Firsthand
testimony from a soldier who refused to kill civilians in Iraq
Today, it is
the 10th black anniversary of the July 12, 2007 US Apache helicopter
attack upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst the over twelve
people killed by the 30mm cannon-fire were two Reuters staff. The
video was part of the huge cache of material leaked to WikiLeaks by
Chelsea Manning.
The
“Collateral
Murder” video which showed
a US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in
Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike
that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters
news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks in 2010.
As
CommonDreams
reported in 2010, the Pentagon blocked an attempt by Reuters to
obtain the video through a freedom of information request. Wikileaks
director Julian Assange said his organisation had to break through
encryption by the military to view it.
In 2010, Josh Stieber
talked to Paul Jay and The
Real News about the Wikileaks video and army
training that makes killing civilians acceptable.
Stieber was
a member of the army company that was in that famous WikiLeaks video
in 2007 showing Iraqis murdered by the US helicopter crew. He wasn't
there that day, but his comrades were. As he explains, he was
excluded from that mission because he refused to follow orders to
kill civilians in a previous incident.
Some
of the most interesting parts of the interview:
Another
big moment in training that really started making me ask questions
and again I found a good excuse not to ask too many, but what
initially disturbed me was our leaders would take us into a room one
at a time, take the new soldiers, and they would ask us a series of
questions leading up to this big question, that if somebody were to
pull a weapon in a marketplace full of completely unarmed civilians
and there's only one person with a weapon, would you return fire
towards that person? And not only did you have to say yes, but in
this exercise if you even hesitated in your answer, then you get
yelled at for not being a good soldier and not prepared to do what it
took to keep your fellow soldiers safe.
It was
probably a couple of months before we saw action. And kind of the
process of how I remember things in Iraq is that one of the first big
milestones is that we moved from the larger base that we were living
in, first to one building in the middle of a district, and then into
an even more remote area in the poor industrial part of town. And as
we were moving in to the poor industrial part of town, into this
factory, the whole district came out and held a large peaceful
protest and were actually waving signs and flags and banners and
telling us peacefully but very explicitly that they don't want us in
their neighborhood.
One
thing that really troubled me that I was thinking about, on a
practical level and a moral level, was this policy that we started
practicing that when a roadside bomb would go off since that started
happening pretty frequently, some of our leaders, from a somewhat
high level, started saying that every time a bomb went off, anybody
standing in that area was open game to fire upon, with the logic that
if we can essentially out-terrorize the locals and make them more
afraid of us than of the people planting the bombs, then they're not
going to plant the bombs, even if they weren't directly involved in
the process.
And
there was one night when that happened and a bomb went off, and our
truck pulled ahead a few feet, and the trucks in front of us kicked
up a lot of dust, and the last thing I had seen before the dust went
up were children running in the street. And my leaders were yelling
at me to fire my weapon, and I said, "No. The last thing I saw
were children running around. I'm not going to do that." And
that didn't go over so well. And that was not long before this video
happened. And that's the reason why I wasn't on the mission that day
is because when I started refusing orders like that and saying, look,
not only is it morally wrong to just open fire for the reasons that
were being given, it practically doesn't make sense that, yeah, you
might scare a few people, but it's probably going to do a lot more to
motivate people who might have had neutral feelings towards us to now
be justified in becoming our enemies, and I wouldn't blame them if
they did.
I was
seeing these things go on. I made that decision that I wasn't going
to fire my weapon. My leader got really upset at me, and I firmly
defended myself.
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