:
"The Americans say the people who fought them are al-Qaeda or fedayeen. We
are all living in this small city here. Why have we not seen these foreign
fighters and strangers in our city before or after this battle? Everyone
here knows everyone, and none have seen these strangers. Why do they tell
these lies?"
Another man, at the scene had drawn my attention to a parked car scarred
with 112 bullets. As I was photographing it, a man with two children at his
side approached. They were, he said, the children of his brother who had
been killed by the gunfire.
"This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who
will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will
feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody
told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him?
They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted
to shoot a man? That's it? This is the reason? Why didn't anyone talk to me
and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal
thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that
the United States promised Iraq?"
My life as an independent reporter in his country was just beginning and his
questions felt like so many blows to the gut. Of course, I was the only
American reporter there to hear him and I was then writing for an email
audience of under 200. This is what it means, in Pentagon terms, to dominate
not only the battlefield, but the media landscape in which that battlefield
is reported. And that sort of domination was, it turned out, very much on
Pentagon minds in that period.
Within days of the incident, for instance, the New York Times published [5]
an article about how the Pentagon had awarded a contract to SAIC, a private
company, which was to investigate ways the Department of Defense could use
propaganda for more "effective strategic influence" in the "war on terror."
The Pentagon referred to this potential propaganda blitz (which would
eventually come back to haunt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) as a
"tactical perception management campaign." The title of the document SAIC
produced was "Winning the War of Ideas."
On December 2, 2005, the U.S. military would admit that the Lincoln Group
[6], which described itself as "a strategic communications & pubic relations
firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments,"
had been hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-American good-news articles in
the new Iraqi "free" press that the Bush administration was just then
touting. This was exposed during a briefing with Senator John Warner of
Virginia, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The admission would not, as one might have expected, prove a step towards
deterrence. Not only did the Lincoln Group get further contracts, but a wide
range of similar tactics continue to be employed by the military in Iraq
today with even greater impunity. In Iraq, the propaganda and misinformation
have, in fact, been continual and on a massive scale. And, of course, the
regular announcements of Iraqi "insurgent" or "criminal" deaths in American
operations have never stopped, nor have the announcements of
"investigations," when those claims are seriously challenged on the
ground -- investigations which, except in a few cases, are never heard of
again. All this is a reminder of something George W. Bush once said [7]:
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and
over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
The Military Wrist is Slapped
Even when one of those investigations did lead somewhere, that somewhere was
almost invariably a dead end. Take Haditha. Witnesses told reporters that,
on November 19, 2005, in the western town of Haditha, 24 Iraqi civilians had
been slaughtered by U.S. Marines. It was no secret that the Marines had shot
men, women, and children at close range in retaliation for a roadside
bombing that killed one of their own.
The Washington Post quoted Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who was watching
[8] from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of
three families. He had heard Younis Salim Khafif, his neighbor across the
street, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members.
"I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am
good,'" Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."
A Post special correspondent and U.S. investigators in Washington reported
that some of the dead were women attempting to shield their children.
According to death certificates, the girls killed in Khafif's house were
aged 14, 10, 5, 3, and 1.
After the news broke in the U.S., the military ordered a probe of the
incident. An Iraqi had actually managed to film the interiors of the
blood-soaked houses as well as scenes of the wounded at the Haditha
hospital, and had recorded statements of eyewitnesses to the massacre.
Even now, two years after the massacre, investigations continue. Anonymous
Pentagon officials having admitted to reporters that there is an abundance
of evidence to support charges against the accused Marines of deliberately
shooting civilians, including unarmed women and children. Currently, Marine
Corps and Navy prosecutors are reviewing the evidence, and will likely ask
for further probes.
As for the charges levied against the soldiers involved in the massacre, on
April 2nd of this year, all of the charges against Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz,
who was accused of killing five civilians, were dropped [9] as part of a
decision that granted him immunity to testify in potential courts-martial
for seven other Marines charged in the attack and in its alleged cover-up.
