[Marxism] Abusing Iraqi Civilians By Bob Herbert - New York Times 10 July 2007

[Ralph Johansen]

Abusing Iraqi Civilians
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Tuesday 10 July 2007

With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The 
Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into 
great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi 
civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines.

The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten 
substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 
2005. Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens 
of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they 
describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused 
or killed Iraqi civilians - men, women and children - with impunity.

The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of 
panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.'s are 
believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the 
article says. The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a 
minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll 
of their actions has been huge.

The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an 
alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts 
of terror as the primary tactic. "The mounting frustration of fighting 
an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with 
their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to 
declare an open war on all Iraqis," said the authors, Chris Hedges, a 
former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.

Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, 
Colo., said in the article: "I guess while I was there, the general 
attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?"

For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph into a 
debilitating sense of guilt after their return home.

Kelly Dougherty of Cañon City, Colo., who served in Iraq as a sergeant 
with a National Guard military police unit, remembered investigating an 
incident in which a military convoy ran over a boy, about 10 years old, 
and his three donkeys. When she and others from her unit arrived at the 
scene, the boy was lying dead by the side of the road. The donkeys had 
also been killed.

"We saw him there," she said, "and, you know, we were upset because the 
convoy didn't even stop. They really, judging by the skid marks, they 
hardly even slowed down."

Accidents, even those caused by recklessness, are bad enough. More 
disturbing are the incidents described in the article in which G.I.'s 
routinely abused civilians. Among the worst abuses have been the 
shootings of innocent civilians and the improper arrests that have 
occurred in the course of raids carried out by soldiers and marines 
looking for insurgents.

There have been thousands of such raids. An extraordinary number of them 
- the vast majority, according to the interviews for article - were 
exercises in futility, yielding nothing but grief and terror for the 
innocent families whose homes were invaded.

"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up," said Army Sgt. 
John Bruhns of Philadelphia, who participated in many raids while 
serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. "And a lot of them think once they 
kick down the door there's going to be people on the inside waiting for 
them with weapons to start shooting at them."

In most cases, there is nothing more than a terrified family on the 
other side of the door. In instances in which unarmed civilians are shot 
and killed in raids, which happens frequently, it's not unusual for 
G.I.'s to plant weapons by their bodies and to arrest survivors on false 
charges of participating in the insurgency, the article says.

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Joe Hatcher, who served with 
the Army's Fourth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. "If you kill someone and 
they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em."

The article emphasizes the extreme stress that G.I.'s are operating 
under in Iraq. A byproduct of that stress is the tendency to stereotype 
and dehumanize all Iraqis. What the soldiers find out, after they get 
home, is that in dehumanizing the people they supposedly were fighting 
for, they often end up dehumanizing themselves.

There is no upside to this war. It has been a plague since the 
beginning. But it's one thing to lose a war. It's much worse for a 
nation to lose its soul.



The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness
By Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian
The Nation
30 July 2007 Issue

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat 
veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to 
investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi 
civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and 
physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, 
gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the 
war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.
Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of 
transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops 
in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, 
including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in 
such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after 
the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their 
unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops 
took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were 
perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as 
common and said they often go unreported - and almost always go unpunished.

Court cases, such as the ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and 
the rape and murder of a 14-year-old in Mahmudiya, and news stories in 
the Washington Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on 
Iraqi accounts have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on 
civilians. Human rights groups have issued reports, such as Human Rights 
Watch's Hearts and Minds: Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by 
U.S. Forces, packed with detailed incidents that suggest that the 
killing of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more common than has 
been acknowledged by military authorities.

This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, 
named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in 
one place to openly corroborate these assertions.

While some veterans said civilian shootings were routinely investigated 
by the military, many more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you 
physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was 
wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your 
time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, 
of Arlington, Virginia. He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in 
Ramadi with a Marine Corps civil affairs unit supporting a combat team 
with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. (All interviewees are 
identified by the rank they held during the period of service they 
recount here; some have since been promoted or demoted.)

Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most 
Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for 
soldiers to sympathize with their victims - at least until they returned 
home and had a chance to reflect.

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is 
just another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand 
Junction, Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, 
First Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of 
Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004. "You know, so what?... 
The soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they 
were mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying 
to help you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and 
my family, and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these 
missions. Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and 
try to kill us."

He said it was only "when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues 
and meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, 
takes root, then."

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise. In this investigation 
of alleged military misconduct, The Nation focused on a few key elements 
of the occupation, asking veterans to explain in detail their 
experiences operating patrols and supply convoys, setting up 
checkpoints, conducting raids and arresting suspects. From these 
collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely 
populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the 
deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity 
between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US 
government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and 
even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other 
misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French 
occupation of Algeria to the American war on Vietnam and the Israeli 
occupation of Palestinian territory.

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael 
Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour 
beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry 
Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the 
scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old 
child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet 
through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the 
gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. 
And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just 
looked at me like - I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but 
she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my 
leg?... I was just like, This is - this is it. This is ridiculous."

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans 
was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to 
the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US 
Army Medical Command, only 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of 
marines agreed that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and 
respect. Just 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they 
would report a unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent 
noncombatant."

These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they 
had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in 
heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They 
only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting 
frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of 
roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led 
many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some 
shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then 
tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened 
fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.

In June 2003 Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejía's unit was pressed by a furious 
crowd in Ramadi. Sergeant Mejía, 31, a National Guardsman from Miami, 
served for six months beginning in April 2003 with the 1-124 Infantry 
Battalion, Fifty-Third Infantry Brigade. His squad opened fire on an 
Iraqi youth holding a grenade, riddling his body with bullets. Sergeant 
Mejía checked his clip afterward and calculated that he had personally 
fired eleven rounds into the young man.

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those 
who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to 
punish the local population that was supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said.

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that 
some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or 
desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The 
Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if 
he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown 
plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in 
Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. 
Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, 
revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a 
bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they!?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers 
and cousins.

In the sections that follow, snipers, medics, military police, 
artillerymen, officers and others recount their experiences serving in 
places as diverse as Mosul in the north, Samarra in the Sunni Triangle, 
Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad in the center, during 2003, 2004 and 
2005. Their stories capture the impact of their units on Iraqi civilians.

A Note on Methodology

The Nation interviewed fifty combat veterans, including forty soldiers, 
eight marines and two sailors, over a period of seven months beginning 
in July 2006. To find veterans willing to speak on the record about 
their experiences in Iraq, we sent queries to organizations dedicated to 
US troops and their families, including Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of 
America, the antiwar groups Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for 
Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War and the prowar group Vets for 
Freedom. The leaders of IVAW and Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of IAVA, 
were especially helpful in putting us in touch with Iraq War veterans. 
Finally, we found veterans through word of mouth, as many of those we 
interviewed referred us to their military friends.

To verify their military service, when possible, we obtained a copy of 
each interviewee's DD Form 214, or the Certificate of Release or 
Discharge from Active Duty, and in all cases confirmed their service 
with the branch of the military in which they were enlisted. Nineteen 
interviews were conducted in person, while the rest were done over the 
phone; all were tape-recorded and transcribed; all but seven 
interviewees (most of those currently on active duty) were independently 
contacted by fact checkers to confirm basic facts about their service in 
Iraq. Of those interviewed, seventeen served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, 
twenty from 2004 to 2005 and six from 2005 to 2006. Of the ten veterans 
whose tours lasted less than one year, eight served in 2003, while the 
others served in 2004 and 2005.

The ranks of the veterans we interviewed range from private to captain, 
though only a handful were officers. The veterans served throughout 
Iraq, but mostly in the country's most volatile areas, such as Baghdad, 
Tikrit, Mosul, Falluja and Samarra.

