For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Today on the show, Dar Jamal and Eric Margulies will be here.
We're going to start with Dar Jamal right now.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Well, I appreciate you joining us.
Everybody, you know Dar.
He's the author of Beyond the Green Zone and The Will to Resist.
He writes for Truthout.org.
And let me guess, you've seen this newly released video of this Apache helicopter shooting these men in Iraq in July, on July 12, 2007, released by WikiLeaks on Monday.
Dar, what did you see in the video there, pal?
Well, what I saw was something that all of us who've reported outside the wire in Iraq are all too familiar with, and that is just rampant killing of Iraqi civilians, whether it comes in the form of airstrikes from F-16s dropping giant bombs in civilian areas or instances like this one in particular with a helicopter strafing people on the ground, whether they be innocents or not, or whether it's soldiers riding around in patrols and shooting cars either for fun or because they come too close to them, or what's also very common is soldiers at checkpoints who open up on cars that come at them and don't stop when they want them to stop or sometimes even just for fun, too.
And I say this all based specifically on what soldiers have told me in addition to what I've seen on the ground as well, because, you know, I started reporting on this kind of thing, Scott, when I first got over to Iraq back in late 2003, and at the time even a lot of people in the anti-war movement thought, nah, this guy, he's biased, he's got some agenda or something, because American troops certainly wouldn't behave that way.
But, you know, here we are, the sad fact is, seven years later, seven years into the occupation, and, you know, me and several of my colleagues have been reporting on this kind of thing all along, and it takes kind of one video, and I'm glad this video got posted, and I'm very happy that it's gotten the type of exposure that it has.
But, again, you know, we can't allow people to, or ourselves, to think this is one isolated incident.
The military's done a couple of investigations.
They, of course, let the air crew off.
They found that they followed the rules of engagement, blah, blah, blah.
This is not an isolated incident.
This is not an anomaly.
This is not a few bad apples kind of thing.
This was standard operating procedure in Iraq, and this is precisely the reason why we have two independent polls now that show us more than 1.3 million Iraqis have died so far, directly because of the U.S.
-led invasion and occupation.
Well, there's a lot to confront there.
But we still have plenty of time to go over it.
But, you know, I guess I want to say this, Dara.
What really I think is the thing that I hate most about this video is it reminding me that there is a war in Iraq, and I'm an American, and TV and I have decided together that there is no war in Iraq.
It never happened, or if it did, it was back in the 1950s or sometime when TV was black and white and before I was born, and I don't have to care, and they'd all be dead by now anyway, and it's out of my mind.
It's the forgotten war like Korea.
And if it did happen, man, it probably wasn't really all that bad.
And now this video is coming and trying to remind me that it was only three years ago that we were at the height of the surge, insurgency in America, picking the bottom brigade side against the Sunni residents of Baghdad and helping finish that civil war there.
And, well, darn it, it bothers me.
I was doing just fine, forgetting about Iraq entirely, Dara, and just focusing on the good war over there in Afghanistan.
Exactly, Scott.
You know, this video certainly rained on all our parades.
I was ready to wrap it up, too, and call a wrap on my reporting on Iraq.
But, you know, lo and behold, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
You know, when we look at just in the last week alone, more than 250 Iraqis have died.
But, of course, we don't hear about this kind of thing because if U.S. soldiers aren't directly related or doing the killing themselves, we tend to not hear about it.
And that makes it very easy for the corporate media to overlook the fact that this tremendously destabilized, chaotic, violent situation in Iraq exists now.
And the bottom line is it did not exist prior to the March 18, 2003, U.S.
-led invasion of that country.
And that is the bottom line.
Well, what do you think about all this stuff about, well, we won after all.
Newsweek said, hey, mission accomplished, finally.
And all the neocons have written celebratory things saying, look, they got ink on their fingers.
Man, it's a democracy now.
Dara, why are you so damn cynical?
Sure, there's some bombings every day, but...
I know, and I love the hypocrisy of this because, you know, if these people could use...
And then there's just inherent racism and dehumanization that goes along with that type of reportage and the rhetoric that goes along with it because who of those folks in the American Enterprise Institute or Newsweek magazine or the other bogus media outlets that have reported on this election as being an astounding success, who of those people would tolerate, well, yeah, I went to go vote, and this bomb went off nearby, and it wiped out my wife and kids, but, you know, by golly, we have a democracy, and this is just a great success anyway.
And people might think, well, that's a bit of an extreme thing to say, but that's the reality in Iraq.
