First, I want to salute Mr. Mark Kraft, his courage and his hon­esty for bring­ing this story.

I read every avail­able reli­gion book to show me the path where can I find jus­tice, his­tory books to see when does all started, Phi­los­o­phy books to dis­cover how to achieve it and I failed to find the answer.

This why I joined the Inter­na­tional com­mit­tee of the Red Cross (ICRC), my goal was to find the answer to this question.

Through this jour­ney, I learned many things (not the answer) and this is one of them:

There are no nation­al­i­ties, coun­tries and groups. There are no bad Amer­i­cans, good Amer­i­cans, bad Iraqis and good Iraqis.
There are bad peo­ple, good peo­ple, liars, hon­est ….etc, for me every human being is trans­par­ent I don’t look at their faces or their ori­gins, I just look through them to their souls and their aura.

“I am just try­ing to find the answer”.

They [the pic­tures] indi­cate that a group of U.S. sol­diers planted weapons — the same weapon, in fact — in front of killed, wounded, and cap­tured Iraqi kids. I can­not authen­ti­cate whether Mr. Hersh is cor­rect and that the teens in ques­tion were inno­cent or not, but clearly, some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is amiss. At the very least, it indi­cates how uncer­tain the sit­u­a­tion is over there. Our sol­diers lit­er­ally do not know who the enemy is, and appar­ently are will­ing to manip­u­late the evi­dence in order to jus­tify their actions.

The pic­tures were taken with a dig­i­tal cam­era in Buhriz, Iraq on Oct. 22nd, 2004, and their file names are num­bered, appar­ently from the dig­i­tal cam­era in ques­tion. They show the basics for you: no weapons in the first pho­tos, then weapons inserted into the pic­tures later.

It appears to me that these teenagers are not insur­gents, in that they showed no signs of hav­ing either weapons or wear­ing khafiyas, or head­scarves, which are typ­i­cally used as a kind of uni­form by insur­gents, as dis­played in the Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos below. To me, the whole sit­u­a­tion is indica­tive of the ter­ri­ble uncer­tainty of the con­flict, where every­one is a poten­tial insur­gent, and where that fear and uncer­tainty leads to a sit­u­a­tion where U.S. sol­diers try to manip­u­late the real­ity of the situation.

It’s also worth not­ing that med­ical treat­ment was appar­ently not offered until shown in the later pic­tures, lead­ing me to won­der whether the assis­tance, in itself, was part of the “staged” ele­ment of these photos.

Read the rest and see the images here

(Thank you Nadia)

315 Comments

  1. Michael September 10th, 2005

    Fred you con­tra­vened Inter­na­tional Law by even being there, as for the Iraqis appre­ci­at­ing you being there, I sup­pose they might have said that to your face as an alter­na­tive to being mur­dered, but it’s a fan­tasy I’m afraid.
    Iraq has been ruined because of fools like you and you claim you’ve given the a chance of mak­ing some­thing for them­selves. Tell me, were you wounded in the head perchance?
  2. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    Recall­ing that its res­o­lu­tion 678 (1990) autho­rized Mem­ber States to use all nec­es­sary means to uphold and imple­ment its res­o­lu­tion 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990 and all rel­e­vant res­o­lu­tions sub­se­quent to Res­o­lu­tion 660 (1990) and to restore inter­na­tional peace and secu­rity in the area….Source Site: The United Nations
  3. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    Don’t let these peo­ple get to you “SSG.Wilson”

    Every­one has a side, these peo­ple just hap­pen to sup­port Abu Zar­qawi and what he’s doing to Iraq, that’s all.

    They also do not under­stand how to read…Example:

    autho­rized Mem­ber States to use all nec­es­sary means to uphold and imple­ment its res­o­lu­tion 660
  4. Michael September 10th, 2005

    Apart from the obvi­ous fact that US Res­o­lu­tion ref­ered ONLY to the Iraqi inva­sion of Kuwait and the removal of Iraq forces from there. Fred is a war crim­i­nal and as far as I’m con­cerned is the same as a Ger­man sol­dier in 1939 claim­ing that the Poles wanted to be invaded by the Germans.

    RESOLUTION 660

    2 August 1990

    Adopted by the Secu­rity Coun­cil at its 2932nd meet­ing, on 2 August 1990

    The Secu­rity Coun­cil, Alarmed by the inva­sion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 by the mil­i­tary forces of Iraq,

    Deter­min­ing that there exists a breach of inter­na­tional peace and secu­rity as regards the Iraqi inva­sion of Kuwait, Act­ing under Arti­cles 39 and 40 of the Char­ter of the United Nations,

    1. Con­demns the Iraqi inva­sion of Kuwait;

    2. Demands that Iraq with­draw imme­di­ately and uncon­di­tion­ally all s its forces to the posi­tions in which they were located on 1 August 1990;

    3. Calls upon Iraq and Kuwait to begin imme­di­ately inten­sive nego­ti­a­tions for the res­o­lu­tion of their dif­fer­ences and sup­ports all efforts in this regard, and espe­cially those of the League of Arab States;

    4. Decides to meet again as nec­es­sary to con­sider fur­ther steps with to ensure com­pli­ance with the present resolution.
  5. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    Again SSG. Wilson.…They can’t read very well…Example:

    Recall­ing all its pre­vi­ous rel­e­vant res­o­lu­tions, in par­tic­u­lar its res­o­lu­tions 661 (1990) of 6 August 1990, 678 (1990) of 29 Novem­ber 1990, 686 (1991) of 2 March 1991, 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991, 688 (1991) of 5 April 1991, 707 (1991) of 15 August 1991, 715 (1991) of 11 Octo­ber 1991, 986 (1995) of 14 April 1995, and 1284 (1999) of 17 Decem­ber 1999, and all the rel­e­vant state­ments of its President,

    and there are more.…many more.

    They pick and choose what fits their agenda only…

    And another issue they don’t under­stand is that when some­one breaks a cease­fire agree­ment, that agree­ment is null and void. Sad­dam Hussien broke these agree­ments faster than the UN could spit out res­o­lu­tions. It’s sim­ple intel­li­gence really.
  6. Michael September 10th, 2005

    Jeff(rey) I know that you are not too smart, but there was no UN Res­o­lu­tion that autho­rised an inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq in 2003. If your mem­ory goes back that far, you will recall that Pow­ell went to the UN with a pack of lies, which he’s already admit­ted, in an attempt to get that Res­o­lu­tion. He failed of course, there­fore the inva­sion of Iraq was illegal.
  7. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    And another issue they don’t under­stand is that when some­one breaks a cease­fire agree­ment, that agree­ment is null and void. Sad­dam Hussien broke these agree­ments faster than the UN could spit out res­o­lu­tions. It’s sim­ple intel­li­gence really.
  8. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    Recall­ing that its res­o­lu­tion 678 (1990) autho­rized Mem­ber States to use all nec­es­sary means to uphold and imple­ment its res­o­lu­tion 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990 and all rel­e­vant res­o­lu­tions sub­se­quent to res­o­lu­tion 660 (1990) and to restore inter­na­tional peace and secu­rity in the area,

    that is from 1441 dumbass.
  9. Jeff September 10th, 2005

    god­damn you guys a bunch a fuck­ing idiots.
  10. Michael September 10th, 2005

    Jeff(rey) there was noth­ing in Res­o­lu­tion 1441 that autho­rised force. Why in your sim­ple mind do you think Pow­ell went back to the UN to try and get one?
  11. Charles September 11th, 2005

    Why in your sim­ple mind do you think Pow­ell went back to the UN to try and get one?

    Sim­ple politics.

    It was becom­ing increas­ingly clear that the coun­tries who had signed the unan­i­mous ulti­ma­tum to Sad­dam, and who had allowed him to vio­late the cease fire agree­ment since 1991, were not will­ing to enforce their own ultimatum.
  12. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    Sim­ple politics.

    It was becom­ing increas­ingly clear that the coun­tries who had signed the unan­i­mous ulti­ma­tum to Sad­dam, and who had allowed him to vio­late the cease fire agree­ment since 1991, were not will­ing to enforce their own ultimatum.

    Exactly.

    Doesn’t take much intel­li­gence to fig­ure that one out, besides France and Rus­sia were so busy sellng arms to and mak­ing money from Sad­dam, they didn’t want that to end.

    Again…simple intel­li­gence.

    oh..

    autho­rized Mem­ber States to use all nec­es­sary means

    what part of that do you not under­stand? is it the use all nec­es­sary means part that fucks you up?
  13. Michael September 11th, 2005

    It was becom­ing increas­ingly clear that the coun­tries who had signed the unan­i­mous ulti­ma­tum to Sad­dam, and who had allowed him to vio­late the cease fire agree­ment since 1991, were not will­ing to enforce their own ultimatum.

    There was noth­ing to enforce, the UN Weapon Inspec­tors were qui­etly doing there job when they were moved out for the oil inva­sion. No WMD were found because there wasn’t any.

    Doesn’t take much intel­li­gence to fig­ure that one out, besides France and Rus­sia were so busy sellng arms to and mak­ing money from Sad­dam, they didn’t want that to end.

    If it doesn’t take much intel­li­gence Jeff to fig­ure that one out per­haps it is left best to you. :) . The USA was also of course sell­ing arms to Sad­dam and Iraq and just about every­one else in the area.
  14. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    And another issue they don’t under­stand is that when some­one breaks a cease­fire agree­ment, that agree­ment is null and void. Sad­dam Hussien broke these agree­ments faster than the UN could spit out res­o­lu­tions. It’s sim­ple intel­li­gence really.

    Learn how to read michael…

    Sad­dam Hussien broke that agree­ment almost every­day by fir­ing SAM’s at jets fly­ing in the no fly zones.

    What part of that do you not understand.
  15. LadyBird September 11th, 2005

    NO–Fly zone was not autho­rized by the UN.

    Read this

    Sad­dam killed Iraqis with a per­mis­sion from the US .

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Bush left the rebels twist­ing in the wind to be ruth­lessly killed by the Iraqi army’s Repub­li­can Guard fly­ing heli­copters allowed by the cease-fire arranged by U.S. mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal lead­ers. U.S. troops in south­ern Iraq in March 1991 were ordered not to inter­fere. How can U.S. troops or Iraqi rebels be con­fi­dent this won’t hap­pen again? Long oppressed by the Iraqi mil­i­tary, what will the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion do if Iraq is lib­er­ated? The Amer­i­can pub­lic won’t sup­port a long-term occu­pa­tion and high casualties.


    Here
  16. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    The two no-fly zones over Iraq were imposed by the US, Britain and France after the Gulf War, in what was described as a human­i­tar­ian effort to pro­tect Shia Mus­lims in the south and Kurds in the north.

    Never said any­thing about the UN and the no fly zones, the cease­fire agree­ment had noth­ing to do with the UN.

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Bush left the rebels twist­ing in the wind to be ruth­lessly killed by the Iraqi army’s Repub­li­can Guard fly­ing heli­copters allowed by the cease-fire arranged by U.S. mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal lead­ers. U.S. troops in south­ern Iraq in March 1991 were ordered not to inter­fere. How can U.S. troops or Iraqi rebels be con­fi­dent this won’t hap­pen again? Long oppressed by the Iraqi mil­i­tary, what will the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion do if Iraq is lib­er­ated? The Amer­i­can pub­lic won’t sup­port a long-term occu­pa­tion and high casualties.