During the course of the interview process, five veterans turned over 
photographs from Iraq, some of them graphic, to corroborate their claims.

Raids

"So we get started on this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc. 
Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno who said he raided between twenty and 
thirty Iraqi homes during an eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that 
ended in October 2005, serving with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry 
Brigade. "It starts with the psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with 
the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or 
whatever they happen to be, saying, basically, saying, Put your weapons, 
if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come 
outside, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over 
for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And 
we're running around, and they - we'd done a few houses by this point, 
and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple 
other people.

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming 
area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, 
like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then 
they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had 
a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. 
And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't 
- motherfucker - he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I 
see this dog - I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals - and this dog 
has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all 
over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The 
family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and 
a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. 
I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's 
crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're 
just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking 
shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....

"And - I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but - and I 
had tears then, too - and I'm looking at the kids and they are so 
scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my 
wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, 
you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that 
asshole did that.

"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? 
Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."

Specialist Chrystal said such incidents were "very common."

According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in 
such raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. 
The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods 
where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising 
fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far 
more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed 
property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling 
to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family 
members who were hauled away as suspects.

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. 
John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in 
raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, 
a city infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the 
capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armored Division, First 
Battalion, for one year beginning in April 2003. His descriptions of 
raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans who served 
in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit.

"You want to catch them off guard," Sergeant Bruhns explained. "You want 
to catch them in their sleep." About ten troops were involved in each 
raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops wearing Kevlar helmets and 
flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons kicked the 
door in or used a sledgehammer to break it down, according to Sergeant 
Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on - if the lights are 
working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team 
outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a 
headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate 
with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of 
bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have 
junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run 
into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all 
together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and 
you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack 
us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have 
him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have 
any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all - 
anything - anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are 
somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant 
Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and 
you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. 
You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw 
everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump 
them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on 
the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just 
hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 
'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated 
this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family 
and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you 
do the same thing in a hundred homes."

Each raid, or "cordon and search" operation, as they are sometimes 
called, involved five to twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of 
attacks on soldiers in a particular area, commanders would normally 
order infantrymen on raids to look for weapons caches, ammunition or 
materials for making IEDs. Each Iraqi family was allowed to keep one 
AK-47 at home, but, according to Bruhns, those found with extra weapons 
were arrested and detained and the operation classified a "success," 
even if it was clear that no one in the home was an insurgent.

Before a raid, according to descriptions by several veterans, soldiers 
typically "quarantined" the area by barring anyone from coming in or 
leaving. In pre-raid briefings, Sergeant Bruhns said, military 
commanders often told their troops the neighborhood they were ordered to 
raid was "a hostile area with a high level of insurgency" and that it 
had been taken over by former Baathists or Al Qaeda terrorists.

"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant 
Bruhns. "And a lot of these troops think once they kick down the door 
there's going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons 
to start shooting at them."

Sgt. Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of 
homes in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth 
Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, for one year beginning in 
February 2004. "We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we 
went through every house," he said.

Spc. Ali Aoun, 23, a National Guardsman from New York City, said he 
conducted perimeter security in nearly 100 raids while serving in Sadr 
City with the Eighty-Ninth Military Police Brigade for eleven months 
starting in April 2004. When soldiers raided a home, he said, they first 
cordoned it off with Humvees. Soldiers guarded the entrance to make sure 
no one escaped. If an entire town was being raided, in large-scale 
operations, it too was cordoned off, said Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, 
of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper with the 263rd 
Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, who was deployed to Baquba for 
a year in February 2004.

Staff Sgt. Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, recalled one summer 
night in 2004, the temperature an oppressive 110 degrees, when he and 
forty-four other US soldiers raided a sprawling farm on the outskirts of 
Tikrit. Sergeant Westphal, who served there for a yearlong tour with the 
Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, beginning in 
February 2004, said he was told some men on the farm were insurgents. As 
a mechanized infantry squad leader, Sergeant Westphal led the mission to 
secure the main house, while fifteen men swept the property. Sergeant 
Westphal and his men hopped the wall surrounding the house, fully 
expecting to come face to face with armed insurgents.

"We had our flashlights and ... I told my guys, 'On the count of three, 
just hit them with your lights and let's see what we've got here. Wake 
'em up!'"

Sergeant Westphal's flashlight was mounted on his M-4 carbine rifle, a 
smaller version of the M-16, so in pointing his light at the clump of 
sleepers on the floor he was also pointing his weapon at them. Sergeant 
Westphal first turned his light on a man who appeared to be in his mid-60s.

"The man screamed this gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, just horrified 
scream," Sergeant Westphal recalled. "I've never heard anything like 
that. I mean, the guy was absolutely terrified. I can imagine what he 
was thinking, having lived under Saddam for years."

The farm's inhabitants were not insurgents but a family sleeping outside 
for relief from the stifling heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had 
frightened awake was the patriarch.

"Sure enough, as we started to peel back the layers of all these people 
sleeping, I mean, it was him, maybe two guys, either his sons or nephews 
or whatever, and the rest were all women and children," Sergeant 
Westphal said. "We didn't find anything.

"I can tell you hundreds of stories about things like that and they 
would all pretty much be like the one I just told you. Just a different 
family, a different time, a different circumstance."

For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. "I just remember 
thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the 
American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said.

Intelligence

Fifteen soldiers we spoke with told us the information that spurred 
these raids was typically gathered through human intelligence - and that 
it was usually incorrect. Eight said it was common for Iraqis to use 
American troops to settle family disputes, tribal rivalries or personal 
vendettas. Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas, was a scout in 
Tikrit with the Fourth Infantry Division during a yearlong tour that 
ended in March 2004. In late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra raided a 
middle-aged man's home in Tikrit because his son had told the Army his 
father was an insurgent. After thoroughly searching the man's house, 
soldiers found nothing and later discovered that the son simply wanted 
money his father had buried at the farm.

After persistently acting on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who 
raided Iraqi homes in more than fifty operations, said soldiers began to 
anticipate the innocence of those they raided. "People would make jokes 
about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna 
get the wrong house," he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always 
got the wrong house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon 
leader shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he 
would radio in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I 
found the weapons of mass destruction in here."

Sergeant Bruhns said he questioned the authenticity of the intelligence 
he received because Iraqi informants were paid by the US military for 
tips. On one occasion, an Iraqi tipped off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a 
small Syrian resistance organization, responsible for killing a number 
of US troops, was holed up in a house. "They're waiting for us to show 
up and there will be a lot of shooting," Sergeant Bruhns recalled being 
told.

As the Alpha Company team leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the 
first person in the door. Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're 
so confident that there are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents ... 
in there, why in the world are you going to send me and three guys in 
the front door, because chances are I'm not going to be able to squeeze 
the trigger before I get shot.'" Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested 
they pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle up to the house and shoot a 
missile through the front window to exterminate the enemy fighters his 
commanders claimed were inside. They instead diminished the 
aggressiveness of the raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran security out front, 
his fellow soldiers smashed the windows and kicked down the doors to 
find "a few little kids, a woman and an old man."

In late summer 2005, in a village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist 
Chrystal searched a compound with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly 
man in his mid-30s escorted Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit 
around the property, where the man lived with his parents, wife and 
children, making jokes to lighten the mood. As they finished searching - 
they found nothing - a lieutenant from his company approached Specialist 
Chrystal: "What the hell were you doing?" he asked. "Well, we just 
searched the house and it's clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The 
lieutenant told Specialist Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of 
the targets" of the raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as 
being an insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission, they'd 
only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there 
with the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he felt 
"humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed no threat was 
deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward, he posted 
himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission.

Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the 
Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, served a yearlong 
tour in several cities in Iraq, including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, 
beginning in February 2004. He estimates that he searched more than a 
hundred homes in Tikrit and found the raids fruitless and maddening. "We 
would go on one raid of a house and that guy would say, 'No, it's not 
me, but I know where that guy is.' And ... he'd take us to the next 
house where this target was supposedly at, and then that guy's like, 
'No, it's not me. I know where he is, though.' And we'd drive around all 
night and go from raid to raid to raid."

"I can't really fault military intelligence," said Specialist 
Reppenhagen, who said he raided thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It 
was always a guessing game. We're in a country where we don't speak the 
language. We're light on interpreters. It's just impossible to really 
get anything. All you're going off is a pattern of what's happened 
before and hoping that the pattern doesn't change."

Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26, of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with 
the Rear Operations Center, Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year 
beginning in October 2004. He said combat troops had neither the 
training nor the resources to investigate tips before acting on them. 
"We're not police," he said. "We don't go around like detectives and ask 
questions. We kick down doors, we go in, we grab people."

First Lieut. Brady Van Engelen, 26, of Washington, DC, said the Army 
depended on less than reliable sources because options were limited. He 
served as a survey platoon leader with the First Armored Division in 
Baghdad's volatile Adhamiya district for eight months beginning in 
September 2003. "That's really about the only thing we had," he said. "A 
lot of it was just going off a whim, a hope that it worked out," he 
said. "Maybe one in ten worked out."

Sergeant Bruhns said he uncovered illegal material about 10 percent of 
the time, an estimate echoed by other veterans. "We did find small 
materials for IEDs, like maybe a small piece of the wire, the detonating 
cord," said Sergeant Cannon. "We never found real bombs in the houses." 
In the thousand or so raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, 
Sergeant Westphal said, he came into contact with only four "hard-core 
insurgents."

Arrests

Even with such slim pretexts for arrest, some soldiers said, any Iraqis 
arrested during a raid were treated with extreme suspicion. Several 
reported seeing military-age men detained without evidence or abused 
during questioning. Eight veterans said the men would typically be bound 
with plastic handcuffs, their heads covered with sandbags. While the 
Army officially banned the practice of hooding prisoners after the Abu 
Ghraib scandal broke, five soldiers indicated that it continued.

"You weren't allowed to, but it was still done," said Sergeant Cannon. 
"I remember in Mosul [in January 2005], we had guys in a raid and they 
threw them in the back of a Bradley," shackled and hooded. "These guys 
were really throwing up," he continued. "They were so sick and nervous. 
And sometimes, they were peeing on themselves. Can you imagine if people 
could just come into your house and take you in front of your family 
screaming? And if you actually were innocent but had no way to prove 
that? It would be a scary, scary thing." Specialist Reppenhagen said he 
had only a vague idea about what constituted contraband during a raid. 
"Sometimes we didn't even have a translator, so we find some poster with 
Muqtada al-Sadr, Sistani or something, we don't know what it says on it. 
We just apprehend them, document that thing as evidence and send it on 
down the road and let other people deal with it."

Sergeant Bruhns, Sergeant Bocanegra and others said physical abuse of 
Iraqis during raids was common. "It was just soldiers being soldiers," 
Sergeant Bocanegra said. "You give them a lot of, too much, power that 
they never had before, and before you know it they're the ones kicking 
these guys while they're handcuffed. And then by you not catching 
[insurgents], when you do have someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting 
a roadside bomb' - and you don't even know if it's him or not - you just 
go in there and kick the shit out of him and take him in the back of a 
five-ton - take him to jail."

Tens of thousands of Iraqis - military officials estimate more than 
60,000 - have been arrested and detained since the beginning of the 
occupation, leaving their families to navigate a complex, chaotic prison 
system in order to find them. Veterans we interviewed said the majority 
of detainees they encountered were either innocent or guilty of only 
minor infractions.

Sergeant Bocanegra said during the first two months of the war he was 
instructed to detain Iraqis based on their attire alone. "They were 
wearing Arab clothing and military-style boots, they were considered 
enemy combatants and you would cuff 'em and take 'em in," he said. "When 
you put something like that so broad, you're bound to have, out of a 
hundred, you're going to have ten at least that were, you know what I 
mean, innocent."

Sometime during the summer of 2003, Bocanegra said, the rules of 
engagement narrowed - somewhat. "I remember on some raids, anybody of 
military age would be taken," he said. "Say, for example, we went to 
some house looking for a 25-year-old male. We would look at an age 
group. Anybody from 15 to 30 might be a suspect." (Since returning from 
Iraq, Bocanegra has sought counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder 
and said his "mission" is to encourage others to do the same.)

Spc. Richard Murphy, 28, an Army Reservist from Pocono, Pennsylvania, 
who served part of his fifteen-month tour with the 800th Military Police 
Brigade in Abu Ghraib prison, said he was often struck by the lack of 
due process afforded the prisoners he guarded.

Specialist Murphy initially went to Iraq in May 2003 to train Iraqi 
police in the southern city of Al Hillah but was transferred to Abu 
Ghraib in October 2003 when his unit replaced one that was rotating 
home. (He spoke with The Nation in October 2006, while not on active 
duty.) Shortly after his arrival there, he realized that the number of 
prisoners was growing "exponentially" while the amount of personnel 
remained stagnant. By the end of his six-month stint, Specialist Murphy 
was in charge of 320 prisoners, the majority of whom he was convinced 
were unjustly detained.

"I knew that a large percentage of these prisoners were innocent," he 
said. "Just living with these people for months you get to see their 
character.... In just listening to the prisoners' stories, I mean, I get 
the sense that a lot of them were just getting rounded up in big groups."

Specialist Murphy said one prisoner, a mentally impaired, blind albino 
who could "maybe see a few feet in front of his face" clearly did not 
belong in Abu Ghraib. "I thought to myself, What could he have possibly 
done?"

Specialist Murphy counted the prisoners twice a day, and the inmates 
would often ask him when they would be released or implore him to 
advocate on their behalf, which he would try to do through the JAG 
(Judge Advocate General) Corps office. The JAG officer Specialist Murphy 
dealt with would respond that it was out of his hands. "He would make 
his recommendations and he'd have to send it up to the next higher 
command," Specialist Murphy said. "It was just a snail's crawling 
process.... The system wasn't working."

Prisoners at the notorious facility rioted on November 24, 2003, to 
protest their living conditions, and Army Reserve Spc. Aidan Delgado, 
25, of Sarasota, Florida, was there. He had deployed with the 320th 
Military Police Company to Talil Air Base, to serve in Nasiriya and Abu 
Ghraib for one year beginning in April 2003. Unlike the other troops in 
his unit, he did not respond to the riot. Four months earlier he had 
decided to stop carrying a loaded weapon.

Nine prisoners were killed and three wounded after soldiers opened fire 
during the riot, and Specialist Delgado's fellow soldiers returned with 
photographs of the events. The images, disturbingly similar to the 
incident described by Sergeant Mejía, shocked him. "It was very 
graphic," he said. "A head split open. One of them was of two soldiers 
in the back of the truck. They open the body bags of these prisoners 
that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He's 
reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and 
he's smiling. And I said, 'These are some of our soldiers desecrating 
somebody's body. Something is seriously amiss.' I became convinced that 
this was excessive force, and this was brutality."

Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served 
in Jalula, where there was a small prison camp at his base. He was with 
the 252nd Armor, First Infantry Division, for nine months beginning in 
March 2004. He recalled his supervisor telling his platoon point-blank, 
"The Geneva Conventions don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in 
writing if you want to see it."

