Hw Bush Pictures and Doing It Again

Instead of investigating its war crimes, the U.S. has actively covered them up, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.

Children in the ruins of Mosul, June fourteen, 2017. (EU/ECHO/Peter Biro)

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. Due south. Davies
Common Dreams

A mericans take been shocked by the death and destruction of Russian federation'south invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the streets.

But the United states of america and its allies accept waged state of war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than has then far disfigured Ukraine.

Equally we recently reported, the U.Due south. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone. Senior U.Due south. Defence force Intelligence Bureau officers told Newsweek that the first 24 days of Russia's bombing of Ukraine was less subversive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.

The U.South.-led campaign confronting ISIS in Iraq and Syria bombarded those countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, the heaviest bombing anywhere in decades. U.Due south. military officers told Amnesty International that the U.S. assail on Raqqa in Syria was also the heaviest artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War.

Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-set on population of 1.5 one thousand thousand. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and arms, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence written report counted at least twoscore,000 civilians killed.

Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A U.N. assessment mission reported that 70 percent to 80 percent of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting four,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the bodily death price these numbers correspond.

Rand Corporation Review

RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California, in 2015. (Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Eatables)

The Pentagon promised to review its policies on civilian casualties in the wake of these massacres, and commissioned the Rand Corporation to deport a report titled, "Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications For Future Conflicts," which has now been fabricated public.

Fifty-fifty as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the premise of the Rand Corp study is that U.South. forces will continue to wage wars that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas, and that they must therefore endeavour to empathise how they can exercise and then without killing quite so many civilians.

The study runs over 100 pages, but it never comes to grips with the key trouble, which is the inevitably devastating and deadly impacts of firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas similar Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Sanaa in Yemen or Gaza in Palestine.

The development of "precision weapons" has demonstrably failed to prevent these massacres. The United States unveiled its new "smart bombs" during the First Gulf War in 1991. But they in fact comprised simply vii per centum of the 88,000 tons of bombs information technology dropped on Republic of iraq, reducing "a rather highly urbanized and mechanized guild" to "a pre-industrial age nation" according to a U.Due north. survey.

Instead of publishing actual data on the accurateness of these weapons, the Pentagon has maintained a sophisticated propaganda campaign to convey the impression that they are 100 pct accurate and tin strike a target like a house or flat building without harming civilians in the surrounding surface area.

However, during the U.Southward. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of an arms merchandise periodical that reviews the operation of air-launched weapons, estimated that 20 percent to 25 per centum  of U.S. "precision" weapons missed their targets.

Much of Raqqa suffered extensive damage during the boxing of June–October 2017. (Mahmoud Bali, Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)

Even when they do hit their target, these weapons do non perform similar infinite weapons in a video game. The near commonly used bombs in the U.S. arsenal are 500-lb. bombs, with an explosive charge of 89 kilos of Tritonal. Co-ordinate to U.N. safety data, the boom alone from that explosive charge is 100 per centum lethal upwards to a radius of 10 meters, and will break every window within 100 meters.

That is but the blast effect. Deaths and horrific injuries are also caused by collapsing buildings and flying shrapnel and droppings — concrete, metallic, drinking glass, wood etc.

A strike is considered authentic if information technology lands inside a "circular fault likely," usually 10 meters effectually the object being targeted. Then, in an urban expanse, if yous take into account the "circular error likely," the blast radius, flying debris and collapsing buildings, even a strike assessed as "accurate" is very likely to kill and hurt civilians.

Howard Zinn's Challenge

U.S. officials describe a moral distinction between this "unintentional" killing and the "deliberate" killing of civilians by terrorists. But the late historian Howard Zinn challenged this stardom in a letter to The New York Times in 2007. He wrote,

"These words are misleading because they assume an action is either 'deliberate' or 'unintentional.' There is something in betwixt, for which the word is 'inevitable.' If you engage in an activeness, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish betwixt combatants and civilians (as a onetime Air Forcefulness bombardier, I volition attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not 'intentional.'

Does that difference exonerate you lot morally? The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (every bit either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time."

Americans are rightfully horrified when they see civilians killed past Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but they are generally not quite so horrified, and more likely to accept official justifications, when they hear that civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syrian arab republic, Yemen or Gaza.

Central Media Function

The Western corporate media play a key part in this, by showing usa corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, simply shielding the states from equally agonizing images of people killed past U.S. or allied forces.

A street of Mariupol on March 12, during Russian siege of the city. (Mvs.gov.ua, CC BY four.0, Wikimedia Commons)

While Western leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for state of war crimes, they take raised no such clamor to prosecute U.S. officials. Notwithstanding during the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the U.N. Assist Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) documented persistent and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions by U.S. forces, including of the 1949 4th Geneva Convention that protects civilians from the impacts of war and armed services occupation.

The International Committee of the Crimson Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups documented systematic corruption and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, including cases in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners to death.

Although torture was approved by U.S. officials all the way up to the White Firm, no officeholder above the rank of major was e'er held answerable for a torture death in Afghanistan or Iraq. The harshest penalization handed down for torturing a prisoner to death was a five-calendar month jail judgement, although that is a upper-case letter law-breaking nether the U.S. State of war Crimes Human action.

Torture photo that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (U.Due south. government)

In a 2007 human rights report that described widespread killing of civilians by U.S. occupation forces, the U.North. Aid Mission to Iraq wrote,

"Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must non exist located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not modify the noncombatant character of an expanse."

The report demanded

"that all credible allegations of unlawful killings be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate activity taken confronting military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force."

Instead of investigating, the U.S. has actively covered up its war crimes. A tragic example is the 2019 massacre in the Syrian town of Baghuz, where a special U.S. military operations unit dropped massive bombs on a group of mainly women and children, killing well-nigh 70. The military non simply failed to acknowledge the botched assault only fifty-fifty bulldozed the blast site to cover it upwardly. Only later a New York Timesexposé years later on did the military even acknowledge that the strike took identify.

And so it is ironic to hear President Joe Biden call for President Vladimir Putin to face a war crimes trial, when the Us covers up its own crimes, fails to hold its own senior officials accountable for state of war crimes and still rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Courtroom (ICC). In 2020, sometime President Donald Trump went so far every bit to impose U.S. sanctions on the most senior ICC prosecutors for investigating U.Due south. war crimes in Afghanistan.

The Rand written report repeatedly claims that U.S. forces have "a securely ingrained commitment to the law of war." Merely the destruction of Mosul, Raqqa and other cities and the history of U.South. disdain for the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions and international courts tell a very different story.

Screenshot from WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video.

[Watch WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" Video on YouTube.]

We agree with the Rand report'south conclusion that, "DoD's weak institutional learning for noncombatant harm issues meant that past lessons went unheeded, increasing the risks to civilians in Raqqa."

However, we take issue with the report's failure to recognize that many of the glaring contradictions it documents are consequences of the fundamentally criminal nature of this entire operation, nether the Fourth Geneva Convention and the existing laws of war.

Rejecting the Premise

Nosotros decline the whole premise of this study, that U.S. forces should continue to conduct urban bombardments that inevitably impale thousands of civilians, and must therefore larn from this experience so that they will kill and maim fewer civilians the next time they destroy a urban center like Raqqa or Mosul.

The ugly truth backside these U.S. massacres is that the impunity senior U.Due south. armed services and civilian officials have enjoyed for past war crimes encouraged them to believe they could get away with bombing cities in Iraq and Syrian arab republic to rubble, inevitably killing tens of thousands of civilians.

They have then far been proven correct, but U.Due south. contempt for international law and the failure of the global customs to hold the United States to account are destroying the very "rules-based order" of international police that U.S. and Western leaders claim to cherish.

As nosotros telephone call urgently for a ceasefire, for peace and for accountability for war crimes in Ukraine, we should say "Never Again!" to the bombardment of cities and civilian areas, whether they are in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or anywhere else, and whether the aggressor is Russia, the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia.

And we should never forget that the supreme war offense is war itself, the crime of aggression, because, every bit the judges declared at Nuremberg, information technology "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Information technology is easy to point fingers at others, but we will not cease state of war until we strength our own leaders to alive up to the principle spelled out by Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson:

"If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the Us does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a dominion of criminal acquit confronting others which nosotros would not exist willing to have invoked against us."

Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and the writer of numerous books includingKingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection  and Within Iran: the Real History and Politics of the Islamic Democracy of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the writer ofClaret On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Devastation of Republic of iraq.

This article is fromMutual Dreams.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/12/killing-civilians-from-mosul-to-raqqa-to-mariupol/

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