The Ethics of War: Is the US Military Guilty of War Crimes in Iraq?
Human Rights Watch has also documented numerous cases in which military authorities have failed to adequately investigate allegations of indiscriminate or excessive force against civilians. In October, Britain's Channel 4 news aired video footage, shot from a cockpit camera, that appears to show U.S. pilots attacking and killing a group of unarmed civilians in Fallujah. The British newspaper the Independent carried a story about the April incident, which has gotten no coverage in mainstream U.S. media.
According to Independent reporter Andrew Buncombe, "The 30-second clip shows the pilot targeting the group of people in a street in the city of Fallujah and asking his mission controllers whether he should 'take them out.' He is told to do so ... . At no point during the exchange between the pilot and controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are armed or posing a threat."
A similar incident was reported in Baghdad in September, when a helicopter fired on a group of Iraqi civilians who had gathered around a disabled Bradley fighting vehicle, killing 13 and wounding 61. There have been a disturbing number of such reports of massacres, but few have resulted in criminal prosecution.
But the most troubling questions of war crimes are raised not by isolated incidents involving individual soldiers, but by strategies and tactics that put large numbers of citizens at risk. As the occupying power, the coalition forces have a legal obligation under the Geneva Conventions to protect civilian lives. The U.S. military has offered repeated assurances that the bombing of Fallujah, Baghdad and other Iraqi cities is carried out with precision weaponry that is carefully targeted against insurgent positions, and that every effort is made to minimize civilian casualties, but the sheer volume of civilian casualties undermines the credibility of those claims.
We know that hundreds of civilians were killed last spring in the assault on Fallujah that followed the killing of four civilian contractors, but there is no reliable count of the number of civilians killed in the near-daily bombardment that followed -- often using indiscriminate 500-pound bombs -- or in the capture of the city in November.
Most Americans probably have little sense of the scale of destruction caused by the U.S. assault on Fallujah, a city roughly the size of St. Paul. But it is devastated, reported Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist for Britain's Guardian in a documentary shown on British TV. "Fallujah used to be a modern city; now there is nothing. We spent that first day going through the rubble that had been the center of the city; I don't see a single building that is functioning."
In that attack, U.S. and Iraqi troops stormed the city's main hospital, making it off-limits to Iraqi civilians, and bombed a second hospital and an emergency clinic -- all violations of international law.
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