And if these people can't look at Iraqis as equal human beings to them, ergo when an Iraqi life is lost, it counts just as much as when an American life is lost, and treat the situation accordingly, then I think that they need to really look at how effectively they've dehumanized Iraqis or how strong their racism is against Iraqis simply because they speak a different language or their skin's a little bit darker than ours or they practice a different religion because the reality of Iraq is an absolute catastrophe.
It's not getting better.
It's only consistently over the entire course of the occupation over any particular segment of time.
And when people talk about what improvements have happened in Iraq, they talk about it in terms of, like, well, you know, instead of 200 people dying a week, we only had 50 die this week, so things are getting better, and it's kind of like how they talk about the economy here.
Well, it's getting better because instead of shedding, you know, 500,000 jobs, we're only shedding 450,000, so that's great news.
It's like, well, yeah, you know what?
Tell that to the people who can't, who don't have any money to buy food for their family.
So it's that type of mindset that I think allows this catastrophe to continue and has kind of dampened people's outrage, the outrage that all of us felt even before the invasion was launched that drew millions of people into the street.
Well, that's the type of outrage that I think we need to get back, and thankfully there's a video going around where people can watch with their own eyes just the blatant willingness to kill people where it couldn't be more clear.
These people are not armed.
They're not attacking Americans or anybody else.
This was just blatant slaughter, and I think that it's good that it's going around, and I'm glad to see that more than a million people have seen it on YouTube, just that one source alone, and I hope that more people continue to see it, and I hope that it sparks up some more of this outrage.
I want to get into a bit of the racism issue here in a minute, but as far as the narrative of, look, an election.
So isn't that great?
The democratic process.
Veteran Saddam Hussein, he used to reelect himself with 99%, and here in this case it looks like the current prime minister didn't even try or wasn't able to rig the election for himself effectively and all that, but at the same time it seems like the neocons are counting on the ignorance of the American people, and because Chris Matthews only talks about what Republicans and Democrats say about each other on Capitol Hill all day for two and a half hours, twice a day or whatever, the American people don't really know anything about Iraq, who's in power there, which different factions are doing this, that, or the other thing.
There might be a little bit of a mention of something, but never any real context.
And so I remember back in 2005 when they did the election, that really with the El Salvador option helped precipitate the civil war by turning the whole country over to the Supreme Islamic Council and Muqtada al-Sadr basically and their Iraqi National Alliance.
Even John Stewart was going, wow, maybe George Bush was right.
Look at this woman with purple ink on her finger.
Maybe Iraq is a democracy now.
Well, then another few hundred thousand people got killed after that.
Now we have another one of these, and it turns out Muqtada al-Sadr is the kingmaker, and he's sitting in Tehran right now trying to figure out whether he wants to throw his weight towards CIA agent murderer Alawi or Revolutionary Guard agent murderer Maliki.
And this is what the neocons and Newsweek are telling the American people.
Look, they've got ink on their fingers.
You don't have a narrative.
You don't know who's who.
You don't know who's winning or if one group takes power over this group, what consequences that's likely to have.
None of this context is provided.
But look, a woman with purple ink.
We're actually doing okay here, folks.
That's why it works, because the rest of the time they won't tell us about Iraq at all.
Then when they say anything, they go, hey, look, a still shot.
Make up your own 10,000 words.
Well, that's exactly right, Scott, and I think that's a really good description and analysis of how this has been perpetuated from the beginning, where we have a corporate media that relies on the ignorance and a U.S. government that relies on the ignorance of the American public, and, of course, the corporate media has been instrumental in ensuring that ignorance.
I mean, we can go back to before the invasion took place, and what people got on TV was a graphic of a picture of Saddam Hussein's head with a bullseye on it or crosshairs, this kind of thing.
It's like, you know what, this is all you need to know.
You don't need to know that the CIA backed him in a coup that put him in a position of power in 1968.
You don't need to know that the U.S. government supported him through his worst atrocities.
You don't need to know that the U.S. supported both Iraq and Iran during that brutal eight-year war that killed over a million people.
You don't need to know these things.
You don't need to know that we supported the 12 1⁄2 years of genocidal sanctions, that, oh yeah, according to Madeleine Albright in the U.N., killed over half a million Iraqi children.
You don't need to know these things.
You just need to know this is the bad guy, and we're going to kill him, and then you're going to be safe, and you can go shopping in that safety, and rest assured that everything's just fine.
And it's the same with these elections.
You don't need to know that Maliki, even before the elections were released, when it became clear to him that he was not going to get the plurality, that he basically went to the Supreme Court in Iraq.
This is going to sound a little familiar to folks.
