WWB: homicide by torture

WHAT WAR BRINGS: homicide by torture

In all wars, and all occupations, people are captured or kidnapped and then tortured to death. This certainly happened in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. And it was done by the occupation forces, and local militias, the resistance, and in Iraq by the elected government.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch reported on homicides that resulted from US torture policy. He found that about 100 prisoners died during interrogations, and some were clearly tortured to death.

The Bush Administration Homicides

A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death. The bottom line is that many detainee homicides in Iraq and Afghanistan were the direct result of approval and orders from the highest levels of government, and that high officials in the government are accomplices.

As of today, those homicides by torture have yet to be fully investigated. Those in the higher level of commands have avoided accountability. Here’s one report from Afghanistan:

In September 2004, the Crimes of War Project, working with investigative journalist Craig Pyes, uncovered a torture murder in Gardez, Afghanistan, in March 2003. Jamal Naseer, a soldier in the Afghan Army, died after he and seven other soldiers were mistakenly arrested. Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables. Some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage.

And here is one from Iraq:

To take one example, in December 2003, a 44-year-old Iraqi man named Abu Malik Kenami died in a U.S. detention facility in Mosul, Iraq. As reported by Human Rights First, U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions. Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined.

With waterboarding, the CIA recognized that they might kill someone, so they had standby medical personnel and equipment:

An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the integrator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required....” The memo also notes that CIA doctors present during waterboarding sessions stood by with necessary equipment to perform a tracheotomy if necessary: “[W]e are informed that the necessary emergency medical equipment is always present—although not visible to the detainee—during any application of the waterboard.”

I wonder how many would have died but were revived at the last minute. What a sickening thought – our government officials are running around torturing and murdering people who did not do a thing to hurt us in the first place. We are barbarians to allow this to go unpunished.

A Daily Kos writer has posted a review of five of the prisoners murdered by the CIA in the last eight years. There are more, but the information is ‘classified’.

Number of detainees murdered by CIA is classified information

Many of these names are probably familiar to you. The un-named detainee froze to death after being chained to a concrete floor without blankets and was left there the whole night. Manadel al-Jamadi was effectively crucified by his CIA interrogator, who is fully known and remains free to this day. Abdul Wali was beaten to death by CIA contractor David Passaro, who would later go on to be the only CIA employee convicted of abusing detainees. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was beaten by a CIA-sponsored unit of Iraqis and then suffocated by Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, who subsequently received no jail time for his actions. Lt. Col. Abdul Jameel was beaten and put into a savage stress position that blocked his oxygen intake and triggered asphyxiation. CIA involvement was discovered in all five of these cases, yet only one CIA interrogator, a contractor, was ever charged in connection to their deaths.

Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said, "Torture and abuse at Bagram is further evidence that prisoner abuse in US custody was systemic, not aberrational, and originated at the highest levels of government."

It wasn’t just the CIA and US military involved in homicide by torture - the Brits got involved too.

Were Iraqis tortured and killed by our soldiers?

Allegations that British soldiers murdered and mutilated 20 Iraqis are to be fully investigated after it emerged that ministers had attempted to warn Tony Blair about damaging evidence of the ill-treatment of battlefield prisoners five years ago. The startling revelation in the High Court yesterday led to the Government withdrawing its objection to a judicial inquiry into the alleged massacre after the battle of "Danny Boy" involving British forces near Basra in May 2004.

They have reopened the inquiry, and I have not heard any results. One piece of evidence that came to light was a video of a British soldier abusing Baha Mousa, who died while in custody. You can watch the video here:

A video of a British soldier screaming at Iraqi detainees is shown as evidence in an inquiry into the death of one of the prisoners.

And, the Iraqis did it too – well, at least we have evidence that they tortured, although I don’t know of documentation that Iraqi officials tortured people to death.

Iraqi torture practices could be more widespread

The discovery of malnourished detainees, many bearing signs of torture, in an underground bunker at the Iraqi Interior Ministry came after a US Army 3rd Infantry Division soldier investigated an Iraqi family's complaints that one of its sons was being secretly held. When US troops raided the facility Sunday night, they expected to find at most 40 detainees, not 173 sickly men and boys, all Sunni Arabs. Iraqi officials have since confirmed that torture implements were also found there.

There was plenty of evidence that Iraqis were tortured to death, just no concrete proof of who was responsible (although I would guess that nearly all parties in Iraq were doing it at some point – police, army, Interior Ministry, militias, and common criminals). Plenty of dead bodies with signs of drill marks, beatings, and mutilations were found on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Here’s one example from the same story as above, which indicates the Iraqi police were involved:

Ammar Hamid Khalaf Muhammed Hummos related how his two brothers Hamid and Rafa were abducted by men in police uniforms on a street in Zafranaiyah, on the outskirts of Baghdad, this May, and how he later received word that the brothers were being held in the Shiite city of Kut, and that for $8,000 they'd be released. The family didn't come up with the money, and near tears he showed photos of his brothers' badly mutilated bodies, which were recovered in a ditch near Kut. "Pulling their fingernails out wasn't even the worst part."

And here is another example:

But the most arresting interview was with a man who wanted only to identified as Abu Adhar. He was carried to the interview by four relatives. Injuries covered his face, back, and legs. He was abducted and thrown into the back of a car while investigating charges of abuse by the Interior Ministry for a Sunni mosque where he leads prayers. After driving through at least five Iraqi police checkpoints, they arrived at a house. He said he was tortured for two days with electric shocks and whips. "Then their commander said they were done, and to take me out and kill me." Driving to a field where he expected to be shot, he managed to free his hands and escape when the car slowed. A farmer took him in and contacted his family.

And here is another story, about Iraqi militias engaging in torture that surely led to homicide.

One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed. In an interview with an embedded reporter just hours after he was freed, he said he had never seen the faces of his captors, who occasionally whispered at him, "We will kill you." He said they did not question him, and he did not know what they wanted. Nor did he ever expect to be released. "They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

In the case of the militias (or insurgents, or terrorists, or whatever they called themselves) they openly declared that they would kill the men they tortured. So did the Iraqi police, and there have been reports that the Iraqi Special Forces and Iraqi Interior Ministry and Iraqi military did this also. And I am sure there were times when US forces or British forces also threatened to kill their prisoners.

