[NYTr] Bush Free-Fire Zones: More on Iran, and Vietnam

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Oct 25, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/102407.html

Bush's Free-Fire Zones

By Robert Parry

Determined to gain the upper hand in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W.
Bush has turned large portions of the two countries into near free-fire
zones where any resistance, even in populated areas, is met with
aggressive tactics that often kill civilians.

Though more attention has been focused on trigger-happy Blackwater
“security contractors,” Bush’s military strategy has employed its own
indiscriminate firepower -- from loose "rules of engagement" for U.S.
troops, to helicopter gun ships firing on crowds, to jet air strikes,
to missiles launched from Predator drones.

For instance, the U.S. military acknowledged on Oct. 23 that an
American helicopter killed 11 people, including women and children,
after someone allegedly shot at the helicopter as it flew over the
village of Mukaisheefa, north of Baghdad.

Iraqi police and witnesses said 16 people died, apparently as some
rushed to help a wounded man, the New York Times reported. The
helicopter gunners presumed the wounded man to be an insurgent and thus
opened fire on the locals who came to his aid, according to witnesses.

“The locals went to check if he was dead and gathered around him,” said
Mohanad Hamid Muhsin, a 14-year-old who was shot in the leg. “But the
helicopter opened fire again and killed some of the locals and wounded
others.”

When Iraqis carried the wounded into houses to administer first aid,
the helicopter fired on the houses, killing and wounding more people,
said Muhsin, who added that the dead included two of his brothers and a
sister.

A local police official said the 16 dead included six women and three
children, while 14 other Iraqis were wounded.

The incident followed on the heels of an Oct. 21 gun battle in which 49
people died when U.S. forces attacked alleged Shiite militiamen in Sadr
City, a crowded slum in eastern Baghdad. Local authorities said the
dead included innocent bystanders. [NYT, Oct. 24, 2007]

Another account of the Oct. 23 incident in the Los Angeles Times quoted
residents saying the men who were killed were farmers irrigating their
fields in the pre-daylight hours.

Abdul Wahab Ahmed, a neighbor, said the U.S. attack also involved jets
that conducted two bombing runs. The dead included two toddlers and
four teenagers, he said. [Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24, 2007]

The U.S. military said one of those killed in the Oct. 23 attack was “a
known member of an I.E.D. cell,” referring to improvised explosive
devices that Iraqi insurgents have made their weapon of choice in
fighting the U.S. occupation.

The American statement added that four other “military-age males” were
killed along with five women and one child. U.S. military spokesmen
often justify killings in Iraq and Afghanistan by noting that the dead
are military-age males (or MAMs), slain in the vicinity of a firefight.

Vietnam Echoes

The shoot-to-kill strategy toward MAMs has a resonance back to the
Vietnam War when U.S. helicopter-borne troops sometimes would spot a
MAM working in a rice paddy, fire a shot near him and then interpret
his running as an aggressive act justifying his killing.

This technique was described approvingly by retired Gen. Colin Powell
in his widely praised autobiography, "My American Journey."

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,”
Powell wrote. “If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked
remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in
front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile
intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

“Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had
served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was
killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And
Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat
tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

While it’s true that combat is brutal and judgments can be clouded by
fear, the mowing down of unarmed civilians in cold blood doesn’t
constitute combat. Under the laws of war, it is regarded as murder and,
indeed, a war crime. Neither can the combat death of a fellow soldier
be cited as an excuse to murder civilians.

[For more on Powell’s justification for war crimes, see our new book,
Neck Deep.]

Evidence from recent military courts-martial also indicate that Bush
has transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special
Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into little more than “death
squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion they might
be threats to American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This dark underbelly of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort has been
whispered about for several years within the U.S. intelligence
community, but hard evidence finally emerged with two attempted
prosecutions of American soldiers whose defense attorneys cited “rules
of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr. who was acquitted
by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28 in the murders of two
unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27 and the other on May 11 – because
the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the
U.S. military rules.

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the
Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in
Iraq to drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and
then shoot Iraqis who pick up the items, according to evidence in the
Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

Sniper Killings

Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man near the town of
Iskandariya on April 27 after a skirmish with insurgents. Sandoval
testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered
him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was
suspected of being an insurgent posing as a farmer.

The second killing occurred on May 11 when a man walked into a
concealed location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were
hiding. After the Iraqi was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela,
was ordered to shoot the man in the head by Hensley and did so,
according to Vela’s testimony at Sandoval’s court-martial.

Sandoval was acquitted of murder charges because a military jury
concluded that his actions were within the rules of engagement.
(Sandoval was convicted of a lesser charge of planting a coil of copper
wire on one of the slain Iraqis. He was sentenced to five months in
prison and a reduction in rank but could rejoin his unit in as few as
44 days.)

The other recent case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect
surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in
mid-September. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the
execution of an Afghani who was a suspected leader of an insurgent
group.

Special Forces Capt. Dave Staffel and Sgt. Troy Anderson were leading a
team of Afghan soldiers when an informant told them where the suspected
insurgent leader was hiding. The U.S.-led contingent found a man
believed to be Nawab Buntangyar walking outside his compound near the
village of Hasan Kheyl.

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might
be wearing a suicide vest, the man was questioned about his name and
the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined
Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as “the
kill-or-capture list.”

Concluding that the man was Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the order to
shoot, and Anderson -- from a distance of about 100 yards away -- fired
a bullet through the man’s head, killing him instantly.