    You can’t have it both ways Lady­bird. You can’t com­plain about the US not occu­py­ing Iraq in the 90’s and then turn around and com­plain about the US being there now.

    Which is it? Should we have removed Sad­dam in the 90’s and occu­pied your for­mer coun­try then or now?

    Don’t use what the US didn’t the first time around as ammo to fuel your hate for the US now. Of course I’ve always believed we should have fin­ished the job in 1991, but just think if we had…You wouldn’t have this nice cozy lit­tle out­let to push your hate for the US.
  17. LadyBird September 11th, 2005

    Never said any­thing about the UN and the no fly zones, the cease­fire agree­ment had noth­ing to do with the UN.

    Your mak­ing as the US and Iraq are two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries, What are your air­planes doing above the Iraqi sky???

    You can’t have it both ways.

    I am talk­ing about the US credibility.
  18. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    and by the way…The UN does not run the world. Last time I checked no one was address­ing Kofi as “Emperor Annan”.

    And one more thing, Just think what Sad­dam and his sons would have done to Iraqi’s if those No-Fly Zones never existed…
    Pon­der that one for a while.
  19. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    Your mak­ing as the US and Iraq are two neigh­bor­ing countries

    No, The would be Kuwait. Remem­ber them? That’s what started all this. That lit­tle inva­sion by Sad­dam in 1990. You know, that lit­tle coun­try that Sad­dam refers to it’s peo­ple as “Kuwaiti Dogs”
  20. Michael September 11th, 2005

    Con­trary to your imag­i­na­tion, the USA doesn’t make Inter­na­tion­ally Law, that comes from the UN on the agree­ment of their mem­bers, includ­ing of course the USA.

    The no-fly zones were uni­lat­er­ally estab­lished by the U.S. gov­ern­ment after the Per­sian Gulf War, sup­pos­edly to enforce UN res­o­lu­tions on Iraq. There was one big prob­lem, how­ever: The United Nations never autho­rised the no-fly zones to be estab­lished. U.S. offi­cials have always claimed that the U.S. gov­ern­ment, as a mem­ber of the United Nations, has the right to uni­lat­er­ally enforce any res­o­lu­tion of the United Nations. Such a posi­tion, how­ever, is patently fal­la­cious. Enforce­ment of an organisation’s rules and reg­u­la­tions belongs to the organ­i­sa­tion itself, not to each and every indi­vid­ual mem­ber of the organisation.

  21. Charles September 11th, 2005

    There was noth­ing to enforce, the UN Weapon Inspec­tors were qui­etly doing there job when they were moved out for the oil inva­sion. No WMD were found because there wasn’t any.

    Sad­dam was given an ulti­ma­tum to com­ply imme­di­ately, uncon­di­tion­ally, and com­pletely. Any fail­ure on his part to accom­plish all of these things put him in vio­la­tion of the ulti­ma­tum. Dur­ing the final inspec­tions, Sad­dam tried to refuse to allow the inter­view­ing of sci­en­tists with­out gov­ern­ment con­trollers, and tried to refuse to allow them to leave coun­try with their fam­i­lies for inter­views. End of story. He tar­gets US/UK planes. End of story. He was found in breach for rock­ets. End of story.

    Sad­dam was for­feit. Every­one will milk the fail­ure to find WMDs for a long time. That’s swell. But Sad­dam vio­lated the ulti­ma­tum and it was incum­bant upon the UNSC to enforce. Many balked. Some didn’t.
  22. Michael September 11th, 2005

    Dur­ing the final inspec­tions, Sad­dam tried to refuse to allow the inter­view­ing of sci­en­tists with­out gov­ern­ment con­trollers, and tried to refuse to allow them to leave coun­try with their fam­i­lies for inter­views. End of story. He tar­gets US/UK planes. End of story. He was found in breach for rock­ets. End of story.

    None of the above is the slight­est bit of truth. But it’s not the end of story, in fact far from it. The USA has many crimes on its hands and will even­tu­ally be called to book. The Ger­mans showed the same kind of arro­gance in 1939 as the Amer­i­cans do now, they too believed they could not be brought into answer their crimes.
  23. Michael September 11th, 2005

    Lady­bird can you delete #384, it’s obvi­ously been put on by an Amer­i­can want­ing to cen­sor the truth and tie up the page.
  24. Charles September 11th, 2005

    None of the above is the slight­est bit of truth.

    If any of the ‘above’ can be proven as true will you acknowl­edge it?
  25. Michael September 11th, 2005

    The fact remains Charles that the UN weapons Inspec­tors acknowl­edged Iraq’ coop­er­a­tion as “excel­lent” or words to that affect before they were advised to leave due to the pend­ing ille­gal inva­sion. The “no flight zones” were ille­gal in any case and were used as a soft­en­ing up of Iraqi defences before the ille­gal inva­sion, the Iraqis actu­ally had every right to shoot at these planes. As for the rock­ets, they were reputed to have trav­elled a few kilo­me­tres fur­ther than autho­rised, big deal.
  26. Charles September 11th, 2005

    Extracts from chief UN weapons inspec­tor Dr Hans Blix’s state­ment to the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil on progress in the search for banned weapons in Iraq.

    Now let’s remem­ber folks, Sad­dam was given a final oppor­tu­nity to com­ply imme­di­ately, com­pletely, and uncon­di­tion­ally. We must con­sider his resume over the 90’s.

    Any con­di­tions he set, delays he cre­ated, or even ommis­sions in report­ing, were to be con­sid­ered mat­eral breach as per 1441.

    Iraq appears not to have come to a gen­uine accep­tance — not even today — of the dis­ar­ma­ment, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the con­fi­dence of the world and to live in peace…

    Iraq has refused to guar­an­tee its safety, unless a num­ber of con­di­tions are fulfilled.

    we note that Iraq is not so far com­ply­ing with our request.

    Iraq had insisted on send­ing heli­copters of their own to accom­pany ours.

    “I am obliged to note some recent dis­turb­ing inci­dents and harassment.

    “Shortly there­after, we receive protests from the Iraqi author­i­ties about an unan­nounced inspection

    Demon­stra­tions and out­bursts of this kind are unlikely to occur in Iraq with­out ini­tia­tive or encour­age­ment from the authorities.

    “Regret­tably, the 12,000-page dec­la­ra­tion, most of which is a reprint of ear­lier doc­u­ments, does not seem to con­tain any new evi­dence that would elim­i­nate the ques­tions or reduce their number…

    “Iraq said that the small quan­tity of agent remain­ing after the Gulf War was uni­lat­er­ally destroyed in the sum­mer of 1991.

    “Unmovic, how­ever, has infor­ma­tion that con­flicts with this account.

    “There are indi­ca­tions that Iraq had worked on the prob­lem of purity and sta­bil­i­sa­tion and that more had been achieved than has been declared.

    “Indeed, even one of the doc­u­ments pro­vided by Iraq indi­cates that the purity of the agent, at least in lab­o­ra­tory pro­duc­tion, was higher than declared.

    “There are also indi­ca­tions that the agent was weaponised.

    “The doc­u­ment indi­cates that 13,000 chem­i­cal bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were con­sumed dur­ing this period.

    “Thus, there is a dis­crep­ancy of 6,500 bombs.

    “The amount of chem­i­cal agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons.

    “In the absence of evi­dence to the con­trary, we must assume that these quan­ti­ties are now unac­counted for.

    “The dis­cov­ery of a num­ber of 122 mm chem­i­cal rocket war­heads in a bunker at a stor­age depot 170 kilo­me­tres (106 miles) south-west of Bagh­dad was much publicised.

    “This was a rel­a­tively new bunker and there­fore the rock­ets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions.

    “Iraq has declared that it pro­duced about 8,500 litres of this bio­log­i­cal war­fare agent, which it states it uni­lat­er­ally destroyed in the sum­mer of 1991.

    “Iraq has pro­vided lit­tle evi­dence for this pro­duc­tion and no con­vinc­ing evi­dence for its destruction.

    “There are strong indi­ca­tions that Iraq pro­duced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruc­tion date.

    “As I reported to the Coun­cil on 19 Decem­ber last year, Iraq did not declare a sig­nif­i­cant quan­tity, some 650 kilo­grammes [1430 lb], of bac­te­r­ial growth media, which was acknowl­edged as imported in Iraq’s sub­mis­sion to the Amorim panel in Feb­ru­ary, 1999.

    “As part of its 7 Decem­ber 2002 dec­la­ra­tion, Iraq resub­mit­ted the Amorim panel doc­u­ment, but the table show­ing this par­tic­u­lar import of media was not included.

    “The absence of this table would appear to be delib­er­ate as the pages of the resub­mit­ted doc­u­ment were renumbered.

    “Iraq declared the con­sump­tion of a num­ber of Scud mis­siles as tar­gets in the devel­op­ment of an anti-ballistic mis­sile defence sys­tem dur­ing the 1980s.

    “Yet no tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion has been pro­duced about that pro­gramme or data on the con­sump­tion of the missiles.

    “Both mis­siles have been tested to a range in excess of the per­mit­ted range of 150 km, with the Al Samoud 2 being tested to a max­i­mum of 183 km and the Al Fatah to 161 km.

    “Some of both types of mis­siles have already been pro­vided to the Iraqi Armed Forces even though it is stated that they are still under­go­ing development.

    The Al Samoud’s diam­e­ter was increased from an ear­lier ver­sion to the present 760 mm.

    “This mod­i­fi­ca­tion was made despite a 1994 let­ter from the Exec­u­tive Chair­man of Unscom direct­ing Iraq to limit its mis­sile diam­e­ters to less than 600 mm.

    “In addi­tion, Iraq has refur­bished its mis­sile pro­duc­tion infrastructure.

    “In par­tic­u­lar, Iraq recon­sti­tuted a num­ber of cast­ing cham­bers, which had pre­vi­ously been destroyed under Unscom supervision.

    “What is clear is that they were ille­gally brought into Iraq, that is, Iraq or some com­pany in Iraq, cir­cum­vented the restric­tions imposed by var­i­ous resolutions…

    “The recent inspec­tion find in the pri­vate home of a sci­en­tist of a box of some 3,000 pages of doc­u­ments, much of it relat­ing to the laser enrich­ment of ura­nium sup­port a con­cern that has long existed that doc­u­ments might be dis­trib­uted to the homes of pri­vate individuals.

    There were also cases in which the inter­vie­wee was clearly intim­i­dated by the pres­ence of and inter­rup­tion by Iraqi officials.

    “This was the back­ground of res­o­lu­tion 1441’s pro­vi­sion for a right for Unmovic and the IAEA [Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency] to hold pri­vate inter­views ‘in the mode or loca­tion’ of our choice, in Bagh­dad or even abroad.

    “To date, 11 indi­vid­u­als were asked for inter­views in Bagh­dad by us.

    “The replies have invari­ably been that the indi­vid­ual will only speak at Iraq’s mon­i­tor­ing direc­torate or, at any rate, in the pres­ence of an Iraqi official.

    Any one of those exam­ples by itself proves Sad­dam did not com­ply imme­di­ately, com­pletely, and unconditionally.
  27. Jeff September 11th, 2005

    Lady­bird, is this the “Intel­lect” that you speak of…?

    Michael what part of “cease­fire agree­ment” do you not under­stand? Is it the “Cease­fire” word that con­fuses you?