Torturing people to death was not official policy, just as rape was not official policy. But torture, when allowed, will sometimes go on to the point of death for the victim. And the sanctioning of the threat of rape will one day lead to actual rape.

But, this is what wars and occupations lead to – always.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: homicide by torture.

Resolution – The Torture Song

WWB: long term occupations

WHAT WAR BRINGS: long term occupations

It is a fact that wars and occupations come to an end one day. Could be weeks, months, years, decades, but they do come to an end.

However, I don’t seen any end (at this time) to the eight year occupation of Afghanistan, or the almost six and a half year occupation of Iraq. And we have about 130,000 to 140,000 troops now in Iraq (due to go down by 10% by the end of the year) and about 50,000 in Afghanistan. THAT is sure to go up.

Army Chief Says US Ready to Be in Iraq 10 Years

Casey said several times that he wasn't the person making policy, but the military was preparing to have a fighting force deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come. Casey said his planning envisions 10 combat brigades plus command and support forces committed to the two wars.

When asked whether the Army had any measurement for knowing how big it should be, Casey responded, "How about the reality scenario?" This scenario, he said, must take into account that "we're going to have 10 Army and Marine units deployed for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan."

I would call it the ‘insanity scenario’ but then I happen to be a linear thinker with some morals…. two BIG differences that Casey does not share with me.

But, over in Britain, they are calling for keeping troops in Afghanistan for DECADES!

AND no chance that NATO would pull out in the next 40 years!

Well, it sure looks like we plan to stay in Afghanistan for awhile.

Barracks and Burger King: U.S. Builds a Supersized Base in Afghanistan

And the Taliban don’t seem to mind. They think the more troops we send, the more targets they have. This is a very good article on what the Taliban are thinking and doing, and why ‘beating’ them is a totally silly idea, unless the REAL plan is to make Afghanistan into a wasteland (which the evil shits just might do).

Inside the Taliban

The men separated into three groups. Two headed to different villages, while the third climbed up the cliff to take up fighting positions. We followed one group down to a small village.

After half an hour we were among houses, and the men dispersed. We waited outside a green door while a Talib went in to talk to the owners. In a valley where everyone comes from the same tribe and everyone is someone's cousin, finding a shelter for the night is simply a matter of knocking on a door.

The family gave us their largest room and six of us took their places, on cushions and mattresses that were still warm. A kerosene lamp was lit and we shared a dinner of eggs, tomato, yoghurt and dry, dark bread.

Of course, we have already pulled out from Iraqi cities and they are now going to vote on whether they want us to stay until the end of 2011 or leave in the summer of 2010.

Oh wait, there’s no vote. It has been cancelled.

When Iraq's Parliament ratified its security pact with the US last year, allowing the presence of US troops until the end of 2011, it built in a provision for a public referendum vote to take place. This would let the Iraqi people decide the ultimate future of the pact. If the public voted to negate it, the US withdrawal deadline would have been shifted up to next summer.

The vote, scheduled to take place by July 30, never happened.

….. American interests likely played a significant role in the missed vote. The postponement came a week after Maliki's White House visit, during which both he and President Obama reiterated the December 2011 deadline for withdrawal. Neither mentioned the referendum.

Well, so much for sovereignty! Jokes on you! Bullets still headed your way also:

And US troops are still shooting up Iraqis after the convoy comes under attack.

American troops shot dead two attackers who tried to blast their convoy with hand grenades near Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, the US military said on Wednesday. In addition, one civilian was killed and four wounded in Tuesday’s incident, which also saw the convoy coming under small arms fire, said military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Philip Smith.

….. As part of a security pact between Baghdad and Washington, the vast majority of US troops have left Iraq’s urban areas ahead of a complete withdrawal from the country, due by the end of 2011.

However, some American soldiers remain in Iraqi cities as trainers and advisors.

WHOOPS!! They lied. Some Iraqi police thought that what they were told was the truth and tried to arrest the US soldiers for killing Iraqis. But the puppet Prime Minister said that was a mistake.

Two of the wounded civilians were children, in case any Americans are noticing or care.

Yeap, it’s official: US troops back on patrol in Iraq

Nearly a month after American troops officially withdrew from urban areas in Iraq, they are quietly going back in again, patrolling the streets of towns and cities where, despite improvements in security, violence remains an everyday occurrence.

From the sounds of this article, one would be lead to think that the American troops had nothing, NOTHING to do with the violence in Iraq at any point in time. They were all just out taking a stroll one night, and gallantly came to the damsel in distress calls. They were calls that the rest of the world could not hear.

Of course, the Iraqi people cannot understand why American troops are still in their streets.

A vote in the US House of Representatives was held on the amendment that required an exit strategy for Afghanistan in June 2009.

It lost.

We don’t need no stinking exit strategy! We can do wars and occupations FOREVER!!!!

And here is a message from the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq:

Open Letter to the American People on Independence Day, 4th July

But let me tell you what your country has achieved for you. Your government has committee the most evil act against humanity for the sake of controlling the resources of another nation in your name, in the name of your humanity and your civilisation. It tried to legalise this evil crime by initiating a so called treaty with the so called government of Iraq. History will Jude those Iraqis who signed, voted and who are quite about it as having committed high treason against the people of Iraq; it is simply an attempt to legalise the most evil act committed in the history of humanity. I do not mean the millions of orphans, or the millions of widows, or the millions of displaced people, or the crimes committed by your military army against detainees, or the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. I mean the use of the American military of at least 2000 tons of depleted uranium in the war against Iraq, which has polluted more or less all aspects of the environment in my beloved Iraq.

I don’t think they like us, and I don’t think those Iraqis will have any appreciation or good feelings about what we did for them. But then, the people of Oklahoma City don’t really appreciate Timothy McVeigh for taking out that ugly building downtown either.

So, pretty soon we will have more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan under Obama than we ever had under Bush. And while there is talk of an exit strategy in Iraq, it does not look like it is being implemented. And, over in Afghanistan, there is only talk of escalation. But, we have a new strategy in Afghanistan, and this is covered by MSNBC. And this analysis of MSNBC’s headlines comes from the blog A Tiny Revolution:

Channeling Orwell

Checking the MSNBC headlines, this caught my eye: “Order to protect Afghan civilians frustrates U.S. troops”

Protect? Protect from whom? Translation: Order to protect Afghan civilians from US troops frustrates US troops.