So he goes to the Supreme Court and basically has them change the rules of the game so that instead of whoever gets the plurality during the election can start forming their own government.
Instead, he now has until June when the parliament reconvenes to basically take out as many of Alawi's elected ministers of parliament as possible because basically the last man standing come June when parliament reconvenes, whoever has the most MPs, that is who is going to get to form the new cabinet.
So conveniently, Maliki's basically given himself two months to go out and hit as many of Alawi's people as possible, and that's exactly what he's done.
So far, he's taken two of them into custody, charging them with terrorism.
You know, everything's terrorism now, so he's charging them with terrorism.
And then one person is whereabouts unknown, and then another MP in Alawi's list is in hiding.
So already, you know, he's at least made it even-steven and probably already taken the lead.
And then, of course, we have the Sadr wild card, which is a bit of another story.
But, you know, and you described it well.
And, you know, all that I just described is against the backdrop of the context that both of these guys are U.S. stooges.
And perhaps this is why Newsweek declares it a resounding success, aside from just the propaganda value.
But, hey, it's a resounding success because we have Tweedledee and Tweedledum as the two leading candidates in this election.
And, oh, guess what?
The U.S. created both these guys, put both these guys in positions of power that they're in, and they wouldn't exist without the U.S. occupation in that country.
And guess what?
One of them is going to win, so the U.S. is going to win either way.
And maybe that's why Newsweek was so triumphant about their Mission Accomplished cover.
Oh, yeah, it took a little longer because we didn't have that kind of a rigged deck in the last election.
But in this one, by golly, we do.
But then, of course, things are a bit more complicated now because, as you said, we have Sadr, who has had this, I think it was a quite astute political move.
He had a referendum vote, sort of an informal, an official referendum vote among his followers.
And, actually, the vast majority of people didn't choose Allawi or Maliki.
They chose Ibrahim al-Jafari, who is the guy who actually was chosen as the first prime minister in Iraq in the wake of the 2005 election.
Now, he's also a Dawa party guy like Maliki, but a different faction of Dawa, they say, right?
That's true, and he is much less affiliated with the Americans, and he's anti-occupation, and that's exactly why the U.S. decided to give him the boot and replace him with Maliki back in April of 2006.
And so this is an interesting thing to see how this is going to play out.
But at the end of the day, you know, shelve everything I just said for a moment and think about the fact that, as usual, as we've gone through this occupation, it's the Iraqi people paying the price for all of this nonsense, all of this U.S. meddling, all of this U.S. orchestrating, all of this propaganda.
What is consistently lost in the mix is that even today, another day, 50 more Iraqis killed in a series of massive bombings across the capital city, and that's just Baghdad.
When I'm talking about the rest of the country, we are back up to levels of violence and death on a daily basis, starting about a week ago in Iraq, that are comparable to the bloodletting of 2006, 2007.
Yeah.
Well, and now that we're in Democrat times, Dar, maybe conservatives can understand.
It's no different than fighting over the school board.
Is it going to be controlled by conservative Christians, or is it going to be controlled by secular humanists?
And they fight like mad over who's going to control the school board.
Well, when you create a monopoly on power and then you have, you know, you create a contest over who's going to hold that power, what do you think's going to happen?
Especially after you decapitate the government, abolish the army and the party in power, and set up a free-for-all here.
But let me ask you about the racism part, because this is a major justification for the behavior of American soldiers over there.
You can hear it in the voices of the helicopter pilots, how they consider the lives of the people on the ground that they're killing to be absolutely worthless, you know, as though they're all politicians down there or something.
But I wonder exactly – and by the way, everybody, Dar Jamal, he was a heroic, unembedded reporter.
He didn't go team up with the Marines.
He went and did this reporting himself.
He wrote a whole book about it, spent years on the ground there in Iraq telling the real story.
And so I was just wondering if you could give us a little bit of insight into how it is that the most racially diverse military probably in the history of the world, ours, can actually still act like a bunch of white supremacists all the time.
Is it just nationalism, Americans, and, you know, Americans are the master race no matter where our grandparents came from, and Iraqis are just Hajjis, or is it not really racism?
Is it something else or a mix of different concepts here that I don't understand, Dar?
Well, it's a mix of some of the things you just touched on, and I want to read you a brief quote from a guy named Robert J. Lifton.
He's a noted, esteemed psychiatrist who actually helped create the diagnosis of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is a guy who has written numerous books and articles, covered in the wake of World War II what happened in Hitler's Germany.
He wrote a book called The Nazi Doctors, where he went in and explored, how is it possible for human beings to carry out atrocities against other human beings?