    Here are hard facts for you:

    Sad­dam vio­lated 17 UN Resolutions.

    Sad­dam vio­lated his Cease­fire agreements.

    Again, live by the rules that you agreed to, or all bets are off. Period.

    End of story.

    You guys pride your­selves with love for the UN, but say noth­ing about “their” laws, as you say, being enforced. You could actu­ally swing the agru­ment to, The United States is doing noth­ing more than enforc­ing the laws put forth by the UN.

    As for the rock­ets, they were reputed to have trav­elled a few kilo­me­tres fur­ther than autho­rised, big deal.

    Accord­ing to the UN and “their” law, it was a big deal. Every­time you try and make an agru­ment you bring up inter­na­tional law…now you’re say­ing it’s ok to bend the rules when it comes to the laws that the UN put forth?

    Which is it Michael? Obey the law or bend it to your liking?
  28. Michael September 11th, 2005

    The point being that we now know Sad­dam didn’t have any WMD and was there­fore unable to destoy them. Listed below are the final com­ments made by the weapons inspec­tors. If it’s sim­ply a ques­tion of ignor­ing UN Resoul­tions, then of course Israel has ignored more than any other coun­try in the world, why were they not invaded?

    From your own link;

    Co-operation might be said to relate to both sub­stance and process.

    “It would appear from our expe­ri­ence so far that Iraq has decided in prin­ci­ple to pro­vide co-operation on process, notably access…

    “Iraq has on the whole co-operated rather well so far with Unmovic in this field.

    “The most impor­tant point to make is that access has been pro­vided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and, with one excep­tion, it has been prompt.

    “We have fur­ther had great help in build­ing up the infra­struc­ture of our office in Bagh­dad and the field office in Mosul.

    “Arrange­ments and ser­vices for our plane and our heli­copters have been good. The envi­ron­ment has been workable.…
  29. Michael September 11th, 2005

    Blix: Iraq War Was Ille­gal
    Blair’s defense is bogus, says the for­mer UN weapons inspector

    by Anne Pen­keth in Stock­holm and Andrew Grice

    The for­mer chief UN weapons inspec­tor Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was ille­gal, deal­ing another dev­as­tat­ing blow to Tony Blair.
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0305–01.htm
    Mr Blix, speak­ing to The Inde­pen­dent, said the Attor­ney General’s legal advice to the Gov­ern­ment on the eve of war, giv­ing cover for mil­i­tary action by the US and Britain, had no law­ful jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. He said it would have required a sec­ond United Nations res­o­lu­tion explic­itly autho­riz­ing the use of force for the inva­sion of Iraq last March to have been legal.
  30. Charles September 11th, 2005

    The point being that we now know Sad­dam didn’t have any WMD and was there­fore unable to destoy them

    Sad­dam had over a decade to prove it. His delib­er­ate attempts to sab­o­tage the inspec­tion process, his lies, and deter­mi­na­tion to not reveal his pro­grams wasthe cause ofthe Iraqi suf­fer­ing. Not to men­tion the war that started it all.

    It might be con­cluded that his sin­gle largest error was to vio­late the cease fire terms by appar­ently dis­pos­ing of much of his WMD mate­r­ial with­out the required UN inspec­tors on hand.

    In any case, the inspec­tions exer­cise after 1441 was not some for­mula that gave Sad­dam one point for being good, and –1 point for being bad, with a total at the end to decide if he was good or bad.

    1441 was very clear. Any con­di­tions that he tried to impose, and delays that he caused, any incon­sis­ten­cies in his report­ing — and even ommis­sions, were all con­sid­ered mate­r­ial breach mean­ing he had exhausted his final oppor­tu­nity (i.e. no more oppor­tu­ni­ties). Any one item was enough to make him for­feit. As Blix pointed out, what was required of Sad­dam was the desire to com­ply, and the will to com­ply. South Africa had both. Dis­arm­ing os not hard. Ver­i­fi­ca­tion of dis­ar­ma­ment is not hard. Sad­dam delib­er­ately made it hard for over a decade. The con­clu­sion is obvi­ous — he did not want to disarm.

    Actual Tran­script

    Large quan­ti­ties of chem­i­cal weapons were destroyed under UNSCOM super­vi­sion before 1994.

    Mean­ing Sad­dam lied about hav­ing destroyed them in 1991.

    While Iraq claims, with lit­tle evi­dence, that it destroyed all bio­log­i­cal weapons uni­lat­er­ally in 1991, it is cer­tain that UNSCOM destroyed large bio­log­i­cal weapons pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties in 1996. The large nuclear infra­struc­ture was destroyed and the fis­sion­able mate­r­ial was removed from Iraq by the IAEA.

    Mean­ing that Sad­dam lied about bioweapons. The only rea­son he was caught at all is because a defecter betrayed him. UNSCOM than located and destroyed the mate­ri­als ‘that never existed’ 5 years after they should have been dis­closed and destroyed.

    Sad­dam used every trick he could to sow uncer­tainty and this came back to haunt him.

    This was not a man to be trusted. He was given plenty of oppor­tu­nity to prove his inten­tions one way or the other, and unfor­tu­nately for him, he chose non-compliance.

    Cherry pick and parse all day long. Sad­dam was a son of a bitch (noth­ing per­sonal against his mom), and chose his fate.
  31. Charles September 11th, 2005

    Well then I guess 1 mil­lion Rwan­dans were legally chopped to bits with machetes.

    The UN had author­ity (as global arbiter) to decide what to do. They decided to do noth­ing. I guess that means its ok. Must be legal.
  32. Jeff September 12th, 2005

    Well then I guess 1 mil­lion Rwan­dans were legally chopped to bits with machetes.

    The UN had author­ity (as global arbiter) to decide what to do. They decided to do noth­ing. I guess that means its ok. Must be legal.

    Speak­ing of Rwanda and geno­cide…

    Every­time this planet expe­ri­ences some sort of geno­cide, there is always an Euro­pean involved.

    Click Here!
  33. Charles September 12th, 2005

    Jeff,

    Let’s not make light of one mil­lion civil­ian deaths. I don’t think Bel­gium is to blame — although it may have some cit­i­zens involved. Their are really crappy peo­ple all over the world.

    My point about Rwanda was sim­ply that the UN is inca­pable of tak­ing deci­sive action, even when it has every right to. Even when it is morally oblig­ated to. The les­son learned — and Clin­ton admit­ted that Rwanda was his most tragic for­eign pol­icy fail­ure — is that you can­not rely on the UN to do the right thing. Look at Bosnia. This stuff just gets repeated over and over again. Dic­ta­tors slaugh­ter and oppress, and they have full vot­ing rights as UN mem­bers, and are voted to chair human rights commissions.

    The UN is now a joke — and every tin pot dic­ta­tor knows it. So do inno­cent oppressed peo­ple in their last pathetic moments before being slaugh­tered. Maybe that will change some day.
    But until then, you bet­ter hope that your fate does not depend on the UN com­ing to help you.
  34. Jeff September 12th, 2005

    Jeff,

    Let’s not make light of one mil­lion civil­ian deaths. I don’t think Bel­gium is to blame — although it may have some cit­i­zens involved. Their are really crappy peo­ple all over the world.

    Wasn’t try­ing to make light, just try­ing to show an exam­ple of the hypro­cricy that we call Europe.

    The UN is now a joke — and every tin pot dic­ta­tor knows it.

    Yep, just ask Iran. But hey, that’s a Euro­pean prob­lem, we need not worry. ;-)

    But until then, you bet­ter hope that your fate does not depend on the UN com­ing to help you.

    Don’t worry, I’ll never expect help from the UN, nor do I want it. I’m fully able to take care of myself.
  35. Jeff September 12th, 2005

    And speak­ing of the lit­tle devils…(both the UN and Iran)

    Iran warns of ‘con­se­quences’ if referred to U.N. Secu­rity Council

    TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran warned Sun­day that there will be “cer­tain con­se­quences” if it is referred to the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil for pos­si­ble sanc­tions over its nuclear activities.

    New For­eign Min­is­ter Manouchehr Mot­taki also told a news con­fer­ence Iran plans to orga­nize ten­ders for build­ing two more nuclear power plants in the Islamic republic.

    Mot­taki reit­er­ated Iran’s posi­tion that it will not stop ura­nium repro­cess­ing, reject­ing a U.S.-backed Euro­pean threat that Tehran has about a week to freeze the activ­i­ties or face refer­ral to the Secu­rity Coun­cil for pos­si­ble sanctions.

    “There is no legal or legit­i­mate rea­son, given Iran’s trans­par­ent activ­i­ties and its open coop­er­a­tion with the IAEA … that Iran be referred to the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil,” Mot­taki told reporters.

    “If a polit­i­cal deci­sion is made to refer Iran to the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil, it will be enter­ing a lose-lose game,” he added. “It will have its own cer­tain con­se­quences and will affect Iran’s deci­sions. We pre­fer that such a game is not played.” Source:

    No need to fear every­one, Europe will save us all!
  36. John December 17th, 2005

    Too bad that we can’t yet(!) trade the lives of you know-it-all pseudo geeks who don’t have a clue about war or most other things, for the lost lives of our HEROIC Amer­i­can war­riors. The islamo-fascists have been wag­ing a war for over 40 years against the plush life that allows you morons to exist on this earth. Get a CLUE, if the islam­o­fas­cists win, then you and every­thing about you gets bru­tally killed and flushed down the sewer, and no they won’t stop to debate it with you and you will soil your pants and as your last thought is when you real­ize you screwed yourselves.
  37. ScreaminFreedom March 7th, 2006

    As an aver­age Amer­i­can, try­ing to find mean­ing in Iraq War since no WMD’s have been found, it led me here. I agree with Sgt. who said above that lib­er­at­ing peo­ple from dic­ta­tor was good. How­ever, I’m puz­zled why we didn’t stop Sad­dam years ago, also i’m puz­zled that in some ways we did cre­ate the lit­tle mon­ster prop­ing him up in Iraq and Iran war.
    I sup­port our troops, but in essence, with no dis­re­spect, they are our lead­ers peons, or per­haps a bet­ter way to say it their goto guys in times of trou­ble against “their ene­mies”.
    I say “their ene­mies” cause there is alot let’s say “back­room” deal­ings doc­u­mented on the inter­net that our gov­ern­ment at the high­est lev­els have been involved in, drug money laun­der­ing, arms, prop­ping up cer­tain gov against other gov’s, etc… all in the name of “greed” in essence. How­ever, they won’t come out and say it that way, but “big money” does make the world go round and the big­wigs are call­ing the shots.
    Whether you like how they shape the world or not , and whether it’s con­sti­tu­tional or not they will pro­tect their invest­ments and buy politi­cians off to accom­plish them.
    Some call it con­spir­acy the­o­ries, but I’m telling you nobody in their right mind could make up all this stuff.
    Just type in “Politi­cians and money laud­er­ing” in Google and you will see what I mean. Fol­low the “money trails” as rush lim­baugh likes to say.
    Most Amer­i­cans don’t even have a clue how cor­rupt prob­a­bly every gov in the world is to some extent.
    Thank God, he is, and will set us piti­ful humans straight one day.
  38. wesley April 14th, 2006

    hah! whad­daya know? an “ille­gal” war?! makes ya won­der who’s going to arrest the per­pe­tra­tor. any­way, my guess is that the com­bined tes­tic­u­lar for­ti­tude of all the sis­si­fied crit­ics of our sol­diers gath­ered on this joke of a blog wouldn’t equal that of even one of our FEMALE sol­diers. if you think mus­ter­ing the cajones to go to Iraq to fight for our ungrate­ful, rapidly declin­ing “democ­racy” is a walk in the park, then i’d love to see you take that walk for just one 24hr period.
  39. wesley April 14th, 2006

    i think it’d be far eas­ier to just shut up and pray for our soldiers—it’s the least they deserve.
  40. Liz August 3rd, 2006

