talknationradio.com

June 1, 2006

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human
rights and the environment. I’m Dori Smith.

Journalist Dahr Jamail joins us this time to talk about his latest piece in Truthout titled: “Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq.”

During the final week of May 2006 corporate television networks in the US featured stories that shocked viewers looking for the usual Memorial Day weekend stories honoring dead soldiers. In addition to those types of stories viewers saw how US forces shot civilians in Haditha, Iraq, on November 19th. How they first said a roadside bomb had killed civilian men, women, and toddlers, ranging in age from 6 months to 77 years old.

On May 28th the New York Times wrote that Hiba Abdullah had survived the killings by American troops in Haditha last November but American troops shot and killed her husband, Rashid Abdul Hamid and her father-in-law, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, a 77-year-old in a wheelchair, shooting him in the chest and abdomen. CNN News has been playing interviews with three children who survived including 12 year old Safa Younis. (See Times story, May 28, 2006 linked above, this name would actually appear to be, Safa Younis Salim, age 13)

(Safa Younis) A bomb exploded on the street outside. We heard the sound of the explosion and we heard shouting. We were inside the house when US forces broke through the door. They killed my father in the kitchen. The American forces entered the house and started shooting with their guns. They killed my mother and my sister, Nour. They killed her when they shot her in the head. She was only 15-years-old. My other sister was shot with seven bullets in the head. She was only ten years old. And my brother Mohammed was hiding under the bed when the U.S. Military hit him with the butt of a gun and they started shooting him under the bed. The U.S. Military then shot me and I was showered in blood.

As the CNN segment “Haditha Uncovered” continues the 8 and 9 year old cousins of Safa Younis tell CNN how US soldiers also killed seven members of their family.

Journalist Dahr Jamail wrote shocking investigative reports from Iraq during his 8 months there, focusing on the civilian population and the heavy handed tactics of US soldiers he said had ruined any hope the Bush administration might have had for winning their hearts and minds. Dahr Jamail’s web site dahrjamailiraq dot com is full of pictures of dead and wounded civilians as well as stories about the largely unreported US air strikes that have been killing them during recent months of the occupation.

But as Dahr Jamail and other independent reporters were breaking more and more stories about mass arrests, collective punishment, torture, and the destruction of most of the city of Fallujah, corporate television executives seemed to be waiting for permission. They have never looked at the scale of civilian casualties and in fact have waited months before releasing important reports such as those about torture going on in Abu Ghraib prison.

In his May 30th piece in Truthout Dahr Jamail wrote that, “the focus on US Marines slaughtering at least 20 civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent, of the media spasm around the “scandal” of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004.” –We are seeing the few bad apples
scenario repeated by the media, he explained, in order to obscure the fact that Iraqis are being slaughtered every single day.

Dahr Jamail had spoken with us about many of his Iraq stories including the fact that attorneys acting on behalf of the military were handing out ridiculously small amounts of cash to those Iraqis who could prove that they had suffered losses. That practice has become controversial now in the Haditha story. Representative John Murtha told CNN that “U.S. military officials paid the families of those killed between $1,500 and $2,500 in the aftermath” of the killings. He said, “Those payments had to be authorized at high levels.” Dahr Jamail tells us more about the payments after the Haditha killings.

Dahr Jamail: The average payout to people who have lost a loved one is quite meager but the U.S. Military themselves will send people in with cash, literally just stacks of hundred dollar bills, and they will go in and pay I’ve heard as low as a few hundred dollars for a dead body and I think maximum payouts are $2,500. But even the Military admits that the average is somewhere around $1,200 to $1,500 dollars per body. And after what happened in Haditha, despite the fact that the Military’s initial report claimed that 15 civilians were killed by a roadside bomb and then they killed 8 resistance fighters, so they would be paying out money for 15 dead civilians; they went in promptly and paid $38,000 dollars which is above and beyond a normal payout for something like this especially when it was a roadside bomb, when they didn’t kill them directly. Instead these people were killed by, according to the Military, a “roadside bomb,” by their initial reports which are absolute lies. In the investigations it is being seen as an attempt to basically bribe the people to just keep quiet, a horrible atrocity was committed, so we are going to just pay you $38,000 dollars and please just keep your mouth shut.

Dori Smith: What does this all tell you Dahr Jamail about the possibility that this type of behavior on the part of U.S. soldiers has perhaps been going on in other situations? I mean just the fact of the ease and swiftness of the cover up itself?