How is this possible?
What has to happen in their mind where they can be totally okay with, for example, loading people up on trains to be shipped into places where they're going to be incinerated on moths, or put into rooms and gassed all in one shot?
How can human beings do this?
And I think this speaks specifically to your question, is how is it that American troops in Iraq can look at Iraqis and just be completely okay with just killing them, even women, children, unarmed men, etc.?
How can this be okay?
And the quote I want to read you is from an article that he wrote back in 2004, where he was talking specifically about the Iraq war and occupation, and he said, quote, Atrocity-producing situations, which is what he called the occupation in Iraq, and I'm sure he would call that in Afghanistan, atrocity-producing situations occur when a power structure sets up an environment where ordinary people, men or women, no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities.
He adds, This kind of atrocity-producing situation surely occurs to some degree in all wars, including World War II, our last so-called good war.
But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, and I think that is key, driven by profound ideological distortions, ergo, USA is the best, white people are better than darker-colored-skinned people, etc.
So especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, it's particularly prone to sustained atrocity, all the more so when it becomes an occupation.
And I think that's what it is.
Well, and I've got to chime in here too, man, is that George Bush and the entire government and the entire media have lied to us for a damn near decade here about Islam being the reason that people attack the United States.
Well, these particular guys believe in a really bad version of it that really makes them get up and go kill Americans and Jews.
And so we're talking about the Muslim world, the Arab world, American troops occupying the land, where these terrible people with this terrible religion are basing their move to create an Islamo-fascist caliphate from, the geographical center of our terror war.
That's right.
I mean, you have to give them credit, Scott.
I mean, they've done a great job in this brainwashing and in this propagandizing this whole situation to their benefit, where you look at a people of Iraq who, you know, it's their country.
This was an illegal invasion and occupation to begin with.
It violated the Geneva Conventions.
The former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, said so as much on BBC in fall of 2004.
So this is the people who were already strangled by the 12-and-a-half-year-long genocidal sanctions, brutalized under a savage dictator that the U.S. helped install and maintain throughout most of his reign.
And yet the U.S. goes in and invades and occupies these people for very clear reasons, oil, support of Israel, new geostrategic positioning of the United States military in the region.
Very, very clear.
Anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells can see this.
And yet then most people were led to believe, and many people in this country still believe, well, this is about fighting Islamic terrorism, Islamic extremism.
Many people still think it has something to do with September 11.
Just all these absolutely bogus ideas, and this is the facade.
This is propaganda, and it's been very effective.
And so when you have troops, so many of them, that bought pieces or all of these arguments and then raced and joined the military in the wake of September 11 and wanted to go overseas and just kill Muslims and kill bad guys, I mean, that's what makes this possible.
And you still have these people over there carrying out these things, and then, of course, you start to throw in the PTSD factor.
You know, someone who's been over there four or five tours, and they're just basically shot psychologically and emotionally and completely numbed out and dead inside.
You know, they're just going around killing people, and at this point they're probably sociopaths, where they're completely okay with killing people and don't even think twice about it.
So, you know, all of that together basically leads into what Lifton described as an atrocity-producing situation.
It is a no-win situation for everybody involved.
And, of course, we have to hold these troops responsible for the slaughtering that they're doing.
You know, these guys in this helicopter in this video, you know, they need to be court-martialed.
These guys are war criminals.
You know, if it's a just society, at the very least, they're going to be spending the rest of their lives in prison, at the very least.
So they have to be held accountable.
But ultimately, of course, we all know who's ultimately accountable.
It's the former Bush administration and the current Obama administration who are perpetuating this.
Obama administration has already refused to begin a new independent investigation into this WikiLeaks video of how did this happen, why, who's responsible.
Of course, just like everything else involving the Bush administration, they've refused to touch it and seek out justice.
Obama announces investigation into who leaked it.
We're going to get them.
Well, I want to continue on this theme about the actual pilots themselves and their responsibility, that kind of thing.
When I was, you know, 17, 18, getting out of high school, hell, they probably wouldn't have had me anyway, but Bill Clinton was the president.
There was no way in hell I was entertaining the idea of going and killing people for that guy, you know, fighting countries that had never attacked us and things like that.
So I don't really understand the mentality.
You know, I mean, I grew up in America watching TV and movies, so I've seen Full Metal Jacket and whatever.
But, you know, something that I hear when these guys are talking about their post-traumatic stress disorder a lot is that you can't just turn it off.
And they talk about how hard it is to become not a killer anymore but just a regular guy again when they get back to America.
And they talk about even, I guess I don't think I hear too much, you can't turn it off, all the experience of being over there.
