War Crimes in Iraq

Unfortunately for all of us the soldiers posted to Iraq don't seem to be well trained and seem to have some incorrect notions with regards to the law.

Here is the full article


(AP) -- Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. troops against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man's head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a "stress position" they insisted was an approved technique.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a January 2006 court-martial.

But even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

"The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information," Welshofer wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. "To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation -- it is a conversation."

Welshofer said in the same letter that he was "within the appropriate constraints that both the rules of law, and just as importantly -- duty, imposed on me."