The pivotal experience for Specialist Delgado came when, in the winter 
of 2003, he was assigned to battalion headquarters inside Abu Ghraib 
prison, where he worked with Maj. David DiNenna and Lieut. Col. Jerry 
Phillabaum, both implicated in the Taguba Report, the official Army 
investigation into the prison scandal. There, Delgado read reports on 
prisoners and updated a dry erase board with information on where in the 
large prison compound detainees were moved and held.

"That was when I totally walked away from the Army," Specialist Delgado 
said. "I read these rap sheets on all the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and 
what they were there for. I expected them to be terrorists, murderers, 
insurgents. I look down this roster and see petty theft, public 
drunkenness, forged coalition documents. These people are here for petty 
civilian crimes."

"These aren't terrorists," he recalled thinking. "These aren't our 
enemies. They're just ordinary people, and we're treating them this 
harshly." Specialist Delgado ultimately applied for conscientious 
objector status, which the Army approved in April 2004.

The Enemy

American troops in Iraq lacked the training and support to communicate 
with or even understand Iraqi civilians, according to nineteen 
interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic. They were offered little or no 
cultural or historical education about the country they controlled. 
Translators were either in short supply or unqualified. Any stereotypes 
about Islam and Arabs that soldiers and marines arrived with tended to 
solidify rapidly in the close confines of the military and the risky 
streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism.

As Spc. Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, who served in Baghdad and 
Mosul with the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, Second Battalion, from 
December 2004 to March 2005, pointed out, 20-year-old soldiers went from 
the humiliation of training - "getting yelled at every day if you have a 
dirty weapon" - to the streets of Iraq, where "it's like life and death. 
And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can - do you know 
what I mean? - we have this power that you can't have. That's really 
liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level."

In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, "a lot of guys really supported that 
whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have 
darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."

In the scramble to get ready for Iraq, troops rarely learned more than 
how to say a handful of words in Arabic, depending mostly on a single 
manual, A Country Handbook, a Field-Ready Reference Publication, 
published by the Defense Department in September 2002. The book, as 
described by eight soldiers who received it, has pictures of Iraqi 
military vehicles, diagrams of how the Iraqi army is structured, images 
of Iraqi traffic signals and signs, and about four pages of basic Arabic 
phrases such as Do you speak English? I am an American. I am lost.

Iraqi culture, identity and customs were, according to at least a dozen 
soldiers and marines interviewed by The Nation, openly ridiculed in 
racist terms, with troops deriding "haji food," "haji music" and "haji 
homes." In the Muslim world, the word "haji" denotes someone who has 
made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is now used by American troops in 
the same way "gook" was used in Vietnam or "raghead" in Afghanistan.

"You can honestly see how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general 
are being, you know, kind of like dehumanized," said Specialist 
Englehart. "Like it was very common for United States soldiers to call 
them derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, 
sand nigger."

According to Sergeant Millard and several others interviewed, "It 
becomes this racialized hatred towards Iraqis." And this racist 
language, as Specialist Harmon pointed out, likely played a role in the 
level of violence directed at Iraqi civilians. "By calling them names," 
he said, "they're not people anymore. They're just objects."

Several interviewees emphasized that the military did set up, for 
training purposes, mock Iraqi villages peopled with actors who played 
the parts of civilians and insurgents. But they said that the constant 
danger in Iraq, and the fear it engendered, swiftly overtook such training.

"They were the law," Specialist Harmon said of the soldiers in his unit 
in Al-Rashidiya, near Baghdad, which participated in raids and convoys. 
"They were very mean, very mean-spirited to them. A lot of cursing at 
them. And I'm like, Dude, these people don't understand what you're 
saying.... They used to say a lot, 'Oh, they'll understand when the gun 
is in their face.'"

Those few veterans who said they did try to reach out to Iraqis 
encountered fierce hostility from those in their units.

"I had the night shift one night, at the aid station," said Specialist 
Resta, recounting one such incident. "We were told from the first second 
that we arrived there, and this was in writing on the wall in our aid 
station, that we were not to treat Iraqi civilians unless they were 
about to die.... So these guys in the guard tower radio in, and they say 
they've got an Iraqi out there that's asking for a doctor.

"So it's really late at night, and I walk out there to the gate and I 
don't even see the guy at first, and they point out to him and he's 
standing there. Well, I mean he's sitting, leaned up against this 
concrete barrier-like the median of the highway - we had as you 
approached the gate. And he's sitting there leaned up against it and, 
uh, he's out there, if you want to go and check on him, he's out there. 
So I'm sitting there waiting for an interpreter, and the interpreter 
comes and I just walk out there in the open. And this guy, he has the 
shit kicked out of him. He was missing two teeth. He has a huge 
laceration on his head, he looked like he had broken his eye orbit and 
had some kind of injury to his knee."

The Iraqi, Specialist Resta said, pleaded with him in broken English for 
help. He told Specialist Resta that there were men near the base who 
were waiting to kill him.

"I open a bag and I'm trying to get bandages out and the guys in the 
guard tower are yelling at me, 'Get that fucking haji out of here,'" 
Specialist Resta said. "And I just look back at them and ignored them, 
and then they were saying, you know, 'He doesn't look like he's about to 
die to me,' 'Tell him to go cry back to the fuckin' IP [Iraqi police],' 
and, you know, a whole bunch of stuff like that. So, you know, I'm kind 
of ignoring them and trying to get the story from this guy, and our 
doctor rolls up in an ambulance and from thirty to forty meters away 
looks out and says, shakes his head and says, 'You know, he looks fine, 
he's gonna be all right,' and walks back to the passenger side of the 
ambulance, you know, kind of like, Get your ass over here and drive me 
back up to the clinic. So I'm standing there, and the whole time both 
this doctor and the guards are yelling at me, you know, to get rid of 
this guy, and at one point they're yelling at me, when I'm saying, 'No, 
let's at least keep this guy here overnight, until it's light out,' 
because they wanted me to send him back out into the city, where he told 
me that people were waiting for him to kill him.

"When I asked if he'd be allowed to stay there, at least until it was 
light out, the response was, 'Are you hearing this shit? I think Doc is 
part fucking haji,'" Specialist Resta said.

Specialist Resta gave in to the pressure and denied the man aid. The 
interpreter, he recalled, was furious, telling Specialist Resta that he 
had effectively condemned the man to death.

"So I walk inside the gate and the interpreter helps him up and the guy 
turns around to walk away and the guys in the guard tower go, say, 'Tell 
him that if he comes back tonight he's going to get fucking shot,'" 
Specialist Resta said. "And the interpreter just stared at them and 
looked at me and then looked back at them, and they nod their head, 
like, Yeah, we mean it. So he yells it to the Iraqi and the guy just 
flinches and turns back over his shoulder, and the interpreter says it 
again and he starts walking away again, you know, crying like a little 
kid. And that was that."

Convoys

Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi 
civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys - 
operations in which they participated. These convoys are the arteries 
that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, 
maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings 
of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) 
and other private contractors, required daily protection from the US 
military. Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys 
consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the 
road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one 
more in the center of the convoy. Soldiers and marines also sometimes 
accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.

These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of 
wanton destruction.

According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight 
veterans who rode in convoys - guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, 
Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk - when these columns of vehicles 
left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main 
supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching 
speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation 
increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic 
jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, 
scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them 
off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run 
over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian 
cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a 
warning to other drivers to get out of the way.

"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben 
Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who 
served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months 
beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp 
Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your 
friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and 
spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not 
you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely 
missed, which happened."

Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort 
vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress 
further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from 
belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, 
which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians 
wounded or dead.

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in 
a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben 
Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 
263rd Armor Battalion of the First Infantry Division from February 2004 
to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these 
guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent 
people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions 
where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes 
off."

Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi 
insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in 
March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops - 39.2 
percent of the more than 3,500 killed - than any single other method, 
according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. 
This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of 
fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginning of the war.

"The second you left the gate of your base, you were always worried," 
said Sergeant Flatt. "You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you 
could never see them. I mean, it's just by pure luck who's getting 
killed and who's not. If you've been in firefights earlier that day or 
that week, you're even more stressed and insecure to a point where 
you're almost trigger-happy."

Twenty-four veterans said they had witnessed or heard stories from those 
in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. 
These incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported.

Sergeant Flatt recalled an incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove 
past him on one of the main highways in Mosul. "A car following got too 
close to their convoy," he said. "Basically, they took shots at the car. 
Warning shots, I don't know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the 
bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into 
the face of this woman in the car. And she was - well, as far as I know 
- instantly killed. I didn't pull her out of the car or anything. Her 
son was driving the car, and she had her - she had three little girls in 
the back seat. And they came up to us, because we were actually sitting 
in a defensive position right next to the hospital, the main hospital in 
Mosul, the civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was obviously 
dead. And the girls were crying."

On July 30, 2004, Sergeant Flanders was riding in the tail vehicle of a 
convoy on a pitch-black night, traveling from Camp Anaconda south to 
Taji, just north of Baghdad, when his unit was attacked with small-arms 
fire and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). He was about to get on the 
radio to warn the vehicle in front of him about the ambush when he saw 
his gunner unlock the turret and swivel it around in the direction of 
the shooting. He fired his MK-19, a 40-millimeter automatic grenade 
launcher capable of discharging up to 350 rounds per minute.

"He's just holding the trigger down and it wound up jamming, so he 
didn't get off as many shots maybe as he wanted," Sergeant Flanders 
recalled. "But I said, 'How many did you get off?' 'Cause I knew they 
would be asking that. He said, 'Twenty-three.' He launched twenty-three 
grenades....

"I remember looking out the window and I saw a little hut, a little 
Iraqi house with a light on.... We were going so fast and obviously your 
adrenaline's - you're like tunnel vision, so you can't really see what's 
going on, you know? And it's dark out and all that stuff. I couldn't 
really see where the grenades were exploding, but it had to be exploding 
around the house or maybe even hit the house. Who knows? Who knows? And 
we were the last vehicle. We can't stop."

Convoys did not slow down or attempt to brake when civilians 
inadvertently got in front of their vehicles, according to the veterans 
who described them. Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, 29, from Cañon City, Colorado, 
was based at the Talil Air Base in Nasiriya with the Colorado National 
Guard's 220th Military Police Company for a year beginning in February 
2003. She recounted one incident she investigated in January 2004 on a 
six-lane highway south of Nasiriya that resembled numerous incidents 
described by other veterans.

"It's like very barren desert, so most of the people that live there, 
they're nomadic or they live in just little villages and have, like, 
camels and goats and stuff," she recalled. "There was then a little boy 
- I would say he was about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we 
responded to it with the investigative team - a little Iraqi boy and he 
was crossing the highway with his - with three donkeys. A military 
convoy, transportation convoy driving north, hit him and the donkeys and 
killed all of them. When we got there, there were the dead donkeys and 
there was a little boy on the side of the road.

"We saw him there and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't 
even stop," she said. "They really, judging by the skid marks, they 
hardly even slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically - basically, your 
order is that you never stop."

Among supply convoys, there were enormous disparities based on the 
nationality of the drivers, according to Sergeant Flanders, who 
estimated that he ran more than 100 convoys in Balad, Baghdad, Falluja 
and Baquba. When drivers were not American, the trucks were often old, 
slow and prone to breakdowns, he said. The convoys operated by foreign 
nationals, usually with Nepalese, Egyptian or Pakistani drivers, did not 
receive the same level of security, although the danger was more severe 
because of the poor quality of their vehicles. American drivers were 
usually placed in convoys about half the length of those run by foreign 
nationals and were given superior vehicles, body armor and better 
security. Sergeant Flanders said troops disliked being assigned to 
convoys run by foreign nationals, especially since, when the aging 
vehicles broke down, they had to remain and protect them until they 
could be recovered.

"It just seemed insane to run civilians around the country," he added. 
"I mean, Iraq is such a security concern and it's so dangerous and yet 
we have KBR just riding around, unarmed.... Remember those terrible 
judgments that we made about what Iraq would look like postconflict? I 
think this is another incarnation of that misjudgment, which would be 
that, Oh, it'll be fine. We'll put a Humvee in front, we'll put a Humvee 
in back, we'll put a Humvee in the middle, and we'll just run with it.

"It was just shocking to me.... I was Army trained and I had a good 
gunner and I had radios and I could call on the radios and I could get 
an airstrike if I wanted to. I could get a Medevac, you know, I had so 
many things at my disposal. I had so much armor. And here these guys are 
just tooling around. And these guys are, like, they're promised the 
world. They're promised $120,000, tax free, and what kind of people take 
those jobs? Down-on-their-luck-type people, you know? Grandmothers. 
There were grandmothers there. I escorted a grandmother there and she 
did great. We went through an ambush and one of her guys got shot, and 
she was cool, calm and collected. Wonderful, great, good for her. What 
the hell is she doing there?

"We're using these vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which probably piss 
off more Iraqis than it actually helps in our relationship with them," 
Flanders said, "just so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning 
and sodas - great - and PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting 
cards and stupid T-shirts that say, Who's Your Baghdaddy?"

Patrols

Soldiers and marines who participated in neighborhood patrols said they 
often used the same tactics as convoys - speed, aggressive firing - to 
reduce the risk of being ambushed or falling victim to IEDs. Sgt. 
Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California, who frequently took part 
in patrols, said his unit fired often and without much warning on Iraqi 
civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks.

"Every time we got on the highway," he said, "we were firing warning 
shots, causing accidents all the time. Cars screeching to a stop, going 
into the other intersection.... The problem is, if you slow down at an 
intersection more than once, that's where the next bomb is going to be 
because you know they watch. You know? And so if you slow down at the 
same choke point every time, guaranteed there's going to be a bomb there 
next couple of days. So getting onto a freeway or highway is a choke 
point 'cause you have to wait for traffic to stop. So you want to go as 
fast as you can, and that involves added risk to all the cars around 
you, all the civilian cars.

"The first Iraqi I saw killed was an Iraqi who got too close to our 
patrol," he said. "We were coming up an on-ramp. And he was coming down 
the highway. And they fired warning shots and he just didn't stop. He 
just merged right into the convoy and they opened up on him."

This took place sometime in the spring of 2005 in Khadamiya, in the 
northwest corner of Baghdad, Sergeant Campbell said. His unit fired into 
the man's car with a 240 Bravo, a heavy machine gun. "I heard three 
gunshots," he said. "We get about halfway down the road and ... the guy 
in the car got out and he's covered in blood. And this is where ... the 
impulse is just to keep going. There's no way that this guy knows who we 
are. We're just like every other patrol that goes up and down this road. 
I looked at my lieutenant and it wasn't even a discussion. We turned 
around and we went back.

"So I'm treating the guy. He has three gunshot wounds to the chest. 
Blood everywhere. And he keeps going in and out of consciousness. And 
when he finally stops breathing, I have to give him CPR. I take my right 
hand, I lift up his chin and I take my left hand and grab the back of 
his head to position his head, and as I take my left hand, my hand 
actually goes into his cranium. So I'm actually holding this man's brain 
in my hand. And what I realized was I had made a mistake. I had checked 
for exit wounds. But what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me, after 
the car failed to stop after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, 
thirty rounds into the car. I never heard it.