What you can't turn off is the training that you get in boot camp, that you are a killer.
And I just wonder if you can kind of, you know, elaborate on the mindset of what it is, what does the Army do when they take a kid from the football team, the high school football team, and they put them in an Apache helicopter and they give them the job of killing people all day.
You know, how much different is it?
It's like being a sociopath for a profession.
You have to be a sociopath, right?
You can't sit there and cry every time you kill somebody or else you're not going to be an effective Apache pilot.
So, you know, when you talk about the responsibility of the guys, especially, well, let's see, here's another follow-up question.
I don't know if you can fit this in or we'll get back to it.
There's a question or a debate, I guess, about the video of, you know, two different incidents, sort of.
First, they shoot at a bunch of guys, maybe one of whom has an AK-47, maybe two, although I don't think the guys with the AKs were anywhere near the crowd when they actually got shot.
But then there's the second incident, which is murdering the good Samaritan and wounding his children and the wounded man, the reporter, that they're trying to get away with.
And so people are saying, well, maybe in the first instance, that would have been justified.
If the guy had an AK in his hand, you can kill the whole crowd.
But maybe killing the good Samaritan would be beyond the rules of engagement.
I just, anyway, if you can get into the mindset of what it means to actually join the Army, the mindset you have to adopt to be in the military, occupying somebody else's land, and then maybe a little bit about the rules of engagement and whether if a group of guys on a street corner in Iraq are standing there and one of them has an AK, whether that's a legitimate target or not.
Yeah, again.
I'm sorry for going on and on, but you can see you bring up so many things I want to ask you, I've got to get them out while I can still think of them.
Fair enough, I understand.
Well, first of all, the mindset, I'll talk about just under two broad points, the mindset of soldiers and then the rules of engagement, because I really want to talk about that with you as well, because that has, of course, been the primary defense of the Pentagon in these air crews that carried out this slaughter, as well they were following the rules of engagement.
So we'll get into that.
But the mindset, we talked earlier a little bit about what leads people to join the military, and so many people, most people I've talked to in the military joined more recently in the wake of September 11, again, because of the propaganda.
Well, they believed the lies, they believed that they needed to go over and kill Iraqis or Iranians or whoever they're being sent overseas to kill, people in Afghanistan, et cetera.
So they believe this stuff, they join up, and then what happens is the military has become very, very effective.
I mean, they've always been really good at brainwashing people, but they've been very effective at turning people into killers.
So, for example, studies in the wake of World War I showed that in World War I, only one out of ten soldiers, American soldiers, actually pulled the trigger to kill another human being.
Most human beings, most halfway adjusted human beings, don't want to kill another human being, even in a situation like that.
I mean, it's your natural tendency to preserve the lives of other human beings.
And that was the case.
I mean, we saw that statistically in the wake of World War I, where even people in the U.S. military, only one in ten, when surveyed, actually shot to kill another person.
Well, fast forward to now, and recent statistics show us, it's more than nine in ten will actually shoot to kill.
So we've seen a complete reversal in how effective the military has been at literally turning people into killers, that they're willing to go follow orders without questioning them.
Don't think about the Geneva Conventions.
Don't think about rules of engagement, any of this kind of stuff.
Just this, if I'm told to go do this thing, I am going to go do this thing.
And that's, you know, again, we see soldiers, you know, so many people I talked to in my second book that said, hey, you know, we would be marching around in formation, doing these heinous chants about killing women, raping women, cutting them in half, killing babies, kill, kill, kill, blood, blood, blood.
You know, this is commonplace.
Anyone in the military would admit, yeah, that's what we do.
That's how we're trained.
That's the type of mindset that we're given to.
And then rules of engagement, I actually have a piece that will be coming out on Truthout either later today or possibly tomorrow, and rules of engagement, ROE, you know, again, this is something we've been reporting on, and I know I've seen a lot of stories on this on antiwar.com over the years, too, particularly in the wake of the winter soldier event in March of 2008 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where a lot of vets got together and talked about this.
You know, there was one guy there at that hearing, Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines, and I want to just read you one of his quotes because I have my piece here in front of me.
He says, quote, during the course of my three tours in Iraq, the rules of engagement changed a lot.
The higher the threat, the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond.
Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and a nudge, was to carry drop weapons or, by my third tour, drop shovels.
We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we would just toss the weapon on the body and make them look like an insurgent, end quote.
Another quote, a guy named Hart Figes, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served in Iraq also, and he talked to me about taking orders over the radio.
He said, quote, one time they said to fire on all taxi cabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.
