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Recent
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April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
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Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
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Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
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Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
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The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
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Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
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Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
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Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
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David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
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John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
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Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
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Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
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Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
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Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
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Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
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Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
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Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
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Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
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Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
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Patrick
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Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
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Robert
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The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
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Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
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March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
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Life During Wartime
Gary
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Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
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Jason
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Blood
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A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
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March 24,
2003
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Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
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Peacekeepers
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Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The
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John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
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Madsen
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Anthony
Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
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We
Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other
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Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
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Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
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Memory Lane
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Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
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Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
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Could the US be at War for Years?
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Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
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Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
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The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
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The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
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Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
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Blood
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Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
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Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
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Paint
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Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
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On the Current Experience of Terror
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Blitz-Coup
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A Cheap Family Farce
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The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
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See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
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March 20, 2003
Jo Wilding
From
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I Was
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How Did
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Nomadic
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Myths
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Cheney's
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Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
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Come
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War is Theft
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April 5,
2003
War
Means (Almost) Never Having to Say You're Sorry
Civilian
Deaths and Official Apologies
By JOANNE MARINER
It may reflect a purely humanitarian concern for
civilian life, or perhaps a more calculated apprehension of what
commentators have dubbed the "al-Jazeera effect" -
the fact that images of civilian death and suffering in Iraq
will further inflame an already angry Muslim world. Whether for
altruistic or strategic reasons, or a combination of both, President
George W. Bush has repeatedly promised that U.S. military forces
will take all necessary steps to minimize the number of civilian
casualties in the Iraq war.
"I want Americans and all the world
to know," Bush declared in a radio address on Saturday,
that U.S. and allied forces "will make every effort to spare
innocent civilians from harm."
But President Bush and his top military
brass have also acknowledged that civilian deaths are inevitable.
Baghdad, currently under heavy bombardment, is a city of some
five million people. Even with careful reliance on precision-guided
weapons, any mistakes made during the on-going "shock and
awe" bombing campaign could be horrifyingly lethal.
Questioned about possible civilian deaths
not long before the start of hostilities in Iraq, White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer explained that they are an inevitable
consequence of war. But, he affirmed, "The President will
regret any action that is taken that does lead to loss of innocent
life."
Fleischer's note of sympathetic regret
is worth examining, for it is a telling and accurate indicator
of the U.S. government's approach to civilian deaths during armed
conflict. Unquestionably, the government would prefer to minimize
the number of civilians killed during wartime. It has even instituted
certain preventive measures to help achieve this end. But when
civilian casualties do occur, the government rarely accepts responsibility
for them in any meaningful way.
Judging by past practice, the families
of civilians killed in Iraq should not expect official apologies,
or compensation, or justice. Nor should they imagine that the
U.S. government will expend significant effort investigating
why and how their relatives died, or conducting a systematic
assessment of how to prevent such deaths in the future.
The U.S. Record on
Official Apologies
Official apologies can be understood
as the first step on a more extended scale of assuming responsibility
for American errors or wrongs. Beyond apologies lies the possibility
of compensation for the damage caused and, in some instances,
sanctioning of the perpetrator.
But the U.S. government is rarely willing
to take even this first step. Indeed, in past incidents involving
civilian deaths, even extremely high numbers of deaths, the government
has been notably unapologetic.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
is the most glaring example. More than 50 years later, peace
activists persist in their so far unheeded calls for an official
apology and compensation. Nor has the government ever apologized
for any of the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam,
including the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of innocent
civilians were killed.
Just before he left office, President
William J. Clinton did express regret about a massacre committed
during the Korean War at the village of No Gun Ri, in which U.S.
troops fired on civilians who were hiding under a railroad bridge,
killing a large but unknown number. "I deeply regret that
Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri," Clinton
said.
But the wording of Clinton's statement
was telling. Expressions of regret, in international currency,
are not entirely equivalent to apologies. While they indicate
sorrow that an incident occurred, they lack the acceptance of
responsibility implicit in a full apology. Unsurprisingly, South
Korean groups have continued to press the U.S. government to
assume responsibility and provide compensation for No Gun Ri
and other wartime incidents.
Besides the precise wording of an apology,
the form in which it is made is also viewed as meaningful. Formal
written apologies, preferably hand-delivered by a personal envoy
of the head of state, carry much more weight than informal, verbal
expressions of repentance. Squabbles over such differences, in
addition to intense attention to wording, have been much in evidence
during the acrimonious debate over Japanese apologies for crimes
committed against Koreans and Chinese during the Second World
War.
Some Civilians Count
More Than Others
Were one to judge by recent experience,
one might conclude that, besides American deaths, the U.S. government
only registers Chinese deaths as truly significant. By a clear
margin, the government's most openly apologetic response to civilian
casualties was with the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, which occurred in May 1999 during the <U.S.-led>
war on Yugoslavia.
The embassy bombing, in which three Chinese
civilians were killed, drew greater official attention than other
far more deadly incidents. Although a total of about 500 civilians
were killed during the conflict in Yugoslavia--indeed, 73 Kosovar
Albanians died in a single incident in April 1999--none of these
deaths merited a reaction remotely comparable to that of the
embassy bombing.
President Clinton personally apologized
for the embassy bombing just days after it happened, and this
time, for once, his wording was unequivocal: "I want to
say to the Chinese people and to the leaders of China, I apologize."
Members of Congress, too, immediately introduced a concurrent
resolution expressing Congress's "regret and apologies"
for the bombing, and extending its "deepest sympathies and
condolences to the Chinese Government, citizens, and families
of the bombing's victims."
A U.S. spy plane's collision with a Chinese
plane, although it did not happen during a military hostilities,
provides a more recent example of U.S. willingness to apologize
when good relations with China are at risk. In April 2001, after
a U.S. aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter plane, resulting
in the pilot's death, the U.S. Ambassador to China delivered
a personal letter of apology to the Chinese authorities.
"Both President Bush and Secretary
of State Powell have expressed their sincere regret over your
missing pilot and aircraft," the letter said. "Please
convey to the Chinese people and to the family of pilot Wang
Wei that we are very sorry for their loss .... We are very sorry
the entering of China's airspace and the landing did not have
verbal clearance."
No Chinese were killed during the <U.S.-led>
war in Afghanistan, but plenty of Afghans were. According to
a survey carried out by Global Exchange, an international human
rights group, at least 824 Afghan civilians were killed during
the <U.S.-led> bombing campaign between October 7, 2001,
and the end of January 2002. (The researchers emphasized that
their survey is far from comprehensive - it covered only ten
of Afghanistan's thirty-two provinces - and that the actual number
of deaths is higher.)
One of the bloodiest single incidents
of the war, in fact, may have occurred in mid-2002, after the
study ended, and as U.S. military operations in the country were
winding down. On July 1, approximately 48 civilians, including
a number of children, were killed an air assault on a wedding
party in the southern province of Kakarak. Nor have civilian
deaths in Afghanistan come to an end. Most recently, in February
2003, Afghan authorities reported that at least seventeen civilians
were killed in American bombing raids in the Baghran valley,
a remote area of southern Afghanistan.
None of these incidents resulted in a
full presidential apology, although President Bush did say that
he called Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the telephone after
the mistaken attack in July. His statement of remorse, if you
can call it that, was studiously bland. "Any time innocent
life is lost," Bush told Karzai, "we're sad."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's
stab at apologizing was equally feeble. While stating that he
regretted the loss of civilian life, he added that "bad
things happen in combat zones," and the United States had
"no regrets about going after bad guys."
Compensation and Prosecution
With apologies for the killing of civilians
being scarce, it is unsurprising that compensation for such killings
is even scarcer, and the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators
is scarce still.
The 1999 Chinese embassy bombing, always
the exception, resulted in substantial U.S. compensation both
for the damage to the building and the loss of life. But other
than this incident, compensation has been extremely rare.
While it is believed that the CIA gave
$1,000 cash to family members of Afghans killed in a mistaken
attack that took place in January 2002, the war's other mistaken
killings went uncompensated. Global Exchange, the organization
that conducted the study of Afghan civilian deaths, has been
pressing the U.S. government to compensate Afghans in the amount
of $10,000 per family, but so far its appeal has been unsuccessful.
Even the most negligent killings almost
never lead to the successful criminal prosecution of responsible
members of the military. A review of incidents that resulted
in large numbers of civilian deaths shows that charges rarely
reach the court-martial stage. When they do, moreover, the defendants
are nearly always acquitted.
Lessons Not Learned
While civilian casualties may be an inescapable
fact of war, it is apparently not one that the Pentagon has any
real interest in examining. As former deputy assistant secretary
of defense Sarah Sewall pointed out in an Op Ed recently published
in The New York Times, the Department of Defense has never undertaken
a systemic evaluation of its record in preventing civilian casualties.
Indeed, the military does not even officially tabulate the numbers
of civilians killed in each war.
This studied official ignorance belies
official expressions of concern. And the government's failure
to take responsibility for the damage it wreaks on civilian lives
is equally disappointing.
Consider the words of an Afghan man who
lost much of his family to American bombs. As he told The Los
Angeles Times last year: "We thought the Americans were
good people. But they just drop their bombs and leave. They don't
explain. They don't apologize. They don't even offer to pay for
what they did."
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights lawyer based in New York. An earlier version
of this article appeared in FindLaw's Writ. She can be reached
at: mariner@counterpunch.org.
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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