“Drive to reduce casualties slows Marines’ progress.”

Progress, what progress?

Translation: The world's mightiest military has been fighting the "cavemen" for 8 years and, according to its commander on the grounds, is losing the war to the cavemen. Why? MSNBC explains :

“U.S. troops are under orders not to attack if civilians would be harmed.”

When you can't kill the women and children, then "progress slows down" and freedom & democracy must wait.

And this was in the comments:

Apparently somebody over at MSNBC realized that maybe they should change the headline. Click on the link now or you can google it, and the google page title is still the old headline, but the link directs to a new story. The new story headline: "Marines in Afghan town meet fire from all sides." Oh the irony of that re-write.

Anyone up to the challenge of listing all the various reasons we were told for staying in Iraq and/or Afghanistan? It must be a hell of a long list by now. The latest in Afghanistan is that we are there to keep the Taliban away from the Afghan people…. which means we are going to keep the Afghan people away from the Afghan people. That should work out just swell.

Ralph Lopez wrote a diary on the real reasons for war in Afghanistan.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: long term occupations, and all the horrors that it brings.

Afghan children starving after being displaced by US bombings

WWB: destruction of culture

WHAT WAR BRINGS: the destruction of a culture

Having a war and occupation in your town, city, province means that the area – and the people who live within – will be forever changed. Journalist Dahr Jamail makes the claim that the US in Iraq became the dominant culture, and that the Iraqi people had no choice but to accommodate them. He called it “Colonizing Culture”. He also claims that this same reality is coming to Afghanistan, only it is multi-national forces, not just American forces.

As per Dahr Jamail:

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the dominant culture for a while now has been the US military. Since it has all the firepower and the brute force, it sets the norms and the standard. This is done by repeated suggestions through propaganda, and advertisements suggesting that the local population is of lesser worth than the occupiers of their country in their appearance, their beliefs, their customs and their way of life.

In this invasion and occupation, resistance is deemed as “insurgency” ---- now, imagine if a foreign military came to the USA and destroyed and disrupted our lives. The resistance would not be called ‘insurgents’ they would be called ‘heroes’.

Destruction of culture means more than the destruction of buildings and of a country’s military. It means the subjugation of a people, the destruction of their history, art, architecture, customs and standards of behavior. It means changing the very self-perception of the people who are being occupied. One small example of this is the giving of backpacks to Iraqi school children. The backpacks have US flags on them, and some of them have Barbie on them.

A larger example is the systemic destruction of literature, art and architecture. With the destruction of infrastructure, there is destruction of education, and thereby another destruction of culture and one of the transmitters of culture.

With the destruction of families, in that family members are killed, or become refugees, or go missing, there is further destruction of culture. And when the entire family becomes refugees, the culture of the family is changed significantly. Community processes and cultural events are left behind in the wake of destruction.

Dahr Jamail further reports on the destruction of culture in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

My artist friends in Baghdad have reported,

"The occupation forces encouraged the rebels to loot museum and libraries. Five thousand years of history and art were irretrievably lost in hours. It is a loss for the world, not Iraq alone. Buildings can be fixed, so can electricity, but where can I find another Khalid al-Rahal to make me a new statue for Abu Fafar al-Mansoor? How will I replace the artifacts dating back to thousands of years? Iraq is altered forever."

I have heard from ordinary men and women in Iraq, "We need our art, because it connects us with what has brought us here, and reminds us of where we are headed." Dr. Saad Eskander has been director general of whatever remains of Iraq's National Archive and Library and he says, "This building was burned twice, and looted. We have lost sixty percent of our archival collections like maps, historical records and photographs. Twenty-five percent of our books were lost ... It has crippled our culture, and culture reaches to the bottom of peoples' hearts, whereas politics do not."

It is not difficult to see that the extent of devastation caused by the invasion and occupation of Iraq goes beyond loss of life, livelihood and property. The historical and cultural roots of the nation have been destroyed.

Journalist Anthony Shadid talks about what Baghdad is like today. Well known landmarks are pockmarked by bullets, spider webs of electrical wires obscure the view, and navigation is disrupted by blast walls.

"It's all become trash, broken windows and crumbling buildings," complained Hussein Karim, a porter looking out from his perch atop a flap of cardboard on the statue's granite pedestal. "Baghdad," added his friend, Hussein Abed, "has become a shattered city."

….. In time, though, those walls may matter less than the deeper forces that six years of an American presence hastened. Baghdad is now a city divided from itself. Shiite neighborhoods rarely have Sunnis. Sunni ones, far less numerous today, no longer have Shiites. Christians have all but left.

Shadid also claims that the impact of the war on Baghdad has spread to the Arab world’s greatest capitals. They are all receding behind walls (real and psychological) and losing the grace and ease that was present just a few short years ago. He says this:

The Americans created none of it, but facilitated all of it, giving space to the region's worst impulses.

Little of Baghdad’s antiquity has survived. Their culture of families going to ice cream shops and coffee shops, of friends hanging out in bookstores and engaging in long conversations, have been drastically altered in the last six years.

Here is a report from McClatchy’s on a village called Yasser al Khuthayer:

Each home was reduced to charred walls and rubble. Waleed had spent everything to furnish the room he'd shared with his wife, which was connected to his brothers' room by an open courtyard. He showed me where his bed had been and proudly described the beautiful wooden dresser he'd bought and the large marriage bed his family had helped him buy.

For a month, he'd come here and weep.

Yas pointed to one destroyed building where five people were killed. Two more people were killed next door, and then another three, and the stories go on. All around me were the broken pieces of what had been. At one home, broken dishes rimmed with pink flowers littered the debris where a family once gathered to eat. The blue shelves of the kitchen were charred by fire. Outside, ornate bricks lined the abandoned path in the garden. Nearby, a dusty remnant of a rug peeked out from a pile of broken bricks.

Of course, destruction of culture and lives is not limited to Iraq. It is happening in Afghanistan also.