One of the snipers replied back, excuse me, did I hear that right, fire on all taxi cabs?
The lieutenant colonel responded, you heard me, trooper, fire on all taxi cabs.
After that, the town lit up with all the units firing on cars.
This was my first experience of the war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.
All right, I'm sorry for cursing, but I used to be a cab driver, and that's just, yeah, anyway.
When somebody arrived, it ought to not be a death sentence, but you know what?
Go ahead and read me more.
What did other soldiers say about Iraq?
Okay, well, we've got another guy, Vincent Emmanuel, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in Iraq in the northern area.
Al-Qa'im is the town up near the Syrian border, and he talked about emptying entire magazines of bullets into a city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees, and stopping to take trophy photos of the bodies.
He then said, quote, an act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by.
This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.
And then we go on.
I have another guy named Michael LeDuc, a corporal in the Marines who was part of the U.S. attack on Fallujah in November 2004, and he said that the orders from his battalion JAG officer that he received before entering the city were thus, quote, you see an individual with a white flag, and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey command.
Assume it's a trick and kill him.
And then we have Brian Kasler, also a corporal in the Marines, who spoke about the dehumanizing process of Iraqis that was so commonplace with soldiers, and he saw this.
He ended up doing two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, but he saw dehumanization that was present even during the actual invasion of Iraq.
So back in March 2003, he said, quote, on these convoys going into the country from Kuwait, I saw Marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road.
And then I had Scott Ewing, who served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006.
He admitted to intentionally giving candy to Iraqi children for reasons other than winning hearts and minds.
He said, quote, there was also another motive.
If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn't attack.
We used the kids as human shields, end quote.
And then I want to get back to the rules of engagement real quick.
We have Adam Kokash.
He served in Fallujah beginning in February 2004 for about a year.
He actually showed a card that he carried around in Iraq, a little card he could put in his pocket that had the rules of engagement, and he showed that and he said, this card says, quote, nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself, end quote.
And he pointed out that, quote, reasonable certainty was the condition for using deadly force under the rules of engagement, and this led to rampant civilian deaths.
He said, quote, we changed the rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear, end quote.
He added, at one point we imposed a curfew on the city and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.
And then he went on to add for males, well, I'm sorry, let me preface this.
He added that he was in charge of a checkpoint that when the siege was coming up or another U.S. attack was going to happen in the city that he was responsible for letting out women and children, but turning back men and not letting them out of the city.
Wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We're talking about November 2004, just after Bush's accountability moment.
And for weeks they advertised, if you are not a bad guy, get the hell out of Fallujah because we're coming.
And what that basically meant sounds like to me from what you're saying now and from what I remember from back then, anybody inside Fallujah once that assault started was fair game, basically weapons free.
Just found a quote from MSNBC yesterday talking about weapons free in Fallujah, November 2004.
And you're telling me, you're quoting Kokesh as saying that his job was letting the women and children out, but turning any fighting age males or maybe any males back into the city.
They were not allowed to leave before the free weapons free zone was created there.
That's exactly correct.
And even during a couple of the ceasefires, during both sieges, in fact, what he's talking about now applies, if I remember correctly, to the April siege.
But certainly I've heard similar information, even worse information for the November siege.
But he said, you know, manning a checkpoint like that where they were letting out women and children, but turning back the men, he said, quote, for males, they had to be under 14 years of age to let them out of the city.
So I had to go over there and turn men back who had just been separated from their women and children.
We thought we were being gracious, end quote.
And then, you know, there's many, many other instances.
I mean, this is a longer piece because there's so many instances I just simply couldn't squeeze it all in.
But another guy, Jason Hurd, he served in central Baghdad from November 2004 to November 2005.
He talked about how after his unit took stray rounds from a nearby firefight, one of his machine gunners responded by firing over 200 rounds into a nearby building.
He said, quote, we fired indiscriminately at this building.
Things like that happened every day in Iraq.
We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction.
You know, it's interesting to me that, and again, you know, I'm not a veteran.
I don't really know about strategy and tactics and this, that, and the other thing.
But it sure seems like once they just closed down the checkpoints and went back to their bases, people quit dying at checkpoints all day.
And once they decided that they would do, well, basically withdraw to their bases in general, the violence really did die down by quite a bit.
I mean, as you were explaining earlier, there's still massive violence there, and the propaganda of the surge worked and all that is ultimately a bunch of nonsense.
But then again, it used to be 3,000-something a month killed over there during the height of the surge and all the seek and destroy tactics.
And it seems like at least post-Civil War, the Petraeus doctrine of basically, for the most part, leave the people of Iraq alone has actually really worked.
All these checkpoints did was serve to get a bunch of people killed.
Did they ever serve any good purpose at all?
It seems like they only just made the insurgency worse.
What?
Another pregnant woman got killed at a checkpoint.
That's it.
I'm joining today, they said.
Right, right.
And that's a good point.
I mean, and that is one of the key reasons why in the last couple of years, I mean, granted, we're still talking about, again, the totally unacceptable number of Iraqis being killed.
You know, any number is unacceptable.
But we did see a decline, primarily one of the main reasons being that the U.S. quit running so many patrols.
They took down most of their checkpoints, and they basically pulled themselves back into the megabases.
And so exactly as you said, the number of checkpoint deaths, which is just absolutely staggering, the number of random deaths from people when they go on patrol and shoot up cars or take fire from someplace, and as we just heard, just light up an entire building or area just indiscriminately.
So all of this, for the most part, you know, save for the odd airstrike, has gone away.
And so that is a big reason why there was a decline in the number of Iraqi civilians being killed, as well as a decline in the number of American soldiers being killed, as well as decline in the ability for the resistance to recruit.
Because as we see in Afghanistan right now, every other day we have a Taliban showing up and saying, you know what NATO's doing, what the U.S. is doing, these airstrikes and the drones?
They're our single biggest recruiter.
We have people coming to us every day wanting to join up because they just lost their brother, father, sister, kid, insert name of relative or friend here.
And so that kind of thing is, you know, going off the charts in Afghanistan.
And now in Iraq, you know, we're going to see how things go.
But at least for right now, as far as direct U.S. soldier involvement, it's less.
And so that's an important point.
All right.
Everybody listen to this part real careful, okay?
Star, what makes you think that a million-something Iraqis died in this war?
Well, I cite two independent polls.
One is from Oxford over in England called Opinion Business Research, and it actually is now, I think, I might be wrong, but I think it's over a year old.
But it came out and stated that, according to their surveys, 1.3 million Iraqis had died as a direct result of the U.S.
-led invasion and occupation.
Another poll called Just Foreign Policy, based here in the United States, actually has a number a little bit higher than that.
It's a little bit more than 1.3 million Iraqis dead.
And then recently, actually, I saw this actually on antiwar.com, just within the last week, Mohammed al-Badari, the former head of the IAEA with the U.N., also mentioned that more than a million Iraqis have died since the U.S. invaded Iraq.
And, of course, all of these figures are based, the foundation of these figures is the more recent Landsat survey that estimated 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the U.S.
-led invasion and occupation.
However, that number is severely outdated.
I mean, that came out, if I remember right, back in October of 2006.
Right.
So it's very, very outdated.
And so these more recent surveys have extrapolated, they've based it on that, and then extrapolated numbers from Iraqi Red Crescent, NGOs, hospitals in Iraq, etc., to come up with this new figure.
Now, to be explicitly clear on this, what we're talking about in terms of the Opinion Business Research Survey, which, by the way, it was first done in the fall of 2007, and Alan Hyde, the director of Opinion Business Research, who, by the way, funded the study himself, this was not some George Soros front trying to help the Democrats or something, he said, a million, huh?
You know what?
Let's do it again.
And they spent another four or five months doing it again.
And then I interviewed him in the spring of 2008, and he said, yep, a million.
But what that means is excess deaths.
That means if you take the rate at which people died during the blockade and the permanent no-fly zone bombings of the Clinton era in the first couple of years of the Bush Jr. administration, and you take the rate at which people died, and then you compare that to how it was after the invasion, never mind how it would have been if Iraq had not been under sanctions, but you compare that to how it was after the invasion, and then you see the excess deaths.
So this doesn't just mean people blown up by American F-16s and Apache helicopters.
It also means people who couldn't get to the hospital when they had an accident because the wreckage from people who had been killed by American F-16s and Apache helicopters littered the roads, or there was a checkpoint that prevented them from getting to the hospital, or there was cholera in their drinking water, or they had treatable diseases that normally they would not have died from, but instead they did.
That kind of thing.
So that what we have is a million people who are dead who would not have been, hundreds of thousands of which are direct casualties from American firepower, but not all of them.
That's exactly right.
And I think people need to understand this and get it and let it sink in, because one thing that's been distressing for me to see more recently in the last several months, I don't know if it's attrition or what, but even some people that I respect that write critically about what's happening in Iraq and have done a really good job of covering the situation have shied away from that figure.
Maybe it scares them.
Maybe it's too shocking for them.