    Bren­gard. What you said makes no sense at allll, if you knew the writ­ings of Islam a lit­tle more, (but I guess your IQ of 149 doesn’t include any knowl­edge of Islam)you would know that it states do not do harm to oth­ers unless they have harmed you. So maybe they felt threat­ened? Any­way I don’t believe that these peo­ple wanted us “dead” they wanted to make their point. Well any­way, check out the web­site above, http://www.911proof.com/ . It has a lot of inter­est­ing facts.
  41. Gregory July 15th, 2007

    Man

    You guys totally fucked up in your heads. You guys are sooo stu­pid that i cant belive and cant explain words! Dont even know how to START ! You peo­ples dieing about JEWS Gov­er­ments in your coun­try!
    Lis­ten to ”george Gol­loway” more i dont have to say ! I Am Iran­ian Armen­ian ! And if your JEW gov­er­ments even think to come into Iran.. you guys are really really death ! Rus­sia and China behinds us. And the days of Israel are num­bered ! Let us fight 1vs1 Iran Vs Israel ! Amer­ica try even to help.. and rus­sia and china help us.… or not!? we don’t give a F*K we are REAL ! You peo­ples join­ing in army for what ? Money, train­ing… Macho Man ? Pfff We will die for ouer right ! Thats REAL SHITT ! You peo­ples don’t has the balls for that ! And AAaaaaaaaaaalot other peo­ples are SO sick of Amer­ica !-) Ya Wanna get WAR ? Let’s get it In„ you Start beef ? We”ll will FINISHE IT ! And don’t think the WAR will fight in ouer coun­trys… we will come with army to your fuck­ing USA as well ! With 1 mind. KILLLLLLLLLL !!!!!!!!!

    I Love You peoples2!

    Kiss Gre­gory.
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Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. SLC Library Boy says:
    September 7, 2005 at 00:41

    appear in the ini­tial pho­tographs, but did appear in later pho­tographs, some observers believed this was evi­dence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insur­gents. The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon. The weblog entries made it clear that:

  2. THE GLOBAL AWAKENING says:
    September 1, 2005 at 02:51

    appear in the ini­tial pho­tographs, but did appear in later pho­tographs, some observers believed this was evi­dence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insur­gents. The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon. The weblog entries made it clear that:

  3. Now more than ever says:
    June 27, 2005 at 18:59

    Hersh deter­mined not to fol­low up on the story because it was incon­clu­sive and it could threaten his sources. Cryp­tome has the pic­tures of the dead boys with and with­out the weapon, cour­tesy of Mark Kraft. Bagh­dad Dweller and Feral Scholar also weigh in. As an aside: today is some­thing of a water­shed moment for me. For the first time, I am not aghast or even sur­prised by this kind of news. For so long now, I have been aston­ished by my own abil­ity to con­tinue to be

  4. Shlonkom Bakazay? says:
    June 26, 2005 at 07:27

    of the Amer­i­cans pulling bod­ies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see sol­diers drop­ping R.P.G.‘s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insur­gent kill. [one, two, three, four , five, six]

  5. Keld Bach’s Press Cuttings says:
    June 23, 2005 at 13:06

    con­flict, where every­one is a poten­tial insur­gent, and where that fear and uncer­tainty leads to a sit­u­a­tion where U.S. sol­diers try to manip­u­late the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion. Read the full story and see the pic­tures for your­self: Cryptome.org (via Lady­Bird ). No Comments »

  6. Robert B. - MySpace Blog says:
    October 18, 2006 at 10:12

    appear in the ini­tial pho­tographs, but did appear in later pho­tographs, some observers believed this was evi­dence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insur­gents. The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his platoon.  The weblog entries made it clear that:

  7. COUNTER TERRORISM, Information Assurance, Counter-terrorism news, Anti-terrorism blog :: NSA, National Security Agency, Support the NSA says:
    July 6, 2008 at 18:24

    appear in the ini­tial pho­tographs, but did appear in later pho­tographs, some observers believed this was evi­dence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insur­gents. The researcher was also able to find­we­blog entries(numbered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon. The weblog entries made it clear that:

  8. How to Identify Misinformation - US Department of State says:
    September 8, 2005 at 20:06

  9. Search results for Ali Atwa - Copernic Agent says:
    September 9, 2005 at 04:56

    […] Bagh­dad Dweller » US troops do kill Iraqi chil­dren (Update) Mohammed Hamadei from the ter­ror­ist group Hezbol­lah, Has­san Izz-al-Din from Lebanon, and Ali Atwa another ter­ror­ist hijacked the plane. August 8, 1985 … http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 — 57% Result found by: Netscape Net­cen­ter, AOL Search […]

  10. Het redactiestatuut van Alt-F4 - Alt-F4.org says:
    September 9, 2005 at 12:09

    […] Het weblog is niet van de mil­i­tairen, een slordighei­dje in het Statuut. Zoals ik hier­boven schreef: ze rea­geren op een weblog-entry. En we hebben het hier wel over “the most dec­o­rated pla­toon in the 1st Infantry Divi­sion dur­ing OIF II”. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361#comment-3600 Het zoge­naamde “Pun­isher” pla­toon: “If they aren’t going to vote any­way, we might as well kill some bad guys.” drunk­men — 11:57:17, 09–09-05 […]

  11. TFP -> Officer fires letter against website over photos says:
    September 18, 2005 at 18:12

    […] http://cryptome.org/buhriz-kill03.htm26 June 2005 The Buhriz report and pho­tos: http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill01.htm

  12. diary 27 says:
    October 4, 2005 at 18:58

    […] The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon.  The weblog entries made it clear that: […]

