Mattis Make Killing Great Again Flag Origin
Retired Gen. James Mattis earned the nickname "Mad Dog" for leading U.Southward. Marines into battle in Fallujah, Iraq, in April 2004. In that assault, members of the Marine Corps, nether Mattis' command, shot at ambulances and aid workers. They cordoned off the metropolis, preventing civilians from escaping. They posed for trophy photos with the people they killed.
Each of these offenses has put other military commanders and members of the rank and file in front of international war crimes tribunals. The doctrine that landed them in that location dates back to World War Two, when an American military machine tribunal held Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita accountable for state of war crimes in the Philippines. His execution later was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
During the siege of Fallujah, which I covered equally an unembedded journalist, Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to exist turned into a graveyard.
In the years since, Mattis – called a "warrior monk" by his supporters – repeatedly has protected American service members who killed civilians, using his status as a segmentation commander to wipe away criminal charges against Marines accused of massacring 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 and granting clemency to some of those convicted in connection with the 2006 murder of a 52-yr-old disabled Iraqi, who was taken outside his dwelling and shot in the face four times.
These actions evidence a unlike side of Mattis, at present 66, than has been featured in nigh profiles published since his nomination as President-elect Donald Trump's defense secretary, which have portrayed him as a strong proponent of the Geneva Conventions and an anti-torture advocate.
Although Mattis argued against the siege of Fallujah beforehand, both international and U.S. police force are clear: As the commanding general, he should be held accountable for atrocities committed by Marines under his command. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting received no reply to messages sent to Mattis' personal, business organization and military email addresses. Trump's transition squad likewise did not respond to inquiries. Mattis' biography on the transition team'due south website does not mention the battle.
"There have been apparent reports that U.S. troops nether the control of Gen. Mattis did target civilians, conducted indiscriminate attacks and besides conducted attacks against armed services objectives that caused disproportionate casualties to civilians during military operations in Fallujah," said Gabor Rona, who teaches international law at Columbia University and worked as a legal adviser at the Geneva headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the time of the siege.
"All of these are war crimes," Rona said. "Applying the doctrine of control responsibility, Gen. Mattis would be responsible for these misdeeds, these state of war crimes of troops under his command if he … either knew, should've known or did cipher to prevent or punish this behavior."
Nearly 13 years subsequently, the siege of Fallujah has receded from the headlines. Just for those of united states who experienced the events firsthand, the death and destruction are seared into our memories. The lack of accountability for the killing of so many civilians grates like nails on chalkboard.
Given his control responsibility, Mattis' confirmation hearing for defense secretary, which starts Thursday, provides an opportunity to probe his role in the killings, including asking whether he committed state of war crimes.
***
I spent parts of iii years in Iraq, roofing the war equally an independent, unembedded journalist, including work in and around Fallujah at the time of the April 2004 siege. The year before, in May 2003, I had spent $10 to take a taxi from Baghdad to Fallujah and – as an American journalist armed only with a microphone – walked freely amid the fruit and vegetable sellers, buying a Seiko lookout man with a imitation leather band and sitting in on a Friday prayer to hear from Jamal Shakur, the city'southward most strident and powerful imam.
Although AK-47s were being sold openly on the street and in that location already had been clashes with American troops, the imam urged nonviolence.
"Islam is a religion of peace," he preached. Exercise not confront the Americans, he said. Do not turn out to protest.
But as the U.Southward. authorities bungled the occupation, anti-American sentiment grew. Bones services such every bit electricity, knocked out during the initial invasion in March 2003, were not restored. Insurgent attacks increased, and along with them the number of civilians killed in American counterattacks. Thousands of Iraqis disappeared into Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam Hussein's sometime lockup outside Baghdad, by then operated by the U.Due south. military.
A year afterwards, Fallujah was destroyed past the Marines under Mattis' command.
Rotting bodies in Fallujah streets
More than 12 years after, I notwithstanding retrieve the smell of bodies left to rot in the streets for weeks because they could be buried just afterward the Marines withdrew. Iraqi doctors told me that when they tried to bury bodies during breaks in the fighting, American snipers on rooftops would shoot at them.
"When you meet a child, v years old with no caput, what (can you) say?" Dr. Salam Ismael, the head of Iraq's young doctors association, told me in Baghdad at the fourth dimension. "When yous come across a child with no brain, just opened cavity, what (tin can you) say? Or when you see a mother just hold her child, still an infant, with no head and the shells all over her body."
My strongest memory of Fallujah came from the 24-hour interval the Marines withdrew from the city. On May 1, 2004, I watched as a squad of volunteers wearing surgical masks pulled the rotting corpse of a eye-anile woman from a shallow grave in the front yard of a unmarried-family home. The homeowner explained how the adult female came to be lying dead in his chiliad.
An American warplane bombed her car as she fled the city with her husband, he said. The husband had been temporarily buried in the garden of the house next door, the charred remains of the machine still visible a few yards from his forepart door.
The volunteers poured formaldehyde over the adult female's body to cutting the stench, then placed her on a gurney and took her abroad in a small pickup truck. I was struck by the sorry, intense eyes of one male child – not more 12 – helping with the operation. He didn't blink as he stood in the back of the open bed of the truck next to the body, which was covered with a white sheet.
The truck sped away. The boy was still standing, his hands on the side of the truck. In ten minutes, he would be at the municipal soccer stadium helping coffin the adult female aslope hundreds of others who had died in the fighting.
When you see a kid, v years old with no head, what (tin can yous) say?" — Dr. Salam Ismael, caput of Republic of iraq'southward immature doctors association
Shooting at ambulances, refugee camp
Ismael told me Marines shot at his organization's ambulance twice while he was in it. In one case, he said, he was trying to think bodies for burial. The other fourth dimension, he was trying to bring aid to civilians stranded in their homes.
"I see people conveying a white flag and yelling at usa, proverb, 'Nosotros are here, only try to salve us,' but we could not salve them because whenever we opened the ambulance door, the Americans would shoot at us. We tried to carry food or water; the snipers shoot the containers of nutrient."
Proof oftentimes is elusive in a state of war zone. Simply that same calendar week, British filmmaker Julia Guest showed me footage of a clearly marked ambulance, consummate with bluish flashing lights, riddled with bullet holes. The driver had a bandage around his head.
"It'south very conspicuously an ambulance," she told me. "It's carrying oxygen bottles. The damage to the ambulance was such that two of the wheels are totally wrecked. … They were left without an ambulance afterwards that."
At the time, the Marine Corps did not deny it was shooting at ambulances, just information technology blamed insurgents. In a 2004 e-mail, corps spokesman Lt. Eric Knapp told me that his forces had seen fighters loading weapons from mosques into ambulances.
"By using ambulances, they are putting Iraqis in harm'south mode past denying them a critical component of urgent medical care," he wrote. "Mosques, ambulances and hospitals are protected under Geneva Convention agreements and are not targeted by U.Due south. Marines. However, once they are used for the purpose of hostile intent toward coalition forces, they lose their protected status and may exist targeted."
Both Ismael and Guest denied that the ambulances were used to ferry arms. Contacted for this story, Ismael, who at present lives in England, however maintains that his ambulance should have been protected.
"We entered that expanse because we had been called for past civilians who were trapped," he said.
The statement that ambulances were being used to smuggle arms was only one of the claims by Marine commanders that didn't match up with what I heard on the footing from civilians and officials alike.
For example, on one hand, the Marine Corps command consistently said it strategically targeted insurgent fighters. On the other, an official with the Iraqi Cherry-red Crescent Gild told me outside Baghdad that the aid agency had to move a military camp for civilians fleeing the violence considering the U.S. kept shooting at it.
Civilians repeatedly told me they were targeted by Marine snipers who had taken up positions at high points around Fallujah, too. One xi-year-old male child, Yusuf Bakri Amash, said a sniper killed his all-time friend.
"Ahmed was in my grade," he said. "He was younger than me. He was standing side by side to the wall of the secondary school and was trying to cross the street. He was hit by a bullet. The American troops fired the bullet."
Through it all, Mattis' acme deputies downplayed the number of civilian casualties. In ane statement, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne told reporters that 95 pct of the casualties were "military-historic period males."
"The Marines are trained to exist precise in their firepower," Byrne said when confronted with an Associated Press report that 600 Iraqis had been killed, with many buried in a mass grave at the soccer stadium. "The fact that in that location are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do."
In New York, a senior official with the Un Committee on Human Rights requested an independent inquiry, citing reports that ninety percent of the people killed in Fallujah were noncombatants. The investigation never occurred. An official Marine Corps history of the boxing afterwards would put the number of civilian deaths in the first two weeks of fighting solitary at 220.
Mattis initially opposed set on on Fallujah
The official Marine Corps history says Mattis was against the set on on Fallujah, reporting that he argued, presciently, "that a big-calibration functioning would send the wrong message, unnecessarily endanger civilians, and ultimately fail to accomplish the primary objective" of apprehending the insurgents who had killed four Blackwater security contractors.
But in one case it began, the official history says the Marines reporting to him carried out the attack "in a state of defoliation." U.South. military veterans of the siege, who I've talked to since, draw ever-shifting rules of date with a self-defense force provision that they were encouraged to stretch to the limit.
Adam Kokesh served as a sergeant in Fallujah during the April siege. I met him 4 years later, in 2008, when he was ane of 36 veterans who spoke at a Winter Soldier gathering of antiwar veterans in Silverish Leap, Maryland. There, veterans disclosed atrocities they perpetrated or witnessed in the wars in Republic of iraq and Afghanistan.
At the gathering, Kokesh showed a trophy photo of himself next to a car with an Iraqi man killed by Marines at a checkpoint he staffed. He said the Marines in his unit of measurement took turns taking pictures with the dead Iraqi, who had been killed in a hail of motorcar-gun fire.
According to Kokesh, a whole grouping of Marines "unloaded into the vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun," even though the car was still far away.
"The bullets started at the bumper and went up through the engine compartment, and and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the breast so hard that it bankrupt his chair backwards, and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance," he said. "Everybody tried to justify it and said, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. And they dragged the motorcar into the area where we were sleeping the side by side 24-hour interval. And we didn't even question that, but it was articulate that there were no … holes from rounds that were cooking off in the side of this car."
Kokesh likewise described how at i point during the siege, he and other men commanded by Mattis stood on a bridge over the Euphrates River and immune women and immature children to abscond Fallujah but pushed back all males 14 and older.
"It took me a long time before I could recall virtually what a horrible conclusion nosotros were forcing these families to make," he said. They "could split up upwardly and go out their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn't land on their caput, or stay with them and hunker downwardly and but promise they made it through alive."
Press on, Mattis said, as ire mounted
The conclusion to allow only some civilians to flee the urban center, which I witnessed – and other media covered as well – occurred when and then-Maj. Gen. James Mattis was sent in to negotiate a armistice following tremendous blowback from across Iraqi club near the mounting number of civilian casualties.
The Iraqi ground forces had refused to fight alongside Mattis' Marines, while members of the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council threatened to quit. The U.N.'s envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to resign.
"Collective penalisation is certainly unacceptable and the siege of the city is admittedly unacceptable," Brahimi said at the time.
But Mattis wanted to continue fighting. In his book "Fiasco," war machine announcer Thomas Eastward. Ricks writes that Mattis was confronting the negotiations and the armistice.
"If you're going to take Vienna, accept fucking Vienna!" Ricks quotes Mattis as snarling to Gen. John Abizaid, then-caput of U.S. Key Control.
Mattis eventually negotiated an terminate to the assault, which turned over control of the city to an Iraqi-run "Fallujah Brigade" allowable by a former general in Saddam Hussein'southward regular army, who sported a beret and wore a thick Baathist mustache. The settlement did not deliver the strategic objective announced when the assault began, namely that the killers of the 4 Blackwater security contractors be apprehended.
Years after, Mattis referred to the withdrawal from Fallujah equally one the toughest orders he ever had to follow.
Credit: Sgt. Tony Nardiello, Headquarters Marine Corps, Defence Department
"It was a difficult decision," he said in a Marine Corps interview posted in October. "It was a decision taken for reasons that had nothing to do with the tactical situation on the ground."
"I was concerned to a degree that the Marines would lose confidence in their leadership," he added, noting that sailors and Marines nether his control had lost comrades in the assault.
"But they didn't," Mattis said, recalling a boring-talking gunner who sat for a television interview and told the reporter that he wasn't troubled by the gild to pull out of Fallujah. Mattis quotes the Marine as proverb: "Doesn't matter, we'll only hunt 'em down somewhere else and impale 'em."
Mattis ordered wedding ceremony party carnage
As the summer of 2004 began and it was clear that Fallujah had become a oasis for insurgents, Mattis once more was sent in to negotiate. Those talks failed and that November, Marines would return and, in an even bloodier siege, accept the entire city.
Past and so, Mattis was back in the U.Southward., having been promoted to lieutenant full general and assigned to the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia.
But before Mattis' command in Iraq concluded, he was involved in another controversial incident. On May 19, less than three weeks afterwards his forces pulled back from Fallujah, Mattis personally authorized an attack on a nuptials political party near the Syrian border. The Iraqi government said the strike left 42 civilians dead, including at least 13 children.
The killings roiled Iraq, coming so shortly later the carnage of Fallujah – just Mattis stood by his action, arguing the expressionless were insurgents.
"How many people get to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" he told The Guardian. "These were more than two dozen military machine-age males. Allow'south not exist naive."
A few days later, the Associated Press obtained a videotape of the event. In information technology, a dozen white pickup trucks sped through the desert, escorting a conjugal car busy with colorful ribbons. The helpmate wore a white apparel and veil and was ushered into a house by a group of women, while men reclined "on brightly colored silk pillows," the AP reported, "relaxing on the carpeted floor of a large goat-pilus tent as boys" danced to tribal songs.
The video did not capture the strike itself, but before long after the footage was taken, the AP reported many, including the wedding videographer, were expressionless.
Mattis afterwards told armed services historian Bing West that it had taken him less than 30 seconds to deliberate whether to bomb the location.
Exonerations for Haditha massacre
In media reports since Donald Trump's nomination of Mattis for defense secretary, the now-retired general consistently has been portrayed as the adult in the room, a veteran military man beloved past his fellow Marines. He's seen by many every bit a steady, well-read leader in a group that includes a national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who believes that Islam is not a religion and wrote in a volume published final year that America already was "in a earth war against a messianic mass motion of evil people."
"There's no dubiety," Flynn wrote, that the Islamic State is "expressionless attack taking us over and drinking our blood."
These observers took eye, for case, when Trump emerged from a meeting with Mattis in November and reported that the full general had argued against waterboarding, an interrogation technique broadly condemned as torture, which Trump embraced during his campaign.
"I've never institute information technology to exist useful," Trump quoted Mattis as saying. "I've always establish, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture."
Only my experience as a journalist reporting on Mattis' assail from the perspective of Iraqi civilians gave me insight into another side of the general, a human who was willing to await the other way – and even authorize attacks on civilians – when in that location were "fighting-aged males" nearby. While he has many aphorisms about the importance of international law and the Geneva Conventions, in the battle of Fallujah, his Marines were not sanctioned.
This pattern becomes even clearer when you expect at Mattis' beliefs once he returned to the U.Due south. and was promoted to general in charge of all Marine forces serving Central Control.
It was in that location where he used his position in the Marine Corps' justice arrangement to wipe away charges confronting 3 Marines charged with the murder of 24 civilians in Haditha, often called the My Lai massacre of the Republic of iraq War.
Time magazine broke the story in March 2006, iv months after the killings. Reporter Tim McGirk wrote that after a pop fellow member of their unit was killed by a roadside flop, a group of Marines "went on a binge in the hamlet … killing fifteen unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children." Marines also shot up a car and killed a man running on a ridge. The total number of civilian expressionless was 24, including a human being in a wheelchair.
The Marines Corps initially did not investigate the attack because no one on the basis reported information technology. A subsequent Department of Defense inquiry constitute Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents arrived on the scene just subsequently Time published its exposé. Another military investigation by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell plant that the entire Marine Corps concatenation of control in Iraq ignored obvious signs of serious misconduct.
"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, fifty-fifty in pregnant numbers, every bit routine and every bit the natural and intended effect of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. "Statements fabricated by the concatenation of control during interviews for this investigation, taken equally a whole, propose that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing concern, and that the Marines need to become 'the job done' no thing what it takes."
Mattis, then a lieutenant general stationed at Camp Pendleton, California, became the "convening authority" for the court martial – giving him ultimate authority of justice in the case. In that role, he took the rare step of writing public letters to Marines accused of murder, exonerating them for their roles in the massacre.
In his alphabetic character wiping away murder charges against Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, who stood accused of killing iii Iraqi men in a home, Mattis referenced Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served as an infantryman in the Civil War, maxim, "Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the face of an uplifted knife."
"You lot take served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq where our Nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any attribute of the law of war, and routinely targets and intentionally draws fire toward civilians. As you well know, the challenges of this combat environment put farthermost pressures on yous and your fellow Marines," Mattis wrote. "With the dismissal of these charges you may fairly conclude that you lot did your best to live up to the standards, followed by U.S. fighting men throughout our many wars, in the face of life or death decisions."
After Mattis dismissed charges against three Marines, the cases confronting the others complanate. In the stop, only the alleged ringleader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, was held answerable, though his sentence did not include a 24-hour interval in prison. In 2012, more than than six years after the massacre, Wuterich pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty, and, every bit penalisation, his rank was reduced to private. He told the court that he regretted telling his men to "shoot first and ask questions subsequently."
Mattis has his defenders – and critics
Today, the prosecution of Marines involved in the Haditha massacre is widely seen as a debacle, said Gary Solis, a erstwhile Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches a form at the Estimate Advocate General's Legal Eye and School called "Losing Haditha."
But Solis, like other observers, doesn't blame Mattis, saying he was hamstrung by inexperienced prosecutors. Compounding matters further was the lack of good evidence, the result of the initial failure of Marines on the basis to report the killings. Marine prosecutors also wasted iii years fighting CBS in court, trying to get the network to provide unreleased footage from a "60 Minutes" circulate, Solis said, during which time memories faded and witness statements changed.
"I call back and then highly of Gen. Mattis," Solis said, putting main blame for the killings on the nature of the Republic of iraq War itself. "Whenever you lot are involved with armed opposition groups who don't identify themselves, civilians are going to die by the carload."
Other observers, including Gabor Rona, the former chaser for the International Commission of the Ruddy Cross, said Mattis' actions in the Haditha backwash deserve renewed scrutiny with his nomination as defense secretary.
"Mattis' role in whitewashing, if in fact that'southward what he did, would be a war crime under international police force, and analogous to what we prosecuted and executed Yamashita for," he said, referring to the Japanese Globe War II general.
Indeed, Haditha was not the only time that Mattis used his command authorization to clear Marines in a war crimes case. He also granted charity to three Marines convicted in the 2006 killing of a disabled Iraqi man in Hamdania, freeing them from prison.
The Washington Post reported that a grouping of Marines went into the home of a 52-twelvemonth-one-time disabled Iraqi with a metal bar in his leg, pulled him out and shot him in the face four times. The Marines then tried to frame him past planting a motorcar gun and shovel at the scene, to go far wait as though he were an insurgent excavation a roadside bomb. Eight servicemen initially were convicted and jailed; a year later, all but one had been released.
Among the 3 freed past Mattis was Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington, who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to viii years.
Faded Iraq State of war memories
Nearly 13 years have passed since the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. More than a decade has gone by since the Haditha massacre. The murder of a disabled human in Hamdania is about as one-time.
And then much fourth dimension has passed, in fact, that an research to the Marine Corps press office for details of service member prosecutions related to the Fallujah siege was met with defoliation. I was routed in sequence to the Marine Corps History Division, the Office of the Judge Advocate Full general of the Navy and eventually back to the Marine Corps' main public affairs desk.
I told each officeholder I encountered that I was not aware of anyone being held accountable for atrocities, just wanted to be certain earlier I said then in a story.
After two weeks of phone calls and emails, a Marine spokeswoman, Lt. Danielle Phillips, offered this reply: I would have to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. The events only were too long agone, she said.
Many of the international law experts contacted for this story likewise had forgotten the details, and I had to jog their memories with photographs, audio recordings and regime documents.
With James Mattis' nomination on the horizon, some suggest senators should press him well-nigh his actions as commanding general of one of the war's bloodiest battles and his subsequent role in exonerating servicemen plant guilty of war crimes.
At his confirmation hearing, senators should "inquire about the high numbers of civilian casualties and whether there was adequate oversight and accountability," said Beth Van Schaack, a law professor at Stanford University who served as deputy to the ambassador-at-big for state of war crimes issues in the Obama administration.
Mattis besides should be asked about his "personal role every bit commander over subordinates who committed what announced to be war crimes confronting Iraqi civilians by targeting civilians or using indiscriminate force that insufficiently verified whether the targets were civilians or combatants," Van Schaack said. "How did he supervise his troops, and what measures did he take after the fact?"
Gabor Rona, the one-time legal adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cantankerous, said senators should remind Mattis that commanders in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been convicted in international war crimes tribunals for declining to prevent or punish lower-ranking war criminals, a doctrine likewise recognized in U.Due south. police through Yamashita'due south case and enshrined in the Department of Defense Police of State of war Transmission.
"Troops are between a rock and a hard place," Rona said, "obligated to follow orders but also obligated to disobey manifestly unlawful orders" such every bit mistreatment of civilians or captured combatants.
Mattis' hearing, he said, offers Congress an opportunity to put commanders on notice that they accept a duty to forestall and punish abuses committed by their troops.
This story was edited by Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nadia Wynter and Nikki Frick.
Aaron Glantz can be reached at aglantz@revealnews.org . Follow him on Twitter: @Aaron_Glantz .
Source: https://revealnews.org/article/did-defense-secretary-nominee-james-mattis-commit-war-crimes-in-iraq/
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