"I heard three rounds, I saw three holes, no exit wounds," he said. "I 
thought I knew what the situation was. So I didn't even treat this guy's 
injury to the head. Every medic I ever told is always like, Of course, I 
mean, the guy got shot in the head. There's nothing you could have done. 
And I'm pretty sure - I mean, you can't stop bleeding in the head like 
that. But this guy, I'm watching this guy, who I know we shot because he 
got too close. His car was clean. There was no - didn't hear it, didn't 
see us, whatever it was. Dies, you know, dying in my arms."

While many veterans said the killing of civilians deeply disturbed them, 
they also said there was no other way to safely operate a patrol.

"So you don't want to shoot kids, I mean, no one does," said Sergeant 
Campbell, as he began to describe an incident in the summer of 2005 
recounted to him by several men in his unit. "But you have this: I 
remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid 
is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he's 
going to start shooting. And you gotta understand...when you have spent 
nine months in a war zone, where no one - every time you've been shot 
at, you've never seen the person shooting at you, and you could never 
shoot back. Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides 
he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene 
thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this 
kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds." 
Sergeant Campbell was not present at the incident, which took place in 
Khadamiya, but he saw photographs and heard descriptions from several 
eyewitnesses in his unit.

"Everyone was so happy, like this release that they finally killed an 
insurgent," he said. "Then when they got there, they realized it was 
just a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in 
the head because you know you're killing insurgents, right, as opposed 
to you're killing little kids.... They'd show all the pictures and some 
people were really happy, like, Oh, look what we did. And other people 
were like, I don't want to see that ever again."

The killing of unarmed Iraqis was so common many of the troops said it 
became an accepted part of the daily landscape, an event that elicited 
little reaction. Sergeant Dougherty recounted an incident north of 
Nasiriya in December 2003, when her squad leader shot an Iraqi civilian 
through the back. The shooting was described to her by a woman in her 
unit who treated the injury. "It was just, like, the mentality of my 
squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't 
have to kill them back in Colorado," she said. "He just, like, seemed to 
view every Iraqi as like a potential terrorist."

Several interviewees said that, on occasion, these killings were 
justified by framing innocents as terrorists, typically following 
incidents when American troops fired on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The 
troops would detain those who survived, accusing them of being 
insurgents, and plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had killed 
to make it seem as if the civilian dead were combatants. "It would 
always be an AK because they have so many of these weapons lying 
around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, 26, of San 
Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even shovels - to make it look 
like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant an IED - were used as 
well.

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with the 
Fourth Cavalry Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway between 
Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you kill 
someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who 
survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused 
insurgents.

In the winter of 2004, Sergeant Campbell was driving near a particularly 
dangerous road in Abu Gharth, a town between Falluja and Baghdad, when 
he heard the sound of gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who served as a medic 
in Abu Gharth with the 256th Infantry Brigade from November 2004 to 
October 2005, was told that Army snipers had fired fifty to sixty rounds 
at two insurgents who'd gotten out of their car to plant IEDs. One of 
the alleged insurgents was shot in the knees three or four times, 
treated and evacuated on a military helicopter, while the other man, who 
was treated for glass shards, was arrested and detained.

"I come to find out later that, while I was treating him, the snipers 
had planted - after they had searched and found nothing - they had 
planted bomb-making materials on the guy because they didn't want to be 
investigated for the shoot," Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The 
Nation a photograph of one sniper with a radio in his pocket that he 
later planted as evidence.) "And to this day, I mean, I remember taking 
that guy to Abu Ghraib prison - the guy who didn't get shot - and just 
saying 'I'm sorry' because there was not a damn thing I could do about 
it.... I mean, I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but I 
would have been kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would've been a 
traitor."

Checkpoints

The US military checkpoints dotted across Iraq, according to twenty-six 
soldiers and marines who were stationed at them or supplied them - in 
locales as diverse as Tikrit, Baghdad, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul and 
Kirkuk - were often deadly for civilians. Unarmed Iraqis were mistaken 
for insurgents, and the rules of engagement were blurred. Troops, 
fearing suicide bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, often fired on 
civilian cars. Nine of those soldiers said they had seen civilians being 
shot at checkpoints. These incidents were so common that the military 
could not investigate each one, some veterans said.

"Most of the time, it's a family," said Sergeant Cannon, who served at 
half a dozen checkpoints in Tikrit. "Every now and then, there is a 
bomb, you know, that's the scary part."

There were some permanent checkpoints stationed across the country, but 
for unsuspecting civilians, "flash checkpoints" were far more dangerous, 
according to eight veterans who were involved in setting them up. These 
impromptu security perimeters, thrown up at a moment's notice and 
quickly dismantled, were generally designed to catch insurgents in the 
act of trafficking weapons or explosives, people violating 
military-imposed curfews or suspects in bombings or drive-by shootings.

Iraqis had no way of knowing where these so-called "tactical control 
points" would crop up, interviewees said, so many would turn a corner at 
a high speed and became the unwitting targets of jumpy soldiers and 
marines.

"For me, it was really random," said Lieutenant Van Engelen. "I just 
picked a spot on a map that I thought was a high-volume area that might 
catch some people. We just set something up for half an hour to an hour 
and then we'd move on." There were no briefings before setting up 
checkpoints, he said.

Temporary checkpoints were safer for troops, according to the veterans, 
because they were less likely to serve as static targets for insurgents. 
"You do it real quick because you don't always want to announce your 
presence," said First Sgt. Perry Jefferies, 46, of Waco, Texas, who 
served with the Fourth Infantry Division from April to October 2003.

The temporary checkpoints themselves varied greatly. Lieutenant Van 
Engelen set up checkpoints using orange cones and fifty yards of 
concertina wire. He would assign a soldier to control the flow of 
traffic and direct drivers through the wire, while others searched 
vehicles, questioned drivers and asked for identification. He said signs 
in English and Arabic warned Iraqis to stop; at night, troops used 
lasers, glow sticks or tracer bullets to signal cars through. When those 
weren't available, troops improvised by using flashlights sent them by 
family and friends back home.

"Baghdad is not well lit," said Sergeant Flanders. "There's not street 
lights everywhere. You can't really tell what's going on."

Other troops, however, said they constructed tactical control points 
that were hardly visible to drivers. "We didn't have cones, we didn't 
have nothing," recalled Sergeant Bocanegra, who said he served at more 
than ten checkpoints in Tikrit. "You literally put rocks on the side of 
the road and tell them to stop. And of course some cars are not going to 
see the rocks. I wouldn't even see the rocks myself."

According to Sergeant Flanders, the primary concern when assembling 
checkpoints was protecting the troops serving there. Humvees were 
positioned so that they could quickly drive away if necessary, and the 
heavy weapons mounted on them were placed "in the best possible 
position" to fire on vehicles that attempted to pass through the 
checkpoint without stopping. And the rules of engagement were often 
improvised, soldiers said.

"We were given a long list of that kind of stuff and, to be honest, a 
lot of the time we would look at it and throw it away," said Staff Sgt. 
James Zuelow, 39, a National Guardsman from Juneau, Alaska, who served 
in Baghdad in the Third Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, for a year 
beginning in January 2005. "A lot of it was written at such a high level 
it didn't apply."

At checkpoints, troops had to make split-second decisions on when to use 
lethal force, and veterans said fear often clouded their judgment.

Sgt. Matt Mardan, 31, of Minneapolis, served as a Marine scout sniper 
outside Falluja in 2004 and 2005 with the Third Battalion, First 
Marines. "People think that's dangerous, and it is," he said. "But I 
would do that any day of the week rather than be a marine sitting on a 
fucking checkpoint looking at cars."

No car that passes through a checkpoint is beyond suspicion, said 
Sergeant Dougherty. "You start looking at everyone as a criminal.... Is 
this the car that's going to try to run into me? Is this the car that 
has explosives in it? Or is this just someone who's confused?" The 
perpetual uncertainty, she said, is mentally exhausting and physically 
debilitating.

