Following my BBC Newsnight appearance last night re the prison sentence given to Bradley Manning, Riaz Ahmed has been in touch to make a strong point:
Do you believe that the crew of crazy horse 18 (who murdered those people in Iraq - including two children - 7 year old boy and 4 year old girl should be let off from their crime of Murder?
Do you believe that the truth of such crimes should be hidden from the world because the US army are given a god given right to kill anyone they want where ever they want?
To which the answers were No and No.
Riaz then challenged me to call for the perpetrators of these attacks to be put on trial and convicted.
I think he is talking about various examples of US army helicopters attacking targets in Iraq where Manning/WikiLeaks later revealed videos of the deadly action. The Wikipedia summary looks comprehensive enough on the facts of the matter and later legal and other investigations for present purposes.
Then there is this 2010 report in the Telegraph about 'Crazy Horse' helicopters:
Later in July, Crazy Horse 20 and 21 were called in to attack a group of insurgents gathering at or near a mosque. The "unconfirmed" casualty list gave a total of 12 dead insurgents and 14 dead civilians. Photographs taken by a drone of the survivors leaving the mosque showed no weapons.
Crazy Horse 18 was featured in a video released earlier this year showing the killing of a number of civilians, including children and two journalists from the Reuters news agency, in Baghdad in 2007.
The Crazy Horses were from the 227th Aviation Regiment, normally based in Fort Hood, Texas, but stationed in 2006-8 in Camp Taji, north of Baghdad.
Although most of the deaths recorded in the logs came at the hands of Sunni and Shia insurgents, and most incidents of torture and brutality blamed on Iraqi security forces, US troops particularly are described as complicit in some of the crimes.
At one stage they are recorded as threatening to turn over suspects being interrogated to the Wolf Brigade, a feared police commando group trained by the Americans and widely accused of torturing and even killing detainees.
At other times detainees were physically handed over and, according to a New York Times journalist, US troops stood by as they were tortured. An interview by the journalist Peter Maass with the Wolf Brigade's American military adviser, Col James Steele, was interrupted by screams, he reported.
Plenty more on the Internet.
There is a serious point here. There looks to be not much obvious Justice in a situation where the lowly Manning reveals strong evidence of apparent abuses by US troops in Iraq and ends up in prison for a long time, while the soldiers who took part in these attacks involving many civilian deaths stand unsanctioned.
As I have made clear on numerous occasions, I of all people have no reason to object to people following their conscience as long as they accept the consequences. If I took it upon myself to leak hundreds of thousands of secret and other classified official documents that I had not read, I would not be surprised if the state took a dim view of that radical abuse of trust and sent me to prison. To ignore my transgression - even if among those documents were some papers showing unambiguous abuses - would send a hopeless signal to everyone else in the system doing their honest best. Manning deserved to go to prison for grossly and deliberately exceeding any reasonable limits for whistleblowing.
What of the Crazy Horses? I can't imagine how difficult it must be for US and other forces operating in Iraq/Afghanistan and such places to work out confidently which targets are legitimate when the insurgents and fanatics are deliberately hiding themselves within the local civilian population as part of their plan to attack coalition forces: these insurgents/fanatics are themselves breaking the rules of war by their very behavior and so making civilian casualties far more likely. Add to that the many journalists running around without any obvious identification and you get every chance of some terrible outcomes, even without any recklessness or callousness among our own troops.
In the cases referred to above, there have been different investigations by the US military authorities, but as far as I can see they have concluded that the combat action taken by the US forces was justified as they had spotted armed insurgents on the ground and were under fire or reasonably feared that they could be.
I have no way of knowing what it would take for the US Crazy Horse military personnel involved in these attacks to be put on trial substantively for war-crime style excesses. My guess is that it won't happen. But there does look to be a case to answer that these helicopter crews behaved in a disproportionate and/or reckless way, even given the hostile operational circumstances they faced. If there is any way for these cases to be formally and publicly investigated again and charges to be brought, they should answer in court and take their chances accordingly.
All of which goes to show why there is no longer any willingness within the serious Western governments to get involved on the ground in the Middle East and its ghastly problems. This in turn means that the scale of the loss of life and the number of civilian casualties is far worse, as events in Syria show us.
No good answers. Responding 'proportionally' and honourably to these policy and operational contradictions is really hard. Whether you're a civilian or military official peering at a computer screen analysing myriad reports. Or a soldier, either on the ground stressed out and facing possible death yourself, or piloting a lethal drone from thousands of miles away.
