“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot,” Washburn’s testimony continued, “The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry ‘drop weapons’, or by my third tour, ‘drop shovels’. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.”
Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.
“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…. One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.”
Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take “trophy” photos of bodies.
Although the testimony from the vets in this article is from the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings, they are a pertinent reminder that the actions by military personnel in the Wikileaks video were not unusual and probably were within a vague and flexible ‘shoot anything that moves’ ROE. How can you blame troops for behaving like barbarians when its Army policy to disregard the safety, and often the humanity, of civilians in a situation where it can be difficult to tell who’s a threat and who’s not? I accept that war is hell, but the Iraq occupation was and is a hopeless clusterfuck that should never have happened.
20, Honeyman,
When you talk about “Army Policy”, you are referring to Army Regulations. THAT is Army Policy. Just because someone is given an unlawful order does not mean that is “Army Policy”.
Therefore, “How can you blame troops for behaving like barbarians when its Army policy to disregard the safety, and often the humanity, of civilians in a situation where it can be difficult to tell who’s a threat and who’s not?” is ignorant and partisan.
Furthermore, every recruit is taught in Basic Training that should they follow an unlawful order, that they too will be on the hook. There is no “Army Policy” for the testimony in which you based your statement.
Now am I saying some officers don’t push the envelope or break the laws? Nope. But if they get caught, it could cost them their career at the very least. If they are in fact guilty, then they could be making little rocks out of big ones and big ones out of little ones for knowingly doing such a thing.
#13 Mikey
You are trying to be funny right? Try a running tab on who’s butchering who. Just because our side gets better press doesn’t make us the good guys! Justifying war is like trying to justify the unjustfiable. Stop spouting somebody else’s dogma and think.
Off topic, but your site is taking longer and longer to load in Chrome. This time it took about 20-30 seconds.
I don’t know what’s broken, but something is gumming up the works. Other sites load fine. It’s getting to the point where I don’t even want to bother waiting.
#23 static.
I too use chrome ver. 5.0.342.9 beta on Ubuntu 9.04 and have no problems. You do know that chrome is still in Beta and requires continous updates, right?
#23 static
You might also want to check your flash plugin.
Maybe it’s time to start calling our troops baby killers and then spit on them as they come home….. Holy crap! What is wrong with this blog?
When I was in the Corps I saw guys do some seriously crazy things just to avoid a 6 month deployment to Japan wanting to say home with new wife/baby/ whatever. How much more will servicemen do to avoid a second tour in a warzone….oh yeah, testify that they were “ordered” to kill civilians.
#26
Second service? LOL, there are plenty already beyond the 2nd service. It’s ridiculous and cruel imo. No one is paying/answering for this BS while our young are out there fighting and dying. And we have all this crap talk around blogs from people who have little to absolute no clue wtf is really going on?
Most here can’t even fathom the emotional states familes, friends and loves ones go through when they are called the 2nd, 3rd and billionth time! Seriously, think about that for a minute. Add in the newborn child, the wife you haven’t just married and haven’t fcking seen in months and years, the comfortable life you knew in US that you can’t even begin to imagine anymore because you’ve been gone so fcking long.
Talk about ignorance. Btw, not a insult on you…just adding to what you’ve said
Occupation that never should have happened is right. We should have nuked the place to glass early on.
The only thing that separates us from the terrorists is that we are supposed to follow “the rules of war”. There is more and more evidence that we have been brought down to their level.
All of this is a consequence of the utter failure of leadership of the Bush administration. Now this comes out today:
“George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times. ”
http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece
This is what happens when the enemy violates the Geneva Convention and refuses to wear uniforms and instead dresses as civilians.
You don’t stop fighting them and defeating them, but it’s war made even uglier.
All war is a crime.
Unless you’ve been there, it’s all just conjecture and arm chair quarterbacking.
US Army Regulations and the UCMJ is clear about the standard and so is the Oath of Enlistment that I swore. I will follow the lawful orders of the officers appointed over me.
Should the US be there, probably not. Was the war predicated on the lies of W., yes. Was Saddam a bad guy…hell yeah. Will the people of Iraq be better when their freely elected government is on it’s feet? YES!
Oh yeah…Fat_Anarchy, Nazi Germany and Italy were “sovereign nations” should we have not invaded them?
#31 – B as in bullshit, S as in bullshit.
I think this newest post from Fred Reed fits the topic at hand.
I’m a fan of John, I’m a fan of Cranky Geeks, and I’m a fan of this blog—but why has this blog gone anti-American military all of a sudden? The reason we all sleep soundly in our beds to due to our fighting forces, keeping us safe.
#35 Uh, Jim, it’s not anti-American military to want to get our military out of an unwinnable situation. We’re creating more terrorists with every innocent civilian we accidentally (or intentionally) kill. Their families immediately become America haters.
We cannot kill our way out of this situation.
#32 Unless you’ve been there, it’s all just conjecture and arm chair quarterbacking.
Uh, right, and the soldiers quoted in the article were there and are telling some pretty disturbing stories. And they are pretty clear that US Army Regulations and the UCMJ went by the wayside.
Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?
The last time a western army at war ordered troops to shoot unarmed civilians indiscriminately, they hung every last man Jack of the generals and politicians involved at Nuremberg. Just saying.
38 what happened to the Japanese generals who did the same thing?
I’m so glad to see that the Iraq War propaganda has returned to Dvorak.org/blog. I’m lapsing into nostalgia.
As a person who deployed to Baghdad in 2008-2009 our ROE conformed to the highest moral codes and the Geneva Conventions.
But what do I know? I just spent a year there and left our area better off than it was when we first arrived.