Freedom at gunpoint

Thursday marked the fifth year of the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States.

This comes as a new low in public knowledge and media coverage of the war is reached. A Pew survey held between Feb. 28 and March 2 found that only 28 percent of Americans could correctly estimate the number of U.S. troops (as of March 10, exactly 3,974 troops as confirmed by the Defense Department) who have died in the war. In addition, the the Project for Excellence in Journalism's news content index showed that coverage of the war in the mainstream media has drastically dropped from about 15 percent of the news cycle in July 2007 to 3 percent this February. And as of the first week of March, Iraq is not even among the top 10 stories covered; it represents 1 percent or less of total news coverage.

It is fitting that in this drought of coverage, Iraq Veterans Against the War held a conference called "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan" this past weekend in Washington. The conference is a play on the Winter Soldier Investigation held from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Just as its historical mirror, this current conference seeks to publicize the war crimes and atrocities carried out by the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, especially, but also in Afghanistan.

In the three days of testimony by war veterans, one thing that has emerged is that Abu Ghraib and other atrocities are not exceptions, but are commonplace. The main cause is not an innate wickedness in our troops but is rather the necessary outcome of placing them in a situation where friend and foe are indistinguishable and soldiers are forced to choose between their survival instinct and their moral code.

Marine Corps Sgt. Adam Kokesh, who served in Fallujah from February to September 2004 on a civil affairs team, specifically explained this confusion of the rules of engagement, which state that "positive identification is required prior to engagement" where positive identification means "'reasonable certainty' that your target is a legitimate military target." However, Kokesh said when all soldiers see is a muzzle flash from a building in a civilian area, they are forced to choose between increasing their chance of survival by returning fire and not breaking the rules of engagement. Consequently, he stated that "we changed the rules of engagement more often that we changed our underwear."

The testimony of Pvt. Clifton Hicks, who served in the First U.S. Cavalry Regiment in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood area in April 2004, further demonstrates the tragedy that occurs in the absence of a clearly definable enemy. He stated that as his unit entered a certain section of the neighborhood, his captain told them that there were "no friendlies in the area" and it was a free-fire zone. He then said that the streets of the neighborhood were littered with bodies (not just men, but women and children) and wreckage. He asserted that he "personally saw no military gear or weapons of any kind on any of the bodies that [he] came across." During the mission, other members of his unit indiscriminately fired at civilian vehicles and at civilians themselves, he said.

So far, the only American mainstream television news source that carried this story is MSNBC. The rest of the media at the event were international.

It is important not to forget that this war was started explicitly on the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, both of which have been proven false. Now the justification has morphed into bringing freedom to the Iraqis, even though when Saddam gassed his Kurdish population in 1988 the U.S. government was unconcerned, even though we continued bombing Iraq through the '90s and imposed sanctions on it that, according to the United Nations, led to the death of at least 500,000 Iraqi children, even though the U.S. government has in its history overthrown democratically governments not in line with U.S. interests. But somehow this time it is definitely about democracy (wink, wink).