...and Disinformation from "The Nation"

September, 2006, The Iraqi sun is very powerful, even early in the morning

There is a rather long article that has created quite a buzz among the anti-war crowd. The article seems to be better researched than the above one from TNR, but it also contains claims that are likely fabrications, and it hasn't received a hard critique (until now).

It's called "The Other War", and it appears in the July 30th issue of The Nation:

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 [these ones are anonymous, of course - JR] 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.

This sounds pretty damning. I'll take the important parts of the article one step at a time. But to start with, The Nation's methodology is a problem:

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.

My invitation must have been lost in the mail. With the exception of "Vets for Freedom", every one of these groups is vehemently anti-war. And, as in the last line, when you find people by friends who refer friends, you can see how your skewed sample is skewed even further. It's also worth noting that at least two of their interviewees are identified as conscientious objectors or military deserters, possibly much more.

True, you would be hard-pressed to find a soldier that is not critical of the war in some fashion. But if you randomly selected 50 soldiers, I am confident that the vast majority support the mission of the war, even if they would rather be home instead. The vast majority also wouldn't make routine claims of atrocities either, some of which are very suspect, as I will discuss below.

Here are some of the claims in the article:

1) Soldiers routinely busted up Iraqi homes during raids. One soldier shot a family dog for no reason and nobody reported it. One description:

"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."

My response: For Heaven's sake, this is war! You can't simply knock on the door in the middle of the day and ask the family to line up outside while you gently search their house. I'm sorry it's humiliating, but how else to handle such searches? One solution was to give the job of actually entering the homes to the Iraqi soldiers, but then you get a lot of complaints about that too. A lot of residents complain that the Iraqi soldiers/Iraqi police will steal anything valuable from the house.

2) Another complained that Officers weren't helping:

"For that mission, they'd only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there with the rest of the troops."

My response: This was definitely not true in my unit, or in any unit I ever saw. Platoon leaders and company executive officers/commanders (who are all lieutenants and captains) are always expected to work right alongside their men in every facet of the mission. I never saw a unit that was an exception to this, and other officers would have a very low opinion of anyone who did this.


3) On results of the raids:

"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."

My response: Often house raids don't reveal anything obvious because insurgents are smart enough to keep their weapons and explosives hidden away somewhere else. But it is common to find computers, cds, notebooks, etc with insurgent information on them. But this is all found later when it's passed up to intelligence analysts at a higher echelon. It won't be always obvious to the troops on the ground.

4) In November 2003, prisoners at Abu Ghraib rioted and several were shot. Army Reserve Spc Aidan Delgado claimed that one soldier had a photograph of himself taken standing over the corpse of a dead prisoner with his brains blown out. He had a spoon in his hand and was pretending to be eating the man's brains for the camera. Note: Delgado later filed for conscientious objector status to get out of the Army.

My response: I simply could not believe such a fantastic claim unless I had a chance to see and analyze the photo myself. The Nation claims they saw it, so have they released it? I do know that sometimes soldiers greatly exaggerate such incidents in order to help get their conscientious objector status approved.

5) Allegations of racism:

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.

My response: Oh the horror... This is perfectly normal for every war in history. During the American Revolution, the British were "Redcoats" and we were "Yankees". In WWI, the Germans were "huns", in WWII, they were "krauts". Was that racist, when they were, by and large, the same race as those they were fighting?

Certainly it is racist sometimes. But "haji" is really just a name. When I first arrived in 2003, "haji" was such a common term that many just thought it was a normal word. Some were actually surprised when the Division ordered us to stop using it.

6) A Specialist Resta was told not to treat a wounded Iraqi who came asking for medical help:

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....

My response: WRONG. Unless the aid station was making up its own rules. The rules were (and are still) simple: you treat anyone for life, limb, loss of eyesight, or anything that we caused. This might or might now have applied to the Iraqi described in the article. Usually we did whatever we could, and interpreted the rule as flexible as possible. But it is unfortunate to turn away sick Iraqis, and I myself had to do it a few times. It is also unfortunate that some soldiers are very rude when enforcing this rule, but there is a reason for their frustration. Sometimes you get days when dozens of Iraqis come to your gate asking for medical help. You just can't treat them all; the military medics and doctors are set up and budgeted to have the resources to treat our own people, plus prisoners. That's about it. Since US care is better than Iraqi hospitals, they would simply be overwhelmed otherwise.

7) On reckless behavior:

Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed [by US convoys].

My response: It galls me when people loosely use terms like "frequently". How many are we talking about? My first unit in Iraq, the 1-1 Cavalry squadron, did hit and kill one woman in a vehicle accident. One in the entire 15 months of our tour from 2003-2004. We had to pay her family compensation, and this was considered a very unusual event.

8) A Specialist Joe Hatcher, of San Diego, claimed that troops often shot civilians and then planted a weapon on the victim to make it look like a legitimate kill.

My response: This is one of the most outrageous claims of all. If it's a lie, its an outrageous lie, and if it's true, it's equally outrageous that Spc Hatcher did not report this when he saw it. Frankly, if he's out of the Army, he needs to be ordered back on active duty immediately to testify when/where he saw this, and on possible charges of failing to report a crime. I hate it when criminals like this get treated as heroes for telling their stories to the media. If he is telling the truth, he is just as guilty as everyone else involved. Treat him as such.

9) On the rules of engagement:

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 if you don't have to.' Well, what does that mean?"

My response: PURE BULL. The rules of engagement are given to soldiers before and during their entire tour. In every Division I served with, every soldier was expected to have a copy in their wallet, at a minimum. Some were required to carry the cards in their helmets as well. Yes, the ROE sometimes changed a bit, but the bottom line was always the same. Don't shoot at someone unless your unit is in danger, or they just attacked you. Period.

10) Allegations of shooting people at traffic check points:

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."

My response:Here's another example of treating a war criminal like a hero. If Sgt Flatt is telling the truth, then he needs to testify about this incident. I am a little skeptical, however. Women in Iraq don't just go driving around without their families knowing about it. Someone will come looking for them. And it's against Islam to simply leave a body sitting out for several days. I don't see how that would happen. The only times I ever saw bodies simply left where they were, was when we had reason to believe they were booby trapped by insurgents, and even then, the body was guarded and only remained there for about 48 hours while the Iraqi Army waited on their ordnance disposal team to show up.

Don't get me wrong. War crimes and atrocities do happen. But at this point I have heard enough false claims to be very, very skeptical, especially when the allegations are vague, or when certain parts just don't ring true. I invite the editors of The Nation to put me in contact with some of their sources, or to speak to me themselves.

Update: At the Daily Kos, the anti-war crowd is going wild. And according to Little Green Footballs, one of the authors of The Nation piece, Laila Al-Arian, is the daughter of islamic Jihad kingpin Sami Al-Arian.

I thought I was alone! Another fisking here.

UPDATE 18/09/2007 01:20:00 AM:
Kind of a late update, but I should have linked to this related article by Robin at "Chickenhawk Express" a long time ago. This is brilliant:

But when you tally up the actual names of people quoted in the article, there are only 29 vets identified by names. Of the 29, 48% are members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) while 6% are members of Vets for Freedom. The rest of the numbers break down like this... 24% IAVA members and 17% had no "official" ties to any organization per a Google search.

See if some of these names ring a bell.... Geoffrey Millard, Garett Reppenhagen, Kelly Dougherty Jeff Englehart, Camilo Meija, Aidan Delgado and Michael Harmon. These are some of the more "active" anti-war activists involved with IVAW. Anytime there is a news piece about an anti-war protest or hunger strike or "street theater" protests, you'll find at least one of these names.

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