Posted on 06/03/2006 9:12:56 PM PDT by bad company
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Posted on Sat, Jun. 03, 2006
13 civilians died in Ishaqi GIs cleared on raid on Iraq town
Star News Services
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A military investigation into allegations that Americans intentionally killed civilians in Ishaqi, a village north of Baghdad, has cleared the troops of misconduct, the U.S. said Friday.
The inquiry acknowledged the deaths of up to 13 Iraqis in the March raid.
There also were developments Friday in two other cases of possible misconduct by U.S. military personnel in Iraq:
■ An attorney for families of some of the two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians allegedly killed Nov. 19 by U.S. Marines in the town of Haditha said that three or four Marines had carried out the shootings while 20 more waited outside the homes.
■ Eight individuals were jailed and four others were told not to leave their base at Camp Pendleton, Calif., while an investigation continues into the April shooting death of an Iraqi man in Hamandiya, west of Baghdad. No charges have yet been presented.
The investigation of the March 15 attack in Ishaqi concluded that the U.S. troops had followed normal procedures in raising the level of force as they came under attack upon approaching a building where they thought that an al-Qaida terrorist was hiding, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S military spokesman.
U.S. forces killed one suspected terrorist and captured another, Caldwell said. Allegations that U.S. forces executed a family, then covered it up by directing an air strike on their house, “are absolutely false,” Caldwell said.
After the raid, Iraqi police accused U.S. troops of herding at least 11 persons into the house and executing them.
Caldwell acknowledged that there had been “possibly up to nine collateral deaths” in addition to the four Iraqi deaths that the military announced at the time of the raid.
Iraqis interviewed in Ishaqi by Knight Ridder immediately after the raid acknowledged that an al-Qaida member had been visiting the house. They said he was visiting the house’s owner, a relative who was a schoolteacher.
The results of the investigation were released after questions were raised about the original U.S. report, and as television stations showed footage of dead children in the aftermath of the raid.
The military said Friday that it would cooperate with the Iraqi government in its own investigation of Haditha and other incidents of alleged wrongdoing by U.S. troops.
The pledge came a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki upbraided the U.S. military over Haditha, which he called “a horrible crime,” and accused U.S. troops of habitually attacking unarmed civilians.
On Friday, White House press secretary Tony Snow said that al-Maliki told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad that he had been misquoted.
Snow was unable to explain what al-Maliki told Khalilzad or how he had been misquoted.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the training and conduct of U.S. troops. He said incidents such as the alleged massacre of civilians at Haditha should not happen.
“We know that 99.9 percent of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner. We also know that in conflicts things that shouldn’t happen do happen,” he said. “We don’t expect U.S. soldiers to act that way, and they’re trained not to.”
In Haditha, the Marines, enraged by the loss of a comrade, stormed into nearby homes in the area and allegedly shot occupants dead as well as several men in a taxi that arrived at the scene of the blast, according to U.S. lawmakers briefed by military officials.
In one of the homes, Marines ordered four brothers inside a closet and shot them dead, said the Haditha lawyer, Khaled Salem Rsayef, who himself lost relatives in the incident.
Despite the Iraqi government’s insistence of cooperation between the U.S. and Iraqi investigations, Rsayef and his brother, Salam Salem Rsayef, said they and other victims’ families refused the request several months ago to exhume the bodies. Under Islamic teachings, exhuming bodies is prohibited but is allowed on case-by-case basis, sometime after a fatwa, or an edict, from a senior cleric allowing it to proceed.
The Rsayef brothers have met at least four times with U.S. military investigators looking into the killings. They said the meetings began in February and were held at Samarra General Hospital. The next meeting is scheduled for Sunday, the two brothers said, suggesting that the U.S. investigations were not finished.
Khaled Salem Rsayef identified the four brothers killed in the closet as a car dealer, a traffic policeman, an engineer and a local government employee. He said the U.S. military did not give compensation payments to their families, because the brothers were thought to be insurgents.
The Haditha attack came four months before the nighttime raid in Ishaqi.
A U.S. ground force conducted the Ishaqi attack, said two defense officials in Washington. After being fired upon from the target building, the soldiers pulled back and called in air strikes by an Air Force AC-130 gunship, which attacked and collapsed the building, they said.