On August 9th, all murder charges against Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt and
charges of failing to investigate the incident against Capt. Randy Stone
were dropped by Lt. Gen. James Mattis, well-known for claiming [10] of
fighting in Afghanistan, "It's fun to shoot some people." On August 23th,
the investigating officer suggested that charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen
Tatum be dropped as well. On October 19th, Tatum's commanding officers
decided the charges should be lowered to involuntary manslaughter, reckless
endangerment, and aggravated assault. More recently, on September 18th, all
charges against Capt. Lucas McConnell were dropped, and the investigating
officer recommended that charges be similarly dropped against Lance Cpl.
Stephen Tatum.
On October 3rd, an investigating officer of an Article 32 hearing (a
proceeding similar to a civilian grand jury) recommended that Staff Sgt.
Frank D. Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women
and five children, and that the murder charges for his involvement in the
killing of 17 innocent civilians, be dropped. In other words, so far, no one
has gone to jail for the massacre in Haditha.
It is now commonplace for such investigations, regarding heinous crimes
against Iraqi civilians, to drag on for months or even years. Equally
commonplace: On completion of these investigations, the low-level soldiers,
who are charged with the crimes, are often either cleared entirely or given
laughably light sentences by military courts.
On November 8th, for instance, Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley, a sniper, was
found not guilty [11] by military judges on three charges of premeditated
murder for killing three Iraqi civilians. He was instead convicted only of
placing an AK-47 rifle with the remains of a dead Iraqi during one of his
missions -- as evidence that the man was an "insurgent."
In January 2004, 19 year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, and his cousin Marwan Fadil
were forced off a ledge into the Tigris River in Samarra at gunpoint by U.S.
soldiers. Fadil survived. He testified that the soldiers, after forcing the
two into the water, had stood by laughing as Hassoun drowned.
Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins was the only soldier tried in the case. Defense
attorney Captain Joshua Norris suggested that Perkins could not be convicted
of manslaughter because there was "no body, no evidence, no death." He was,
in fact, cleared of the involuntary manslaughter charge in a military court
on January 9, 2005 and instead was reduced in rank by one grade and
sentenced to six months in a military prison for assault.
Similarly, on June 6, 2006, three British soldiers were cleared of charges
of killing 15-year-old Ahmed Jabber Kareem in May 2003 by forcing him into a
Basra canal.
Iraqis Dehumanized
None of this -- from the unending "incidents" themselves to the way the
Pentagon has dominated the reporting of them -- would have been possible
without a widespread dehumanization of Iraqis among American soldiers (and a
deep-set, if largely unexpressed and little considered, conviction on the
American "home front" that Iraqi lives are worth little). If, four decades
ago, the Vietnamese were "gooks," "dinks," and "slopes," the Iraqis of the
American occupation are "hajis," "sand-******s," and "towel heads." Latent
racism abets the dehumanization process, ably assisted by a mainstream media
that tends, with honorable exceptions, to accept Pentagon announcements as
at least an initial approximation of reality in Iraq.
Whether it was "incidents" involving helicopter strikes in which those on
the ground who died were assumed to be enemy and evil, or the wholesale
destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004, or the massacre at Haditha, or
a slaughtered wedding party [12] in the western desert of Iraq that was also
caught on video tape (Marine Major General James Mattis: "How many people go
to the middle of the desert.... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest
civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not
be naive."), or killings at U.S. checkpoints; or even the initial invasion
of Iraq itself, we find the same propaganda techniques deployed: Demonize an
"enemy"; report only "fighters" being killed; stick to the story despite
evidence to the contrary; if under pressure, launch an investigation; if
still under pressure, bring only low-level troops up on charges; convict a
few of them; sentence them lightly; repeat drill.
At the time of this writing, the group Just Foreign Policy has offered an
estimate [13] of Iraqis killed since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.
Their number: 1,118,846. Consider that possibility in the context of the
latest round of news from Iraq about lessening violence.
