I talked to a veteran soldier recently, and he confirmed for me that the following story is true:
A soldier told one of the prisoners to jump off the bridge to the rocks 50 feet below. The prisoner refused, so the soldier shot him and kicked the body off the bridge. Then the soldier ordered the other prisoner to jump, and he did. This incident was our first interchange with a unit that had been under attack for some time. Later that day we received word from that outfit to quit sending them prisoners, because they were just killing them.
Pretty awful, isn’t it? And its a true story. Not that dissimilar to the massacre committed by Marines at Haditha where 24 civilians were killed, many of them execution-style.
WASHINGTON — Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them “execution-style,” in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.
The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.
One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results.”
Or the “dead check” executions of wounded, defenseless Iraqis by Marines in Fallujah including one caught on video of a Marine killing a wounded Iraqi prisoner.
While I [NBC journalist Kevin Sites] continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.
Then I hear him say this about one of the men:
“He’s fucking faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s fucking dead.”
Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.
However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he’s going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man’s leg slumps down.
“Well he’s dead now,” says another Marine in the background. […]
… I … tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant — that this man — all of these wounded men — were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.
Or the torture at Abu Ghraib which included beatings, the use of attack dogs and the rape of female prisoners (caution: link is to a site displaying disturbing graphic images) and children.
” Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”
Or the abuse of prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, including the death of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver wrongfully detained at Bagram Air Base, when was chained to a wall by wrist and ankle restraints, after his leg bones were literally beaten by soldiers to the consistency of oatmeal.
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man’s legs “had basically been pulpified.”
“I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus,” added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.
Or the deliberate gang rape of a 14 year old Iraqi girl and the premeditated murder of her and her family in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, by four Marines including ring leader Steven D. Green who stated he went to Iraq “because I wanted to kill people.”
Sgt Paul Cortez admitted four murders, rape and conspiracy to rape. His plea means he will avoid the death penalty.
In November, Specialist James Barker, 24, admitted rape and murder over the killings and was jailed for 90 years.
Cortez broke down as he confessed to raping the girl as her parents and sister were shot dead in another room. […]
According to the plea agreement, Cortez admitted conspiring with three other soldiers, Private First Class Jesse Spielman, Specialist Barker and Steven Green, a now discharged soldier, to rape Abeer Qassim al-Janabi.
These, of course are only the atrocities that are the most well publicized. There have been countless other examples of brutal and immoral actions by US soldiers and private contractors (e.g., the murders of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Baghdad). Actions that have often been covered up by our own government, such as the recent grant of immunity to the Blackwater contractors involved in the Baghdad massacre by the State Department. One would think that these horrific stories would shock anyone, regardless of their opinion about the war or their party or political affiliations.
Yet, despite these well documented atrocities and abuses, we have been told by right wing bloggers that a far worse outrage occurred when Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a soldier in Iraq, published in The New Republic excerpts from his diary that alleged the following:
(cont.)
1. Rude and misogynistic remarks made to a female soldier with a severe facial disfigurement by Beauchamp and another soldier at a mess hall.
2. The use of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to intentionally run over and kill a dog while on patrol.
3. Soldiers playing with the bones of dead Iraqi children, including one soldier wearing part of a skull on his head.
You might find these alleged incidents repugnant, and evidence of the dehumanizing effects of the war on young soldiers, if true. And, if false, Mr. Beauchamp certainly deserves his fair share of opprobrium for telling lies regarding his experience in Iraq. Yet, from the level of invective directed at Mr. Beauchamp, by conservative and right wing commentators one would think that Beauchamp was a worse fiend that Hitler, a greater traitor than Benedict Arnold, and the worst person to have served in the US military during the course of the Iraq War. Here are some examples of the overblown, foaming at the mouth hyperbole spewed by conservatives in the media and on blogs regarding Scott Thomas Beauchamp collected by David Fiderer of The Huffington Post:
“The stories were meant to shock. And they did. The most ghastly however, was about the author himself mocking a woman…”
I mean, obviously, if this stuff is true, that The New Republic says, it is horrible, it is criminal offenses by American troops over there.” Fred Barnes, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007
Pretty florid stuff, pretty dramatic, pretty disturbing…” Brit Hume, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007
It is pornography. It really is military pornography, is what it is. It smacks of being dreamed up. Now, maybe it will be turn out to be true. But it just is so over- the-top that it is almost too bad to be true.” Morton Kondracke, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007
“TNR’s ‘Investigation’ Reveals Beauchamp Was Always a Monster” The Weekly Standard, August 2, 2007 […]
“Just the terminology, and the writing of this, reminds me of Penthouse Forums. It is pornography. It really is military pornography, is what it is. It smacks of being dreamed up. Now, maybe it will be turn out to be true. But it just is so over-the-top that it is almost too bad to be true.”
