THE SET-UP: I may have buried the lede on today’s RUNDOWN. That’s because I started with a set of interlocking stories on Trump’s garish display at Arlington and the “lessons” Israel “learned” from its benefactor’s misadventure in Afghanistan. But it’s the story of Haditha “buried” below ‘em that I see as the crucial predicate to what’s happening to Gaza.
Ironically, the massacre was also buried behind a wall of official secrecy. It didn’t hurt that the America public is always eager to “move on” when it can’t handle the truth. But the New Yorker kept at it and, along with retelling the tale of a US-committed war crime, their FOIA eventually dislodged some shocking photos that would’ve helped seal a conviction … if, that is, the US hadn’t simultaneously demolished Iraq, the rule of law and the efficacy of the Geneva Conventions.
But the US did just that when it launched an unprovoked war against a nation that posed it no threat. It then doubled-down on the destruction by instituting a massive program of extrajudicial incarceration and torture (among other things).
Eventually, Uncle Sam just walked away and pretended that it all never happened. The preemptive strikes, the white phosphorous weapons, the indifference to civilian casualties, the extrajudicial killings, the double-tap drone strikes, the torture and the cruel and unusual imprisonment that continues to this day … Uncle Sam baked all of these practices into the geopolitical cake during the “Global War On Terror” (or “of Terror,” depending on which end of the bomb you were looking at). The icing came when then-White House counsel and future Attorney General Alberto Gonzales justified war crimes by simply dismissing the Conventions as “quaint”?
Can the US ever expect Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China to take its finger-wagging seriously when they claim their piece of the cake in Ukraine or the South China Sea or perhaps even Taiwan? How does any dictator or authoritarian regime not simply dismiss out of hand US objections to human rights abuses or military aggression? And how can the US ever again claim to be the champion of international law or the Geneva Conventions?
The answer to all those questions is given daily in Gaza. Uncle Sam’s Mini-Me is running roughshod over the laws of war and human rights, and they are doing so with bombs handed to them by the US. The complete impotence of the Geneva Conventions is made clear every time a US official publicly scolds the IDF’s latest atrocity while another official quietly fulfills Netanyahu’s deadly shopping list. The Israeli government knows it can get away with killing aid workers and ambulance drivers and doctors and journalists and children … and entire extended families. It knows there will be no consequences for constructing its own Abu Ghraib or engaging in torture … because it has simply franchised the US model. They do indeed “share our values.” To indict them is to indict ourselves, and Netanyahu knows it. And as Haditha demonstrates, we are loathe to indict ourselves.
TITLE: The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see
EXCERPTS: On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines was travelling in four Humvees down a road in the town of Haditha, Iraq, when their convoy hit an I.E.D. The blast killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two others. What followed would spark one of the largest war-crime investigations in the history of the United States.
During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.
After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.
Briones and Wright went from site to site, marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the scene. By the time they were done, they had made a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines.
The killings came to be known as the Haditha massacre. Four Marines were charged with murder, but those charges were later dropped. General James Mattis, who went on to become Secretary of Defense, wrote a glowing letter to one of the Marines, dismissing his charges and declaring him innocent. By 2012, when the final case ended in a plea deal with no prison sentence, the Iraq War was over, and stories about the legacy of the U.S. occupation rarely got much attention. The news barely registered.
The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public. The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became an international scandal when graphic photos were published. The Haditha killings had no similar moment. A few of the images that the Marines had made ended up in the public domain, but most have never been released.
In 2020, our reporting team at the In the Dark podcast filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Navy, seeking records that included the photos. We thought that the photos would help us reconstruct what happened that day—and why the military had dropped murder charges against the Marines involved. The Navy released nothing in response. We then sued the Navy, the Marine Corps, and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records related to the Haditha killings. In March, more than four years after our initial FOIA request, the military relented, and gave us the photos.
The photos are graphic. They show men, women, and young children in defenseless positions, many of them shot in the head at relatively close range.
TITLE: The Military Tried To Hide Evidence of a Massacre. A Lawsuit Just Exposed It.
https://reason.com/2024/08/28/the-military-tried-to-hide-evidence-of-a-massacre-a-lawsuit-just-exposed-it/
EXCERPTS: The FOIA files also included a recording of a 2014 interview between [Gen. Michael] Hagee and a Marine Corps historian, meant for internal use. The massacre "could have been horrific for the Marine Corps if we did not handle that correctly. Another My Lai. Or another Abu Ghraib," Hagee claims, referring to the My Lai massacre, which helped turn American opinion against the Vietnam War, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where U.S. soldiers and CIA officers were photographed torturing and sexually assaulting inmates.
Hagee "learned from" the Abu Ghraib scandal not to let Briones and Wright's photographs of the Haditha killings be published. "Those pictures today have still not been seen, and so I'm quite proud of that," he says.
Indeed, the photos are pretty shocking; the victims range from a three-year-old girl to a 76-year-old man. "I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart," Briones told The Los Angeles Times in 2006.