Granai: the murder of an Afghan village

A first bomb hit the centre of the village and a second landed in a compound one kilometre to the south. In their panic, women and children headed to a compound in the north of the village, away from the site of the first two strikes. This group numbered some 100 people from around 15 families. At 9.12pm they were struck by a 2,000 pound guided bomb dropped by a B-1B strategic bomber.

In less than half an hour 147 innocents were dead – the biggest single loss of civilian life since the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan. The response from the population was immediate. A riot erupted in nearby Farah City. A furious crowd surrounded and broke the windows of the regional governor’s house. The following Saturday angry students marched through the capital Kabul chanting, “The blood of Farah will never dry”.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, they had a history and a culture that is older than our history and culture by thousands of years (I am not including the culture of the Native Americans, since that too was destroyed by aggression).

The destruction in Baghdad, after the arrival of US troops, of the museums and libraries and archives, were an unmitigated disaster for the entire world. There was so much history and culture lost, in just a short time.

It is so much easier to destroy than to build, and what took centuries to build was sometimes destroyed in a day.

And in Babylon, the US military presence did further damage to historical sites there.

Hired Hands

Channel 4 News broadcast the thoughts of a US Marine on broad issues of strategy: “We’ll unleash the dogs of hell, we’ll unleash ‘em... They don’t even know what’s coming - hell is coming! If there are civilians in there, they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (Sergeant Sam Mortimer, US Marines, Channel 4 News, November 8, 2004)

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: the destruction of culture.

This video is about Gaza, but it certainly applies to all war zones: “Hell on Earth”

WWB: human rights abuses

WHAT WAR BRINGS: human rights abuses

This is a broad topic, a very broad topic. One could easily write a book on human rights abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Amnesty International issued a report on human rights abuses in Iraq. They state that all parties in the continuing conflict in Iraq have committed gross human rights abuses. Here is a summary of their report:

Thousand of civilians, including children, were killed or injured, mostly in suicide and other bomb attacks carried out by armed groups opposed to the government and the US-led Multinational Force (MNF). Civilians were also killed by MNF and Iraqi government forces. The MNF and the Iraqi authorities both held thousands of detainees; most were held without charge or trial, some for up to five years. Government security forces, including prison guards, were reported to have committed torture, including rape, and unlawful killings. The authorities made extensive use of the death penalty. More than 4 million Iraqis were displaced; 2 million were refugees abroad and others were internally displaced within Iraq. The Kurdistan region remained less affected by the conflict but there were continuing reports of abuses by the security forces and violence against women.

They go on to describe how confessions were obtained under torture, of kidnapping by Iraqi forces and militia groups, how the “security contractors” were engaged in murder and torture, and how a sizable number of Iraqis do not have enough food, and 40% of the population has no access to clean drinking water. They note that US military who are convicted of human rights abuses do not get a punishment in line with the gravity of their crimes. They do make note of this fact:

In August, Iraq ratified the UN Convention against Torture and in November parliament passed a law establishing a High Commission for Human Rights.

Amnesty International also talk about the detentions without charges or trials:

US forces of the MNF held some 15,500 detainees, mostly without charge or trial, at Camp Bucca, near Basra; Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport; and other locations. Some had been held for five years. The Iraqi authorities were reported to be holding at least 26,000 detainees, many without charge or trial. Some were believed to be held incommunicado in secret detention facilities.

Also, there no longer is a “MNF” since the only foreign military in the country is the US. Here is Amnesty International’s report on Iraqi forces and their behavior:

Government forces committed gross human rights violations, including torture and extrajudicial executions. Prison guards and security forces were reported to have tortured and otherwise ill-treated detainees, including juveniles. Methods alleged included beating with cables and hosepipes, prolonged suspension by the limbs, electric shock torture, breaking of limbs, removal of toenails with pliers, and piercing the body with drills. Detainees held by Interior Ministry officials were particularly at risk of torture.

• Male juveniles were reported to have been physically and sexually assaulted by guards at the Tobchi juvenile detention facility in West Baghdad. US investigators found clear evidence that two Sunni juveniles had been killed by prison guards at the beginning of 2008.

• Allegations of rape and other torture were made by male juveniles held in al-Karkh juvenile prison in Baghdad.

In June 2009, the head of the Human Rights Committee in the province of Babel, had this to say:

Fawziya al-Jashami said she had seen “horrific traces” of torture during a visit to a prison in the southern Province of Babel of which Hilla is the capital. “I saw types of torture which are so vicious and horrific that I cannot describe them as a woman. “It is a kind of sexual torture which one is ashamed to talk about and occurs for the first time in Iraq,” Jashami, who heads the Human Rights Committee in the province, said.

A member of the Iraqi Parliament was shot dead in June 2009. This happened just minutes after he gave a sermon condemning the Maliki government of human rights abuses.

His name was Harith al-Obaidi, and he was a long time advocate of human rights.

Recently, the US has been accused of torturing children and other human rights abuses.

Iraq & Afghanistan -War Crimes Against Children ascribed to former President Bush

The best kept secret of the Bush's war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence.

Go and take a look at this picture of two terrified children.

And, if this report is accurate, than a number of the human rights abuses by Iraqi Special Forces were trained by US forces.

“The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army’s Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret’s dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process. The ISOF is at least 4,564 operatives strong, making it approximately the size of the US Army’s own Special Forces in Iraq. Congressional records indicate that there are plans to double the ISOF over the next “several years.”

These Special Forces are known throughout Iraq for their barbaric behavior. When this incident happened in June 2008, they were working with the American forces and had a helicopter on scene as backup:

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

Lt. Col. Roger Carstens had this to say about the Iraqi Special Forces that he helped train:

"All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day," he says, laughing. "These guys are shit hot. They are just as good as we are. We trained 'em. They are just like us. They use the same weapons. They walk like Americans."

This is a poor reflection on all of us. It is made even worse by the non-violent attempts by Iraqis to have these human rights abusers disbanded, which are ridiculed and ignored:

Civilian pleas, public protests, complaints by Iraqi Army commanders about the ISOF's actions and calls for disbanding it by members of Parliament have not pushed the US government to take a hard look at the force they are creating. Instead, US advisers dismiss such claims as politically motivated.