  13. Eyeballing the Buhriz Body Count says:
    January 1, 2006 at 11:05

    […] Eye­balling the Buhriz Body Count 6 July 2005. A writes: Pulled this from the U.S. Army White Pages. The email for Lt Terry Jonathan Grider from the arti­cle: terry.grider [at] us.army.mil Phone Num­ber: 09643–205-339 Assigned to 2–2 Infantry. 1 July 2005. Mark Kraft responds to Lt. Grider: I wanted to reply to http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361#comment-3600 the anony­mous com­ment from roadstoiraq.com, made, appar­ently, by Lt. Grider. First off, Lt. Grider seems to think that my post­ing of the the pic­tures was a per­sonal attack on him. In fact, he was men­tioned once in my orig­i­nal post, as being the leader of the par­tic­u­lar unit involved at Buhriz that day. My source for this infor­ma­tion was straight out of the news­pa­per reports of what hap­pened that day, and I never said that Lt. Grider was per­son­ally involved in the pic­tures them­selves. Lt Grider’s claim that I should have inves­ti­gated this mat­ter fur­ther before com­ing for­ward with the pic­tures over­looks sev­eral impor­tant things. 1. I make no claims to being a reporter. I am a weblog­ger who went pub­lic with pic­tures sent to me by a U.S. cit­i­zen in Iraq. A cit­i­zen who found the inci­dent trou­bling and felt that they should be released. 2. I had no clear way to get in touch with Lt. Grider. 3. Had I got­ten in touch with Lt. Grider first, I still would not know if he was telling the truth about the pic­tures. Denial does not equal inno­cence. 4. I feel that the pub­lic has a right to see the pho­tographs in ques­tion, regard­less of Lt. Grider’s per­ceived guilt or inno­cence. 5. The pub­lic release of the pic­tures was, I felt, a nec­es­sary step in order to deter­mine more about them. In his account, Lt. Grider basi­cally says that the pic­tures were taken accord­ing to the orders of engage­ment. While I do not deny that he was most cer­tainly fol­low­ing his orders, the ques­tion is, why was it nec­es­sary to take the sec­ond set of pic­tures, show­ing the same weapon, an RPG launcher, being placed in front of each of the Iraqi teens, to be used, as he said, for “evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents”? Didn’t the ini­tial pic­tures more accu­rately reflect the real­ity of the situ­aiton for the great major­ity of the Iraqi teens in ques­tion? Clearly, if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of tak­ing an addi­tional pic­ture to indi­cate which Iraqi his men had taken the RPG launcher from, this would’ve bet­ter reflected the inci­dent, right? The impli­ca­tion here is that it is accept­able, stan­dard behav­ior when U.S. troops clear a given area, for them to view Iraqis who are killed, wounded, or cap­tured as insur­gents, regard­less of whether they are armed or not, and to take pho­tographs which reflect this “real­ity”. The end result is, we have two Iraqi teens in prison, pre­sum­ably for fir­ing an RPG launcher at Amer­i­can troops, who risk these pic­tures being used against them when they finally get a trial. What is at fault here, basi­cally, is a wide­spread sys­tem where U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cers are under orders to col­lect evi­dence for pos­si­ble future crim­i­nal cases, to be sub­mit­ted to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. Their col­lec­tion of evi­dence, how­ever, would be thrown out in any respectable court of law, and doesn’t com­ply with accept­able inter­na­tional stan­dards. Arguably, the new Iraqi courts do not respect those stan­dards either — see  this arti­cle orig­i­nally printed in the L.A. Times: http://iraqtunnel.com/php/index.php?showtopic=1364 If offi­cers are going to be col­lect­ing evi­dence, then they should be trained in the same rules of evi­dence col­lec­tion that police depart­ments use every day — noth­ing more, noth­ing less. Like any legit crim­i­nal case, bad evi­dence should be deemed inad­miss­able. Cer­tainly most Amer­i­cans would never tol­er­ate such evi­dence han­dling tech­niques as being accept­able, even if the sol­diers in ques­tion were just fol­low­ing orders. Sol­diers aren’t cops. If you send them in with­out suit­able train­ing to do a police officer’s duty, you’re going to have hor­ri­ble injus­tices take place. Given the past abuses we’ve seen in Iraq, this, frankly, should hardly be a  les­son that we need to learn once more. 26 June 2005. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 LT Grider June 26th, 2005 13:31 100 Let me start this off by stat­ing exactly who I am. My name is 1LT TJ Grider. I led the pla­toon attack that resulted in those insur­gents being killed. I per­son­ally killed some of them and I took the pic­tures that are being tossed around on the inter­net now. My actions and the actions of my men that day were law­ful, pre­cise, descrim­i­nat­ing, and com­pletely fol­lowed the rules of engage­ment. They did not vio­late the laws of land war­fare or the Geneva Con­ven­tions. My only wish is that Mr. Mark Kraft, who appar­ently fol­lows com­ments on this web­site would have tried to con­tact me and do a lit­tle more inves­ti­gat­ing prior to putting my name on an inter­net page asso­ci­at­ing me and my pla­toon, pos­si­bly the most dec­o­rated pla­toon in the 1st Infantry Divi­sion dur­ing OIF II, with war crimes. Now I will answer a few ques­tions that should put to rest this issue with the major­ity of the sen­si­ble peo­ple that read this. To those obsessed with con­spir­acy the­o­ries or already con­vinced that the U.S. is fight­ing an unlaw­ful war, I doubt these com­ments will change your views. On Octo­ber 22 2004, my pla­toon received a call to aid a friendly unit in con­tact in Buhriz. We moved to Buhriz and fought in the city for 8 hours against over 60 RPG attacks, mul­ti­ple snipers, and an array of insur­gents rang­ing greatly in age, dress, and level of skill. Through­out the day we engaged insur­gents very dis­crim­i­nately and never fired on any­one that was unarmed or not pre­sent­ing a threat. One exam­ple that I can think of specif­i­cally is when one of my sec­tion sergeants reported that 150 meters from him a man was video tap­ing the fight­ing. He asked if he should engage and I asked if the man was armed. He replied no and that he was not pre­sent­ing a threat. I told him not to engage the indi­vid­ual and con­trol the fires around him to ensure only indi­vid­u­als with weapons or pre­sent­ing a threat were engaged. He com­plied and the next day while eat­ing break­fast in the chowhall we watched part of the fight on CNN as the Al Jazeera cam­era­man had sold the video­tape to CNN. On that video insur­gents were inter­viewed and called them­selves the Fri­day Free­dom Fight­ers. They described them­selves as work­ing men from the town of Buhriz who were attempt­ing to expel the for­eign invaders. So you can see we were fight­ing against men, boys, any­one able to grab a weapon and take up arms against us. Some were dressed in scarves and masks, oth­ers looked just like those boys in the pho­tos. To con­tinue, we received an order to move to con­tact through the palm groves where a Kiowa War­rior heli­copter had just been hit by small arms fire and had to return to base. I led my pla­toon of 30 men into the palm grove. The vis­i­bil­ity was about 20 meters in the palm grove…imagine some­thing more like the jun­gles of Viet­nam than the deserts you might think of in Iraq. Over 4 hours we moved about 600 meters, mov­ing slowly to watch for booby traps and insur­gents hid­den in the under­growth (this was a dense palm grove…you can see in the pic­tures, these kids were not play­ing soc­cer in there as some of you have implied) . We saw one man dur­ing our move­ment who was hid­ing near a shack. He was a date farm owner and we obvi­ously did not engage him. We put him inside the shack with water and his dates for food in order to pro­tect him and told him not too come out until all the fir­ing and explo­sions had stopped. He was thank­ful and did as we told him. As we turned to move back to the city and com­plete the clear­ance of the palm grove we came under heavy RPG fire at a dis­tance of less than 50 meters. The RPGs exploded on the trees and foliage around us. I set in a sup­port by fire posi­tion with the lead squad and they returned fire to fix the insur­gents posi­tion and pre­vent them from accu­rately fir­ing on us. I got a sit­u­a­tion report from the lead ele­ment that five or six indi­vid­u­als wear­ing civil­ian clothes were fir­ing on us. I led the other two squads on a flank­ing move­ment to destroy the enemy. We moved quickly to the point of assault. As I prepped my men to move across and assault through a sol­dier next to me said he had eyes on the insur­gents mov­ing towards us. They were less than 25 meters from us. I turned, iden­ti­fied the insur­gents and began the assault by fir­ing my weapon. We had pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the these “kids.” They were only the sec­ond peo­ple we had seen in four hours, they were within 20 meters of where the RPG fire had come from. They were dressed in cloth­ing match­ing the cloth­ing that my lead squadleader said the indi­vid­u­als that fired the RPGs had on, and they had RPGs. I made the deci­sion because at that point I was a sea­soned com­bat leader and had com­plete con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion. Now I will describe the actions on the objec­tive. After we fired on the isur­gents and I felt com­fort­able that the sit­u­a­tion was under con­trol I led the assault across the objec­tive. As we assaulted across the objec­tive the first thing we do is remove weapons and secure the area. We set in a perime­ter. I rec­og­nized that two of the boys were still alive and we had cap­tured one detainee unin­jured and try­ing to flee. We were no longer tak­ing fire (because we had just neu­tral­ized the insur­gents that had fired on us) and so we called up our actions to higher and I ordered my medic and two other com­bat life­saver qual­i­fied sol­diers to begin treat­ing the enemy wounded while myself and the other squad lead­ers estab­lished secu­rity and planned our next move­ment. I then took pic­tures in accor­dance with the rules of engage­ment. The pic­tures were nec­es­sary for evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents as well as doc­u­men­ta­tion of the skir­mish. The ini­tial picu­tures were taken with­out weapons because we had con­sol­i­dated the RPGs away from the indi­vid­u­als and were guard­ing them while we set up secu­rity and treated the wounded. It was the tac­ti­cally right thing to do as well as the morally right thing to do by treat­ing the wounded even though they had just tried to kill us. In accor­dance with orders we then took a series of pic­tures of the insur­gents with the weapons that they had on them. You are cor­rect there was obvi­ously only one RPG launcher there and a few war­heads. The rest of the war­heads they had were already fired at us min­utes ear­lier. Were there more launch­ers that they dropped while attempt­ing to flee as they real­ized the over­whelm­ing force they had just engaged? I don’t know and we didn’t have time to search as we started tak­ing fire and had audio on small arms fire from nearly every direc­tion. At that point I had a deci­sion to make. We could have done the wrong thing and left the injured to die. I could have pulled out my 9mm and killed them myself. We could have threat­ened them to get fur­ther intel­li­gence or beaten them for fir­ing at us and putting our lives in dan­ger. We did not do this because we are pro­fes­sional sol­diers in the United States Mil­i­tary. I chose to do the right thing. We had secu­rity set in, I was com­fort­able with the sit­u­a­tion and so we con­tin­ued to treat the indi­vid­u­als, which you see in the pic­tures. When my medic said the wounded were sta­ble we picked them up, threw them over our backs, and moved with them and the detainee over 200 meters to the road where we had coor­di­nated for a field