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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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August 3rd,
2007 - U.S. Military Killing Trials Reflect Public Fatigue |
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U.S. Military Killing Trials
Reflect Public Fatigue By Adam Tanner Reuters August 3, 2007 San Francisco - In one Iraqi
city U.S. Marines kidnapped and killed an Iraqi grandfather. In another,
enraged forces killed 24 civilians, most in their homes, after the death of a
popular American comrade. One Marine urinated on a corpse. Yet many Americans outraged
three years ago by nonlethal U.S. abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are
tuning out deadlier acts, reflecting growing public fatigue with a messy war
and hope that American involvement in an unending conflict will fade. This week, military courts
in Camp Pendleton, California convicted the last of eight Americans charged
in the 2006 killing of the Iraqi grandfather in Hamdania. Later this month,
hearings start against the suspected leader of the killings of 24 Iraqis, many
of them women and children, in Haditha. Stanford University
psychology professor Philip Zimbardo gained fame with his 1971 experiment in
which ordinary people turned abusive when given authority. Yet he is
surprised that the Hamdania and Haditha cases involving ordinary Marines have
sparked far less outcry than Abu Ghraib, in which startling photographs
depicted prisoners piled into a naked pyramid. At Abu Ghraib, "The
deeds were horrendously humiliating but I think pale in comparison to these
new revelations and of the Marine who got only bad conduct discharge and no
jail time for cold-blooded murder of a middle-aged Iraq citizen,"
Zimbardo said. "Where is the ...
outrage?," he said. Zimbardo referred to the
July 20 verdict against Cpl. Trent Thomas, one of two Marines who shot the
Hamdania man. U.S. forces then placed a shovel and an AK-47 rifle by the
corpse to make it appear he was caught digging a hole for a roadside bomb. Rage In Iraq, U.S. Distraction Incidents of illegal
killings by U.S soldiers in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have
enraged ordinary Iraqis and many other people around the world, including in
Arab countries and Europe. Yet after news broke last
year of the Haditha killings, a Pew Research Center poll found just 24
percent of U.S. adults closely following the investigation. "America has taken
little interest in the war ... and even even less interest in the
disciplinary proceedings of the military," said Gary Solis, a former
military judge now an adjunct Georgetown University Law School professor. A Factiva database search of
news articles over the past year finds Paris Hilton mentioned 50 times more
often than Hamdania. Polls suggest most Americans
have turned against the Iraq war. Reports of frequent bombings
in which dozens of Iraqis die typically appear deep inside American
newspapers and some analysts see a public numbing to the carnage, even when
Americans are involved. Rarely do Americans see
photos of Iraqi dead or the caskets of the more than 3,600 Americans who have
died there. The abuses at Abu Ghraib
raised questions of whether they reflected Pentagon policies - a factor
unseen in the more recent trials, said John Brady Kiesling, a former U.S.
diplomat who resigned in 2003 to protest the war. "The trials of small
fry (for Abu Ghraib) attracted global interest as a surrogate for war-crimes
trials at a much higher level." For many Americans the
Haditha and Hamdania cases, which occurred without the photographs that made
Abu Ghraib so startling, have become footnotes to a war gone bad. "Highlighting the
Haditha/Hamdania trials offers no clear benefit to anyone," said
Kiesling, author of the 2006 book "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an
Unloved Superpower." "I suspect most Americans would share my ...
sense that these are the all-too-ordinary war crimes of angry, grieving,
heavily-armed young soldiers and junior officers dropped into an environment
they were helpless to understand." Lawyer Paul Bergrin, who
represented one of the convicted U.S. Abu Ghraib defendants, said the Abu
Ghraib photos awoke many Americans to a bitter reality about the Iraq war and
its impact on the behavior of soldiers. "There were different
expectations about what to expect from the American soldier," he said.
"Abu Ghraib occurred when the war was in its very early stages and the
perception about what the American soldier experienced in Iraq was a lot different
in the American mind." External link: http://tinyurl.com/2suhl4 |