November 22, 2009

CNN gets panties in a twist over 2007 execution of Iraq insurgents by US soldiers

There is heavy breathing at CNN tonight over a story they are breaking about an investigation by the US Army into the execution of four insurgents captured in Iraq in March 2007. The Army conducted an investigation in early 2008 and convicted the three sergeants who conducted the execution. They are currently serving life sentences at Ft. Leavenworth.

U.S. soldiers interrogated by the Army in the 2007 murders of four Iraqi detainees blamed a military policy they said made it too hard to detain suspected insurgents, a CNN investigation has found.

Soldiers questioned in the killings said the sergeant in command of their detachment ordered the suspected insurgents killed because Army rules made it too difficult to hold them.

"They're gonna be right back on the streets," one soldier put it.

CNN obtained an extraordinary 23½ hours of Army interrogation videotapes that detail the March 2007 executions of the prisoners by three sergeants who were attached to Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment....

By all accounts, the incident began after soldiers from the company were fired upon. The soldiers went to a house where they found four Iraqi men and a small weapons cache.

The men were loaded into the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle. But instead of being taken to the detainee housing area, they were driven in a convoy of 13 soldiers to the canal and killed, according to trial testimony and other documents in the case...

The tapes, and the investigative case file obtained by CNN, reveal how the soldiers believed the policy for taking in and holding detainees was not working, and was the reason for the murders.

"Seems like, even if you do your job and take these guys to the detainee center, they just come right back," Leahy said on tape. "The same [expletive] guys shooting at you."

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what CNN is trying to make of this. First off, there doesn't appear to have been any cover-up. The Army dealt with the matter expeditiously. Apparently, CNN is upset that they weren't informed immediately so they could make a major international incident about it while Bush was still in office. Boo-freaking-hoo.

There are larger questions this incident raises, namely the ridiculous rules of engagement and the policies regarding captured insurgents. Also, according to international conventions the US is entirely justified to summarily execute insurgents. Excepting their disobeying orders about detainee treatment, which may be absurd but are military rules nonetheless, under international law these men were entirely justified in their actions.

This case does expose the glaring absurdities of our military's rules of engagement and detention. Are soldiers now supposed to act as cops, gathering evidence and the like, while trying to fight a war? Is it any surprise that incidents like these occur when tens of thousands of detainees continued to go through the revolving door, only to kill more American soldiers?

Given the facts of the case (the insurgents were captured with a cache of weapons), on what basis were these men tried for murder? Last time I checked, we were in the middle of fu**ing war in Iraq in March 2007. Should we also prosecute the military leaders of the 1991 Gulf War, namely Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell for killing 100,000 Iraqi soldiers without trial or evidence? Should the soldiers in this case make an appeal based on international law? Is their only crime not executing these insurgents on the spot, rather than taking them somewhere and conducting their execution? What say you?