Da! Da! Bolshoy 'orosho!
Posted on 11/19/2003 8:35:31 PM PST by Bobibutu
Court martial of US officer in Iraq
Tuesday 18 November 2003, 13:08 Makka Time, 10:08 GMT A court martial hearing against a high-ranking US military official on charges of beating up an Iraqi detainee has begun in Tikrit.
Court martial of US officer in Iraq
Lieutenant-Colonel Allen West is charged on three counts - beating Yahya Hamudi, threatening to kill him and firing his gun near the detainee's head during interrogation on 20 August.
The hearing, which started on Tuesday, marks the first time that legal proceedings have been initiated against a senior US officer in Iraq.
West's driver, appearing as a witness, said the officer waved his gun in the air and later fired it after Hamudi refused to talk. The driver, Private Michael Johnson, 20, added that the Iraqi was beaten during the interrogation at a detention centre in Taji, outside Baghdad. "When he was not giving information that was pleasing to the interrogator or translator, we'd use abusing tactics, mainly striking him," Johnson said. Asked how hard the detainee was hit, he said: "We weren't hitting him as hard as we possibly could."
The soldiers later pushed the detainee's head into a sandbox used by soldiers to clear their weapons, where West fired shots near Hamudi's head, said Johnson.
Demanding names
West wanted the Iraqi man to divulge the names of people who allegedly wanted to assassinate him. Johnson said Hamudi was an Iraqi policeman who prior to his detention had taken part in raids with US troops. An officer who had questioned West after the incident said the defendant had admitted to firing near Hamudi's head and that soldiers beat the detainee, who was yelling and screaming.
Two-day trial
The proceedings are expected to last at least two days, and West's civilian lawyer, retired lieutenant-colonel Neal Puckett, said his client was unlikely to testify before Wednesday. The pre-trial hearing was held in an octagonal, marble-lined room in one of the palaces used as the headquarters of the US army's 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, the hometown of ousted president Saddam Hussein, 180km north of Baghdad. A lieutenant colonel chairs the pre-trial hearing, after which he will write a report recommending to the commander who directed the investigation what action should be taken. A military spokesman said the proceedings were the first against an officer in Iraq reported to occupation offices in Baghdad.
Reuters
Which facts? Do you mean that he did more than what has been reported?
How so? The JAG is within their right to ask for a resignation from an officer to avoid using up their limited resources. There are always political considerations to deal with these days, one of those is the fact that West, being black, could raise the racial issue as a reason for his prosecution. I dont blame JAG for trying to avoid a nasty case. I actually applaud them for it.
The ROE understands that what is required is a perception of danger
ROEs are, as you know, mission specific. I believe that in this case the ROE was not to engage targets until authorized because of the live fire excersize that was to be conducted by Canada. Now if this was the case, and Schmidt did not get conifmation, he violated the ROE. The working assumption, I believe, was that the chance of being engaged by the enemy in that region was very remote. If this were not the case, Canada would not be conducting a live fire. in a region where the enemy could respond real world to the live fire by Canada. I think that lesser charge of dereliction of duty stems from his failure to follow the ROE.
The JAG is within their right to ask for a resignation from an officer to avoid using up their limited resources
I know, but if they can prove such a serious contention they are duty bound to seek justice, to see that the punishment fits the crime. One would think that at the very least, the Army would have Dismissed him at a minimum. As you know, this is excatly like an Enlisted Dishonorable discharge. The only real question that we do not agree on is the level of punishment, not punishment, per se. You are willing to see him recieve no retirement, and I am saying that to deny ANY retirement for West is a bit much.
I can't get past what I know Saddam's accomplices have already done ~ to babies and grandfathers, 13-year-old daughters of local officials, mothers widowed by the thousands and fathers and young boys mass-murdered...not including the "games" the Husseins played ~ videotaping torture and murder for pleasure, feeding people to their pet lions ~ and you know what they did to POWs.
LTC West shooting at the sand? Compared to what the enemy would do to his troops? How can there be any question? I don't understand.
Not necessarily. There are mission specific ROE, but there are also ROE based upon conditions, threat scenario, JSTARS and other factors. On a 'Sweep', where targets of opportunity might present themselves first through tracer fire, it is pretty clear that Schmidt would have the authority to light them up. I dont recall Schmidt asking to be cleared hot, just a tally, followed by a drop and shack. Self defense is always cleared, and there was no announcement of the Canadian exercize. We did not know they were there.