And then there is Afghanistan.

Yes, lots of human rights abuses there too. Children were detained without charges, and it sometimes took weeks or years before parents were informed of where their children were located. This report claims that 800 boys (aged 10 to 15) were captured in Afghanistan and 64 were sent to Guantanamo, and some placed in solitary confinement.

Haas notes that Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Convention states "No Party to the conflict shall arrange for the evacuation of children, other than its own nationals, to a foreign country" unless written consent of the parents is obtained.

I doubt they got that consent form signed. The Convention on the Rights of the Child says that children should be considered victims of war, rather than treating them as war criminals. Here something else the US failed to do for the children in Afghanistan and Iraq that they captured:

Contrary to the CRC's Article 9, which states that a captured child shall be allowed to "maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis," some children were not allowed to write or telephone home for as long as five years.

….And although CRC Article 31 requires that children have the right "to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child," Haas writes, "There is no record of recreation for the hundreds of children detained at Bagram or at Abu Ghraib."

At Bagram, the largest US prison in Afghanistan, the prisoners are refusing to leave their cells to protest their indefinite detention (another human rights abuse) and their treatment. I am not sure if this protest has ended or still continues.

At Jail in Bagram, A Detainee Protest

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

… Unlike at Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have access to lawyers, the 620 prisoners at Bagram are not permitted to visit with their attorneys. Afghan government representatives are generally not allowed to visit or inspect the Bagram facility.

This prison (doesn’t it sound nicer when they call it a “facility”? what horse’s asses some of our journalists are these days!) has inmates from other countries, who were not captured in Afghanistan. They have no rights. And the prison is going to be expanded under the Obama administration.

How lovely. Another Guantanamo, only with more secrecy and more prisoners.

It is looking more and more unlikey that some prisoners in US custody around the world will ever get a fair trail.

And so, human rights abuses, which are part of every war and occupation, show every sign of continuing.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: human rights abuses.

Quote:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. - Nuremburg War Tribunal regarding wars of aggression

WWB: poverty and homelessness

WHAT WAR BRINGS: vast increases in poverty and homelessness

War and occupation makes the poor much poorer, and often leaves the formerly well-off in a destitute condition. Jobs often disappear in war torn countries, and people often become refuges and flee for their lives, leaving their jobs, schools, savings, belongings and homes behind. Sometimes they have to pay protection or ransom money that drains their bank accounts of all that they had.

I suppose there are millions of stories in Iraq and Afghanistan on how the poor or middle class ended up in desperate poverty, but it is a story as old as war and occupation itself. Poverty and homelessness is just one more aspect of what happens when a war is started up, or when a foreign military power occupies another land. Of course, in both countries, but particularly in Afghanistan, there was poverty before the wars and occupations even started.

But after almost eight years in Afghanistan, and over six years in Iraq, one would think that the US authorities would have made some degree of improvement in living conditions in these countries if they gave a damn, or if they actually wanted to have peace and stability in the region. One would think wrong, apparently.

Here is one example from a NYT article titled “Fate of missing Iraqis haunts those left behind”. This was published in May 2009, and gives an example of the level of poverty that some Iraqi people are dealing with at this time.

The family of Ms. Diham, whose 13-year-old son disappeared while buying vegetables, has been squatting at a former army base in Baghdad's Amiriya neighborhood. They survive by recycling aluminum cans scavenged from a large garbage dump a few dozen yards away. The glass on their windows has been knocked out by explosions from car bombs, and there is no proper front door, only a strip of white cloth. One of the rooms is filled with piles of empty cans waiting to be bagged. Among the family's few possessions are two white mules and a television set.

In another story called “Displaced Iraqis lead fractured lives” both the poverty and the hopelessness is highlighted. This is from May 2009.

Mohammad Jaffar cast his eyes toward a barren patch of land he calls home. "There is no life here," Jaffar said. "No life."

Jaffar and 400 other Iraqi Arabs have lived here in a squalid camp, along a road that seems to lead nowhere, since they were driven from their homes in the sectarian bloodshed that plunged the country into chaos in 2006 and 2007.

The camp illustrates some of the problems Iraq faces as it attempts to build the institutions of a modern state: Although there is a semblance of peace, the country remains riddled with fault lines of sect and ethnicity, and saddled with competing authorities. Jaffar and his neighbors live at the intersection of those realities. They cannot return home, and they cannot rebuild their lives, a situation that threatens to make a temporary solution permanent.

This camp is located near the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, where the Baghdad government does not seem able to help, and where the Kurdish officials do not seem willing to help. The Iraqis fled to this camp with nothing, running to save their lives. There is no financial assistance for them. There is no electricity or water or latrines. They feel they have been abandoned, since no one is taking an interest in them or helping them.

"This is what the war did to us," said Intissar Saadou, whose tent is next to Jaffar's.

A study released in May 2009 by an Iraqi government agency said that 25% of Iraqis are now living in poverty.

Study: Nearly 25 percent of Iraqis live in poverty

Nearly one in four Iraqis lives below the poverty line, according to a study released Wednesday by an Iraqi government agency.

The Central Statistics Authority ….. spokesman Abdul-Zahra Hendawi said 23 percent of the country's 27 million people live in poverty, most of them in the rural areas.

... Hendawi said the study blames failing infrastructure, corruption and high unemployment for the spread of poverty, which was defined as living on $2.50 or less per person, per day. He said the food ration system has played a role in minimizing poverty. "We expected a higher percentage of poverty, but apparently the ration system is helping the poor to cope with the situation," he told The Associated Press.

This statistic was repeated in an article published in The Independent (UK) about corruption in Iraq.

Although it is an important oil producer, many Iraqis are on the edge of starvation; 20-25 per cent of Iraq's 27 million people live below the poverty line on less than $66 (£41) a month.

McClatchy’s had a report in July 2009 titled “In Baghdad, the poor have no choice but to beg” about current conditions in the capital city of Iraq.

Zainab, 7, dodged moving cars as she stuck out her hand for help. After a couple of hours, she'd collected 3,000 dinars, less than $4. She walked back to where she lives.