The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified
mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,”
the International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules
allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had
designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified
him.”

Staffel’s civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army’s Criminal
Investigation Command concluded in April that the shooting was
“justifiable homicide,” but a two-star general in Afghanistan
instigated a murder charge against the two men. That case, however,
foundered over accusations that the charge was improperly filed. [IHT,
Sept. 17, 2007]

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army
investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been
operating under “rules of engagement” that empowered them to kill
individuals who have been designated “enemy combatants,” even if the
targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat.

Suicide Vest?

In late September, a U.S. military judge dismissed all charges against
the two soldiers because he ruled it was conceivable that the detained
Afghani was wearing a suicide explosive belt, though there was no
evidence that he was.

Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly hailed the acquittals of the two
soldiers and blasted the New York Times for reporting on the original
charges but not the exoneration. “Two separate investigations in the
Afghan theatre clearly stated the Green Berets effectively did their
duty,” O’Reilly said.

However, the larger point is that the case revealed that the “rules of
engagement” approved by U.S. higher-ups countenance the murder of
unarmed suspects, behavior that would appear to violate the laws of war.

The troubling picture is that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up
to Bush, has authorized loose “rules of engagement” that allow targeted
killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary
arrests, “enhanced interrogations,” kidnappings in third countries with
“extraordinary renditions” to countries that torture, secret CIA
prisons, detentions without trial, and “reeducation camps” for younger
detainees.

The U.S. counterinsurgency and security operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan also have been augmented by heavily armed mercenaries, such
as the Blackwater “security contractors” who operate outside the law
and were accused by Iraqi authorities of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in
a shooting incident on Sept. 16.

The use of lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians has a
notorious history in irregular warfare especially when an occupying
army finds itself confronting an indigenous resistance in which
guerrillas and their political supporters blend in with the local
population.

In effect, Bush’s “global war on terror” has reestablished what looks
like the Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated
Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist political allies.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,”
the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third
World armies, especially in Latin America allegedly giving a green
light to some of the “dirty wars” that swept the region in the
following decades. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

Despite behind-the-scenes support for some Latin American “death
squads,” the U.S. government presented itself as the defender of human
rights and criticized repressive countries that engaged in
extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions.

Double Standards

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as
Bush waged his “war on terror,” while continuing to impress the
American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human
rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25.

Under Bush’s remarkable double standards, he has taken the position
that he can override both international law and the U.S. Constitution
in deciding who gets basic human rights and who doesn’t. He sees
himself as the final judge of whether people he deems “bad guys” should
live or die, or face indefinite imprisonment and even torture.

By early 2005, as the Iraqi insurgency grew, the Bush administration
reportedly debated a “Salvador option” for Iraq, an apparent reference
to the “death squad” operations that decimated the ranks of perceived
leftists who were opposed to El Salvador’s right-wing military junta in
the early 1980s.

According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the
adoption of that brutal “still-secret strategy” of the Reagan
administration as a way to get a handle on the spiraling violence in
Iraq.

“Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy [in El Salvador] to have
been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek
wrote.

The magazine also noted that many of Bush’s advisers were leading
figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, including
Elliott Abrams, who is now an architect of Middle East policy on the
National Security Council.

In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth
commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the
Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including
massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter committed by a
U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children near
the town of El Mozote in 1981.

The Reagan administration’s “Salvador option” also had a domestic
component, the so-called “perception management” operation that
employed sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the fears of the
American people while hiding the ugly reality of the wars.

[For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George
H.W. Bush, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For more on the
Salvador option, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Death Squads,” Jan.
11, 2005.]

Haditha Killings

Iraqis have objected to other disregard of innocent life by American
troops, such as the killing of two dozen Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19,
2005, after one Marine died from an improvised explosive device.

According to published accounts of U.S. military investigations, the
dead Marine’s comrades retaliated by pulling five men – MAMs – from a
cab and shooting them, and entering two homes where civilians,
including women and children, were slaughtered.

The Marines then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the
civilian deaths were caused by the original explosion or a subsequent
firefight, according to investigations by the U.S. military and human
rights groups.

One of the accused Marines, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, gave his account of
the Haditha killings in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” including
an admission that his squad tossed a grenade into one of the residences
without knowing who was inside.

“Frank, help me understand,” asked interviewer Scott Pelley. “You’re in
a residence, how do you crack a door open and roll a grenade into a
room?”

“At that point, you can’t hesitate to make a decision,” Wuterich
answered. “Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men.”

“But when you roll a grenade in a room through the crack in the door,
that’s not positive identification, that’s taking a chance on anything
that could be behind that door,” Pelley said.

“Well, that’s what we do. That’s how our training goes,” Wuterich said.

Four Marines were singled out for courts-martial over the Haditha
killings though some legal analysts believe the case is collapsing
because of loose “rules of engagement” that let U.S. troops kill Iraqis
when a threat is detected.

In the context of dangerous combat, many Americans sympathize with the
individual U.S. soldiers who have to make split-second life-or-death
decisions, all the while thinking they are operating under legitimate
rules of engagement that allow killing perceived enemies even if they
are unarmed and showing no aggressive intent.

But the greater significance of these recent cases is that they confirm
the long-whispered allegations that the U.S. chain of command has
approved standing orders that give the U.S. military broad discretion
to kill suspected militants on sight – and to blast away at civilians
who might get in the way.

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. ]