The estimate is based on figures from a study conducted by researchers from
Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and al-Mustansiriya University in
Baghdad, and published in October 2006 in the British Medical Journal, The
Lancet, which found 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the
Anglo-American invasion and occupation. The report methodology has been
called "robust" and "close to best practice" by Sir Roy Anderson, the chief
scientific advisor to Britain's Ministry of Defense. Since that time, in
addition to Just Foreign Policy, the British research polling agency Opinion
Research Business has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq.
Based on this, veteran Australian born journalist John Pilger wrote recently
[14], "The scale of death caused by the British and U.S. governments may
well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest
single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century."
It is an indication of the success of an effective Pentagon "tactical
perception management campaign," of the way the Bush administration has
continued to "catapult propaganda," and of the dehumanization of Iraqis that
has gone with it, that the possibility of the number of dead Iraqis being in
this range has largely been dismissed (or remained generally undealt with)
in the mainstream media in the United States. Add to that the refusal of the
U.S. military to bring justice to those charged with some of these heinous
crimes, the lack of accountability, and an establishment media which has
regularly camouflaged the true nature of the occupation, and we have the
perfect setting for a continuance of industrial-scale slaughter in Iraq,
even while the news highlights the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan
and their adventures in various rehab clinics.
In what could reasonably serve as a summary of the American occupation of
Iraq, the eighteenth century philosopher Voltaire wrote, "It is forbidden to
kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers
and to the sound of trumpets."
Dahr Jamail. an independent journalist, is the author of the just-published
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied
Iraq [15] (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for
eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the
last four years. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com, Inter Press
Service, Asia Times, and Foreign Policy in Focus. He has contributed to The
Sunday Herald, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other
publications. He maintains a website, Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches [16],
with all his writing.
Copyright 2007 Dahr Jamail
_______
About author Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com
[17] ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of
the American Empire Project [18] and, most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and
Dissenters [19] (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Nov 26 2007 - 12:23pm
- from TomDispatch [1]
Acts matter. Here's how Dahr Jamail, a young mountain guide and volunteer
rescue ranger in Alaska (who did freelance writing in the "off-season")
describes his rash decision, back in 2003, to cover George W. Bush's Iraq
War in person: "I decided that the one thing I could do was go to Baghdad to
report on the occupation myself. I saved some money, bought a laptop, a
camera, and a plane ticket, and, armed with information gleaned via some
connections made over the Internet, headed for the Middle East." That was
it. The next thing he knew he was driving through the Iraqi desert from
Amman, Jordan, toward Baghdad and directly into the unknown. He had few
contacts; no media organization to back him; no hotel/office [2] with
private guards to return to at night; no embedded place among American
forces for protection; not even, on arrival in Baghdad, any place to write
for.
Call that a shot in the dark. The result? A singularly remarkable running
account of what Iraq actually felt like, of what life for Iraqi civilians
actually was like after the shock-and-awe onslaught of March 2003 devolved
into the endless occupation/catastrophe we all know so well. Jamail, who has
written regularly for Tomdispatch these last years, has now published a book
on his time on (and always very close to) the ground in Iraq, Beyond the
Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq [3].
Unnerving as it is to come, once again, upon the real face of the American
occupation, largely seen through Iraqi eyes, Jamail's new book is also a
gripping adventure to read, the odyssey of a neophyte becoming a journalist
under the pressure of events.
In reviewing the book for Mother Jones magazine [4], Nick Turse recently
wrote:
"I suspect Jamail's account will prove an enduring document of what really
happened during the chaotic years of occupation, and how it transformed
ordinary Iraqis. To paraphrase one of the Vietnam War's finest
correspondents, Gloria Emerson, writing about Jonathan Schell's exceptional
accounts of that conflict: If, years from now, Americans are willing to read
any books about the war, this one should be among them. It tells
everything."
Don't miss it -- or Jamail's latest below.
-- Tom
Iraq Has Only Militants, No Civilians: "Tactical Perception Management" in
Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
"Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody
up close and get to know him before you can shoot him." -- Colonel Potter,
M A S H
Name them. Maim them. Kill them.
