08/29/12 – Craig Corrie – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 now, for real.
Going back to 2003.
And check out my blog, Stress, at scotthorton.org/stress.
Our next guest is Craig Corey.
Welcome to the show, Craig.
How are you doing?
Good to talk to you again.
I'm doing pretty well.
Thank you for having me on.
All right, well, I guess all things considered, I'm happy to hear that you're doing pretty well.
I guess you've had a little while to get used to the fact that you're not going to get any kind of justice from the Israeli court system.
And so you probably weren't too, I'm sure you're disappointed, but not surprised to hear the court's ruling the other day, huh?
Well, that's probably a pretty good way to describe it.
I also think, you know, we're, I think my wife keeps saying, deeply concerned, which is, it sounds kind of like we're part of a diplomatic corps.
But I think that the court's win even passed just a simple ruling on Rachel.
And they said that what happened was an act of war, the judge agreed that it was an act of war, and so that the military can't be held responsible for what happens in any act of war.
And I remind the listeners that, you know, Rachel was in the Gaza Strip, and the Gaza Strip is actually, in legal terms, it's under occupation, it's not a war zone.
And even if it were, you know, I'm an old, and I don't really like to brag about this, but I'm an old Vietnam War veteran, and you're responsible for the citizens that are around you, even if you were in a war zone.
And so there's no excuse for telling somebody simply because you're in war.
You have to look at the absolute essence of what's going on at that moment, and look at it that way.
And I don't think the judge went anywhere close to that.
So we're disappointed with this, largely, I mean, it's very personal and about Rachel in that, but it's even worse, because it just gets carte blanche to a military of Israel to do whatever it wants to do.
And it continues, I think, what others have called this attitude of impunity for whatever the Israeli Defense Force wants to do.
And that's certainly not why we came to court.
Oh, no.
So, in other words, this is sort of precedent-setting, that, no, really, go ahead, a war zone means a free-fire zone, which, if I'm remembering my Vietnam War history, that was the most controversial thing, is whenever they would say, between here and here, everyone's the enemy.
Yeah.
And, you know, this, well, the person that investigated it, people may remember that actually caught on audio tape was a conversation about a captain going out to confirm the kill in the same area, which Rachel was in southern Gaza, in a strip that goes right between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
She was in this area up close to a home.
But right in that same area, I think just a few miles away of that, a 13-year-old girl was shot at and killed by the soldiers, Israeli soldiers, in a tower.
And what happened is, the tape of the radio conversations got out into the media, and there was a captain that went over and confirmed the kill of a 13-year-old child, a little Iman.
And it's that attitude, and we saw that drawn out into the court documents.
We saw in the log, the operations log that was submitted as evidence in Rachel's case, that the colonel dictated into that log that everybody on the border should be shot to kill, and, or every adult on the border should be, the standing orders were to shoot to kill.
And then, under cross-examination, he tried to say, well, that wasn't really what he meant, and he was misinterpreted.
But then his commander, the brigade commander, Kiki Suarez, said, no, that was the order.
And that's the order that was carried out, not only on this little 13-year-old child, but also, shortly after Rachel was killed, there were two other internationals killed right within a two-mile stretch in a seven-week time frame, right on that border.
And one was Tom Herndl, who was a photojournalist, I think he was about 20 years old when he was killed, I think 20.
And then James Miller, who was photographing, actually, an award, what turned out to be an award-winning film on home demolitions, he got two Emmys, posthumously, for that film that he was doing.
But both of those people were shot.
And in Tom Herndl's case, eventually, a soldier was convicted of killing Tom, and served part of a, I believe it was a seven-year, maybe an eight-year sentence, he served part of that.
And in James Miller's case, nobody was ever convicted.
But in Great Britain, a coroner's inquest looked into those two killings, combined them to see if anything was happening on a consistent basis, and it ended up with Great Britain calling for the extradition of the people that had killed, at least in James's case, killed James to put him on trial in Great Britain.
And finally, there was a settlement in their case.
James's wife had two little children, and they sort of had to go about their lives.
So all I'm trying to say is, this sort of thing went on.
It was encouraged, as near as I can tell, it was encouraged by the officers.
And I think any person of conscience has to oppose that.
Well, there's a lot of different things to go over there.
First of all, to understand it right, and I'm sorry, because I didn't really do this justice at all in the introduction.
You and your wife, Cindy, are the parents of Rachel Corey, who was murdered by an Israeli IDF bulldozer tank driver back in 2003, and you had this civil lawsuit against them.
And it was about, if I understand the media right, which either they got it wrong or I do is likely.
But anyway, something about the lawsuit is based on the murder being intentional rather than an accident.
And so I would like for you to clarify that, if you could, please.
But also, I think what you're telling me is that the court did not rule on whether he did it deliberately or not.
The court ruled that it was a war zone, and so I, as a judge, don't have the right to rule on these issues.
My understanding has been denied, quashed, or something basically, right?
Well, he sort of did all of the above, but yes, essentially what we allege was that either she was intentionally killed, and our family has avoided using the word murder throughout all this time, because we really wanted a thorough investigation, and in fact, President Bush was promised a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation by Prime Minister Sharon the day after Rachel was killed, and it's still the U.S. government's view that that investigation has not happened, that she wasn't thoroughly investigated.
So the only- Well, wait, now, that's a very important point.
That's the official position of the U.S. State Department, is that this investigation was not good enough.
Yes, and including the White House.
We've had contact with the White House in the last few years, and they have continued to state that that's still the unchanged position of the U.S. government from, I guess, literally day two.
Well, there was some chance for them to do an investigation, but they didn't come through, so it was first put in writing to us by Colin Powell's Chief of Staff when Colin Powell was Secretary of State.
His Chief of Staff wrote us a letter on June 11, 2004, stating that he could say unequivocally that what he had read, or what he had seen notes of, but some people in the embassy had read a legal brief done after the investigation.
What he said is, we can state without equivocation that legal brief does not indicate an investigation that was thorough, credible, and transparent.
Throughout the intervening years, there have been numerous attempts to try to get a better investigation, inquiries into that, by the U.S. government, but as one, actually the Acting Head of Citizen Services, Michelle Bernier-Toth, wrote to us in a letter and she said that their inquiries had gone unanswered or ignored.
Now, this is a government who gets usually $3 billion, that's with a B, billion dollars of military aid from the United States, but this year is getting $4 billion worth of aid.
Maybe your listeners think that that money could be better used at home, I don't know, but you would think that we could get some answers with that sort of change going overseas.
When I interviewed you and your wife before, and it's been a couple of years, I think, you guys told me something that I had never heard in all of the media covers that I'd read of it, which I guess was more limited than it should have been, but it's certainly, I don't believe this is part of the common narrative and story of what happened here, that there were five children in that house, that she was not symbolically standing in front of a house, and because this is what the right wing, especially the war bloggers kind of thing is, is, oh, here she threw her life away by jumping in between a house and a bulldozer, so too bad for her, that kind of thing, but she was protecting the lives of five children in there, is that right?
Yeah, there were two brothers that owned that house, it was an upstairs-downstairs apartment, so there were four adults, the two brothers, their wives, and then a total of five children at that time, and Rachel knew this family.
She had stayed on some occasions in the home.
The home was built in a neighborhood, and there were houses in between it in the Egyptian border when it was built, but those houses were torn down, destroyed by the Israeli military using bulldozers over time, and so eventually this house was right out on the border.
At night, the Israeli soldiers would come by in their tanks or armored personnel carriers, and they would just shoot into the house, so the children and Rachel, on some nights, they would have to leave their bedroom, because the house was still standing when Cindy and I got there some six months later.
At that time, it was destroyed shortly after we left, but we saw where the bullet holes came through the front wall of the children's bedroom, then through the back wall of the children's bedroom, into the living room, but these are concrete walls.
The bullets were stopped by that third wall, and it was behind that in the parents' bedroom that they all slept, the kids on the floor and Rachel on the floor, as she described it, in a big puddle of blankets.
So as that bulldozer is coming forward, she knows that the family is in the house right behind her, and I'd like to really emphasize the fact that there were children behind her, there were adults behind her, and we've gotten to know the family and gotten to know the children, and I hang on to the fact that those children are growing up, and part of why we do all this publicity is because I believe those children have the rights to a life and a future that we'd want for any of our children, and they're actually wonderful, beautiful kids just like kids everywhere, but they're still bottled up in the Gaza Strip and have been at times under huge threat, so my heart goes out to them, but I'm incredibly grateful that they have survived.
Well, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Before I let you go, would you like to tell the people a little bit about Rachel?
Well, Rachel, yeah, I would, and I thank you for that opportunity, because Rachel was our youngest of three.
She was about five years younger than her older sister and seven years younger than her brother.
She was the kid in the corner that was either doodling or writing when she was a little kid.
She would participate in the family conversations, usually with a little humor, and she loved to dance, even tried ballet even up through college.
She had actually a nice voice, and she's a really good writer.
You can go to, we have a foundation set up in Rachel's name, the Rachel Corey Foundation.
You can go out there.
We have a book of her writing that was put out some years ago by Norton.
The book is called Let Me Stand Alone, and there's been a play that has gone, I've lost track, but I think it's been in 20 countries in at least a dozen different languages, called My Name is Rachel Corey.
It was put together by the British actor Alan Rickman, and Catherine Viner is the editor with Guardian, and so people can find out more by either reading that play or reading her book or going to our website and seeing some of what she wrote.
On the website you can find what she wrote from Gaza, but mostly she was just a kid like everybody else's kid, and she was my daughter.
I think I remember reading something from some young person, it's not probably what you ought to write to some woman's father, but she said, I read about Rachel and I realized she chased boys just like I do, and then she did this other sort of thing, and so if she can do some act of courage, then I can do an act of courage, and maybe I don't want to remember her as chasing boys, but I do think that people that learn about her will think she's just like any other American girl, yet when the time came she did act with courage, and I think we can all act with courage, and I hope that's what people take from her.
Alright, thank you very much Craig, appreciate it.
Thank you.
Good luck to you.
Everybody, that is Craig Corey, father of Rachel Corey.
Check out RachelCoreyFoundation.org, and also a lot of the facts that he was recounting there about the situation in Gaza at the time of her killing are available in this great article by Chris McGreal at The Guardian, and it's called Rachel Corey Verdict Exposes Israeli Military Mindset, and you can find it in the viewpoint section today at AntiWar.com.