ambu­lance, at this time we were still tak­ing fire but could not locate the ori­gin. We saved the lives of the very kids that had shot at us and attempted to kill us. And what you all do not real­ize is that the detainee admit­ted to an inter­preter that he and his friends had attacked us and had been paid to fight by a local insur­gency leader. As far as the pic­tures go they were and are nec­es­sary. They will be used in the pros­e­cu­tion of the sur­viv­ing insur­gents, although their con­fes­sions, which have never been men­tioned by Mr. Kraft will prob­a­bly be enough to con­vict them. It was not my require­ment to take those pic­tures, but that of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. They specif­i­cally instructed the mil­i­tary to take pic­tures of insur­gents wit the weapons or con­tra­band they had on them. That is what we did that day. Yes the RPGs were ini­tially moved to secure the area and pic­tures were taken. What if we had not had time because of com­ing under fire to take pic­tures with the weapons? We needed to have pic­tures at least con­firm­ing the days events. Because we did not come under fire imme­di­ately we had time to go back and take the pic­tures accord­ing to how the Iraqi gov­ern­ment wanted them for evi­dence pur­poses. To sug­gest we planted them is ridicu­lous. I will say that when you shoot some­one at close range the scene is chaotic. Those “kids” did have shoes on but were lit­er­ally blown out of them just as the weapons were scat­tered about. The bot­tom line is that when we came upon the scene we couldn’t be sure which indi­vid­ual held the launcher and which car­ried the rounds. A scene like that is much too chaotic to deter­mine things like that in such a short period of time. When I took the pic­tures, I did so with the weapons in front of each because they were all trav­el­ling in a group and all guilty to some degree. They will have a trial and a chance to pre­vent evi­dence show­ing their inno­cence. The only evi­dence I saw was that of guilt. As I said maybe some of them ditched another launcher or some hand grenades as they tried to flee from us. The bot­tom line is those RPGs were on them and we had just taken fire from those “kids.” I do not see at the range the fight took place any way that we could have been more dis­crim­i­nat­ing with our fires. They had the weapons on them and the first pri­or­ity when on the scene was to elim­i­nate the threat by remov­ing the weapons, secur­ing the area, treat­ing the wounded, then tak­ing pic­tures. What some of you don’t seem to under­stand is that regard­less of their age we took human lives that day. But it was out of neces­sity and self-preservation and in attempt­ing to accom­plish the mis­sions set forth for us by our unit. That mis­sion was to rid Iraq of insur­gents and ter­ror­ist attempt­ing to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment and ter­ror­ize the Iraqi peo­ple. We helped accom­plish that mis­sion that day. Once an able-bodied indi­vid­ual picks up a weapon and employs it against U.S. Forces they give up the right to claim that their age or gen­der should pre­vent us from engag­ing them to pro­tect our lives and com­plete the mis­sion. While I sup­port free­dom of the press and free speech rights, those pic­tures should never have been released by a sol­dier who was not even there. My job was to hand those pic­tures up the chain of com­mand which I did. Once out of my hands I can­not be sure of who had access to them or what story they con­cocted to go along with the pic­tures. Mr. Kraft, I am a pro­fes­sional sol­dier and a Ranger who lives my life and fights accord­ing to the Ranger Creed which I doubt you are famil­iar with. One stanza in par­tic­u­lar says…”Energetically will I meet the ene­mies of my coun­try. I shall defeat them on the field of bat­tle for I am bet­ter trained and will fight with all my might. Sur­ren­der is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen com­rade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no cir­cum­stances will I ever embar­rass my coun­try… My men and I did the right thing out there and I will not allow you or any­one else to insin­u­ate that we embar­rassed our coun­try by doing any­thing wrong. I believe that you, Mr. Kraft, should have done the right thing and attempted to con­tact me and do some inves­ti­ga­tion into this inci­dent before pub­lish­ing my name in con­junc­tion with any war crime. Although I feel it is not war­ranted, I wel­come any inves­ti­ga­tion into the events that day. I am con­fi­dent that my actions were right and in accor­dance with the Geneva Con­ven­tion and the laws of land war­fare. I hope you feel com­fort­able with your actions, Mr. Kraft. You have man­aged to skip any inves­ti­ga­tion and asso­ci­ated an hon­or­able, very accom­plished pla­toon with a crime that did not exist. Thank you for your time and con­sid­er­a­tion of these facts from the day. 22 June 2005. At the request of Mark Kraft the orig­i­nal 16 pho­tos have been reduced to half-size and cou­pled to speed down­load­ing and to ease com­par­a­tive view­ing. The orig­i­nal pho­tos: http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill02.htm http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill02.htm 19 June 2005 Mark Kraft (http://insomnia.livejournal.com) writes: Awhile back, a U.S. cit­i­zen work­ing in Iraq sent me sev­eral pho­tographs he obtained from a sol­dier in Iraq. Appar­ently, they had been passed along between sev­eral sources before reach­ing me. I felt that the pic­tures were par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial and news­wor­thy, in that they appear to show U.S. sol­diers plant­ing weapons on Iraqi teenagers. As a result, I passed them on to Sey­mour Hersh of the New Yorker, who men­tioned them in an inter­view on May 11, 2005. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250 After I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of dig­i­tal pic­tures emailed me, and — was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some gen­eral rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehi­cles. One of them got blown up. The other two units — sol­diers ran out, saw some peo­ple run­ning, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys play­ing soc­cer. And in the dig­i­tal videos you see every­body stand­ing around, they pull the bod­ies together. This is last sum­mer. They pull the bod­ies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Amer­i­cans pulling bod­ies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see sol­diers drop­ping R.P.G.‘s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insur­gent kill. Unfor­tu­nately, Mr. Hersh has no plans to go for­ward with the story at this time, cit­ing the incon­clu­sive nature of what hap­pened, and the risk it could have to his sources. I, how­ever, have no such eth­i­cal prob­lem with releas­ing the pic­tures as is, as I think there is an over­whelm­ing pub­lic inter­est that they be released. It should be up to the media and the gen­eral pub­lic to deter­mine for them­selves what occurred that day. (It’s not for me to spec­u­late too much upon Mr. Hersh’s rea­sons for not going for­ward with the pic­tures. He has his rea­sons, which I assume are valid.) They indi­cate that a group of U.S. sol­diers planted weapons — the same weapon, in fact — in front of killed, wounded, and cap­tured Iraqi kids. I can­not authen­ti­cate whether Mr. Hersh is cor­rect and that the teens in ques­tion were inno­cent or not, but clearly, some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is amiss. At the very least, it indi­cates how uncer­tain the sit­u­a­tion is over there. Our sol­diers lit­er­ally do not know who the enemy is, and appar­ently are will­ing to manip­u­late the evi­dence in order to jus­tify their actions. The pic­tures were taken with a dig­i­tal cam­era in Buhriz, Iraq on Oct. 22nd, 2004, and their file names are num­bered, appar­ently from the dig­i­tal cam­era in ques­tion. They show the basics for you: no weapons in the first pho­tos, then weapons inserted into the pic­tures later. They also show pretty clearly that I didn’t stage these pic­tures. It appears to me that these teenagers are not insur­gents, in that they showed no signs of hav­ing either weapons or wear­ing khafiyas, or head­scarves, which are typ­i­cally used as a kind of uni­form by insur­gents, as dis­played in the Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos below. To me, the whole sit­u­a­tion is indica­tive of the ter­ri­ble uncer­tainty of the con­flict, where every­one is a poten­tial insur­gent, and where that fear and uncer­tainty leads to a sit­u­a­tion where U.S. sol­diers try to manip­u­late the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion. It’s also worth not­ing that med­ical treat­ment was appar­ently not offered until shown in the later pic­tures, lead­ing me to won­der whether the assis­tance, in itself, was part of the “staged” ele­ment of these pho­tos. Here is what I know hap­pened with the inci­dent in ques­tion: A US patrol led by 1st Lt. Terry “T.J.” Grider’s pla­toon — 1st Infantry Divi­sion troops based out of FOB Gabe — were on a “move­ment to con­tact” mis­sion — basi­cally try­ing to draw fire. At approx­i­mately 7:20 am, they were report­edly fired upon by small arms and RPGs while dri­ving near Buhriz. A Cap­tain Bill Cop­per­noll from the 1st Infantry Divi­sion told AFP that nine insur­gents were killed and three wounded that day. A hos­pi­tal from Ba’aquba reported that it received three dead and eight wounded from the fight­ing. The dead appear to have been turned over within 48 hours to some other party — I sus­pect one of the hos­pi­tals at Ba’aquba. Al Jazeera appar­ently had a reporter/photographer on the scene who took pic­tures of these teens prior to their funer­als. Some of their clothes have been changed, pos­si­bly in prepa­ra­tion for their funer­als. Fig­ur­ing out from Al Jazeera what their reporter saw and what the locals told him would prob­a­bly be very reveal­ing as to what hap­pened that day. See the fol­low­ing links for details: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1–292925-466310.php http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/23–10-2004/main/main10.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20041110005515/http://www.alchahed.net/bah241004p1.htm At least one of these Iraqi kids was “framed and arrested,” so I think it’s impor­tant that some kind of inves­ti­ga­tion be done to deter­mine whether or not he is guilty of any­thing. He could still be rot­ting away in Abu Ghraib for all I know. I’ve attached all the pic­tures I have avail­able, named Buhriz 2004 22OCT 074–091. (#083 and #087 are miss­ing for some rea­son, prob­a­bly because the sol­dier who took the pic­tures didn’t want to pass them on.) Please dis­play them in that order. Also, I attached pho­tos “aljazeerabahraz1-4,” which I found in a Google search at the time I orig­i­nally researched this issue. The site that hosts these pic­tures is down now, but archive.org still has a mir­ror of them. It shows what is obvi­ously sev­eral of the same teens. These should be shown after the other pic­tures, with their sep­a­rate source explained. (Cryp­tome added two Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos of the same time period. Cryp­tome notes under pho­tos.) This per­son also appears in No. 2, No. 6, No. 10, and No. 11. Per­son at top in grey t-shirt appears in No. 4, No. 8 (turned face up), No. 13 (head at left), and No. 14 (at left, lower cloth­ing removed, t-shirt cut away). Per­son at cen­ter in blue t-shirt appears in No. 7, No. 13 (cen­ter, partly nude), and No. 14 (at right). Both these per­sons appear to be alive. Two per­sons in No. 5 appear in No. 12. Per­son at cen­ter (white shirt) also appears in No. 9. Weapons have been added in the fol­low­ing pho­tos. aljazeer­abahraz 1–4 Asso­ci­ated Press Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Abu­raya) Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Aburaya) […]