Maybe they think they won't be taken seriously if they talk about it because it's such a high figure.
But even people that are normally really dead on in their analysis and really do excellent reporting, they'll say things like, well, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
No, it's very clear.
It is scientifically backed up information, extremely credible sources, and there's no debate about this in most countries overseas.
Again, it's here in the U.S. where this debate and doubt has been instilled, and the reality is that both these numbers show very, very clearly 1.3 million plus Iraqis have died as a direct result of the U.S.
-led invasion and occupation, and we all have blood on our hands.
If you pay any taxes whatsoever, if you go through a day and are doing things to try to stop this, then we're all complicit, all of us are.
I am, you are, all of us, and we are fully responsible for doing whatever we need to do to make this situation end, to change this situation, because this is a shockingly high number.
I mean, any number is too high, but this is just off the charts.
I mean, this is why there's groups and organizations and conferences being held overseas that I go to from time to time about the situation in Iraq that regularly refer to this as genocide, and I do not think that that is too harsh a term when we look at U.S. policy, the goals, how they train the military, what this is all about, what they hope to accomplish, the type of weapons being used, what happened during the sanctions, the intentional bombing of water plants, electricity, hospitals, etc., you know, intentionally doing this to create climates where diseases would spread, to cripple people, to take down the people's will to live, etc.
I mean, this is exactly what this is, and then here we are, you know, 2010, more than seven years now into this occupation, things continue to get worse, and these numbers are this high because this has been the policy, this has been the goal of the policy, and we are looking right now every day at the results of this policy.
Well, I'm not too sure about the term genocide.
I mean, even when Harry Truman sent three million Russian soldiers back to Stalin to be murdered at the end of World War II in Operation Keelhaul, it wasn't really a genocide, even though it was that many.
I mean, a genocide is really an attempt to exterminate an entire race or ethnicity of people, and so mass murder upon mass murder and atrocity upon atrocity upon atrocity doesn't necessarily amount to genocide, and I always like to be real careful with terms like that.
It's sort of like brainwashing.
You know, you watch CNN all day.
Yeah, they're manipulating you.
They're not really brainwashing you.
That's sort of, you know, it's like when people say impacted when they mean affected.
It's a bit too much for me, but your point is well taken, and I absolutely agree with you that even if we can't count the 1.3 million bodies and know exactly for sure all of their names and have a pile of all of their shoes or that kind of thing, these are the best numbers.
Nobody else has, you know, a rack body count that counts only the verified Reuters reports on the subject or something.
It has tens of thousands.
But all of the, as you say, scientific surveys on the subject, if you look at the timeline, even the Lancet surveys in 2004, in the fall of 2004, they said it was 250-something thousand, and then in the fall of 2006, as you say, it was up to almost 700,000, and now we're talking about, you know, over a million people.
And I agree with you.
For anybody to say at least tens of thousands or some hundreds of thousands, as though it might be 200,000 or 300,000 at this point, I think is a disservice.
It's not like opinion business research has been discredited or anything.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And we just have to keep in mind, and in our hearts, I think, that the real impact of this situation is absolutely devastating.
It's hard to take in.
All of us are tired of it.
All of us are sick that this has gone on this long and caused such a catastrophe for the Iraqi people.
But, you know, this is the reality, you know, and this one WikiLeaks video, I think it really reminds people this is what happens over there when you send people into these situations, into no-win situations, this is what's going to go down.
And this happens every day over there to one degree or another.
Maybe it's one person being killed at a checkpoint, or maybe it's a slaughter like this from the air, or, you know, some of the other instances that I read you from the article.
But this type of thing is going on every day over there.
And now, whether U.S. soldiers are directly involved or not, two out of three Iraqis don't have access to clean drinking water, staggering unemployment, not enough electricity, bombs going off in Baghdad every day again.
This is what Iraqi people are having to live with on a daily basis.
Yeah, well, and millions of them are still living in refugee camps in Jordan and Syria.
How's that for voting with your feet?
How's that for the surge words in Everything's Fine Now?
That's right.
They prefer to live in a refugee camp in Syria than come home.
That's right.
4.8 million people still displaced from their homes, roughly half those in the country, half out.
According to the U.N., a survey they did with the Iraqi refugees in Syria, more than 90 percent of them never have any intention of ever going back home.
Everybody, that is Dar Jamal.
You can find him at truthout.org.
He's got a brand new article on this subject that will be coming out today or tomorrow.
Please also read his books, Beyond the Green Zone, which is a masterpiece, and The Will to Resist, very important as well.
Thank you, Dar.
Yeah, always good to be with you.