Dahr Jamail: Well we know for a fact that this is going on in other situations. There is another situation very similar to what happened in Haditha which occurred in Balad this past March. I actually mentioned that as well in a piece I wrote for Truth-Out at around that time. U.S. forces were suffering attacks in a particular area so they went in and basically leveled the house and executed 11 people that were in that house. -A quite similar instance in many different regards but not just that there are so many others that are happening, of executions, of reprisal attacks that are going on, that are simply just not being covered by the media whatsoever.

Any of these that happen, of course the Military is getting away with it because again, if we use the Haditha situation as an example, the only reason this has gotten the attention that it has is that for once a larger media outlet, Time Magazine, covered this story and thank heavens they did but the bottom line is when these types of things are going on on probably a weekly basis that they are not getting the coverage they deserve and the military is simply getting away with it. This one they are not getting away with because there is video proof, there are photographs, but mainly it’s because a large nationally recognized media outlet in the United States, Time Magazine, covered it. Imagine what would happen if all of these instances were getting this type of coverage?

Dori Smith: Now prior to the story that broke about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal you were doing some writing about the earlier stages of house to house arrests, how prisoners were being taken, how they were being treated after they were taken, and what kinds of evidence you were finding about prison abuse. Do you think that the Haditha shootings might represent a new stage in the tactic of how to deal with the Iraqi people? I mean that in the sense that previously they were going to houses and making all these arrests and now they are perhaps just shooting people? I mean is this part of the continuation of the dehumanization process and really the militancy and the way that the tactics are starting to go?

Dahr Jamail Without a doubt it’s a step deeper into the dehumanization of the Iraqi people because these people in Haditha and these others that are being killed in similar incidents, they are not fighters and the U.S. Military doesn’t even think that they are fighters. What they are is innocent people who simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when some members of the U.S. Military decided to vent their frustration on the fact that they are being attacked on a regular basis. It’s a guerilla war so of course they don’t know by whom. Usually it’s not a direct attack. Usually it’s something more along the lines of a roadside bomb or some sort of booby trap. And so this is what generated Haditha where they went in, here were these people, they had gone into this village before and issued threats to these people and said, we are being attacked, we think that you have information that you can give us to help us find these people-if you don’t give it to us you’re going to be very sorry.

They were attacked again and they went back to the same village and went in four different houses and basically just started executing people. This is the type of really brutal heavy handed methodology being used by the Military that I remember talking with you about from Baghdad way back in my very first trip, in fact, you’re the very first radio show that I ever started doing from Baghdad and we were talking about what was happening with the home raids and the threats and the heavy handed tactics. And then what happened in Al Doura, which is just on the outskirts of Baghdad, when collective punishment was being used. I wonder when the mainstream media will begin reporting on collective punishment tactics that are being used–very similar in scope to what’s being used by the Israeli Military in Palestine where we have homes demolitions going on, we have entire families being targeted because one member of the family is a suspected resistance fighter.
This same sort of scenario is being played out in Iraq and has been being played out as I’ve talked with you as far back as December 2003 and it was even happening before then.

The situation has degenerated down to the level where it is today which is an unlivable, often times non-survivable situation for the Iraqi people and U.S. soldiers alike because of, as a direct result of these heavy handed tactics. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that violence breeds more violence. And when you go into a country after the majority of the people believed that their situation would have been improved by the removal of Saddam Hussein and then fully believed the propaganda that the Bush Administration put out which was they would basically come in, remove this evil dictator, and then leave.

The reality has been the opposite. They’ve come in, removed the dictator, and made the situation worse on basically every single level compounded by the fact that they have disappeared thousands of Iraqi people. There are over 14,000 Iraqis now in US detention facilities, torture is ongoing, these heavy handed home raids are ongoing, the humiliation of the Iraqi people is ongoing, the attacks and assaults on their dignity that they don’t even have electricity anymore, they can’t find jobs, their lives have been utterly destroyed. So then you wonder why the guerilla war gets uglier and more people are sympathetic to the resistance and attacks continue unabated against U.S. soldiers.