  14. Officer in Charge Eyeballs the Buhriz Body Count says:
    January 3, 2006 at 20:38

    […] Offi­cer in Charge Eye­balls the Buhriz Body Count 6 July 2005. A writes: Pulled this from the U.S. Army White Pages. The email for Lt Terry Jonathan Grider from the arti­cle: terry.grider [at] us.army.mil Phone Num­ber: 09643–205-339 Assigned to 2–2 Infantry. 1 July 2005. Mark Kraft responds to Lt. Grider: I wanted to reply to http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361#comment-3600 the anony­mous com­ment from roadstoiraq.com, made, appar­ently, by Lt. Grider. First off, Lt. Grider seems to think that my post­ing of the the pic­tures was a per­sonal attack on him. In fact, he was men­tioned once in my orig­i­nal post, as being the leader of the par­tic­u­lar unit involved at Buhriz that day. My source for this infor­ma­tion was straight out of the news­pa­per reports of what hap­pened that day, and I never said that Lt. Grider was per­son­ally involved in the pic­tures them­selves. Lt Grider’s claim that I should have inves­ti­gated this mat­ter fur­ther before com­ing for­ward with the pic­tures over­looks sev­eral impor­tant things. 1. I make no claims to being a reporter. I am a weblog­ger who went pub­lic with pic­tures sent to me by a U.S. cit­i­zen in Iraq. A cit­i­zen who found the inci­dent trou­bling and felt that they should be released. 2. I had no clear way to get in touch with Lt. Grider. 3. Had I got­ten in touch with Lt. Grider first, I still would not know if he was telling the truth about the pic­tures. Denial does not equal inno­cence. 4. I feel that the pub­lic has a right to see the pho­tographs in ques­tion, regard­less of Lt. Grider’s per­ceived guilt or inno­cence. 5. The pub­lic release of the pic­tures was, I felt, a nec­es­sary step in order to deter­mine more about them. In his account, Lt. Grider basi­cally says that the pic­tures were taken accord­ing to the orders of engage­ment. While I do not deny that he was most cer­tainly fol­low­ing his orders, the ques­tion is, why was it nec­es­sary to take the sec­ond set of pic­tures, show­ing the same weapon, an RPG launcher, being placed in front of each of the Iraqi teens, to be used, as he said, for “evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents”? Didn’t the ini­tial pic­tures more accu­rately reflect the real­ity of the situ­aiton for the great major­ity of the Iraqi teens in ques­tion? Clearly, if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of tak­ing an addi­tional pic­ture to indi­cate which Iraqi his men had taken the RPG launcher from, this would’ve bet­ter reflected the inci­dent, right? The impli­ca­tion here is that it is accept­able, stan­dard behav­ior when U.S. troops clear a given area, for them to view Iraqis who are killed, wounded, or cap­tured as insur­gents, regard­less of whether they are armed or not, and to take pho­tographs which reflect this “real­ity”. The end result is, we have two Iraqi teens in prison, pre­sum­ably for fir­ing an RPG launcher at Amer­i­can troops, who risk these pic­tures being used against them when they finally get a trial. What is at fault here, basi­cally, is a wide­spread sys­tem where U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cers are under orders to col­lect evi­dence for pos­si­ble future crim­i­nal cases, to be sub­mit­ted to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. Their col­lec­tion of evi­dence, how­ever, would be thrown out in any respectable court of law, and doesn’t com­ply with accept­able inter­na­tional stan­dards. Arguably, the new Iraqi courts do not respect those stan­dards either — see  this arti­cle orig­i­nally printed in the L.A. Times: http://iraqtunnel.com/php/index.php?showtopic=1364 If offi­cers are going to be col­lect­ing evi­dence, then they should be trained in the same rules of evi­dence col­lec­tion that police depart­ments use every day — noth­ing more, noth­ing less. Like any legit crim­i­nal case, bad evi­dence should be deemed inad­miss­able. Cer­tainly most Amer­i­cans would never tol­er­ate such evi­dence han­dling tech­niques as being accept­able, even if the sol­diers in ques­tion were just fol­low­ing orders. Sol­diers aren’t cops. If you send them in with­out suit­able train­ing to do a police officer’s duty, you’re going to have hor­ri­ble injus­tices take place. Given the past abuses we’ve seen in Iraq, this, frankly, should hardly be a  les­son that we need to learn once more. 26 June 2005 The Buhriz report and pho­tos: http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill01.htm http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 LT Grider June 26th, 2005 13:31 100 Let me start this off by stat­ing exactly who I am. My name is 1LT TJ Grider. I led the pla­toon attack that resulted in those insur­gents being killed. I per­son­ally killed some of them and I took the pic­tures that are being tossed around on the inter­net now. My actions and the actions of my men that day were law­ful, pre­cise, descrim­i­nat­ing, and com­pletely fol­lowed the rules of engage­ment. They did not vio­late the laws of land war­fare or the Geneva Con­ven­tions. My only wish is that Mr. Mark Kraft, who appar­ently fol­lows com­ments on this web­site would have tried to con­tact me and do a lit­tle more inves­ti­gat­ing prior to putting my name on an inter­net page asso­ci­at­ing me and my pla­toon, pos­si­bly the most dec­o­rated pla­toon in the 1st Infantry Divi­sion dur­ing OIF II, with war crimes. Now I will answer a few ques­tions that should put to rest this issue with the major­ity of the sen­si­ble peo­ple that read this. To those obsessed with con­spir­acy the­o­ries or already con­vinced that the U.S. is fight­ing an unlaw­ful war, I doubt these com­ments will change your views. On Octo­ber 22 2004, my pla­toon received a call to aid a friendly unit in con­tact in Buhriz. We moved to Buhriz and fought in the city for 8 hours against over 60 RPG attacks, mul­ti­ple snipers, and an array of insur­gents rang­ing greatly in age, dress, and level of skill. Through­out the day we engaged insur­gents very dis­crim­i­nately and never fired on any­one that was unarmed or not pre­sent­ing a threat. One exam­ple that I can think of specif­i­cally is when one of my sec­tion sergeants reported that 150 meters from him a man was video tap­ing the fight­ing. He asked if he should engage and I asked if the man was armed. He replied no and that he was not pre­sent­ing a threat. I told him not to engage the indi­vid­ual and con­trol the fires around him to ensure only indi­vid­u­als with weapons or pre­sent­ing a threat were engaged. He com­plied and the next day while eat­ing break­fast in the chowhall we watched part of the fight on CNN as the Al Jazeera cam­era­man had sold the video­tape to CNN. On that video insur­gents were inter­viewed and called them­selves the Fri­day Free­dom Fight­ers. They described them­selves as work­ing men from the town of Buhriz who were attempt­ing to expel the for­eign invaders. So you can see we were fight­ing against men, boys, any­one able to grab a weapon and take up arms against us. Some were dressed in scarves and masks, oth­ers looked just like those boys in the pho­tos. To con­tinue, we received an order to move to con­tact through the palm groves where a Kiowa War­rior heli­copter had just been hit by small arms fire and had to return to base. I led my pla­toon of 30 men into the palm grove. The vis­i­bil­ity was about 20 meters in the palm grove…imagine some­thing more like the jun­gles of Viet­nam than the deserts you might think of in Iraq. Over 4 hours we moved about 600 meters, mov­ing slowly to watch for booby traps and insur­gents hid­den in the under­growth (this was a dense palm grove…you can see in the pic­tures, these kids were not play­ing soc­cer in there as some of you have implied) . We saw one man dur­ing our move­ment who was hid­ing near a shack. He was a date farm owner and we obvi­ously did not engage him. We put him inside the shack with water and his dates for food in order to pro­tect him and told him not too come out until all the fir­ing and explo­sions had stopped. He was thank­ful and did as we told him. As we turned to move back to the city and com­plete the clear­ance of the palm grove we came under heavy RPG fire at a dis­tance of less than 50 meters. The RPGs exploded on the trees and foliage around us. I set in a sup­port by fire posi­tion with the lead squad and they returned fire to fix the insur­gents posi­tion and pre­vent them from accu­rately fir­ing on us. I got a sit­u­a­tion report from the lead ele­ment that five or six indi­vid­u­als wear­ing civil­ian clothes were fir­ing on us. I led the other two squads on a flank­ing move­ment to destroy the enemy. We moved quickly to the point of assault. As I prepped my men to move across and assault through a sol­dier next to me said he had eyes on the insur­gents mov­ing towards us. They were less than 25 meters from us. I turned, iden­ti­fied the insur­gents and began the assault by fir­ing my weapon. We had pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the these “kids.” They were only the sec­ond peo­ple we had seen in four hours, they were within 20 meters of where the RPG fire had come from. They were dressed in cloth­ing match­ing the cloth­ing that my lead squadleader said the indi­vid­u­als that fired the RPGs had on, and they had RPGs. I made the deci­sion because at that point I was a sea­soned com­bat leader and had com­plete con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion. Now I will describe the actions on the objec­tive. After we fired on the isur­gents and I felt com­fort­able that the sit­u­a­tion was under con­trol I led the assault across the objec­tive. As we assaulted across the objec­tive the first thing we do is remove weapons and secure the area. We set in a perime­ter. I rec­og­nized that two of the boys were still alive and we had cap­tured one detainee unin­jured and try­ing to flee. We were no longer tak­ing fire (because we had just neu­tral­ized the insur­gents that had fired on us) and so we called up our actions to higher and I ordered my medic and two other com­bat life­saver qual­i­fied sol­diers to begin treat­ing the enemy wounded while myself and the other squad lead­ers estab­lished secu­rity and planned our next move­ment. I then took pic­tures in accor­dance with the rules of engage­ment. The pic­tures were nec­es­sary for evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents as well as doc­u­men­ta­tion of the skir­mish. The ini­tial picu­tures were taken with­out weapons because we had con­sol­i­dated the RPGs away from the indi­vid­u­als and were guard­ing them while we set up secu­rity and treated the wounded. It was the tac­ti­cally right thing to do as well as the morally right thing to do by treat­ing the wounded even though they had just tried to kill us. In accor­dance with orders we then took a series of pic­tures of the insur­gents with the weapons that they had on them. You are cor­rect there was obvi­ously only one RPG launcher there and a few war­heads. The rest of the war­heads they had were already fired at us min­utes ear­lier. Were there more launch­ers that they dropped while attempt­ing to flee as they real­ized the over­whelm­ing force they had just engaged? I don’t know and we didn’t have time to search as we started tak­ing fire and had audio on small arms fire from nearly every direc­tion. At that point I had a deci­sion to make. We could have done the wrong thing and left the injured to die. I could have pulled out my 9mm and killed them myself. We could have threat­ened them to get fur­ther intel­li­gence or beaten them for fir­ing at us and putting our lives in dan­ger. We did not do this because we are pro­fes­sional sol­diers in the United States Mil­i­tary. I chose to do the right thing. We had secu­rity set in, I was com­fort­able with the sit­u­a­tion and so we con­tin­ued to treat the indi­vid­u­als, which you see in the pic­tures. When my medic said the wounded were sta­ble we picked them up, threw them over our backs, and moved with them and the detainee over 200 meters to the road where we had coor­di­nated for a field ambu­lance, at this time we were still tak­ing fire but could not locate the ori­gin. We saved the lives of the very kids that had shot at us and attempted to kill us. And what you all do not real­ize is that the detainee admit­ted to an inter­preter that he and his friends had attacked us and had been paid to fight by a local insur­gency leader. As far as the pic­tures go they were and are nec­es­sary. They will be used in the pros­e­cu­tion of the sur­viv­ing insur­gents, although their con­fes­sions, which have never been men­tioned by Mr. Kraft will prob­a­bly be enough to con­vict them. It was not my require­ment to take those pic­tures, but that of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. They specif­i­cally instructed the mil­i­tary to take pic­tures of insur­gents wit the weapons or con­tra­band they had on them. That is what we did that day. Yes the RPGs were ini­tially moved to secure the area and pic­tures were taken. What if we had not had time because of com­ing under fire to take pic­tures with the weapons? We needed to have pic­tures at least con­firm­ing the days events. Because we did not come under fire imme­di­ately we had time to go back and take the pic­tures accord­ing to how the Iraqi gov­ern­ment wanted them for evi­dence pur­poses. To sug­gest we planted them is ridicu­lous. I will say that when you shoot some­one at close range the scene is chaotic. Those “kids” did have shoes on but were lit­er­ally blown out of them just as the weapons were scat­tered about. The bot­tom line is that when we came upon the scene we couldn’t be sure which indi­vid­ual held the launcher and which car­ried the rounds. A scene like that is much too chaotic to deter­mine things like that in such a short period of time. When I took the pic­tures, I did so with the weapons in front of each because they were all trav­el­ling in a group and all guilty to some degree. They will have a trial and a chance to pre­vent evi­dence show­ing their inno­cence. The only evi­dence I saw was that of guilt. As I said maybe some of them ditched another launcher or some hand grenades as they tried to flee from us. The bot­tom line is those RPGs were on them and we had just taken fire from those “kids.” I do not see at the range the fight took place any way that we could have been more dis­crim­i­nat­ing with our fires. They had the weapons on them and the first pri­or­ity when on the scene was to elim­i­nate the threat by remov­ing the weapons, secur­ing the area, treat­ing the wounded, then tak­ing pic­tures. What some of you don’t seem to under­stand is that regard­less of their age we took human lives that day. But it was out of neces­sity and self-preservation and in attempt­ing to accom­plish the mis­sions set forth for us by our unit. That mis­sion was to rid Iraq of insur­gents and ter­ror­ist attempt­ing to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment and ter­ror­ize the Iraqi peo­ple. We helped accom­plish that mis­sion that day. Once an able-bodied indi­vid­ual picks up a weapon and employs it against U.S. Forces they give up the right to claim that their age or gen­der should pre­vent us from engag­ing them to pro­tect our lives and com­plete the mis­sion. While I sup­port free­dom of the press and free speech rights, those pic­tures should never have been released by a sol­dier who was not even there. My job was to hand those pic­tures up the chain of com­mand which I did. Once out of my hands I can­not be sure of who had access to them or what story they con­cocted to go along with the pic­tures. Mr. Kraft, I am a pro­fes­sional sol­dier and a Ranger who lives my life and fights accord­ing to the Ranger Creed which I doubt you are famil­iar with. One stanza in par­tic­u­lar says…”Energetically will I meet the ene­mies of my coun­try. I shall defeat them on the field of bat­tle for I am bet­ter trained and will fight with all my might. Sur­ren­der is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen com­rade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no cir­cum­stances will I ever embar­rass my coun­try… My men and I did the right thing out there and I will not allow you or any­one else to insin­u­ate that we embar­rassed our coun­try by doing any­thing wrong. I believe that you, Mr. Kraft, should have done the right thing and attempted to con­tact me and do some inves­ti­ga­tion into this inci­dent before pub­lish­ing my name in con­junc­tion with any war crime. Although I feel it is not war­ranted, I wel­come any inves­ti­ga­tion into the events that day. I am con­fi­dent that my actions were right and in accor­dance with the Geneva Con­ven­tion and the laws of land war­fare. I hope you feel com­fort­able with your actions, Mr. Kraft. You have man­aged to skip any inves­ti­ga­tion and asso­ci­ated an hon­or­able, very accom­plished pla­toon with a crime that did not exist. Thank you for your time and con­sid­er­a­tion of these facts from the day. […]

  15. www.streamtime.org says:
    January 22, 2006 at 20:11

    […] Sey­mour Hersh: “…In one case — after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of dig­i­tal pic­tures emailed me, /../ Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see sol­diers drop­ping R.P.G.‘s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insur­gent kill. It’s a kill of, you know, would-be insur­gents or resis­tance and it goes into the com­put­ers, and I’m sure it’s briefed. Every­body remem­bers how My Lai was briefed as a great vic­tory, “128 Viet­cong killed.” And so you have that pat­tern again…” /../ The case of these pho­tos is being dis­cussed on a grow­ing num­ber of Iraqi blogs: Bagh­dad Dweller, Raed Jar­rar, Lim­i­nal Sym­bol, with Mark Kraft as turn­ing source. […]

  16. " " - says:
    February 20, 2006 at 02:12

    http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 […]

  17. THE BRAD BLOG: "Post-Show Sunday Wrap-Up" says:
    March 21, 2006 at 05:18

    […] All,It gets worse for OSD and RNC. There are reports posted today that US troops denied com­mit­ting war crimes. But, there are pho­tographs allegedly show­ing them plant­ing weapons on chil­dren and call­ing them “insur­gents.” [More … ]There’s no rea­son to be fear­ful of your speak­ing out when youru gov­er­ment lies about wars; com­mits war crimes; and then the troops engage in con­duct that brings dis­credit not only on the coun­try, but destroys any rea­spon­able con­fi­dence that they are civ­i­lized war­riors defend­ing your consitutiton.It remains to be seen how wide­spread the mis­con­duct is in the US mil­i­tary, not only on the bat­tle­field, but in the Pen­ta­gon and OSD in dis­suad­ing you to look into the Down­ing Street Memo and the White House unlaw­ful war of aggres­sion. Take a look at the com­ments and reac­tion on this board — [More …]Keep up the pres­sure! Your work may not appear to be mak­ing much progress form where you can see it, but it is mak­ing big waves inside OSD and with those who are increas­ingly wor­ried about being held liable for war crimes.The Down­ing Street Memo and your pres­sure is forc­ing them to make some very seri­ous deci­sions. They are run­ning out of options, time, and allies because of your great work!Great job! You’re bust­ing down some very big walls and they are run­ning out of places to hide.Remember, we out­num­ber them and their allies are walk­ing away. Just because you sim­ply speak out in your blogs.Be proud of what you are doing sim­ply by notic­ing what is going on, using your minds, and blog­ging about it. You’re mak­ing a huge impact not only for the coun­try, but the Con­sti­tu­tion and history.Don’t lose sight of how much your efforts can col­lec­tively build up. From every tiny drop of water, there is a Tsunami. […]

