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June 03, 2006

Haditha An Insurgent Citadel Part Two

The best report on this situation so far........Wild Thing

Haditha: Blood Money, Lies and Videotape?

Much of the media commemorated Memorial Day weekend by using the deaths of 24 Iraqis in Haditha last November to smear US Marines. Over 40 stories Memorial Day weekend named Marines as “murderers” guilty of “atrocities” and called the incident a “massacre”.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter pace says, “it would be premature for me to judge….” President George W Bush says: "I am troubled by the initial news stories. I am mindful there is a thorough investigation going on. If in fact laws were broken there will be punishment." Marine Second Lt. Ilario Pantano who was charged with war crimes only to see the charges dropped after autopsy results presented at trial contradicted testimony that he had shot insurgents in the back. Pantano spoke out about US Rep John Murtha’s rush to judgment in the Haditha case in a May 28 letter to the editor of the Washington Post. Said Pantano, “Members of the U.S. military serving in Iraq need more than Mr. Murtha's pseudo-sympathy. They need leaders to stand with them even in the hardest of times. Let the courts decide if these Marines are guilty. They haven't even been charged with a crime yet, so it is premature to presume their guilt -- unless that presumption is tied to a political motive.”

From their air conditioned comfort, heedless media commentators and members of Congress rush to sit in judgment of US Marines’ conduct in combat. Worse their eager frenzy comes before the military investigation is complete, before any charges are filed and before any military trial is held. But even worse—they are doing so on the word of local Iraqi sources. There is a possibility these Iraqi sources’ credibility may fall apart in the event of a trial. It has happened before in similar cases. The reasons are deep rooted in Iraqi culture.

In a May 27 Washington Post article, the chain of events in Haditha is described in detail based on interviews conducted by an unidentified Washington Post “special correspondent”. Often western media outlets depend on freelance Arab reporters with questionable loyalties to work combat zones.

Notable about the account are the sources. They are all Iraqi locals. The first source sited is: “Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home”. Fahmi is later described as also being a friend of five men in a taxi who were killed by Marines during the IED attack on their convoy. The Post points out that, “The descriptions of events provided to The Post by witnesses in Haditha could not be independently verified, although their accounts of the number of casualties and their identities were corroborated by death certificates.” Another source was the Post’s special correspondent’s interview with doctors at the local hospital who described bodies riddled with bullet holes. This information does not answer the question of who killed the civilians. Were the civilians killed by insurgents who took over their homes to detonate the IED? Was it Marines? Were the civilians killed accidentally in a firefight or as Murtha charges—“in cold blood”? It is known that a large firefight occurred in Haditha on November 19 about 1/3 of a mile away from the site of the IED attack which killed 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, of El Paso, TX and either killed or led to the death of 15 Iraqi civilians and 9 deemed hostile.

One person, Aws Fahmi, claims to live next door to the house where the massacre allegedly occurred and also claims to be a friend of the men killed in the taxi.

According to the Post, “only 13-year-old Safa Younis lived -- saved, she said, by her mother's blood spilling onto her, making her look dead when she fell, limp, in a faint….Townspeople led a Washington Post reporter this week to the girl they identified as Safa. Wearing a ponytail and tracksuit, the girl said her mother died trying to gather the girls. The girl burst into tears after a few words. The older couple caring for her apologized and asked the reporter to leave.”

This account differs slightly from an ABC News report which shows a video of Safa Younis. She calmly says yes to leading questions from an off-camera interviewer describing Marines throwing a grenade into the bathroom of her home and killing the other seven members of her family. She responds with amazing composure for one who has witnessed the murder of her parents and siblings. She does not mention her mother’s blood spilling all over her. She says she is 12 years old. Is it staged testimony? This can only be discovered in an investigation or trial.

ITV news March 30 carries yet another interview—this time with a ten-year-old Iraqi girl named Iman Walid. Like Safa, Iman calmly describes the murder of seven members of her family by US Marines in Haditha on November 19.

A non-Iraqi account comes from Lance Cpl. James Crossan who was sitting next to Terrazas when he was killed. Wounded in the IED explosion, Crossan was evacuated and did not see any of the action after the explosion. He therefore has no eyewitness story to tell about any possible massacre of civilians. This does not keep the media from splashing selectively quoted pieces of his speculation all over the airwaves anyway.

Another of the Marines in Haditha that day, Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones of Hanford, CA, describes the removal of bodies after the incident in a May 29 Los Angeles Times article. He was part of a crew dispatched to take the bodies to the morgue. He says he did not witness their deaths.