Oh yeah, I can see the headline on Drudge:
"Army Fires Black Colonel for saving lives".
I dont think anyone would want a part of that shitstorm, or the moral hit the Army would suffer.
Da! Da! Bolshoy 'orosho!
Depends on your point of view. I prefer:
He who dies with the best toys wins....
-archy-/-
There are at least two fairly possible answers, one fairly simple to understand, the second a little more complex, but still reasonable.
It is also the more charitable vision of the two. For your attention:
Op-Ed Contributor: The Lessons of a Quagmire
November 16, 2003
By MAX BOOT
This month's setbacks in Iraq - the downing of American helicopters, the suicide bombing of an Italian headquarters - have made President Bush's mantra of "progress" ring increasingly hollow. It's true that 80 percent of Iraq remains peaceful and stable, but we seem to be losing in the other 20 percent, mostly among Sunni Muslims who benefited from Saddam Hussein's rule. The escalating violence lends credence to critics who see parallels with Vietnam.
In truth, there is no comparison: In Vietnam, we faced more than 1 million enemy combatants backed to the hilt by North Vietnam and its superpower patrons, China and Russia. In Iraq we confront a few thousand Baathists and jihadis with, at most, limited support from Iran and Syria. But even if this isn't "another Vietnam," we can still learn important lessons from that earlier war about how to deal with the insurgency.
The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht. The military staged big-unit sweeps with fancy code names like Cedar Falls and Junction City, and dropped more bombs than during World War II. Neither had much effect on the enemy, who would hide in the jungles and then emerge to ambush American soldiers. Seeing that his strategy wasn't working, Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander, responded by asking for more and more troops, until we had 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And still it was not enough.
President Bush seems so intent on avoiding this mistake that the Defense Department has unveiled plans to cut the total number of troops in Iraq next year from 132,000 to 105,000. It is hard to see what, in the current dismal strategic picture, convinces the Pentagon that this makes sense. Such a slow-motion withdrawal will only embolden our enemies in Iraq and discourage our friends.
Senator John McCain has suggested that, far from reducing our forces, it's time to send another division. There are certainly tasks where we could use more troops, such as securing Iraq's porous borders and guarding arms depots that have become virtual Wal-Marts for terrorists. But as the experience of Vietnam suggests, more troops will not necessarily solve our central challenge: defeating guerrillas.
Sending more soldiers could even be counterproductive if it results in more civilian casualties, as it did in Vietnam, complicating our effort to win over the population. American forces in Iraq have tried hard to avoid "collateral damage," but they have nevertheless made some costly mistakes. A week ago, an army sentry shot dead the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City in Baghdad.
What proved most effective in Vietnam were not large conventional operations but targeted counterinsurgency programs. Four - known as CAP, Cords, Kit Carson Scouts and Phoenix - were particularly effective.
CAP stood for Combined Action Platoon. Under it, a Marine rifle squad would live and fight alongside a South Vietnamese militia platoon to secure a village from the Vietcong. The combination of the Marines' military skills and the militias' local knowledge proved highly effective. No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the Vietcong.
Cords, or Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was the civilian side of the counterinsurgency, run by two C.I.A. legends: Robert Komer and William Colby. It oversaw aid programs designed to win hearts and minds of South Vietnamese villagers, and its effectiveness lay in closely coordinating its efforts with the military.
The Kit Carson Scouts were former Communists who were enlisted to help United States forces. They primarily served as scouts and interpreters, but they also fought. Most proved fiercely loyal. They had to be: they knew that capture by their former Vietcong comrades meant death.
Phoenix was a joint C.I.A.-South Vietnam effort to identify and eradicate Vietcong cadres in villages. Critics later charged the program with carrying out assassinations, and even William Colby acknowledged there were "excesses." Nevertheless, far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000).
There is little doubt that if the United States had placed more emphasis on such programs, instead of the army's conventional strategy, it would have fared better in Vietnam. This is worth keeping in mind today as Sunni towns like Fallujah and Ramadi increasingly turn into an Arab version of Vietcong "villes." The Army is running some valuable counterinsurgency programs in Iraq, but too often it responds to major setbacks with big-unit sweeps (the ongoing one is called Iron Hammer). In a move reminiscent of some of the excesses of Vietnam, the military has taken to dropping 500-pound bombs and sending out M-1 tanks in a largely futile attempt to wipe out elusive foes.
To secure the Sunni Triangle, the army would do better to focus on classic counterinsurgency strategies. We need closer cooperation between Iraqi and coalition forces, as in CAP. We need better coordination between the military and L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, as in Cords. We need better intelligence to identify and neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in Phoenix. We might even want to recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their erstwhile comrades, as in the Kit Carson Scouts.
The common factor in all these initiatives is solid help from Iraqis. Only locals can pick out the good guys from the bad. Also - and this is a more delicate matter - Iraqis would be able to try some of the strong-arm tactics that our own scrupulously legalistic armed forces shy away from.
Excessive brutality can be counterproductive in fighting an insurgency (as the French discovered in Algeria), but there is also a danger of playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules against ruthless opponents. Our military - which is court-martialing an Army lieutenant colonel who fired his pistol into the air to scare an Iraqi suspect into divulging details of an imminent attack - may simply be too Boy Scoutish for the rougher side of a dirty war. Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny likely feel no such compunctions. More should be done to recruit relatives of those killed by the Baathists who would be eager to pursue a "blood feud" against Saddam Hussein's men.
While Mr. Bush's plans to accelerate the turnover of political authority to Iraqis and the deployment of Iraqi security forces make sense, for now the brunt of the military campaign will still have to be borne by Americans. If American forces fear to spend time on the streets of Fallujah and other Sunni towns, what hope is there for undertrained Iraqi security officers who will be branded collaborators by their own people?
Even if the American forces do everything right, there is no quick or easy end in sight. No halfway competent guerrilla force has ever been defeated as easily as the Iraqi army was in 1991 and 2003.
The Iraqi guerrillas, like the Vietcong, realize that a conventional military victory is beyond their grasp. Their only hope is to continue ratcheting up the cost of the conflict until the desire of the American public to continue the struggle is shattered. This worked in Vietnam. It might - sobering thought - work today. Is the American will to sustain casualties greater than our enemies' ability to inflict them? Upon that question will turn the future of Iraq.
###
I think he was warned off by AWACS and advised to take sky, then schmidt told the AWACS he thought artillery was engaging him and told the AWACS he was rolling in in defense. AWACS then acknowledged the talley. I do not know if he was cleared hot or not, just that his talley was acknowledged.
I will see if I can dig up some transcripts, but in any event, I think that you and I are on the same page with respect to this issue. FWIW, I am hoping that Schmidt beats the CM for the same general reason that I hope that the Army cuts West some slack: Neither issue is Mi Lei, (sp?) and West, Umbach, or Schmidt are the 21st century version of Cally.
This is exactly what we have now...
The positive/negative ratio of events in Iraq is more on the order of 95/5; much better than 80/20. The author watches too much CNN. He is correct with respect to the placement of additional troops, and I would not trust John McCain with the proper usage of a paper airplane, much less a real one. He has no mind for military matters, his experience is failure, not success.
Again, Col. West actions are again mentioned only in the limited scope the media has settled on, but the most important point is the failure to consider the counter-insurgency that is already going on in Iraq, with very positive results. These results are not what you are going to find daily in the Media, but in the changing tactics of the enemy.
Clearly, our counter-insurgency efforts are meeting with success, especially those similar to what the article describes. Attacks are much less frequent, suggesting that more planning is required than before, and they seem to have been shifted towards the partners and allies in the war on terror, with less attacks on American forces directly.
The only thing I wish our forces were doing would be for them to construct a permanent secure base of operations including those for flight ops. That would allow safe air-transport from within a controlled space. Any unauthorized persons within the perimiter would just be shot. No more SA-7 issues to deal with. But thank you for the article.
Don't we have counterinsurgency programs going on in Iraq? Didn't we have Special Forces in Iraq months before the war started? Aren't the Brit SAS and SBS arriving now because they now have solid leads?
According to at least one General, the Iraqi people responded to the increased attacks after the Al Rasheed hit (and the increased press quagmire-peddling that followed) by providing us with far more intel than before the attacks....and they are speaking out against our mutual enemies more often - in public, and condemning the press.
8 Enemy Attacks Drop 70 Percent Since Iron Hammer's Start ~ DoD | 11/20/03
~~~~~~
I don't understand how anyone can think LTC West was wrong. He was 'questioning' a member of a group he knew had committed inhuman acts on innocents....and on our POWs.
He fired into the sand to save his troops.
It's war.
By holding up LTC West to public censure in front of these same, conscienceless enemies, isn't the Army further endangering our troops and emboldening the terrorists?
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