I think it’s important that people keep in mind that we are averaging now two and a half soldiers being killed every single day, ten times that number being wounded, most of those very seriously wounded with permanent medical disabilities. This on top of the fact that the U.S. had already escalated the air war to try to lower the number of patrols they are running to lower the casualty figures and instead what we have is a situation that’s completely out of their control and its getting more out of control by the day. You have probably seen that just in the last couple of days we now have reports that 1500 more soldiers from Kuwait are being sent into Iraq, not just into Iraq, but straight into Al Anbar Province which is where some of the fiercest fighting is going on right now. Italy has just announced that in June they will be withdrawing approximately half their troops. The rest of their troops will be completely moved out of Iraq by the end of this year.
Basically, by the end of this year there are only going to be three countries that have more than a thousand troops in Iraq and that is the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea.

Dori Smith: Dahr have you been writing about U.S. soldiers? I know you did speak about some of them literally walking the streets trembling, that it was just so bad, and after all of those tours we can just imagine that they truly are mostly suffering from PTSD. So talk a little bit about U.S. soldiers and what you have been writing about lately or interested in.

Dahr Jamail: That’s critical because in the big picture U.S. soldiers are victims of these same ridiculous policies of the Bush Administration as are the Iraqi civilian population where these soldiers are sent in, they are lied to, they are sent in to a no win situation. Just talking about the National Guard, for example, these are people that signed up to serve one weekend a month; they’ve been spending now some of them years in Iraq. They have lost their jobs back home which paid easily twice what the Military pays them. Most likely they have lost their families. They are in this despicable no win situation where there is no finish line in sight under the rule of an administration that refuses to put any sort of time table for withdrawal out there.

Then they are under the rule of an administration that if you look at Bush’s future budget plans, if he gets his way, his future budget over the next five years will cut ten billion dollars from the Veteran’s Administration. Already we are looking at is least 550,000 veterans from this current Iraq situation, and that’s a very conservative number, so over half a million veterans, they come home, those that are lucky enough to have been discharged, to a VA that’s so backlogged already before these cuts start taking place that if they file a claim they are going to be waiting six months. This is someone who maybe has just lost their leg and they need some help from the VA in getting some medical assistance or some employment opportunities, this sort of thing. Well just to start that process they can file their paper work and then sit at home and wait for six months. That’s the situation they are coming home to. Also to a general public, a significant percentage of the people here continue to remain kind of woefully ignorant of the situation in Iraq. You know so many people go about their lives as if there is not even a war going on and how do you think soldiers feel when they come home to that situation? And I’ve talked with many of these people. Several people in Iraq Veteran’s Against the War and these are the experiences and frustrations that they have shared with me.

Dori Smith: You are listening to a Talk Nation Radio interview with journalist Dahr Jamail.

There has been the now familiar “bad apples” argument. Turning again to your piece in Truthout.org May 30th Dahr you note the May 29th comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, on CNN:

(General Peter Pace”) To my recollection the first we knew about it back here in D.C. was around the 10th of February and the very next day is when the investigations began. So from my perspective as soon as we found out that there were allegations the investigations began. I understand it’s going to be a couple of more weeks before those investigations are complete and we should not prejudge the outcome. But we should, in fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we expect of them. (CNN Anchor Miles O’Brien interviews General Peter Pace head of the Joint Chiefs, Monday May 29, 2006, Memorial Day.

Dori Smith: I have a hard time listening to him right now and certainly his figure, wearing all of the medals on his chest you know? Comment on that aspect of it. Those arguments about what’s going on in Iraq.

Dahr Jamail: The Military is really in an untenable position now and they are trying to do damage control and the reality is just like Abu Ghraib this Haditha situation was just the tip of the iceberg that really this type of thing is going on regularly. There is really no way they can cover up these things when they do happen and this much evidence is produced so they are going to try to minimize this. And Peter Pace and his comments? This is an individual that recently told Tim Russert on Meet the Press on March 5th of 2006 that things were going very very well in Iraq. So either this person is a bald faced liar or they are totally delusional. Either way they obviously should not be in a position of power. They are a threat to innocent people especially being the Chief Commander of the Military of the United States and I hope that people are taking notes and making a record of history so that this individual can be brought up on war crimes charges because he is most certainly guilty.

You know if we just use logic, for example, to Peter Pace’s statement where he says 99.9 percent of the soldiers in Iraq are serving honorably. If we just go by his math that means point 1 percent–Do the math on 130,000 or now about 133,000 soldiers in Iraq–so we are talking about what, roughly? Far less than 1,000 soldiers are then responsible for all of the torture that has gone on in Iraq from the beginning and is going on to this day? And far less than 1,000 soldiers have managed to kill what’s estimated as high as a quarter of a million Iraqis now if we go by statistics provided by Les Roberts who co-authored the Lancet report which is to date the most accurate statistical survey of how many people have died as a result of the invasion and occupation. That’s less than a thousand soldiers that have been awful busy if we believe things like what the Iraqi Ambassador and Peter Pace are saying.