All accounts of the incident describe 15 civilians being killed—with the cause of death in dispute. There is dispute over whether the nine other deaths were hostiles. The total is 24 deaths. Is it possible that Marines entered two separate homes, killed seven or eight civilians—including women and small children--in each home and in each case left a young girl in each home as the sole witness? Is it not impossible—but since all the reports depend entirely on Iraqi witnesses and the possibly coached testimony of two young girls, it is worth taking a look at other cases where these type of charges fell apart at trial.

There is another case which speaks directly to the credibility of local Iraqi witnesses and to the Iraqi tradition of “blood money”. On trial were seven British soldiers charged with murder stemming from a May, 2003 incident in Ferkah, Iraq. The trial collapsed November 3, 2005 after it became clear that many of the key Iraqi witnesses were lying in order to gain “blood money”. The BBC describes the collapse of the trial as follows:

“…it has become clear to everyone involved as the trial has progressed that the main Iraqi witnesses had colluded to exaggerate and lie about the incident.”

Three women had admitted lying about being assaulted by British soldiers and one witness had told the court that Mr. Abdullah's family encouraged others to tell lies, Judge Blackett said.

Witnesses some distance from the scene “could not possibly have seen what they said they saw”, he added.

And Iraqi court witnesses had used the case to seek “compensation to what were patently exaggerated claims”, he said.

One witness at the court martial, Samira Rishek, a Marsh-Arab who had claimed to have been brutally beaten by the soldiers while she was pregnant, admitted to the court it was a “wicked lie".

The court heard that Mrs. Rishek, along with other witnesses, was paid $100 a day to give evidence at the trial and that she only agreed to give evidence after being told she would be paid.

BBC correspondent Paul Adams said there was an "underlying sense" that some of the witnesses were "out to try and get something for themselves".

A number of questions were going to be asked about why the trial had been mounted, he added.

Roger Brice, solicitor for defendant Pte Samuel May told BBC News there had never been a case to answer.

"What the judge has done today is stop the case when the prosecution have concluded... there was never a case for any of the defendants to answer.

“He summed up the fact that the evidence as it came out in these last two months has been one of acknowledged lies."

Why all the lies? The tribal tradition of demanding “blood money”. A February 2, 2004 BBC article explains the workings of the blood money system:

On the side of a road in a ramshackle tent tribal elders have gathered for a court case, but it is not an ordinary law court, it's a tribal court. The case defies logic - one brother has killed another, but the tribe they belonged to is blaming a rival tribe for the killing.

Their argument is that if there had not been a feud with the other tribe, the killing would not have taken place; they are now demanding $20,000 in blood money….

At the tribal court, the discussion is heated, but not about guilt or innocence. Through a complex network of tribal support, both sides know where they stand, now it is just a matter of agreeing the money.

Eventually the price is knocked down to $4,000 and a woman, her value to be determined in later negotiations.

For many Iraqis it's a system that works, and in a violent region recompense appears much more practical than locking someone away.

The logic in the British case and possibly in Haditha is simple: If the coalition did not have a fight with the insurgents, the deaths would not have occurred. Therefore the coalition owes blood money regardless of who actually killed the 24 people in Haditha or the circumstances of those deaths. In this system the payment of blood money is not an admission of guilt, it is a balancing of tribal obligations.

What tribal Iraqis would understand as blood money has already been paid by US military representatives in Haditha. According to the May 31 New York Times payments totaling $38,000 were made “within weeks of the shootings” to the families of 15 of the 24 dead. The Times continues:

In an interview Tuesday, Maj. Dana Hyatt, the officer who made the payments, said he was told by superiors to compensate the relatives of 15 victims, but was told that rest of those killed had been deemed to have committed hostile acts, leaving their families ineligible for compensation.

After the initial payments were made, however, those families demanded similar payments, insisting their relatives had not attacked the marines, Major Hyatt said….

The list of 15 victims deemed to be noncombatants was put together by intelligence personnel attached to the battalion, Major Hyatt said. Those victims were related to a Haditha city council member, he said. The American military sometimes pays compensation to relatives of civilian victims.

The relatives of each victim were paid a total of $2,500, the maximum allowed under Marine rules, along with $250 payments for two children who were wounded. Major Hyatt said he also compensated the families for damage to two houses.

"I didn't say we had made a mistake," Major Hyatt said, describing what he had told the city council member who was representing the victims. "I said I'm being told I can make payments for these 15 because they were deemed not to be involved in combat."