From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and
attacks by the U.S. military have only killed "militants," "criminals,"
"suspected insurgents," "IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,"
"anti-American fighters," "terrorists," "military age males," "armed men,"
"extremists," or "al-Qaeda."
The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the
early years of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on October
23rd of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The U.S.
military claimed it had killed 11 among "a group of men planting a roadside
bomb." Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that at least six
of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that those killed were
farmers, that there were children among them, and that the number of dead
was greater than 11.
Here is part of the statement released by U.S. military spokeswoman in
northern Iraq, Major Peggy Kageleiry:
"A suspected insurgent and improvised explosive device cell member was
identified among the killed in an engagement between Coalition Forces and
suspected IED emplacers just north of Samarra.... During the engagement,
insurgents used a nearby house as a safe haven to re-engage coalition
aircraft. A known member of an IED cell was among the 11 killed during the
multiple engagements. We send condolences to the families of those victims
and we regret any loss of life."
As usual, the version offered by locals was vastly different. Abdul
al-Rahman Iyadeh, a relative of some of the victims, revealed that the
"group of men" attacked were actually three farmers who had left their homes
at 4:30 A.M. to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the initial
helicopter attack and the survivor ran back to his home where other
residents gathered. The second air strike, he claimed, destroyed the house
killing 14 people. Another witness told reporters that four separate houses
were hit by the helicopter. A local Iraqi policeman, Captain Abdullah
al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 -- seven men, six women, and three
children, with another 14 wounded.
As often happens, the U.S. military, once challenged, declared that an
"investigation" of the incident was under way.
And So It Goes
On October 21st, two days before that helicopter strike near Djila, American
soldiers, again aided by helicopters, but this time in a heavily populated
urban neighborhood, claimed to have killed 49 "armed men" in a "gun battle"
in Sadr City, a sprawling Shi'ite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. Then,
too, the military initially insisted "no civilians were killed or injured."
A Shi'ite citizens' council and other Shi'ite groups responded that many
innocent bystanders had died. Among the 13 dead mentioned in initial reports
by local Iraqi police were three children and a woman. Other Iraqi
authorities announced that 69 people had been injured.
The U.S. military had no explanation for the widely varying American and
Iraqi tallies of casualties.
The official American account went like this:
"The operation's objective was an individual reported to be a long time
Special Groups member specializing in kidnapping operations. Intelligence
indicates he is a well-known cell leader and has previously sought funding
from Iran to carry out high profile kidnappings. Upon arrival, the ground
force began to clear a series of buildings in the target area and received
sustained heavy fire from adjacent structures, from automatic weapons and
rocket propelled grenades, or RPGs. Responding in self-defense, Coalition
forces engaged, killing an estimated 33 criminals. Supporting aircraft was
also called in to engage enemy personnel maneuvering with RPGs toward the
ground force, killing an estimated six criminals. Upon departing the target
area, Coalition forces continued to receive heavy fire from automatic
weapons and RPGs and were also attacked by an improvised explosive device.
Responding in self-defense, the ground force engaged the hostile threat,
killing an additional estimated 10 combatants. All total, Coalition forces
estimate that 49 criminals were killed in three separate engagements during
this operation. Ground forces reported they were unaware of any innocent
civilians being killed as a result of this operation."
To be fair, the military admitted that the target of this manhunt was not,
in fact, among those captured or killed.
After the "operation," television news outlets broadcast images of grieving
families in the streets of Sadr City. One man reported that his neighbor's
6-year-old child had been killed, and a 2-year-old wounded. Arab television
outlets caught scenes of ambulances with wailing sirens carrying the injured
to the Imam Ali hospital, the largest in Sadr City, where doctors were shown
treating the casualties, including children.