That's a trash-filled warehouse only a few yards from Abu Nowas, the busy street in the Karrada district where she was begging. Then Habeeb Abdulsada, her father, let her watch cartoons on TV with two of his other children in the blue tent he'd pitched inside the warehouse, which reeked of rotten fruit and vegetables.

……. For the Abdulsada family, Zainab is their meal ticket. Neighbors sometimes bring food for them, but the 7-year-old's innocent face "makes people sympathize with her and give her money," her father said.

Beggars on the streets of Baghdad are widespread, and are as common as checkpoints and blast walls (some of those walls are coming down, by the way). Reportedly, unemployment is at 18%, but unofficial estimates places the unemployment as high as 30%. The family mentioned above sleep at night out on the grass in the median of the street. US and Iraqi officials go by every day, as do US troops. They don’t stop to help, with the rare exception of the US troops – who have given them food on occasion.

Many Iraqi families cannot get their food rations because they are displaced. But there are more problems than just the internally displaced.

Over 20 percent of Iraqis live below the poverty line

Iraq's food rationing system, known as the Public Distribution System, was set up in 1995 as part of the UN’s oil-for-food programme following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait 17 years ago. However, it has been crumbling since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 due to insecurity, poor management and corruption.

The poverty in Iraq is driving an illegal trade in kidney and other organs in Baghdad. Donating organs is legal, selling them is not. Most of the money from the organ trade does not go to the donator, but to the dealers. Most of the buyers are Iraqis, but there is a growing market that is attracting other people in the Middle East.

Poverty drives Iraq organ trade

Karim Hussein made the long journey from Amara, a province in the south of Iraq, to Baghdad because he was desperate for the $3,000 he would get from the sale of a kidney there. "I have taken a loan to build my house," he told Al Jazeera.

"I thought I would be able to get work in order to be able to pay my debts back, but the daily amount I am getting is not enough to feed my family, I have eight children."

And there is no help for the many Iraqi detainees that are released by the American military. They get $25 in cash and a new set of clothes. There are about 90,000 detainees released in the last six years, with many more due to be released or turned over to the Iraqi authorities in the next year.

Iraqis Freed by US face few jobs and little hope

They have received a grim welcome. Many return to families crippled by debt from months without a breadwinner. Insurgents see them as potential recruits — or American agents. Old friends, neighbors and even relatives refuse to greet them in public, suspicious of their backgrounds or worried that a few minutes of socializing could mean guilt by association when the authorities, as Iraqi officials often intimate, come to round them back up.

All of these factors are aggravated when the men can find no legitimate work, because of mistrust and a brutal job market. In a town where there are other, bloodier ways to earn cash, this makes for a dangerous brew.

……. “He’s an engineer and can’t get a job anywhere,” Mr. Gannaoui said, pointing at one of the four men in the room with him, who all were nodding. “It’s like they’re ordering them to go and do bad things.”

Some Iraqi reporters working for McClatchy’s discussed homelessness in Iraq this past May. There was clearly homelessness before the US invasion. After the US military showed up, a lot of Iraqis expected things to change. Some started building homes on government land.

Homeless

With the absence of the authority of law people went far with their dreams and they built houses on the lands that belong to the state. They thought the new comers would understand their needs to have shelters. They thought at least the government would find them the substitute of the illegal shelters that they built. Now those people have evacuation orders because their illegal houses deform the appearance of the cities. And the new complexes are built to give to those who are not in need.

The McClatchy reporter goes on to claim that the current government is following the policies of the former regime of giving to their followers and leaving the rest destitute. And this is creating real bitterness among the Iraqi population.

And in Afghanistan – things are worse. Poverty was much more entrenched, even while there is less reporting done on the subject. A French news service said that three things are going to impact on the upcoming Afghanistan election – security, corruption and poverty.

The big issues - security, corruption and poverty

Poverty: A promise to tackle poverty features in all the candidates’ programmes. And no wonder. More than ten million Afghans, 37 per cent of the population, live in severe poverty, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Unemployment stands at 40 per cent.

And Admiral Mullen had this to say about poverty in Afghanistan:

"What I do see and have seen over the last two or three trips is something that I call a 'culture of poverty' and it isn't just that we've under-resourced it - we've under-resourced it for a significant period of time," Adm. Mullen said.

Of course, that does not mean that we have not sent over billions of dollars to address the issues facing the Afghan people. It just means those dollars never reached them. Oxfam is urging Americans to write our congress critters asking for reform of the US foreign assistance strategies in Afghanistan. More information here.

A recent Daily Kos diary by Ralph Lopez talks about conditions in Afghanistan and how JOBS are really needed.

Jobs for Afghans Last Blog from Kabul

The soft underbelly of this occupation is the angry men in the squares looking for work, who are ripe to take the Taliban's $8 a day wage because that's who is hiring. It's insane. The Taliban is making gains all over the countryside because of economics, not because anyone likes them. In fact, they are thoroughly disliked.

He is 100% correct. Without jobs, there is no hope. And with hungry children at home crying at night, a man will do almost anything to stop that crying. It is vastly stupid not to have started up a jobs program the very day the US military went into Afghanistan and Iraq, but then our government is not exactly known for its ability to figure out the basics.

Here is a comment he made in another one of his Daily Kos diaries about poverty in Afghanistan.

We have occupied this country for going on 9 years now [actually, it would be 8 years – dancewater] and still many people are living as if the bombing had stopped yesterday. Most Afghans do not have enough to eat, and in the remote provinces there is slow starvation. One out of five infants dies before the age of five of malnutrition or lack of access to clean drinking water.

And today, he made another appeal for a jobs program in Afghanistan.

Poverty and drought is also showing a negative impact on education, as per this report from December 2008.

Drought, poverty lead children to abandon school

Drought, poverty and lack of food have adversely affected the life of many children in Chemtal and elsewhere, forcing some to work instead of going to school. It is hard to estimate the number of children who have abandoned school to collect water and/or help feed their families, but local officials have reported a considerable drop in school attendance.
…. "We hardly find any food to eat. Our children often go hungry," said a resident of Chemtal District, explaining that all his four children had lost weight and regularly fell ill.

With the clear poverty and chronic homelessness that are evident in war zones, one would think that the world (and the US in particular) would make an attempt to help the victims of these wars. One would think wrong.