Morton Kondracke, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007[…]
“It is an attack–it is a way of saying ‘Look what the war has done to these people.’ The author says I work with disabled in the past, and now we are turning into a monster. George Bush, of course, is destroying Iraq, destroying that neighborhood. And now we are destroying the goodness of Americans soldiers. That is what this is all about.” Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007
“We’ve seen this prefab narrative a lot. And there’s this impulse in the mainstream media to turn our soldiers. And both you and J.D. were in the military. It must be annoying to see this, to turn soldiers into either victims, or criminals, and thugs.” Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor, July 21, 2007
I don’t recall them being this upset about the incidents I’ve described previously that occurred at Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, Bagram, Mahmudiyah or Baghdad, do you? Indeed, they have often attacked the credibility of those who reported these stories, and downplayed the horrific nature of these atrocities (the most iconic example being Rush Limbaugh and his famous comparison of the Abu Ghraib abuse and torture to a “fraternity prank”).
I imagine they may also try to smear me for the vet’s war story that I recounted at the beginning of this post. I hope not, though. You see, that is a story my uncle wrote about. My uncle who fought in The Battle of the Bulge in World War II:
At one point we had accumulated roughly 20 prisoners, and the captain asked for a volunteer to take them back to the rear to be turned over to MP’s. I immediately volunteered as a way to avoid the action for a while. At first the captain said OK but then reversed himself because he didn’t want to lose the fire power of my Browning Automatic Rifle. When I explained loudly that the weapon didn’t work, he agreed to let me go. As I herded the prisoners to the rear, some still in possession of their side arms, I wondered if any of them had understood my exchange with the captain.
Many Germans spoke excellent English, but one of them didn’t know enough to keep his mouth shut and began to taunt us, saying that he would be back in the states before we would. One of the guys simply stated, “No you won’t” and shot him dead.
I suspect that if he was an Iraq war vet like Scott Beauchamp he’d get the full on right wing smear campaign for daring to tell such treasonous tales about patriotic American soldiers fighting for our freedoms. Good thing he’s a member of the “Greatest Generation” and therefore unlikely to attract their ire and feel the full force of their wrath for making the troops look bad. Lucky for him, eh? No one is likely to nitpick his account, or question his integrity or his patriotism, or interview his old girl friends to find some dirt on him.
But what my uncle described is far worse than anything Scott Beauchamp related, as are most of the incidents that I referred to above regarding the conduct of US forces in the “War on Terror.” So why all the misdirected anger and rage? Even if Beauchamp lied in his TNR article, what he wrote made himself look as bad as any of the other soldiers he quoted. And what he described was trivial in comparison to the well known incidents of torture, murder, rape, etc. by US troops and government agents which we know occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Was it merely because Beauchamp and The New Republic were easy targets? Or as Fiderer claims, is it part of an organized campaign to distract Americans from the very real horrors that are occurring every day in Iraq? After all, most people never would have heard of Scott Beauchamp and his TNR piece if the right wing noise machine, aided and abetted by the US Army, hadn’t dedicated so much effort to publicizing his story, and attacking him. Then again these are the same people who went after a 12 year old boy and wounded Iraq veterans for daring to speak against the policies of the Bush administration on child health care and the Iraq war, respectively.
I don’t know, but it seems to me, conservative outrage is not only highly selective, it’s highly hypocritical, as well. I suggest that their priorities are skewed, at best. I might even go so far as to label conservatives as “soulless” parasites on the body politic. Well, I would if I were a conservative describing liberals, that is. So I won’t question whether they have souls. Not yet anyway. I’ll just question whether they have a conscience, instead.