Dori Smith: Talk about the violence in general and who is doing it and what kind of situation the Iraqi people really find themselves in as they are pressured from various sides.

Dahr Jamail: Violence is at levels never seen before and people are literally camping in their houses a lot of the time and just kind of hoping that violence isn’t visited upon them. Of course, the vast majority of the Iraqi people have no idea what resistance group might be operating in their area or what their agenda might be and certainly would have absolutely no control over it.
When U.S. soldiers, therefore, come into their homes and ask them for information about these groups and this sort of operation of course they have absolutely nothing to tell them. I think I have spoken with you about that in the past, using Al Doura again as the example, where mortars were fired by the U.S. Military into a farmer’s field. They did not explode and then when the family came to the U.S. Military to ask them to remove the mortars the Military said we’ll remove the mortars when you give us some information about resistance fighters. Well, of course, the family didn’t have any information to give them and so there the mortars sat for months and months until the family decided to try to remove them themselves. That’s really I think an example of the situation most families are in. They are essentially caught up in the crossfire of a war that they never wanted in the first place.

Dori Smith: I want to turn to some more of what you have said in the Truthout dot org piece where you discuss the death squads in Iraq and responsibility again for violence being committed in various ways, coming from various directions now whether we are talking about the Iraqi Security Forces, the various ministries where we see these death squads being cultivated, and the U.S. forces.

Dahr Jamail: Right. I think we have to look very clearly at the fact of why these death squads exist and who funds them and who propped them up. If we just back track a little bit and look at the fact that John Negroponte was the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras under the Reagan Administration; John Negroponte, its now proven without a doubt, is responsible for setting up the death squads there who were responsible for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. And it’s not a coincidence that this same John Negroponte was then appointed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. He was there when I was there during the winter of December 2004 and January 2005. And I remember being in Baghdad at the same time John Negroponte was there and it was right at the same time when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was talking about the Salvador option being discussed to be used in Iraq. -I remember it vividly because already we’d had countless reports of death squads operating all around Iraq, going out and taking out Sunni Imams, Sunni people in the resistance, as well as people in Muqtada al-Sadr’s militias and these death squads, of course, funded, armed, and many of them trained directly by the U.S. Military and by advisors. And now its degenerated to the point where these death squads have spiraled completely out of control to the point where even now down in Basra I’m sure you’ve seen these reports too it’s coming out, that the new Prime Minister of Iraq Al-Maliki, has said that they will begin ruling Basra with an “iron fist” because the security situation there is completely out of control. There’s over one assassination every hour going on as the main Shiite blocks are vying for power in the second most populace city in Iraq. And that’s in Basra where things were theoretically going well for the occupation and this is all a result of the death squads being completely out of control, and again, if you look at where they are from? They are from the Iraq Ministry of the Interior. Where does the Iraq Ministry of the Interior get its funding right now? It’s from the U.S. Government.

Dori Smith: Talk about what else you know about the deaths of civilians and the responsibility of the U.S. forces in those deaths.

Dahr Jamail: The primary responsibility of an occupation power is to safeguard the civilian lives of that country and so if we look at just by that criteria alone what the U.S. Military has been doing in Iraq it’s the opposite-they are responsible for the vast majority of the deaths of all of the civilians who have died in Iraq. They are responsible for the rising sectarian tensions in this low burn civil war. The western contractors who were awarded the lion’s share of these contracts are responsible for not reconstructing the infrastructure of Iraq. So I think that the responsibility for the vast majority of the suffering going on in Iraq lies squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. Military and all of the private contractors who were awarded billions and billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq’s infrastructure and have gotten away with literal corporate looting in so many of these instances.

I actually just came across a couple of more recent news articles that I just posted to kind of give people an update just of the last couple of days of civilian slaughter that’s ongoing. Two Iraqi women were shot by U.S. troops just North of Baghdad in their vehicle at a checkpoint and one of these women was pregnant. And then if we go back to the 29th Al-Sharqiya television reported from Iraq that in Ramadi five more civilians were killed, at least one of them a child, one of them a woman, again by U.S. forces, several others wounded as well. That report also noted that in Ramadi the Iraq Security Forces there are even reporting that the U.S. Military surrounding the city is building up and they are afraid that they are looking at another type of siege reminiscent to what happened in Fallujah in 2004. So this is just a snap shot of this deathly moving picture of atrocities that is ongoing in Iraq every single day.