"In the moment, what's passing through your head is, Is this person a 
threat? Do I shoot to stop or do I shoot to kill?" said Lieutenant 
Morgenstein, who served in Al Anbar.

Sergeant Mejía recalled an incident in Ramadi in July 2003 when he 
watched an unarmed man drive with his young son too close to a 
checkpoint. The father was decapitated in front of the small, terrified 
boy by a member of Sergeant Mejía's unit firing a heavy .50-caliber 
machine gun. By then, Sergeant Mejía noted, "this sort of killing of 
civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment." The 
next month, Sergeant Mejía returned stateside for a two-week rest and 
refused to go back, launching a public protest over the treatment of 
Iraqis. (Sergeant Mejía was charged with desertion, sentenced to one 
year in prison and given a bad-conduct discharge. He has since written a 
memoir about his time in Iraq.)

During the summer of 2005, Sergeant Millard, who served as an assistant 
to a general in Tikrit, attended a briefing on a checkpoint shooting, at 
which his role was to flip PowerPoint slides.

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid 
is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. 
"This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second 
decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly 
trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It 
killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the 
daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they 
briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. 
And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If 
these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"

Whether or not commanding officers shared this attitude, interviewees 
said, soldiers and marines were rarely held accountable for shooting 
civilians at checkpoints. Eight veterans described the prevailing 
attitude among them as "Better to be tried by twelve men than carried by 
six." Since the number of troops tried for killing civilians is so 
scant, interviewees said, they would risk court-martial over the 
possibility of injury or death.

Rules of Engagement

Indeed, several troops said the rules of engagement were fluid and 
designed to insure their safety above all else. Some said they were 
simply told they were authorized to shoot if they felt threatened, and 
what constituted a risk to their safety was open to wide interpretation. 
"Basically it always came down to self-defense and better them than 
you," said Sgt. Bobby Yen, 28, of Atherton, California, who covered a 
variety of Army activities in Baghdad and Mosul as part of the 222nd 
Broadcast Operations Detachment for one year beginning in November 2003.

"Cover your own butt was the first rule of engagement," Lieutenant Van 
Engelen confirmed. "Someone could look at me the wrong way and I could 
claim my safety was in threat."

Lack of a uniform policy from service to service, base to base and year 
to year forced troops to rely on their own judgment, Sergeant Jefferies 
explained. "We didn't get straight-up rules," he said. "You got things 
like, 'Don't be aggressive' or 'Try not to shoot people if you don't 
have to.' Well, what does that mean?"

Prior to deployment, Sergeant Flanders said, troops were trained on the 
five S's of escalation of force: Shout a warning, Shove (physically 
restrain), Show a weapon, Shoot non-lethal ammunition in a vehicle's 
engine block or tires, and Shoot to kill. Some troops said they carried 
the rules in their pockets or helmets on a small laminated card. "The 
escalation-of-force methodology was meant to be a guide to determine 
course of actions you should attempt before you shoot," he said. 
"'Shove' might be a step that gets skipped in a given situation. In 
vehicles, at night, how does 'Shout' work? Each soldier is not only 
drilled on the five S's but their inherent right for self-defense."

Some interviewees said their commanders discouraged this system of 
escalation. "There's no such thing as warning shots," Specialist Resta 
said he was told during his predeployment training at Fort Bragg. "I 
even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them 
than to have somebody wounded and still alive."

Lieutenant Morgenstein said that when he first arrived in Iraq in August 
2004, the rules of engagement barred the use of warning shots. "We were 
trained that if someone is not armed, and they are not a threat, you 
never fire a warning shot because there is no need to shoot at all," he 
said. "You signal to them with some other means than bullets. If they 
are armed and they are a threat, you never fire a warning shot 
because...that just gives them a chance to kill you. I don't recall at 
this point if this was an ROE [rule of engagement] explicitly or simply 
part of our consistent training." But later on, he said, "we were told 
the ROE was changed" and that warning shots were now explicitly allowed 
in certain circumstances.

Sergeant Westphal said that by the time he arrived in Iraq earlier in 
2004, the rules of engagement for checkpoints were more refined - at 
least where he served with the Army in Tikrit. "If they didn't stop, you 
were to fire a warning shot," said Sergeant Westphal. "If they still 
continued to come, you were instructed to escalate and point your weapon 
at their car. And if they still didn't stop, then, if you felt you were 
in danger and they were about to run your checkpoint or blow you up, you 
could engage."

In his initial training, Lieutenant Morgenstein said, marines were 
cautioned against the use of warning shots because "others around you 
could be hurt by the stray bullet," and in fact such incidents were not 
unusual. One evening in Baghdad, Sergeant Zuelow recalled, a van roared 
up to a checkpoint where another platoon in his company was stationed 
and a soldier fired a warning shot that bounced off the ground and 
killed the van's passenger. "That was a big wake-up call," he said, "and 
after that we discouraged warning shots of any kind."

Many checkpoint incidents went unreported, a number of veterans 
indicated, and the civilians killed were not included in the overall 
casualty count. Yet judging by the number of checkpoint shootings 
described to The Nation by veterans we interviewed, such shootings 
appear to be quite common.

Sergeant Flatt recounted one incident in Mosul in January 2005 when an 
elderly couple zipped past a checkpoint. "The car was approaching what 
was in my opinion a very poorly marked checkpoint, or not even a 
checkpoint at all, and probably didn't even see the soldiers," he said. 
"The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot 
up the car. And they literally sat in the car for the next three days 
while we drove by them day after day."

In another incident, a man was driving his wife and three children in a 
pickup truck on a major highway north of the Euphrates, near Ramadi, on 
a rainy day in February or March 2005. When the man failed to stop at a 
checkpoint, a marine in a light-armored vehicle fired on the car, 
killing the wife and critically wounding the son. According to 
Lieutenant Morgenstein, a civil affairs officer, a JAG official gave the 
family condolences and about $3,000 in compensation. "I mean, it's a 
terrible thing because there's no way to pay money to replace a family 
member," said Lieutenant Morgenstein, who was sometimes charged with 
apologizing to families for accidental deaths and offering them such 
compensation, called "condolence payments" or "solatia." "But it's an 
attempt to compensate for some of the costs of the funeral and all the 
expenses. It's an attempt to make a good-faith offering in a sign of 
regret and to say, you know, We didn't want this to happen. This is by 
accident." According to a May report from the Government Accountability 
Office, the Defense Department issued nearly $31 million in solatia and 
condolence payments between 2003 and 2006 to civilians in Iraq and 
Afghanistan who were "killed, injured or incur[red] property damage as a 
result of U.S. or coalition forces' actions during combat." The study 
characterizes the payments as "expressions of sympathy or remorse...but 
not an admission of legal liability or fault." In Iraq, according to the 
report, civilians are paid up to $2,500 for death, up to $1,500 for 
serious injuries and $200 or more for minor injuries.

On one occasion, in Ramadi in late 2004, a man happened to drive down a 
road with his family minutes after a suicide bomber had hit a barrier 
during a cordon-and-search operation, Lieutenant Morgenstein said. The 
car's brakes failed and marines fired. The wife and her two children 
managed to escape from the car, but the man was fatally hit. The family 
was mistakenly told that he had survived, so Lieutenant Morgenstein had 
to set the record straight. "I've never done this before," he said. "I 
had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave 
her money, we gave her, like, ten crates of water, we gave the kids, I 
remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really know 
what else to do."

One such incident, which took place in Falluja in March 2003 and was 
reported on at the time by the BBC, even involved a group of 
plainclothes Iraqi policemen. Sergeant Mejía was told about the event by 
several soldiers who witnessed it.