Caldwell said that a search found the body of Abu Ahmed — described as a bomb maker and insurgent recruiter — plus three noncombatants. The “investigating officer concluded that possibly up to nine collateral deaths resulted from this engagement but could not determine the precise number due to collapsed walls and heavy debris,” Caldwell said.
The bloody aftermath of the attack was captured by a cameraman. The video became the focus of attention Friday when the BBC broadcast it in the wake of recent allegations of U.S. troops killing unarmed civilians.
The footage shows at least one adult male and four children with deep wounds to the head that might have been caused by bullets or shrapnel. One child has an obvious entry wound to the side, and the inside of the walls left standing were pocked with bullet holes. A voice on the tape said there were clear bullet wounds in two persons.
Although it had been known that U.S. air power was involved in the assault on the building in Ishaqi, it was not previously reported that there was an AC-130 gunship, a devastating weapon capable of operating at night and pummeling its target with side-firing guns, including a 105 mm cannon. The gunship is flown by Air Force Special Operations crews.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Drew Brown and Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder Newspapers and Hamza Hendawi, Kim Gamel, Robert Burns, Qais al-Bashir, Patrick Quinn and Mazin Yahya of The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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© 2006 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansascity.com
So now, will the military allow each soldier/Marine to sue their media accusers?
OK, so this is one "incident" down, a few more to go. Dont be at all surprised if they are all setups from the terrorists and their allies in the media....and John Murtha.
What kind of leadership finds it necessary to respond to enemy propaganda accusations (or 'alleged' anything) at all?
I would like our Liberal friends in the MSM to define with certainty exactly who a civilian is. In Vietnam, many of our brave soldiers were killed and thousands wounded by "civilians" which included women, the old and the young. I feel quite certain the same holds true in Iraq.
This isn't PC crap. If American soliers did this they must be punished. End of story. Where all this sickens me is that it paints an ugly picture of the deeds of hundreds of thousands of good Americans. We are a nation founded in law, with reverence to human rights. These men are under extrme pressure and it is unrealistic in war to think that this does not happen.
If I was 19-25 years old watched my fellow marines dying to bombs around the area I was patroling, and knew the bombers had the tacit approval of the village...It is not unimaginable for a 19-25 yr old version of me to snap and remove the problem with extreme collateral damage.
This is not how America liberates nations and is not in the plan for any branch. But to say it discredits the mision that this happens in war is absurd.
This is an MSM ploy. Really, if this is all they have LEFT to fight with we must be close.
"Several men that appeared in taxis after the blast"
Read No True Glory. Good book about the battle in Fallujah. Every time we probed deeper into the city the Jihadis showed up in taxis. No running water, no contact with the world (except for Code Pink and other Islamofascist groups}
Like my prior post, if it is life or deathand I saw a taxi full of men appear after a blast (In a town that is probably not rife with ambulance chasers) I would be likely to light up that taxi before I made myself a corpse by process of inaction.
Because Rummy respondsso well. That guy could be a stand up comic for the way he shuts down people who ask stupid questions.
You obviously don't understand. Any people who are not guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, based on American criminal standards regardless of circumstance are civilians
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The Marines don't need the permission of the brass.....
I didn't know that.
Iirc, the NOrth Vietnamese really ramped up the propaganda war toward the end, just when our troops had effectively finished the VC, and most of the troops they were fighting were NVA regulars.
Iran must be saving some of their jihadis out of fear of invasion.
If talks succeed in toning that down, watch for more terrorist activity--a la the Tet offensive..
The fact that AQ reps are meeting with schoolteachers may not be significant, but chances are they are running out of much the same insurgency warfare playbook as the VC, and compromising, enlisting, or neutralizing the few teachers was the first step to indoctrinating the villagers who had a school.
A buddy of mine who was just "over there" confirms that Al Qaeda in Iraq is studying and applying the lessons learned by the VC during the Vietnam war. They are deliberately orchestrating attacks that put innocent women and children in the crossfire, so as to make the US look like the bad guys.
The Media is using the same techniques they used to undermine support for Vietnam- hey, it worked once, let's do it again.
Meanwhile, the current administration has chosen to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, rather than learn from them. Unless we're ready to put a boot on every neck in the middle east, kill every terrorist we can lay our hands on, and tell the "international community" to do something which is both obscene and anatomically impossible, we're going to lose this war- and the people of Iraq will pay the price for our failure in blood and sorrow.
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