Dori Smith: In addition to seeing Peter Pace on CNN we also saw
Arwa Damon on May 29th, and she insisted that soldiers she was with in Iraq made a great effort to avoid killing civilians. And she was on “Operation Steel Curtain” as an embedded reporter. She talked about the IEDs and then said that the soldiers would be in what she called the “kill zone”. Just talk about the disparity there.

Dahr Jamail: “Kill zone,” is a military term like “free fire zone,” which was applied to the entire city of Fallujah that means anything in that area that they perceive may be a threat is a legitimate target. You know you can’t say as a soldier or as a reporter for that matter, that well I’m with these soldiers in this area that they have declared a “kill zone” yet they are taking extra measures to make sure no civilians get hurt. It’s just simply not logical and it’s a problem where you have U.S. Military propaganda running into the reality on the ground and then the reporter has allowed themselves to be put in a situation where they are basically parroting the Military propaganda and so, of course, they are completely discredited and should be.

Dori Smith: Now Arwa Damon was not specific about what the “kill zones” were. It almost sounded like she was talking about fire fights. But are U.S. soldiers under orders that once an IED goes off now they are in a “kill zone” Dahr?

Dahr Jamail: It appears to be but I can’t say for sure. I haven’t researched that. However, I can say that I have personally run into soldiers on the streets of Baghdad that have told me, yes, you are in a “kill zone” you should keep walking, meaning there might be a bomb in the area or there might be a search going on for a suspected resistance fighter, so these are some of the instances that I’ve seen them personally institute this, so called, “kill zone”. And I think that it’s important for people to understand that at any given time, any given place, in Iraq, that’s going to happen. So any civilian that just happens to be there when so many of the soldiers are still going around and don’t have interpreters; and if it’s a “kill zone” how are these people going to know? I mean there’s still countless situations where there are road blocks set up or check points by the Military without signs, without signs in Arabic, with no way for the Iraqi people knowing what the Military actually wants them to do. So this is one of the main factors in why we are seeing so many civilian casualties generated by the U.S. Military in Iraq.

Dori Smith: The President, early on, said that U.S. forces would not be accountable to international law and that foreign parties, foreign governments, could not try to hold them accountable.

Dahr Jamail: Well and I think he certainly still adheres to that and I think the biggest evidence that we have is the fact that he among however many U.S. Presidents that preceded him, Clinton included, refused to have the U.S. join the International Criminal Court. So I think that’s really the strongest evidence. But I think these statements that he is making now about well we will try to take care of this and prevent it from happening in the future, we know that these are atrocities, and these types of statements; it’s just poll driven politics. The simple matter is that his administration is under more fire than it ever has been in the past six years. This is obviously an atrocity and politically it would just be a really bad call for him to come out and not make these kinds of damage control type of statements.

Dori Smith: Do you foresee any changes in policy whatsoever? Orders to the troops or anything coming out of the investigations?

Dahr Jamail: We will have a lot more media focus on trials of these soldiers. If there are court martials, if there are prison terms, we will have loads of media coverage about that just like we did with the few sort of hang men soldiers that were offered up to the public as a result of Abu Ghraib. I think we should get ready to have endless stories about that written and discussed by the pundits but as far as actual policy on the ground? We won’t see any change at all just like we didn’t see anything change regarding Abu Ghraib other than that they were a bit more careful about what they did with their digital cameras.

Dori Smith: Dahr Jamail thanks so much for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.
Dahr Jamail: My pleasure Dori, Thank you.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over eight months reporting from Iraq. You can read his unflinching reports on his web site: dahrjamailiraq.com where you will find, for example, a December 3, 2004 story titled: “Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone.”

In that and other reports he describes accounts of U.S. troops killing unarmed and wounded Iraqi civilians. Dahr Jamail writes regularly for Truth-Out, Inter-Press Service, Asia Times, and TomDispatch.

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS Radio at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. WHUS dot org You can log on to our web sites at Talk Nation dot org and Talk Nation Radio dot org for transcripts and ongoing discussions within the New Cafe Community

Talk Nation Audio: You may download broadcast quality audio of this interview at the web site of Radio4all.net in MP3 format or podcasting. Search Talk Nation Radio June 1, 2006 or use this link: http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=18348
Write to Dori Smith at theshockvote@yahoo.com

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