Typically with such incidents, those 49 dead "criminals" turned back into
civilians when local police began checking, including two (not three)
children in their final count.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki vowed an investigation for which U.S.
military officials offered to form a joint committee; but, as is so often
the case in such "investigations," there have been no follow-up reports. In
this "incident," the U.S. military, as far as we know, still stands by its
assertion that no civilians were killed or wounded.
Two months earlier, in a similar incident, the U.S. military claimed 32
"suspected insurgents" killed during an air strike, also in Sadr City, a
claim disputed by Iraqis in the neighborhood, followed by the usual promise
of an investigation -- of which, once again, nothing more was heard.
"Tactical Perception Management"
For perspective, let me take you back to Iraq in November 2003. I had been
there less than a week on my first visit to that occupied country when the
U.S. military reported a raging firefight between American forces and 150 of
Saddam Hussein's former Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. According to General
Peter Pace, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, American
soldiers, on being attacked by the group, had responded fiercely and killed
54 of them. "They attacked and they were killed, so I think it will be
instructive to them," General Pace had smugly observed.
Most of the Western media simply chalked up the number of "insurgent" dead
at 54 and left it at that. Local media in Baghdad, as well as outlets like
Al-Jazeera, were, however, citing very different figures taken directly from
the hospital in Samarra where the wounded were being treated. Doctors there
announced a count of eight killed in the incident, including an Iranian
pilgrim, and 50 Iraqis wounded.
I traveled to Samarra that week, visited the morgue at Samarra General
Hospital, spoke with wounded Iraqis at the hospital, and interviewed one of
the leading sheikhs of the city as well as several eyewitnesses to the
event. What I found was general agreement that a U.S. patrol had, in fact,
come under attack -- but by only two gunmen while delivering money to a
downtown bank. Jumpy American soldiers had responded with a spray of fire
that had killed neither of the attackers, but eight civilians, while
wounding 50 others. The streets in the city center, where the firing took
place, were riddled with bullets.
The military, nonetheless, stood by their figure -- 54 dead -- and insisted
that the enormous force of "insurgents" had attacked with mortars, grenades,
and automatic weapons.
A man I interviewed, who had been in his tea stall in the vicinity and
witnessed most of the incident, summed up the local reaction this way:
"The Americans say the people who fought them are al-Qaeda or fedayeen. We
are all living in this small city here. Why have we not seen these foreign
fighters and strangers in our city before or after this battle? Everyone
here knows everyone, and none have seen these strangers. Why do they tell
these lies?"
Another man, at the scene had drawn my attention to a parked car scarred
with 112 bullets. As I was photographing it, a man with two children at his
side approached. They were, he said, the children of his brother who had
been killed by the gunfire.
"This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who
will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will
feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody
told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him?
They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted
to shoot a man? That's it? This is the reason? Why didn't anyone talk to me
and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal
thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that
the United States promised Iraq?"
My life as an independent reporter in his country was just beginning and his
questions felt like so many blows to the gut. Of course, I was the only
American reporter there to hear him and I was then writing for an email
audience of under 200. This is what it means, in Pentagon terms, to dominate
not only the battlefield, but the media landscape in which that battlefield
is reported. And that sort of domination was, it turned out, very much on
Pentagon minds in that period.
Within days of the incident, for instance, the New York Times published [5]
an article about how the Pentagon had awarded a contract to SAIC, a private
company, which was to investigate ways the Department of Defense could use
propaganda for more "effective strategic influence" in the "war on terror."
The Pentagon referred to this potential propaganda blitz (which would
eventually come back to haunt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) as a
"tactical perception management campaign." The title of the document SAIC
produced was "Winning the War of Ideas."