The description of compensation “within weeks” of November 19 places the payments in mid to late December. Time magazine broke the Haditha story in its March 19 edition. Time says it was January when they gave US military spokesman Col. Barry Johnson, a copy of a video of the Haditha aftermath. The video was purportedly made on November 20 showing the aftermath of the incident. That would place the release of the video to Time just after the payment of compensation to some—but not all--of the families. Could the release of the video have been motivated by demands for blood money?

There is another unsavory connection involving the video. According to the Time article:

A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with Time. This video is the source of all the images being spread across the international media purporting to show the aftermath of the Haditha incident.

The “internationally respected” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been accused of anti-Israel bias and is funded by numerous left-wing foundations including George Soros’ “Open Society Institute.” HRW accuses US forces of “torture” in Iraq and Afghanistan which in one report it describes as, “interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep….” HRW advocates putting US soldiers under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court which would make them subject to the whim of pink Belgian bureaucrats.

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia describes blood money traditions throughout the Islamic world:

In Islamic and Arab traditions, blood money is the money paid by the killer or his family or clan to the family or the clan of the victim. It is unlawful for a believer to kill a believer except if it happens by accident. And he who kills a believer accidentally must free one Muslim slave and pay ‘Diyat’ to the heirs of the victim except if they forgive him. The tradition finds repeated endorsement in Islamic tradition; several instances are recorded in the Hadith, which are the acts of the Prophet Mohammad.

The Blood-Money tradition has found its way into legislation in several Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. Some of these countries also define, by lawful legislation, a hierarchy of rates for the lives of people; religious affiliation and gender are usually the main modulating factors for these Blood Money rates.

Would Muslims lie in order to obtain blood money payments? Some insight comes in this response to the collapse of the British trial posted online by a Baghdad-based US contractor.

I’ve been in Iraq for about 18 months now performing construction management. It is simply not possible for me to exaggerate the massive amounts of lies we wade through every single day. There is no way - absolutely none - to determine facts from bulls*** from these people.

To be fair to individual Iraqis, lying and deception is an integral part of their culture. It is not even considered lying to them; it is more akin to being clever - like keeping your cards close to your chest. And they don’t just lie to westerners. They believe that appearances--saving face--are of paramount importance. They lie to each other all the time about anything in order to leverage others on a deal or manipulate an outcome of some sort or cover up some major or minor embarrassment. It’s just how they do things, period.

I’m not trying to disparage them here. I get along great with a lot of them. But even among those that I like, if something happens I’ll get 50 wildly different stories, every time. There’s no comparison to it in any other part of the world where I’ve worked. The lying is ubiquitous and constant.

Obviously in the case of these soldiers, the “witnesses” were lying with malice for profit - saving face had nothing to do with it.

But every Westerner here has been taken totally by surprise by the lies upon lies upon BS and lies. It makes it impossible to form any agreements, impossible to plan anything, and impossible to investigate anything….

Remember this every time you see news reports where Iraqi “witnesses” say that American planes killed a bunch of civilians somewhere…. First, those people are living under the threat of terrorists in their midst - what do you think they are going to say when a western camera is thrust into their face, nice shot America! Death to the terrorists! They’d be dead in 5 minutes.

It drives those of us who work closely with the Iraqis absolutely mad. It makes me sick and alarmed to think of any westerner being brought up on charges of any kind based strictly on the words of an Arab. I’m sure the prosecutors were informed by field officers and others about the Iraqi propensity to lie about everything all the time. Shame on them (the British Ministry of Defense) for going forward without any other evidence.

The British Ministry of Defense spent the equivalent of about $18 million dollars on the investigation and the trial which collapsed in November, 2005—over 29 months after the initial incident. The Haditha charges could also collapse, but not until the media and politicians have enjoyed months of free reign to slander US combat troops’ conduct in Iraq. If the British case is a model then the investigation will be followed by a trial which could drag out until early 2008. Investigators, defense attorneys and the honest media need to dig out the truth and defend our troops before their sacrifices in Iraq are swept away in a sea of lies.

I have done 4 parts to this.
Part One tells about Haditha and what it is like there
Part Two tells about Blood money and the money for lies
Part Three tells about Miguel Terrazas’ father and what he has to say about all of this
Part Four and this one which is my comment just an opinion of a girl that has never served our country but adores our troops and appreciates what they and our Veternas have done.

Posted by Wild Thing at June 3, 2006 12:04 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Robert at June 5, 2006 12:20 AM

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Posted by: Wild Thing at June 5, 2006 12:47 AM

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