Countries at war get little aid for mothers, children

Countries that are at war such as Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq get only US$1.30 a person a year in aid to help prevent mothers dying from childbirth and children dying before they are five, a study has found.

…… In an article in PLoS Medicine, researchers in Britain said they trawled through databases kept by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nations and found that a total of US$20.8 billion was given each year between 2003 and 2006 to 18 countries that were affected by war.

….. In comparison, developing nations which were not at war - such as Bangladesh, Malawi and Cambodia - were getting an average of US$2.50 a person a year.

Photo: People clamour for food in Baghdad - around 25 per cent of Iraqis live below the poverty line. From The Indepentent (UK): Iraq faces the mother of all corruption scandals

Photo: Residents wait for the distribution of relief goods by the Red Crescent organization to a poor neighbourhood in Baghdad's Abu Dsheer district in this September 8, 2008 file photo. REUTERS/Mohammed Ameen/Files

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: vast increases in poverty and homelessness.

Quote:

What shall we say when history asks how such crimes came to be committed in the name of America? Will we say that we stood silently by, shrugging our shoulders, filling our bellies, closing our eyes? Or will we be able to say: We saw. We dissented. We resisted. We condemned. ~ Chris Floyd

WWB: civilian casualties from shootings

WHAT WAR BRINGS: civilian casualties from military shootings

Photo: "I hate the Americans," said Sufian Neda, 9, who was wounded when U.S. troops and insurgents traded gunfire near Baghdad. (By Ernesto Londoño -- The Washington Post)

Of course in every war and occupation, there will be cases of civilians being shot and killed by the superior military force. They really have no protection from that. The civilians just have to take it. Many civilians have been killed in Iraq and a significant number has been killed in Afghanistan too. In Pakistan, there are no US troops shooting at civilians, but there are drone attacks that have killed hundreds.

One blogger in Mosul told about her great uncle being shot by US troops. He was out driving his car, and he was unarmed. This happened in March 2006. This incident was never reported in regular news outlets and never made it into any US reports that were obtained by the ACLU…. I know because I checked.

Here is the blogger’s report:

We need help to stop the violence, and the disrespect of the humanity. I am giving some of the details about my relative's accident to seek for help, and investigation. On Wednesday afternoon about 5 pm. My dear grand uncle was shot by many American bullets from the right side while he was driving his car (Dark brown" Opel\vectra", model 1991.), in a residential neighborhood, "Al Tairan ". The report of the forensic doctor mentioned that the victim was turning his head toward the left, when he got the first bullet on his neck (that one caused immediate death), the other was in his upper right side of his chest, and the third bullet was on his upper part of his right arm. Such accidents, I mean shooting innocent people, had been repeated to a large extent that turned the appreciation of the Iraqis toward the American liberation from Saddams' regimen to hate or violence or at least suspicious about the intentions of the Americans' coexistence in Iraq

There are many more like this incident. I received the following information from an email sent to me by an Iraqi-American who posts at Daily Kos.

We all read about stories of horrors by soldiers in Colorado telling and explaining how being deployed in Iraq has affected their entire life, and if you did not here is the link.

As I was reading, I was feeling the pain in my heart toward both sides. Iraqis who were getting shot and killed left and right and those soldiers who were sent to hell for no reason at all and left them suffer what they suffer. It is really hard to have living heart that try to empathize and sympathize with both sides and that’s why I sometimes wish if I had a dead heart so I would not go through the pain and wonder who’s fault and who is to be blamed? Asking though is really the easy part of that.

I know a soldier who is a father of a very beautiful girl and a husband of a gorgeous wife. This guy was deployed to Iraq and came back to the States due to some injury. Every time I see this soldier and say to him hi I get that urging question to ask “how many Iraqi civilians did you kill?”. I know he has to defend his life and others. I know that he is doing his job but I am not talking about those terrorists who point their guns against the troops, or blow themselves and kill civilians. I am talking about those people who were in the wrong place on the wrong time. Those like my friend’s dad, Hamza.

Hamza was in his early fifties, still young to die. Any one is too young to die, especially if he was a loving father, a caring husband and beloved person by his community like Hamza. There was a rule of thumb over there in Iraq which it said that if you saw an American convoy, stay away from it as far as possible. Because you never know what would happen. And it was really a scary thing to share the road with the troops. Hamza knew about that rule and that’s why he got scared and confused when he saw the convoy, his fears and emotions made him act improperly by telling him to speed up and beat that convoy so he could get away from it. The matter that made him looked suspicious and ended up being showered with bullets. The car stopped so as the convoy but Hamza was bleeding inside his car which did not explode. He was not a suicider or anything; he was just a scared poor soul. So they took him thankfully to the nearest hospital and dropped him off there to face his fate, while I was trying to help him over here to get better treatment and care. I was trying to help Hamza as well as the troops to gain hearts and minds by facilitating better opportunity to survive. Operation give and its sponsors was my only choice since I did not know about other organization that may help in treatment back then. Fruitless my efforts were, and we were all late in doing so whereas Hamza’s time was coming to leave to a better place where is always peace and love and no hate.

He was not the only one who lost his life tragically like that my second cousin Ammar who was also another example. Ammar was in his twenties newly wed and enjoying life when he was driving his car down the roads of Baghdad sharing laughs and jokes with his mom and bride paying no attention to anything but his joyful moment. Forgetting about the rule of thumb and passing by the convoy of death. The shower of bullets started as soon as he passed by and the fate of the driver would be soon declared to dead. Ammar left this world without knowing that he was going to leave behind an orphan daughter whose life could have been definitely changed by having a loving father around to care and protect. Those were examples of people whom I knew about and there are many others whom I did not know, met, or heard about.

The question that remains in my mind is that whom to blame for that?

The above are but three examples of shooting by US troops in Iraq that never made the news. God only knows how many there are in total, but the number is not insignificant. Below are some reports that made the news – or at least, made the caption of a photograph.

This one is from May 2009 in Mosul, Iraq:

The US military says its forces have killed an Iraqi civilian who failed to heed warnings and stop his car at a checkpoint in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

… The Monday killing comes nearly a month after US troops shot dead two members of an Iraqi family and detained four others in a raid on their house in the Iraqi city of al-Kut. Following the incident, the US military apologized and expressed sadness over its hostile conduct.