On December 2, 2005, the U.S. military would admit that the Lincoln Group
[6], which described itself as "a strategic communications & pubic relations
firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments,"
had been hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-American good-news articles in
the new Iraqi "free" press that the Bush administration was just then
touting. This was exposed during a briefing with Senator John Warner of
Virginia, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The admission would not, as one might have expected, prove a step towards
deterrence. Not only did the Lincoln Group get further contracts, but a wide
range of similar tactics continue to be employed by the military in Iraq
today with even greater impunity. In Iraq, the propaganda and misinformation
have, in fact, been continual and on a massive scale. And, of course, the
regular announcements of Iraqi "insurgent" or "criminal" deaths in American
operations have never stopped, nor have the announcements of
"investigations," when those claims are seriously challenged on the
ground -- investigations which, except in a few cases, are never heard of
again. All this is a reminder of something George W. Bush once said [7]:
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and
over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
The Military Wrist is Slapped
Even when one of those investigations did lead somewhere, that somewhere was
almost invariably a dead end. Take Haditha. Witnesses told reporters that,
on November 19, 2005, in the western town of Haditha, 24 Iraqi civilians had
been slaughtered by U.S. Marines. It was no secret that the Marines had shot
men, women, and children at close range in retaliation for a roadside
bombing that killed one of their own.
The Washington Post quoted Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who was watching
[8] from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of
three families. He had heard Younis Salim Khafif, his neighbor across the
street, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members.
"I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am
good,'" Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."
A Post special correspondent and U.S. investigators in Washington reported
that some of the dead were women attempting to shield their children.
According to death certificates, the girls killed in Khafif's house were
aged 14, 10, 5, 3, and 1.
After the news broke in the U.S., the military ordered a probe of the
incident. An Iraqi had actually managed to film the interiors of the
blood-soaked houses as well as scenes of the wounded at the Haditha
hospital, and had recorded statements of eyewitnesses to the massacre.
Even now, two years after the massacre, investigations continue. Anonymous
Pentagon officials having admitted to reporters that there is an abundance
of evidence to support charges against the accused Marines of deliberately
shooting civilians, including unarmed women and children. Currently, Marine
Corps and Navy prosecutors are reviewing the evidence, and will likely ask
for further probes.
As for the charges levied against the soldiers involved in the massacre, on
April 2nd of this year, all of the charges against Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz,
who was accused of killing five civilians, were dropped [9] as part of a
decision that granted him immunity to testify in potential courts-martial
for seven other Marines charged in the attack and in its alleged cover-up.
On August 9th, all murder charges against Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt and
charges of failing to investigate the incident against Capt. Randy Stone
were dropped by Lt. Gen. James Mattis, well-known for claiming [10] of
fighting in Afghanistan, "It's fun to shoot some people." On August 23th,
the investigating officer suggested that charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen
Tatum be dropped as well. On October 19th, Tatum's commanding officers
decided the charges should be lowered to involuntary manslaughter, reckless
endangerment, and aggravated assault. More recently, on September 18th, all
charges against Capt. Lucas McConnell were dropped, and the investigating
officer recommended that charges be similarly dropped against Lance Cpl.
Stephen Tatum.
On October 3rd, an investigating officer of an Article 32 hearing (a
proceeding similar to a civilian grand jury) recommended that Staff Sgt.
Frank D. Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women
and five children, and that the murder charges for his involvement in the
killing of 17 innocent civilians, be dropped. In other words, so far, no one
has gone to jail for the massacre in Haditha.
It is now commonplace for such investigations, regarding heinous crimes
against Iraqi civilians, to drag on for months or even years. Equally
commonplace: On completion of these investigations, the low-level soldiers,
who are charged with the crimes, are often either cleared entirely or given
laughably light sentences by military courts.
On November 8th, for instance, Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley, a sniper, was
found not guilty [11] by military judges on three charges of premeditated
murder for killing three Iraqi civilians. He was instead convicted only of
placing an AK-47 rifle with the remains of a dead Iraqi during one of his
missions -- as evidence that the man was an "insurgent."
In January 2004, 19 year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, and his cousin Marwan Fadil
were forced off a ledge into the Tigris River in Samarra at gunpoint by U.S.
soldiers. Fadil survived. He testified that the soldiers, after forcing the
two into the water, had stood by laughing as Hassoun drowned.
Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins was the only soldier tried in the case. Defense
attorney Captain Joshua Norris suggested that Perkins could not be convicted
of manslaughter because there was "no body, no evidence, no death." He was,
in fact, cleared of the involuntary manslaughter charge in a military court
on January 9, 2005 and instead was reduced in rank by one grade and
sentenced to six months in a military prison for assault.
Similarly, on June 6, 2006, three British soldiers were cleared of charges
of killing 15-year-old Ahmed Jabber Kareem in May 2003 by forcing him into a
Basra canal.
Iraqis Dehumanized
None of this -- from the unending "incidents" themselves to the way the
Pentagon has dominated the reporting of them -- would have been possible
without a widespread dehumanization of Iraqis among American soldiers (and a
deep-set, if largely unexpressed and little considered, conviction on the
American "home front" that Iraqi lives are worth little). If, four decades
ago, the Vietnamese were "gooks," "dinks," and "slopes," the Iraqis of the
American occupation are "hajis," "sand-******s," and "towel heads." Latent
racism abets the dehumanization process, ably assisted by a mainstream media
that tends, with honorable exceptions, to accept Pentagon announcements as
at least an initial approximation of reality in Iraq.
Whether it was "incidents" involving helicopter strikes in which those on
the ground who died were assumed to be enemy and evil, or the wholesale
destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004, or the massacre at Haditha, or
a slaughtered wedding party [12] in the western desert of Iraq that was also
caught on video tape (Marine Major General James Mattis: "How many people go
to the middle of the desert.... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest
civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not
be naive."), or killings at U.S. checkpoints; or even the initial invasion
of Iraq itself, we find the same propaganda techniques deployed: Demonize an
"enemy"; report only "fighters" being killed; stick to the story despite
evidence to the contrary; if under pressure, launch an investigation; if
still under pressure, bring only low-level troops up on charges; convict a
few of them; sentence them lightly; repeat drill.
At the time of this writing, the group Just Foreign Policy has offered an
estimate [13] of Iraqis killed since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.
Their number: 1,118,846. Consider that possibility in the context of the
latest round of news from Iraq about lessening violence.
The estimate is based on figures from a study conducted by researchers from
Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and al-Mustansiriya University in
Baghdad, and published in October 2006 in the British Medical Journal, The
Lancet, which found 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the
Anglo-American invasion and occupation. The report methodology has been
called "robust" and "close to best practice" by Sir Roy Anderson, the chief
scientific advisor to Britain's Ministry of Defense. Since that time, in
addition to Just Foreign Policy, the British research polling agency Opinion
Research Business has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq.
Based on this, veteran Australian born journalist John Pilger wrote recently
[14], "The scale of death caused by the British and U.S. governments may
well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest
single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century."
It is an indication of the success of an effective Pentagon "tactical
perception management campaign," of the way the Bush administration has
continued to "catapult propaganda," and of the dehumanization of Iraqis that
has gone with it, that the possibility of the number of dead Iraqis being in
this range has largely been dismissed (or remained generally undealt with)
in the mainstream media in the United States. Add to that the refusal of the
U.S. military to bring justice to those charged with some of these heinous
crimes, the lack of accountability, and an establishment media which has
regularly camouflaged the true nature of the occupation, and we have the
perfect setting for a continuance of industrial-scale slaughter in Iraq,
even while the news highlights the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan
and their adventures in various rehab clinics.
In what could reasonably serve as a summary of the American occupation of
Iraq, the eighteenth century philosopher Voltaire wrote, "It is forbidden to
kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers
and to the sound of trumpets."
Dahr Jamail. an independent journalist, is the author of the just-published
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied
Iraq [15] (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for
eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the
last four years. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com, Inter Press
Service, Asia Times, and Foreign Policy in Focus. He has contributed to The
Sunday Herald, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other
publications. He maintains a website, Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches [16],
with all his writing.
Copyright 2007 Dahr Jamail
_______
About author Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com
[17] ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of
the American Empire Project [18] and, most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and
Dissenters [19] (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson