Post by Moses on Mar 10, 2005 10:51:52 GMT -5
On October 24, 2004, the Dayton Daily News published a detailed but neglected investigation of both the content and management of claims filed with the U.S. military by Iraqi civilians under the Foreign Claims Act, the only official way for Iraqis who have lost property or loved ones at the hands of U.S. forces to get financial recompense. (Provided, that is, that death or destruction occurred outside of combat: While the act covers instances of excessive or wrongful force against property or persons, it only does so in the case of "non-combat" operations -- and, unfortunately for many claimants, any number of daily U.S. endeavors in Iraq are considered combat. U.S. military units do, however, have authority to disburse "condolence payments" -- which, conveniently, are not expressions of responsibility -- for death or damage incurred in "combat" situations.)
While the Daily News didn’t review all of the roughly 15,000 Iraqi claims filed as of October 2004, of the 4,611 it did examine, 905 involved the wounding or death of Iraqi citizens; of those, 39 were shootings that left 12 dead and 28 injured at security stops. In light of the Sgrena case, it’s perhaps worth revisiting sections of the Daily News story that fall under the subhead "Checkpoints: Clash of Cultures":
If there is a place that most exemplifies the problems plaguing the American-led occupation, it is the traffic-control checkpoints. Often little more than a group of Humvees in the middle of a road, checkpoints are used to secure an area or conduct spot searches of cars . … [Ivan] Medina, former assistant Army chaplain in Iraq, said many checkpoints were poorly marked and manned by soldiers who didn’t understand the culture or have translators who could help them communicate with Iraqi citizens.
“‘Our soldiers would put their hands up as a sign to stop at the [checkpoints], but we didn’t do our homework on how to deal with the Iraqi people,’ he said. ‘To them, putting your hand up was a gesture or greeting, so they would just keep approaching the soldiers in their cars. And a lot of soldiers would just open fire, and they killed a lot of innocent people. We just didn’t do enough to study the culture of Iraqis.’
Medina, whose twin brother was killed in Iraq last November, said soldiers sometimes were ordered to open fire on any vehicle that didn’t stop. "In one case there was a father, mother and three children," said Medina, whose unit arrived shortly after the shooting. "They were shot many times. The car was full of blood. There was one kid alive. He was alive for a few hours before being pronounced dead … ."
Similar examples can be found elsewhere in the story, as well as in a small handful of reports in the back pages of other papers like Newsday and the Los Angeles Times over the last 18 months. Among the more recent was a December 5, 2004, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette report about two errant -- but deemed officially justified -- checkpoint shootings on September 30, 2004, which left three civilian Iraqis dead and four wounded. Characterizing the incidents as the result of "a deadly combination -- the language barrier and a day filled with car bombings," in both cases, cars with unarmed civilians were fired upon with no verbal or nonlethal warnings beforehand:
Spc. Jason Cole was manning a .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of his Humvee Sept 30. He heard the gunner behind him open fire on the red Opel, wounding the two men and boy. Moments later he faced a car speeding toward his end of the roadblock.
He opened fire, shooting the ground in front of the vehicle. Then he shot the engine and then the windshield.
Three of the four people in the car died at the scene.
The latest account of trigger-happy U.S. troops is in the March 7 Army Times, under the headline "Cash Not A Cure-All For Iraqis Hit By War." In one case, when a car outside Balad Ruz with two Iraqis didn’t get out of a Humvee’s way fast enough, a soldier in the Humvee opened fire on the car, killing the driver and wounding the passenger, schoolteacher Bassim Abid Azul, in the abdomen. (Abid Azul asked for $12,000 in compensation, but only got $2,000.) In another case, when Iraqi engineer Mahmoud Lateif Mohammed tried to pass a U.S. Army convoy earlier this year, a soldier opened fire on him for no discernible reason, riddling his car with bullets and blowing two fingers off of his left hand. Asking for $15,000, "he begrudgingly walked out with $3,400," venting to the paper that "[t]hey shoot me, then they leave. They didn’t take me to the hospital."
While Sgrena and others have been floating the theory that she might have been the victim of an ambush, as thousands of claims and $8.2 million paid out in compensation as of last fall makes clear, instances of "shoot or destroy first, ask questions later" that end with civilian casualties are hardly uncommon in Iraq. And while the Italians may or may not file claims of their own, the U.S. goverment certainly expects to keep paying compensation for incidents like the one on the airport road: $10 million dollars has been budgeted for paying out future claims in 2005 alone.
"I understand how everyone wants to focus on what exactly happened to the Italians," the CIA officer I spoke with said. "But I hope that people don't forget the bigger picture here. The question here shouldn't just be, what happened to the Italians? It should also be, why, coming up on two years after liberating Iraq, isn't the road to the capital's airport secure? And is accidentally shooting people and other stuff to the tune of millions of dollars helping or hurting security there?"
Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Jason Vest, "Checkpoints and Balances", The American Prospect Online, Mar 9, 2005.
While the Daily News didn’t review all of the roughly 15,000 Iraqi claims filed as of October 2004, of the 4,611 it did examine, 905 involved the wounding or death of Iraqi citizens; of those, 39 were shootings that left 12 dead and 28 injured at security stops. In light of the Sgrena case, it’s perhaps worth revisiting sections of the Daily News story that fall under the subhead "Checkpoints: Clash of Cultures":
If there is a place that most exemplifies the problems plaguing the American-led occupation, it is the traffic-control checkpoints. Often little more than a group of Humvees in the middle of a road, checkpoints are used to secure an area or conduct spot searches of cars . … [Ivan] Medina, former assistant Army chaplain in Iraq, said many checkpoints were poorly marked and manned by soldiers who didn’t understand the culture or have translators who could help them communicate with Iraqi citizens.
“‘Our soldiers would put their hands up as a sign to stop at the [checkpoints], but we didn’t do our homework on how to deal with the Iraqi people,’ he said. ‘To them, putting your hand up was a gesture or greeting, so they would just keep approaching the soldiers in their cars. And a lot of soldiers would just open fire, and they killed a lot of innocent people. We just didn’t do enough to study the culture of Iraqis.’
Medina, whose twin brother was killed in Iraq last November, said soldiers sometimes were ordered to open fire on any vehicle that didn’t stop. "In one case there was a father, mother and three children," said Medina, whose unit arrived shortly after the shooting. "They were shot many times. The car was full of blood. There was one kid alive. He was alive for a few hours before being pronounced dead … ."
Similar examples can be found elsewhere in the story, as well as in a small handful of reports in the back pages of other papers like Newsday and the Los Angeles Times over the last 18 months. Among the more recent was a December 5, 2004, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette report about two errant -- but deemed officially justified -- checkpoint shootings on September 30, 2004, which left three civilian Iraqis dead and four wounded. Characterizing the incidents as the result of "a deadly combination -- the language barrier and a day filled with car bombings," in both cases, cars with unarmed civilians were fired upon with no verbal or nonlethal warnings beforehand:
Spc. Jason Cole was manning a .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of his Humvee Sept 30. He heard the gunner behind him open fire on the red Opel, wounding the two men and boy. Moments later he faced a car speeding toward his end of the roadblock.
He opened fire, shooting the ground in front of the vehicle. Then he shot the engine and then the windshield.
Three of the four people in the car died at the scene.
The latest account of trigger-happy U.S. troops is in the March 7 Army Times, under the headline "Cash Not A Cure-All For Iraqis Hit By War." In one case, when a car outside Balad Ruz with two Iraqis didn’t get out of a Humvee’s way fast enough, a soldier in the Humvee opened fire on the car, killing the driver and wounding the passenger, schoolteacher Bassim Abid Azul, in the abdomen. (Abid Azul asked for $12,000 in compensation, but only got $2,000.) In another case, when Iraqi engineer Mahmoud Lateif Mohammed tried to pass a U.S. Army convoy earlier this year, a soldier opened fire on him for no discernible reason, riddling his car with bullets and blowing two fingers off of his left hand. Asking for $15,000, "he begrudgingly walked out with $3,400," venting to the paper that "[t]hey shoot me, then they leave. They didn’t take me to the hospital."
While Sgrena and others have been floating the theory that she might have been the victim of an ambush, as thousands of claims and $8.2 million paid out in compensation as of last fall makes clear, instances of "shoot or destroy first, ask questions later" that end with civilian casualties are hardly uncommon in Iraq. And while the Italians may or may not file claims of their own, the U.S. goverment certainly expects to keep paying compensation for incidents like the one on the airport road: $10 million dollars has been budgeted for paying out future claims in 2005 alone.
"I understand how everyone wants to focus on what exactly happened to the Italians," the CIA officer I spoke with said. "But I hope that people don't forget the bigger picture here. The question here shouldn't just be, what happened to the Italians? It should also be, why, coming up on two years after liberating Iraq, isn't the road to the capital's airport secure? And is accidentally shooting people and other stuff to the tune of millions of dollars helping or hurting security there?"
Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Jason Vest, "Checkpoints and Balances", The American Prospect Online, Mar 9, 2005.