The police officers were riding in a white pickup truck, chasing a BMW 
that had raced through a checkpoint. "The guy that the cops were chasing 
got through and I guess the soldiers got scared or nervous, so when the 
pickup truck came they opened fire on it," Sergeant Mejía said. "The 
Iraqi police tried to cease fire, but when the soldiers would not stop 
they defended themselves and there was a firefight between the soldiers 
and the cops. Not a single soldier was killed, but eight cops were."

Accountability

A few veterans said checkpoint shootings resulted from basic 
miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted signals or cultural ignorance.

"As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards 
somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky," said Sergeant Jefferies, 
who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a 
day. "That means stop to most Americans, and that's a military hand 
signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please 
freeze, but an open hand means stop. That's a sign you make at a 
checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can 
see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, 
and the soldiers think they're saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think 
they're saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, 
so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty 
soon you're shooting pregnant women."

"You can't tell the difference between these people at all," said 
Sergeant Mardan. "They all look Arab. They all have beards, facial hair. 
Honestly, it'll be like walking into China and trying to tell who's in 
the Communist Party and who's not. It's impossible."

But others veterans said that the frequent checkpoint shootings resulted 
from a lack of accountability. Critical decisions, they said, were often 
left to the individual soldier's or marine's discretion, and the 
military regularly endorsed these decisions without inquiry.

"Some units were so tight on their command and control that every time 
they fired one bullet, they had to write an investigative report," said 
Sergeant Campbell. But "we fired thousands of rounds without ever filing 
reports," he said. "And so it has to do with how much interaction and, 
you know, the relationship of the commanders to their units."

Cpt. Megan O'Connor said that in her unit every shooting incident was 
reported. O'Connor, 30, of Venice, California, served in Tikrit with the 
Fiftieth Main Support Battalion in the National Guard for a year 
beginning in December 2004, after which she joined the 2-28 Brigade 
Combat Team in Ramadi. But Captain O'Connor said that after viewing the 
reports and consulting with JAG officers, the colonel in her command 
would usually absolve the soldiers. "The bottom line is he always said, 
you know, We weren't there," she said. "We'll give them the benefit of 
the doubt, but make sure that they know that this is not OK and we're 
watching them."

Probes into roadblock killings were mere formalities, a few veterans 
said. "Even after a thorough investigation, there's not much that could 
be done," said Specialist Reppenhagen. "It's just the nature of the 
situation you're in. That's what's wrong. It's not individual atrocity. 
It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."

The March 2005 shooting death of Italian secret service agent Nicola 
Calipari at a checkpoint in Baghdad, however, caused the military to 
finally crack down on such accidents, said Sergeant Campbell, who served 
there. Yet this did not necessarily lead to greater accountability. 
"Needless to say, our unit was under a lot of scrutiny not to shoot any 
more people than we already had to because we were kind of a run-and-gun 
place," said Sergeant Campbell. "One of the things they did was they 
started saying, Every time you shoot someone or shoot a car, you have to 
fill out a 15-[6] or whatever the investigation is. Well, that 
investigation is really onerous for the soldiers. It's like a 'You're 
guilty' investigation almost - it feels as though. So commanders just 
stopped reporting shootings. There was no incentive for them to say, 
Yeah, we shot so-and-so's car."

(Sergeant Campbell said he believes the number of checkpoint shootings 
did decrease after the high-profile incident, but that was mostly 
because soldiers were now required to use pinpoint lasers at night. "I 
think they reduced, from when we started to when we left, the number of 
Iraqi civilians dying at checkpoints from one a day to one a week," he 
said. "Inherent in that number, like all statistics, is those are 
reported shootings.")

Fearing a backlash against these shootings of civilians, Lieutenant 
Morgenstein gave a class in late 2004 at his battalion headquarters in 
Ramadi to all the battalion's officers and most of its senior 
noncommissioned officers during which he asked them to put themselves in 
the Iraqis' place.

"I told them the obvious, which is, everyone we wound or kill that isn't 
an insurgent, hurts us," he said. "Because I guarantee you, down the 
road, that means a wounded or killed marine or soldier.... One, it's the 
right thing to do to not wound or shoot someone who isn't an insurgent. 
But two, out of self-preservation and self-interest, we don't want that 
to happen because they're going to come back with a vengeance."

Responses

The Nation contacted the Pentagon with a detailed list of questions and 
a request for comment on descriptions of specific patterns of abuse. 
These questions included requests to explain the rules of engagement, 
the operation of convoys, patrols and checkpoints, the investigation of 
civilian shootings, the detention of innocent Iraqis based on false 
intelligence and the alleged practice of "throwaway guns." The Pentagon 
referred us to the Multi-National Force Iraq Combined Press Information 
Center in Baghdad, where a spokesperson sent us a response by e-mail.

"As a matter of operational security, we don't discuss specific tactics, 
techniques, or procedures (TTPs) used to identify and engage hostile 
forces," the spokesperson wrote, in part. "Our service members are 
trained to protect themselves at all times. We are facing a thinking 
enemy who learns and adjusts to our operations. Consequently, we adapt 
our TTPs to ensure maximum combat effectiveness and safety of our 
troops. Hostile forces hide among the civilian populace and attack 
civilians and coalition forces. Coalition forces take great care to 
protect and minimize risks to civilians in this complex combat 
environment, and we investigate cases where our actions may have 
resulted in the injury of innocents.... We hold our Soldiers and Marines 
to a high standard and we investigate reported improper use of force in 
Iraq."

This response is consistent with the military's refusal to comment on 
rules of engagement, arguing that revealing these rules threatens 
operations and puts troops at risk. But on February 9, Maj. Gen. William 
Caldwell, then coalition spokesman, writing on the coalition force 
website, insisted that the rules of engagement for troops in Iraq were 
clear. "The law of armed conflict requires that, to use force, 
'combatants' must distinguish individuals presenting a threat from 
innocent civilians," he wrote. "This basic principle is accepted by all 
disciplined militaries. In the counterinsurgency we are now fighting, 
disciplined application of force is even more critical because our 
enemies camouflage themselves in the civilian population. Our success in 
Iraq depends on our ability to treat the civilian population with 
humanity and dignity, even as we remain ready to immediately defend 
ourselves or Iraqi civilians when a threat is detected."

When asked about veterans' testimony that civilian deaths at the hands 
of coalition forces often went unreported and typically went unpunished, 
the Press Information Center spokesperson replied only, "Any allegations 
of misconduct are treated seriously.... Soldiers have an obligation to 
immediately report any misconduct to their chain of command immediately."

Last September, Senator Patrick Leahy, then ranking member of the 
Judiciary Committee, called a Pentagon report on its procedures for 
recording civilian casualties in Iraq "an embarrassment." "It totals 
just two pages," Leahy said, "and it makes clear that the Pentagon does 
very little to determine the cause of civilian casualties or to keep a 
record of civilian victims."

In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have 
already taken a heavy toll - both on the Iraqi people and on the US 
servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi 
physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's 
Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study late last year in 
the British medical journal The Lancet that estimated that 601,000 
civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion as the result of 
violence. The researchers found that coalition forces were responsible 
for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be 
"conservative," since "deaths were not classified as being due to 
coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible 
party."

"Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I 
saw," Specialist Englehart said. "I just - I started thinking, like, 
Why? What was this for?"

"It just gets frustrating," Specialist Reppenhagen said. "Instead of 
blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you 
start blaming the Iraqi people.... So it's a constant psychological 
battle to try to, you know, keep - to stay humane."

"I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for 
people," said Sergeant Flanders. "The only thing that wound up mattering 
is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned."