US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them athome, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, "Welcome toStalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us.They're not talking about it.We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter orjournalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled throughan answer and the President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipmentand we're going to do it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing-- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say againand again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib.We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much hascome out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not anisolated incident what's happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, LynndieEngland. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But youknow, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to waris the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect thesekids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle ofthese people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped whenone of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew.I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported inJanuary of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what wasgoing on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. AlthoughRumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told thePresident. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematiceffort to do anything other than to prosecute seven "bad seeds", enlisted kids, reservists fromWest Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! Theywere basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of aprison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is anotherframework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten away with it.So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funnyway, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, aMarine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, afuneral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name wasHodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in SouthernVirginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his sondied. He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I atebreakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half aworld away."There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the MyLai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai,one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember,but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our69