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Report: Surge Hasn't Cut Attacks on Iraqi Civilians    [
Documents Show Soldiers Disregard Rules    [

    Lawsuit Demands US Reveal Civilian Deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan
    Agence France-Presse

    Tuesday 04 September 2007

    A US civil rights group filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding the American military release documents about civilians killed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, accusing the government of trying to hide the human cost of war.

    The American Civil Liberties Union's legal move came after a request for documents related to civilian deaths under the country's Freedom of Information laws was rebuffed by the US Navy, the Air Force and Marines. The US Army complied with the ACLU's year-old request.

    The group has already released thousands of documents obtained from the army showing compensation claims from families whose loved ones were killed by stray bullets or in traffic accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    On Tuesday, the ACLU released thousands of additional documents revealing court martial proceedings and military investigations in cases in which US soldiers were accused - and often acquitted - of killing civilians intentionally or through negligence.

    In its suit filed in federal court in Washington, the ACLU - citing the public's legal right to information held by the government - demands the Pentagon release "all records relating to the killing of civilians by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 1, 2005."

    The ACLU accused President George W. Bush's administration of suppressing information about military and civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    "There can be no more important decision in a democracy than whether to go to war, yet this administration has gone to unprecedented lengths to control the information that the American people need to make informed judgments," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the ACLU.

    The government's refusal to meet ACLU's freedom of information request "unlawfully obstructs the public's right to know the true costs of our nation's wars," Wizner said.

    Few of the military investigations or courts martial called for disciplinary action as a result of civilian deaths, according to the documents cited by the ACLU.

    In one case, US military authorities called for a US driver to be charged with negligent homicide and reckless endangerment after a six-month-old infant was killed in a traffic accident.

    In the probe of a soldier who shot an Iraqi man in the head at close range, an army investigating officer expressed concern that soldiers questioned in the case seemed to lack knowledge or understanding of the rules governing the treatment of enemy prisoners, according to documents cited by the ACLU.

 

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    Report: Surge Hasn't Cut Attacks on Iraqi Civilians
    By Renee Schoof and Warren P. Strobel
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Tuesday 04 September 2007

    Washington - The surge of additional U.S. troops in Iraq has failed to curtail violence against Iraqi civilians, an independent government agency reported Tuesday.

    Citing data from the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, the Government Accountability Office found that daily attacks against civilians in Iraq have remained "about the same" since February, when the United States began sending nearly 30,000 additional troops to improve security in Iraq.

    The GAO also found that the number of Iraqis fleeing violence in their neighborhoods is increasing, with as many as 100,000 Iraqis a month leaving their homes in search of safety.

    The GAO's conclusions contradict repeated assertions by the White House and the Pentagon in advance of the coming congressional debate on whether to stay the course in Iraq or to begin some withdrawal of U.S. troops.

    Neither a July report from the White House nor a report last month from 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, however, provided any statistics to support their claims that the surge has improved security. The GAO report, in contrast, includes charts showing the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces and U.S. troops. Only attacks against U.S. troops have declined in recent weeks.

    In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday, U.S. comptroller general David S. Walker, who heads the GAO, said he couldn't vouch for charts that Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, had shown him during a recent congressional visit to Iraq. Coleman said those charts showed a decrease in violence.

    "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree. So I don't know what Gen. Petraeus is giving you," Walker said.

    When President Bush announced in January that he'd dispatch more troops, he said the goal was to cut sectarian violence so the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki could work out political compromises on key issues among Iraq's rival religious and ethnic groups.

    Supporters and opponents of the surge now agree on at least one thing: Maliki has been unable to bring about those agreements. So does the GAO. Its report found that of the 18 benchmarks Iraq's government set for itself, three have been met, four have been partially met and 11 haven't been met.

    "Overall, key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," the report said.

    The GAO said it couldn't determine whether sectarian violence in Iraq is down "because measuring such violence requires understanding the perpetrator's intent, which may not be known."

    But the report said it was possible to assess the overall daily number of attacks against civilians. A chart showed that those attacks have remained relatively constant throughout 2007, despite the additional U.S. troops. The GAO referred a request for precise numbers to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

    Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged the controversy over the numbers in comments to reporters in Baghdad on Tuesday. But he said that violent incidents in Iraq are at their lowest point in 15 months this week.

    "There's been some controversies about civilian casualties," Odierno said. "Ours still see it as below what it was. We think we're making progress."

    The GAO said that the Pentagon disagreed with its conclusion that there was no discernable trend in sectarian violence and provided the agency with additional data. But the GAO said it wasn't persuaded and didn't change its conclusion.

    The GAO said it did change its assessment of two benchmarks from "not met" in a draft report to "partially met" after it received additional information. Those were whether the Iraqi government had provided three trained and ready brigades to join in Baghdad security operations and whether it had ensured that there were no safe havens for outlaws, regardless of sectarian affiliation.

    Walker said that Iraqi forces have made progress in providing some security in Baghdad, but that it's unclear whether they can sustain those gains alone.