One of the photos shows the body of Ayda Yassin Ahmed surrounded by her three dead daughters and her dead son. "Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him," Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum told U.S. military investigators, according to Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) notes also released under FOIA. Tatum later denied making that statement, and his lawyer declined to let The New Yorker interview him.
Another photo shows what appears to be the execution of a mother and her child. Asmaa Salman Raseef lies dead on the ground, her arm wrapped around the body of her son Abdullah, as if she is shielding him. NCIS investigators concluded that the boy was shot from close range.
A version of one of The New Yorker's photos had previously been obtained and published by The Washington Post in 2007. It shows the bodies of five college students spread out around the car they had been riding in, with a Marine standing over them.
Some of the Marines claimed that the students were running, which is why they were mistaken for insurgents and shot. According to retired homicide detective Kevin Parmelee, who was interviewed for the podcast, the photo suggests that at least one of the college students was kneeling on the ground when he died. Iraqi witnesses told NCIS the same thing.
Photos, eyewitness statements, and NCIS records also show that the Marines lied about killing Jamal's father and uncles in self-defense. After Jamal's family surrendered their legally-owned rifles to the troops, The New Yorker concluded, the Marines separated out the men, shot two of Jamal's uncles in a doorway, shot Jamal's father while he was sitting against a wall, and shot Jamal's third uncle while he hid in a wardrobe.
[J]amal never stopped thinking about the day the Marines took away his father and uncles. He even found Wuterich on Facebook, and considered sending a message, Jamal tells In the Dark. "How did they die? Did they die like brave men, or were they scared? Like, what happened?" he wanted to ask.
The FOIA case gave Jamal an answer, albeit a sad one. The photos of his father and uncles were not published in The New Yorker article.
For the rest of us, the release of the photos should be a chance to reflect on the Iraq War. Americans often think of that war as a mistake to walk away from. But the desire to move on has allowed American leaders to sweep a lot of deceptive and dangerous behavior under the rug. And forgetting how bad the last big war was is perhaps making it too easy to sell the next one.
TITLE: Gaza breakdown: 20 times Israel used US arms in likely war crimes
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-weapons-gaza/
EXCERPTS: The Biden administration acknowledges that Israel likely broke human rights law with U.S.-supplied weapons, but claims it doesn’t have enough evidence to link U.S.-supplied weapons to specific violations that would warrant cutting off military aid to Israel. As national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS, “We do not have enough information to reach definitive conclusions about particular incidents or to make legal determinations, but we do have enough information to have concern…Our hearts break about the loss of innocent Palestinian life.”
None of that is believable. As this report demonstrates, there is more than enough available information. If the Biden administration is truly concerned about the loss of innocent Palestinian life in Gaza, it can stop Israel’s atrocities by denying it the tools it needs to commit them.
October 9, 2023: Israeli airstrikes hit a busy market in Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 69 people. The market was more crowded than usual because people were in the process of fleeing their homes at the instruction of the Israeli military. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) analysis reported that “one or two GBU-31 air dropped munitions were used” and found no military objective to justify the strike. The GBU-31 is made from a U.S.-made 2,000-pound MK 84 or BLU-109 bomb and a JDAM guidance kit.
October 22, 2023: An Israeli airstrike on the Abu Mu’eileq family home in Deir al-Balah killed 19 people, including 12 children. The home was located in the area to which the Israeli military had ordered residents of northern Gaza to flee on October 13. The code stamped on the recovered scrap, 70P862352, is associated with JDAMs and Boeing.
October 25, 2023: Israeli airstrikes flattened at least 5,700 square meters in the Al Yarmouk neighborhood of Gaza City, killing at least 91 people, including 39 children. A U.N. assessment determined that “several” 2,000-pound GBU-31s air-dropped munitions were likely dropped by Israeli forces in the attack
January 29, 2024: Six-year-old Hind Rajab was the only survivor in her family’s car after Israeli tanks opened fire. Over the phone, Hind begged rescue workers to come save her. The Palestine Red Crescent Society dispatched an ambulance with two emergency workers. At least one Israeli tank opened fire, killing both paramedics. A fragment of a U.S.-made M830A1 120mm tank round was documented at the scene.
March 27, 2024: An Israeli strike on the Emergency and Relief Corps of the Lebanese Succour Association, a humanitarian organization, killed seven emergency and relief volunteers in southern Lebanon. The strike used a U.S.-made JDAM guidance kit affixed to an Israeli-made 500-pound bomb. Human Rights Watch said that the incident should be investigated as a war crime.
May 26, 2024: An Israeli airstrike on a displacement camp in Rafah filled with makeshift tents killed at least 46 people — including 23 women, children and older adults — and injured more than 240 others. The tail of a U.S.-made GBU-39 bomb was recovered at the site of the attack
June 23, 2024: An Israeli airstrike on a health clinic in Gaza City killed five people, including Hani al-Jaafarawi, Gaza’s director of ambulances and emergency. He was reportedly the 500th medical worker killed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The rocket motor of a U.S.-supplied Hellfire missile was recovered at the health care center.
NOTE: that’s just a sampling, for the full list of 20 click on the link above.