Posted on 11/17/2004 9:02:43 AM PST by areafiftyone
WASHINGTON -- The Marine who shot and apparently killed a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Fallujah on Saturday has been removed from the battlefield for questioning, and U.S. commanders in Iraq said they were bracing for a wave of outrage in the Middle East after the airing of the videotaped shooting.
Senior military officials and human rights advocates, including those often critical of the armed services, cautioned that the graphic videotape of the shooting, taken by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC News, left many questions unanswered and underscored the confusion of urban warfare.
Agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have taken over the inquiry, a senior Pentagon official said, and will determine whether the Marine believed he was acting in self-defense when he yelled that the Iraqi was only pretending to be dead and fired at the body.
It is unclear from watching an unedited version of the video tape whether the prisoner was moving before the shot. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday that an autopsy might be required to help determine whether the man was dead or alive when the Marine shot him.
The inquiry will also have to determine what happened to the other Iraqis in the room. Some of them, according to the initial NBC report, appeared to be dead or dying when Sites entered with a group of Marines, joining other Marines who were already there. He has suggested that the other Iraqis may have been shot just before he entered, according to The Associated Press.
On Tuesday, Sites declined to elaborate on what he had seen.
After the on-camera shooting, Marines pointed their guns at another prone Iraqi who was reaching out weakly with one hand, but they backed off without shooting at him, the videotape showed.
The initial NBC report said that the Iraqis, all of whom had been wounded in fighting on Friday and then had been disarmed and left in the mosque, did not appear to be threatening, and that there were no weapons visible in the room.
The incident captured in the NBC report unfolded as members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division entered the unidentified mosque in Fallujah on Saturday. Sites reported that Marines from a different unit had attacked the building Friday after coming under fire, killing 10 insurgents and wounding five others.
The Marines treated the wounded Friday, took their weapons and then left, Sites reported. On Saturday, another group of Marines, accompanied by Sites, entered the mosque, but it is unclear how many of the Iraqis were still alive then.
"Obviously, the shooting of an incapacitated detainee is a fundamental violation of the Law of Armed Conflict," said James D. Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch. "But if someone feigns being incapacitated or killed, and then uses that to trick someone and shoot them, that's a war crime, and might justify the shooting."
Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the top Marine officer in Iraq, promised a thorough investigation.
saying in a statement, "We follow the Law of Armed Conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability."
Other senior officers, while not defending the Marine's actions, said that there had been instances in Fallujah in which insurgent corpses had been booby-trapped and that some fighters wore vests with explosives for possible suicide attacks if they came into contact with Americans.
"It is hard for anyone to imagine the stress of urban combat -- the fatigue, the threat, the noise, the filth, the death," a senior Marine officer said Tuesday. "But if the incident turns out to have occurred as it appeared in the video, then it is inexcusable. Understandable perhaps, but not excusable."
Florian Westphal, a spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross, said it was not clear what had happened in the mosque, based solely on the videotape.
"We cannot, on the basis of TV images, no matter how disturbing and disconcerting they are, arrive at a judgment about an incident," Westphal told AP "We were not on the spot, so we cannot be aware of all the circumstances."
As Marine commanders in Iraq rushed to learn details of the shooting incident, Al-Jazeera broadcast the unedited version of the footage, complete with a name visible on one Marine's backpack and the faces of the Marines, which were not shown on American networks.
Several commanders voiced concern that no matter what the inquiry determines, the incident had handed the Iraqi insurgency a huge propaganda victory, and this after commanders said they had gone to extraordinary lengths in the battle of Fallujah to avoid civilian casualties.
The situation in the videotape appears to resemble two earlier incidents in Iraq. One, in Kufa last May, resulted in charges of murder and dereliction of duty against an officer in the Army's 1st Armored Division.
In that incident, Capt. Rogelio M. Maynulet shot the wounded driver of the militant Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Maynulet then told a fellow officer that the man was so badly wounded, with part of his skull blown away, that he had shot him out of compassion.
On Monday, the Army's 1st Cavalry Division announced that 2nd Lt. Erick J. Anderson of the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, had been charged with murder in the death of a 16-year-old Iraqi, who had been badly wounded in Baghdad on Aug. 18.
~Merlin~
True.
That line has always been in my memory.
I wonder why he didn't notice the big rat that had a camera in his hand.
ARTHUR
Which is the greatest quality of knighthood? Courage? Compassion? Loyalty? Humility? What do you say, Merlin?
MERLIN
The greatest? They blend together like the metals we mix to make a good sword.
ARTHUR
I didn't ask for poetry. Which is it?
MERLIN
All right. Truth. It must be truth, above all. When a man lies he murders some part of the world.
What really pisses me off about this is that the commanding general (Gen. George Casey) has already judged the Marine guilty and has alluded to it publicly. He said: "But I don't think that [the incident] in any way is a reflection on the quality and caliber of absolutely fine young servicemen and women we have serving here in Iraq." [Link here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138813,00.html ]
This has to be dealt with FREEPERS. Our guys cannot be walking around with their safteys on on their weapons. They don't have time to ask the bad guys if they are unarmed. The bad guys never read the Geneva Convenation. The world is trying to disarm us an they are led by the U.N. They can't have the Military's weapons and they can't have mine. I was not in combat though from what I've found out about it over the years is that you have to be the first one to fire. Gunery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock put a round though the Noth Vietnamese sniper scope and into his head just before the Cong decided to pull his trigger. Hathcock lived the North Vietnamese didn't.
They seem to forget to mention the reason they went back to that spot. Was they were taken fire from there again.
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