    "I think there's a serious question whether they on their own will be able to hold these neighborhoods for an extended period of time ... absent direct U.S. troop involvement," Walker said. "That's probably the $64,000 question."

    The report found that many Iraqi military units include fighters with strong sectarian and tribal loyalties, and therefore are unwilling to confront extremist militias.

    Walker said it was important to determine not just whether Iraqi forces were ready to fight, but also whether they were "committed to a unified Iraq and committed to fight on that basis."

    That kind of loyalty will be hard to achieve until Iraqi politicians reach political reconciliation, Walker said. Currently, he said, the Maliki government is "dysfunctional".

    The GAO report also provided evidence to support some analysts' belief that U.S. combat deaths have declined in the past few months because some Iraqi groups have chosen not to face American troops on the battlefield.

    U.S. officials had predicted that combat deaths would rise when the surge was at full strength and the U.S. began a series of military offensives. Instead, U.S. combat deaths declined from a high of 120 in May to 55 in August, according to the icasualties.com Web site.

    Citing a June 2007 Pentagon document, the GAO report said that many fighters from the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr left Baghdad as the number of U.S. and Iraqi troops there increased. However, it said, "they now engage in ethnic and sectarian violence in northern and central Iraq" and are battling another Shiite militia, the Badr Organization, for control of southern Iraq.

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    Leila Fadel in Baghdad contributed.

 

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    Documents Show Soldiers Disregard Rules
    By Ryan Lenz
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 04 September 2007

    Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a troubling pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

    The documents, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

    The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

    In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man's head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a "stress position" they insisted was an approved technique.

    Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a January 2006 court-martial that received wide media attention due to possible CIA involvement in the interrogation.

    But even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

    "The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information," Welshofer wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. "To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation - it is a conversation."

    Welshofer said in the same letter that he was "within the appropriate constraints that both the rules of law, and just as importantly - duty, imposed on me."

    The documents were obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act request the ACLU filed with the military more than a year ago asking for all documents relevant to U.S. military involvement in the deaths of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only the Army responded.

    Considered against recent cases, including soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division convicted of killing detainees in Samarra, Iraq, last year and the ongoing courts-martial of Marines accused of killing 24 civilians in Haditha, these new examples shed light on the frequency soldiers and Marines may disregard the rules of war.

    Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said the documents also show that theres an abundance of information being withheld from public scrutiny.

    "The government has gone out of its way to hide the human cost of this war," Bargzie said. Releasing the documents now "paints at least a part of that picture so people at least know what's going on," she said.

    The lawsuit seeks to compel the military to produce all documents related to all incidents of civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 2005. The ACLU contends the materials are releasable under federal law.

    The Defense Department declined to comment on the lawsuit until it could review its claims.

    Among the files released to the ACLU were the court-martial records for two soldiers convicted of assault in the drowning of a man pushed into the Tigris for violating curfew and three soldiers convicted in the "mercy killing" of an injured teenager in Sadr City.

    The teen had been severely injured; one soldier explained that he shot and killed the teen "to take him out of his misery."

    Other killings included:

• A man shot after a search of his home near Balad uncovered illegal weapons and anti-American literature. Immediately after the shooting, according to testimony, Sgt. 1st Class George Diaz, who was convicted of unpremeditated murder, said, "I'm going to hell for this." Diaz also was convicted of mistreating a teenage detainee when he forced the youth to hold a smoke grenade with the pin pulled as Diaz questioned him at gunpoint.
  
  
• A suspected insurgent in Iraq by Staff Sgt. Shane Werst, who said the man appeared to be reaching for a weapon. Werst was acquitted of murder despite acknowledging he had fired and then planted a chrome Iraqi pistol on the suspect to make his claim of self defense more believable.

    In a previously unreported case, Pfc. James Combs was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for shooting an Iraqi woman from a guard tower in what he claimed was an accident, though court documents and testimony indicate his weapon was set to fire multiple shots despite a regulation advising against such a setting.

    Another previously undisclosed case involved Sgt. Ricky Burke, who was charged with murder for killing a wounded man alongside the road following a firefight. Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein, a member of Burke's military police company, testified he heard Burke say before the shooting, "It's payback time."

    Burke, a member of the Kentucky National Guard, was found not guilty of the charges that stemmed from the same battle that led to the first woman since World War II being awarded the Silver Star.

    In closing arguments, Burke's attorneys asked the jury to recommend that soldiers be trained better for handling detainees. "They are not trained to standard," said an attorney not identified in the transcript.

    The attorneys also insisted that the rules of engagement are clear and in favor of soldiers, contending that the perception of hostility merits deadly action.

    Michael Pheneger, a retired Army intelligence colonel who reviewed the materials for the ACLU, said the documents suggest many allegations of war crimes in Iraq are not being made public.

    "Wars are messy by their very nature. These are dangerous circumstances, and the fog of war is out there," said Pheneger, who served in Vietnam. "But it's perfectly obvious that there is no rule of engagement that would authorize someone to kill someone in custody."