ddchalmers | June 08, 2010
(composite video) - Australia's military commitment in Afghanistan is under scrutiny following the deaths of two 'diggers' today..... Counter-insurgency expert Retired Major General Jim Molan interview with Kerry O'Brien in Canberra..... (full Gen Molan interview @0.25 thru 8.53)
JIM MOLAN: I think that there is a lack of logic in what we're doing in Uruzgan Province. I don't believe that any honourable strategy is linked to the campaign that we're running in the province that can feed down into the tactics, Kerry.....
I don't believe that we impressed our allies in Iraq. We are impressing them a little bit more ....in Afghanistan. The only thing I'd say ....is that I think we should keep in mind that when we list the reasons for being there, that we should be there primarily for the humanitarian reasons..... We can help the Afghan people, and they deserve our help as much as the East Timorese.....
The second reason, in my view - second or third reason, perhaps, is our allies. So I would hope that for the families who sacrifice, for the soldiers who sacrifice we're there to help the people. It's a second or third order reason to impress our allies, but it's critical..... If we're making these sacrifices .....to assist the people and impress our allies and we're not putting the time and resources in to do it, then there's a lack of logic in there..... http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/20...
The bodies of two Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan will begin their journey home today.
The Brisbane-based combat engineers, 26-year-old Sapper Darren Smith and 21-year-old Sapper Jacob Moerland, were killed by a roadside bomb on Monday.
Sapper Smith's explosives detection dog, Herbie, was also killed..... Monday was the deadliest day for Coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan this year; the Australians were among 10 NATO-led soldiers killed.
A ramp ceremony will be held at Tarin Kowt before their bodies are flown to Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.
Defence Minister John Faulkner and Defence Force chief Angus Houston will attend a service at the base (in luxurious DUBAI!)
The bodies are expected to be repatriated by the weekend. The dead soldiers were based at the Gallipoli Barracks in Brisbane. It was their first tour of Afghanistan..... http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/20...
AUSTRALIA suffered its first multiple combat deaths since the Vietnam War when two Diggers - one just 21 - died in an Afghanistan bomb blast..... http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/aust...
Australia to stay course in Afghanistan - Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says the deaths of two Australian soldiers in Afghanistan are tragic but Australia remains committed to staring down terrorism in the troubled region..... http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/ 1274152/We'll-stay-Afghan-course:-Smith
AFP - A string of attacks in Afghanistan killed 10 NATO soldiers and two foreign contractors in the bloodiest 24 hours for the alliance this year, as troops readied for a push into the heart of Taliban territory. Seven Americans, two Australians and one French soldier were killed on Monday, one of the deadliest days in the nine-year war in Afghanistan to crush the hardline Islamist Taliban.
Six US soldiers were killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and another was killed by small arms fire, Washington announced. Two Australians, who were training Afghan troops, were killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol in the province of Uruzgan, officials in Australia said.
France said one of its troops was killed and three others wounded in a rocket attack by Taliban militants in the east of the country. Separately, two foreign contractors, one of them an American, were killed in a suicide attack on an Afghan police training centre in the southern city of Kandahar, the US embassy said.
NATO, US and Afghan troops are preparing their biggest offensive yet against the Taliban in Kandahar province, with total foreign troop numbers in the country set to peak at 150,000 by August. President Barack Obama ordered the US war effort to be ramped up in the hope that an initial surge will break the back of the Taliban insurgency and allow him to start drawing down troops next year..... http://www.france24.com/en/20100607-a...
Is Australian General Jim Molan a War Criminal?
Few people have heard of Australian General Jim Molan, despite his direct command responsibility for the brutal Coalition assault on Fallujah and other Sunni cities in Iraq in late 2004. He planned and directed the attacks on Najaf, Fallujah, and Samarra. CHRIS DORAN believes Molan must take responsibility for the atrocities that occured.
Fallujah is particularly notorious for the widespread and well documented allegations of serious atrocities, if not outright war crimes, committed by Coalition troops under Molan's command. Molan has just released a book, entitled Running the War in Iraq, a highly sanitised version of what actually occurred under his command. Molan's account suggests that the attack on Fallujah, codenamed Operation Fury, was little more than a few surgical missile strikes which unfortunately and only occasionally resulted in civilian deaths.
He conveniently omits the fact that an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 civilians still remained in Fallujah when the attack began. Citizens had been instructed to evacuate the city, population 250,000, before bombing began in October 2004, but any and all men aged 15 to 45 were prohibited from leaving. Many family members understandably chose to stay with their fathers and brothers. Once the bombing began, all exits out of the city were sealed off.
On October 16, the Washington Post reported that "electricity and water were cut off to the city just as a fresh wave of [bombing] strikes began Thursday night, an action that US forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra". The Red Cross and other aid agencies were also denied access to deliver the most basic of humanitarian aid - water, food, and emergency medical supplies to the civilian population.
The situation was so severe that the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that the Coalition had used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population [in] flagrant violation" of the Geneva Conventions. Specifically Article 14, which clearly states that cutting off water, electricity, and denying access to humanitarian aid is considered to be a war crime.
But it gets worse, much worse. On November 7, a New York Times front page story detailed how the Coalition's ground campaign was launched by seizing Fallujah's only hospital: "Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of the rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." The story also revealed the motive for attacking the hospital: "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital with its stream of reports of civilian casualties". The city's two medical clinics were also bombed and destroyed.
In his excerpt, Molan also clearly views any non Coalition approved reporting of civilian deaths as propaganda. Independent American journalist Dahr Jamail interviewed scores of Fallujah survivors after the assault. He documented eye witness accounts of US troops denying the Red Cross entry to Fallujah to deliver medical aid, and firing on ambulances trying to enter the city. The fourth Geneva Convention strictly forbids attacks on hospitals, medical emergency vehicles and any impeding of medical operations.
Molan's account also neglects to mention the now irrefutable evidence that chemical weapons, specifically white phosphorous, were used under his command on Fallujah. Irrefutable because U.S. Colonel Barry Venable admitted it to the UK's Independent newspaper a year later. "Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants".
In a November 2005 editorial denouncing its use, the New York Times described white phosphorous: "Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body."
Again, one does not have to be an international legal expert to know that the use of chemical weapons is considered to be a war crime, and a particularly heinous one. We are particularly aware of this thanks to The Australian and other Murdoch press, which told us ad nauseam in the lead up to the invasion that there was no better proof of the need to remove Saddam Hussein by force than his use of the same white phosphorous on the Kurds.
Further allegations of atrocities occurred when U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Fallujah. Jamail reports first hand accounts of U.S. snipers shooting women and children in the streets; unarmed men shot while seeking safe passage with their wives and children under a white flag; photographers shot as they filmed battle. And in images captured by journalist Kevin Sites and beamed around the world on November 9, a U.S. marine was shown to approach a clearly wounded man lying on the floor of a mosque. The marine then fired his rife directly into the man, said "He's done", and casually walked away.
Relatively few insurgents were found once the city was subdued; most had, predictably, fled the city long before the assault began. Meanwhile an estimated 70% of the city was utterly destroyed, with thousands dead (Jamail and Fadhil 2006). Molan claims, and perhaps even believes, that his actions "represented the rule of law". In writing about the "terrorists", Molan succinctly expresses the view of many in the international community regarding the Coalition in Iraq: "But there are rules; they just did not obey them. In fact they institutionalised the transgression of international law."
There is little evidence to suggest that the resistance emanating from Fallujah was anything other than Fallujans fighting an occupation they believed to be illegal and unjust, a view shared by good deal of the planet. Yet Molan doggedly holds onto the long warn out U.S. propaganda view that there were just a few extreme "terrorists" who could be singled out: "They went to Fallujah to hide among the people but committed mindless acts of violence against them. They set up local religious courts and Fallujans were tried and punished, even tortured and executed, if they did not commit to extreme fundamentalist Islamic ideology and sharia law."
While he does not provide evidence to support this claim, regardless, it is stunning to suggest that this was somehow a worse fate than what awaited ordinary Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the scandal of which had broken months earlier. Or what clearly awaited them once the assault on their city began under his direct command.
Under the international legal doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if they knew, or should have known, that anyone under their command was committing war crimes and they failed to prevent them. The consistency and similarity of the attacks at Najaf, Samarra, and Fallujah display a deliberate disregard for civilian casualties in the planning and implementation of those military assaults. By Molan's own admission, he was responsible for not only planning, but also directing, these attacks. It is not conceivable that Molan was unaware of the serious and well documented accusations of atrocities being committed under his command.
While admirable that General Molan is so quick to admit responsibility for Fallujah, it is disconcerting that he does not seem to feel that he has done anything wrong, or should in any way be held accountable, for his actions. It is this utter hubris that most accurately characterises his writing. Sanitised as it is though, Molan has written an excellent brief regarding why it is crucial we start holding our political and military leaders accountable for their actions in Iraq. He would be an excellent place to start.
This is a shorter version of the piece originally published here.
Chris Doran summarised these views in a letter to The Australian, which sparked a reply from Molan and a fierce debate. Molan has just released a book, entitled Running the War in Iraq.
He conveniently omits the fact that an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 civilians still remained in Fallujah when the attack began. Citizens had been instructed to evacuate the city, population 250,000, before bombing began in October 2004, but any and all men aged 15 to 45 were prohibited from leaving. Many family members understandably chose to stay with their fathers and brothers. Once the bombing began, all exits out of the city were sealed off.
On October 16, the Washington Post reported that "electricity and water were cut off to the city just as a fresh wave of [bombing] strikes began Thursday night, an action that US forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra". The Red Cross and other aid agencies were also denied access to deliver the most basic of humanitarian aid - water, food, and emergency medical supplies to the civilian population.
The situation was so severe that the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that the Coalition had used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population [in] flagrant violation" of the Geneva Conventions. Specifically Article 14, which clearly states that cutting off water, electricity, and denying access to humanitarian aid is considered to be a war crime.
But it gets worse, much worse. On November 7, a New York Times front page story detailed how the Coalition's ground campaign was launched by seizing Fallujah's only hospital: "Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of the rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." The story also revealed the motive for attacking the hospital: "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital with its stream of reports of civilian casualties". The city's two medical clinics were also bombed and destroyed.
In his excerpt, Molan also clearly views any non Coalition approved reporting of civilian deaths as propaganda. Independent American journalist Dahr Jamail interviewed scores of Fallujah survivors after the assault. He documented eye witness accounts of US troops denying the Red Cross entry to Fallujah to deliver medical aid, and firing on ambulances trying to enter the city. The fourth Geneva Convention strictly forbids attacks on hospitals, medical emergency vehicles and any impeding of medical operations.
Molan's account also neglects to mention the now irrefutable evidence that chemical weapons, specifically white phosphorous, were used under his command on Fallujah. Irrefutable because U.S. Colonel Barry Venable admitted it to the UK's Independent newspaper a year later. "Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants".
In a November 2005 editorial denouncing its use, the New York Times described white phosphorous: "Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body."
Again, one does not have to be an international legal expert to know that the use of chemical weapons is considered to be a war crime, and a particularly heinous one. We are particularly aware of this thanks to The Australian and other Murdoch press, which told us ad nauseam in the lead up to the invasion that there was no better proof of the need to remove Saddam Hussein by force than his use of the same white phosphorous on the Kurds.
Further allegations of atrocities occurred when U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Fallujah. Jamail reports first hand accounts of U.S. snipers shooting women and children in the streets; unarmed men shot while seeking safe passage with their wives and children under a white flag; photographers shot as they filmed battle. And in images captured by journalist Kevin Sites and beamed around the world on November 9, a U.S. marine was shown to approach a clearly wounded man lying on the floor of a mosque. The marine then fired his rife directly into the man, said "He's done", and casually walked away.
Relatively few insurgents were found once the city was subdued; most had, predictably, fled the city long before the assault began. Meanwhile an estimated 70% of the city was utterly destroyed, with thousands dead (Jamail and Fadhil 2006). Molan claims, and perhaps even believes, that his actions "represented the rule of law". In writing about the "terrorists", Molan succinctly expresses the view of many in the international community regarding the Coalition in Iraq: "But there are rules; they just did not obey them. In fact they institutionalised the transgression of international law."
There is little evidence to suggest that the resistance emanating from Fallujah was anything other than Fallujans fighting an occupation they believed to be illegal and unjust, a view shared by good deal of the planet. Yet Molan doggedly holds onto the long warn out U.S. propaganda view that there were just a few extreme "terrorists" who could be singled out: "They went to Fallujah to hide among the people but committed mindless acts of violence against them. They set up local religious courts and Fallujans were tried and punished, even tortured and executed, if they did not commit to extreme fundamentalist Islamic ideology and sharia law."
While he does not provide evidence to support this claim, regardless, it is stunning to suggest that this was somehow a worse fate than what awaited ordinary Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the scandal of which had broken months earlier. Or what clearly awaited them once the assault on their city began under his direct command.
Under the international legal doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if they knew, or should have known, that anyone under their command was committing war crimes and they failed to prevent them. The consistency and similarity of the attacks at Najaf, Samarra, and Fallujah display a deliberate disregard for civilian casualties in the planning and implementation of those military assaults. By Molan's own admission, he was responsible for not only planning, but also directing, these attacks. It is not conceivable that Molan was unaware of the serious and well documented accusations of atrocities being committed under his command.
While admirable that General Molan is so quick to admit responsibility for Fallujah, it is disconcerting that he does not seem to feel that he has done anything wrong, or should in any way be held accountable, for his actions. It is this utter hubris that most accurately characterises his writing. Sanitised as it is though, Molan has written an excellent brief regarding why it is crucial we start holding our political and military leaders accountable for their actions in Iraq. He would be an excellent place to start.
This is a shorter version of the piece originally published here.
Chris Doran summarised these views in a letter to The Australian, which sparked a reply from Molan and a fierce debate. Molan has just released a book, entitled Running the War in Iraq.
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