Sometimes, US troops wound someone and it is not fatal. This happened in Hilla, Iraq in May 2009:

U.S. forces on Saturday wounded a farmer northeast of Hilla city, according to a source from Babel province’s police.

“U.S. forces opened fire on a farmer in the Neel area, 5 km northeast of Hilla,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. He pointed out that the injured farmer was admitted to the Hilla surgical hospital.

Here’s another example of US troops wounding someone, again in Hilla in May 2009:

A professor working at al-Qadissiya University in the province of al-Diwaniya was wounded on Sunday morning when U.S. forces opened fire on him to the north of al-Hilla city, a police source in Babel said. “U.S. troops opened fire on a Caprice vehicle carrying al-Qadissiya university professor Abdulhussein Abbas, at al-Mahaweel district, (16 km) north of Hilla, leaving him wounded,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

And here is another story of two civilians being wounded by US shooting in Mosul:

“One civilian and a woman were wounded when U.S. forces opened fire randomly in al-Adl neighborhood in eastern Mosul,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. “The two were in a bus when the forces opened fire on them,” he added. “The woman is a Mosul University employee,” he noted.

Here’s one that never made a news story, but made it into the caption for a Reuter’s photograph. This happened in May 2009:

A woman, whose her husband was killed during a U.S. raid, cries in her house in Kut, 150 km (95 miles) southeast of Baghdad April 26, 2009. Hundreds of Iraqis protested against U.S. forces on Sunday after U.S. soldiers killed a policeman and a woman in an overnight raid that was condemned by the provincial governor. REUTERS/Jaafer Abed (IRAQ CONFLICT POLITICS)

And here is another one that made it into a caption of a photograph, and happened in 2005:

“After the shooting stopped, the American convoy continued driving. I thought only the driver was hit. His injuries were serious but not life threatening. When I looked into the back seat, I found my wife and two children covered in blood. I realized my wife was dead. My daughter was dead. I tried to lift my daughter. Parts of her brain fell from the wound on the side of her head. My baby boy was covered with blood and wounds. He survived. I don’t know why the Americans shot at us.” - AHMED MOAYDA, WITH HIS SON, HAMZA

This one happened in Iraq in July 2009:

NORTHERN IRAQ - U.S forces shot dead a civilian on a highway between the cities of Tikrit and Balad, north of Baghdad, on Friday, the U.S military said. The statement said a U.S. soldier opened fire on a man driving a truck after he failed to heed a signal to stop.

There was another incident in July 2009 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Apparently, US soldiers had killed three civilians and wounded four more (including two children). This sounds like it might be a ‘caught in the crossfire’ type of incident, but an Iraqi officer tried to detain the US soldiers. I guess the Iraqi officer felt it was excessive force:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said an Iraqi officer who ordered the detention of US soldiers last week after they killed three Iraqis had acted "out of line."

The prime minister told The Washington Post in an interview the officer "did not understand the agreement" governing US military activities since US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities last month.

…… Four Iraqis, including two children, were also wounded in the incident when US forces returned fire and raided nearby houses after insurgents attacked their convoy.

That Iraqi officer is not the only one confused. I am confused too at this so-called sovereignty of Iraq where the US troops stay on their bases, except they don’t. And they are still shooting up Iraqi civilians and raiding Iraqi homes, just like they have been for the past six years.

Here’s what one of the injured children in this shooting had to say:

Neda's 9-year-old son, Sufian, said he was wounded when a bullet grazed his left shoulder.

"I hate the Americans," the boy said quietly. "I never liked them, even before this happened."

That article also states:

Interviews with residents, hospital officials and Iraqi army police commanders in the suburb of Abu Ghraib suggest that conventional wisdom holds the Americans killed civilians.

And here is a statement from the Haditha massacre that killed 24 civilians in their homes after a roadside bomb had killed a US troop (some graphic pictures of this incident at the link). This happened in November 2005.:

“The brains of at least one of the little girls were shoved through fractures in her skull by the impact of a bullet. This is a standard effect of high-velocity rounds fired into the closed cavity of a head. Later that day, when a replacement Marine came in to carry out the bodies, the girl's brains would fall onto his boot.” - William Langewiesche

But, Iraq is not alone. Afghanistan also has had it’s share of US troops shooting civilians, and the number of incidents has gone up lately.

This one happened in Afghanistan in July 2009:

US-led coalition forces have gunned down one civilian and detained 3 others outside Kabul The operation was carried out overnight in the Mohammad Agha district of Logar province, 40 km south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, a government spokesman said.

Din Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for the provincial administration, added that the troops have killed a retired former head of the traffic department in Logar province.

…… According to the district governor, Abdul Hamid, the former government employee had no connections to any militant or terrorist groups.

This one also happened in Afghanistan in July 2009:

German soldiers killed two civilians Sunday when their van failed to stop as it approached a roadblock near Kunduz, Afghanistan, defence officials said.

….. A youth was killed in the van and one of the three people seriously wounded by the gunfire died while being rushed to a clinic operated by the German provincial reconstruction team in Kunduz.

And here is another one from Afghanistan in July 2009:

An Afghan girl has been killed in an accidental shooting by Canadian soldiers in Kandahar province.

….. When the driver did not heed signals to stop, a warning shot was fired and the motorcycle changed direction and sped away. Moments later, officials say the soldiers noticed a crowd gathering and discovered that a girl, whose age was not disclosed, had been shot.

And here is a report from Afghanistan in May 2009:

In a separate episode in Farah on Tuesday, one Afghan was killed and another was wounded when an American convoy on a supply mission fired on their car as it approached at high speed, according to the American military. Despite three warning flares and three rounds of warning shots, the car continued to approach the convoy, the military said.

Although an investigation is still under way, Col. Chris Kubik, a military spokesman, said the two Afghans were likely civilians “who did not understand our escalation-of-force procedures.”

I would not understand them either. Particularly if I didn’t see them.

Yes, shooting up civilians is a part of every war. And many of them end up dead or with terrible injuries. And then they are mostly ignored, but if there is any attention paid to them, then we will shed a few tears. And go out tomorrow and shoot some more civilians up.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: US troops shooting up civilians.