  18. roadstoiraq: Debate on Buhriz Massacre continues says:
    June 4, 2006 at 07:21

    […] Posted: July 17, 2005 3:56:00 PM http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361WHEREIN THE GREENCROW CONTINUES TO DEBATE WITH RESIDENT DUFUSS ‘JEFF’ AND NEWCOMER ‘RANGER’ WITH THE ABLE ASSISTANCE OF ‘MICHAEL’Hopefully, the pho­tos of the chil­dren of Buhriz will end up with the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court as evi­dence of war crimes. […]

  19. السفارة الأمريكية في تركيا : تهاجم تقرير ال&# says:
    September 8, 2006 at 02:14

    […] The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon.  The weblog entries made it clear that: […]

  20. Cutting Edge Political Commentary The Razor says:
    November 3, 2006 at 22:40

    […] The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (num­bered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the com­mand­ing offi­cer of the pla­toon that was involved in the inci­dent and another mem­ber of his pla­toon. The weblog entries made it clear that: […]

  21. This Fucking War: June 2005 says:
    November 23, 2006 at 04:34

    […] US troops do kill Iraqi chil­dren “They [the pic­tures] indi­cate that a group of U.S. sol­diers planted weapons — the same weapon, in fact — in front of killed, wounded, and cap­tured Iraqi kids. I can­not authen­ti­cate whether Mr. Hersh is cor­rect and that the teens in ques­tion were inno­cent or not, but clearly, some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is amiss. At the very least, it indi­cates how uncer­tain the sit­u­a­tion is over there. Our sol­diers lit­er­ally do not know who the enemy is, and appar­ently are will­ing to manip­u­late the evi­dence in order to jus­tify their actions.“Read the rest and see the images here(Thank you Nadia)“Baghdad Dweller­Warn­ing the pic­tures are graphic even for me. I did not even post the one on the cover. If you want to see them fol­low the links. Also don’t any­one read over the dis­claimer, mainly ” the incon­clu­sive nature of what happened“I have decided to link this story to the Mil­blog­ger memo series. You might ask your­self why? well if you fol­low the links all the way to the first post in that series, I pre­dict the pub­li­ca­tion of just this kind of story. spans = document.getElementsByTagName(‘span’); num­ber = 0; for(i=0; i < spans.length; i++){ var c = ” ” + spans[i].className + ” “; if (c.indexOf(“fullpost”) != –1) num­ber++; } if(number != mem­ory){ document.write(‘Read More’); } mem­ory = number; […]

  22. diffrence between fabricators and export houses: Web Search Results from Answers.com says:
    December 16, 2006 at 20:09

    […]   BodyLoad(‘s’); Web SearchRe­sults 1 — 10 of about 32 for diffrence between fab­ri­ca­tors and export houses…  Bangkok­Post : Forum85% of our GDP is com­ing from export. After Hous­ton, Antwerp is the biggest … Thats the big diffrence between the Euro­pean con­cept and the US sys­tem. …matrix.bangkokpost.co.th/forums/ thread.php?Thread_ID=1182Fiji Times Online > Your SayI just if those who have left Fiji for a long time to go back so they can under­stand the diffrence between ‘cor­rup­tion’ and ‘Melane­sian’. …www.fijitimes.com/yourSay.aspx?id=44Roads to Iraq » Blog Archive » US troops do kill Iraqi chil­dren …The house to house fight­ing is rare if it hap­pens at all. … Only diffrence between then and now is…radical mus­lims behead and kill their hostages quicker. …www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361Who is lying about Iraq? | MetaFil­terIn all, the Bush White House has given the INC at least $39 mil­lion over the past 5 years. … rang­ing any­where from ques­tion­able to out­right fab­ri­ca­tion. …www.metafilter.com/mefi/46515ReBelle Nation: 07/10/2005 — 07/16/2005They go on the Lon­don Eye and then I nor­mally meet them in the Houses of … She pointed out the diffrence between con­ven­tional and online cov­er­age of the …rebellenation.blogspot.com/ 2005_07_10_rebellenation_archive.htmlReBelle Nation: 07/17/2005 — 07/23/2005In one case, accord­ing to Stars and Stripes, the in-house US forces … How can it be my 6 year old under­stands the diffrence between Sad­dam and Osama …rebellenation.blogspot.com/ 2005_07_17_rebellenation_archive.htmlJSTOR: A Flesh­ped­dler at Work: Power, Pain, and Profit in the …On the sup­ply side, one must expli­cate the social fab­ri­ca­tion of homo … Richie: That wouldn’t make no diffrence, yeah: he gotta fill them cards. …links.jstor.org/sici? sici=0304–2421(199802)27%3A1%3C1%3AAFAWPP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-IEUROPA — Enter­prise — Entre­pre­neur­ship: A sur­vey of the Lit­er­a­tureThe export per­for­mance of Ital­ian SMEs has also been com­pared between … Audretsch, David B. and Juer­gen Weigand, 1999, “Does Sci­ence Make A Diffrence? …ec.europa.eu/enterprise/entrepreneurship/ green_paper/literature_survey_2002.pdfEDITORIAL 1988 SAAAM MEET­INGS­foyer 2I tuykres; une aire de fab­ri­ca­tion de sel vkgk­tal. et un autel domes­tique. … Chi­nese export porce­lain saucer of the early eigh­teenth …cohesion.rice.edu/CentersAndInst/SAFA/ emplibrary/NA%2029%20contents.pdfpatrick.net » Blog Archive » The Libertarianism-Morality Conun­drumWe should also be clear about the dis­tinc­tion between lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as an … The diffrence is that this time around, the fac­tory floor is no longer just …patrick.net/wp/?p=173Result Page:   1   2   3   4   Next.adLinkUnitVertical{width:300px;margin:10px 0px 0px 0px;} var lid = ‘G_LU_WebSearch’; func­tion google_ad_request_done(ads) { } func­tion google_radlink_request_done(radlinks) { var size = radlinks.length; if ( size< 1) return; document.write(“Related Adsn”); for(i=0; i < size; ++i) { var lpos = ‘pgad’+i+’-’+size; document.write(“” + radlinks[i].term + “n”); } document.write(“n”); } google_ad_client = ‘ca-gurunet_radlinks_js’; google_ad_channel = ‘link-definitions’; google_ad_output = ‘js’; google_max_num_ads = ‘0’; google_language = ‘en’; google_encoding = ‘utf-8′; google_hints = ”; google_kw= “diffrence between fab­ri­ca­tors and export houses “; google_kw_type = ‘broad’; google_safe = ‘high’; google_adtest = ”; google_num_radlinks = ‘5’; google_max_radlink_len = ‘35’; google_rl_filtering = ‘high’; google_rl_mode = ‘rel­e­vance’; ShopEn­ter a key­word ( browse ) Choose a cat­e­go­ryAll Cat­e­gories­BooksCarsCloth­ing & Acces­sori­esCom­put­ers & Soft­wa­re­Elec­tron­ics­Flower & Gift­sHealth & Beau­ty­Home & Gar­den­Jew­elry & Watch­esKids & Fam­i­ly­Movies­Mu­si­cOf­fice­S­ports & Out­doorsVideo Games if(screen.width Tell me about: […]

  23. Eyeballing the Buhriz Body Count says:
    January 15, 2007 at 06:59

    […] Eye­balling the Buhriz Body Count This file is avail­able on a Cryp­tome DVD offered by Cryp­tome. Donate $25 for a DVD of the Cryp­tome 10-year archives of 35,000 files from June 1996 to June 2006 (~3.5 GB). Click Pay­pal or mail check/MO made out to John Young, 251 West 89th Street, New York, NY 10024. Archives include all files of cryptome.org, cryptome2.org, jya.com, cartome.org, eyeball-series.org and iraq-kill-maim.org. Cryp­tome offers with the Cryp­tome DVD an INSCOM DVD of about 18,000 pages of counter-intelligence dossiers declas­si­fied by the US Army Infor­ma­tion and Secu­rity Com­mand, dat­ing from 1945 to 1985. No addi­tional con­tri­bu­tion required — $25 for both. The DVDs will be sent any­where world­wide with­out extra cost. 6 July 2005. A writes: Pulled this from the U.S. Army White Pages. The email for Lt Terry Jonathan Grider from the arti­cle: terry.grider [at] us.army.mil Phone Num­ber: 09643–205-339 Assigned to 2–2 Infantry. 1 July 2005. Mark Kraft responds to Lt. Grider: I wanted to reply to http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361#comment-3600 the anony­mous com­ment from roadstoiraq.com, made, appar­ently, by Lt. Grider. First off, Lt. Grider seems to think that my post­ing of the the pic­tures was a per­sonal attack on him. In fact, he was men­tioned once in my orig­i­nal post, as being the leader of the par­tic­u­lar unit involved at Buhriz that day. My source for this infor­ma­tion was straight out of the news­pa­per reports of what hap­pened that day, and I never said that Lt. Grider was per­son­ally involved in the pic­tures them­selves. Lt Grider’s claim that I should have inves­ti­gated this mat­ter fur­ther before com­ing for­ward with the pic­tures over­looks sev­eral impor­tant things. 1. I make no claims to being a reporter. I am a weblog­ger who went pub­lic with pic­tures sent to me by a U.S. cit­i­zen in Iraq. A cit­i­zen who found the inci­dent trou­bling and felt that they should be released. 2. I had no clear way to get in touch with Lt. Grider. 3. Had I got­ten in touch with Lt. Grider first, I still would not know if he was telling the truth about the pic­tures. Denial does not equal inno­cence. 4. I feel that the pub­lic has a right to see the pho­tographs in ques­tion, regard­less of Lt. Grider’s per­ceived guilt or inno­cence. 5. The pub­lic release of the pic­tures was, I felt, a nec­es­sary step in order to deter­mine more about them. In his account, Lt. Grider basi­cally says that the pic­tures were taken accord­ing to the orders of engage­ment. While I do not deny that he was most cer­tainly fol­low­ing his orders, the ques­tion is, why was it nec­es­sary to take the sec­ond set of pic­tures, show­ing the same weapon, an RPG launcher, being placed in front of each of the Iraqi teens, to be used, as he said, for “evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents”? Didn’t the ini­tial pic­tures more accu­rately reflect the real­ity of the situ­aiton for the great major­ity of the Iraqi teens in ques­tion? Clearly, if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of tak­ing an addi­tional pic­ture to indi­cate which Iraqi his men had taken the RPG launcher from, this would’ve bet­ter reflected the inci­dent, right? The impli­ca­tion here is that it is accept­able, stan­dard behav­ior when U.S. troops clear a given area, for them to view Iraqis who are killed, wounded, or cap­tured as insur­gents, regard­less of whether they are armed or not, and to take pho­tographs which reflect this “real­ity”. The end result is, we have two Iraqi teens in prison, pre­sum­ably for fir­ing an RPG launcher at Amer­i­can troops, who risk these pic­tures being used against them when they finally get a trial. What is at fault here, basi­cally, is a wide­spread sys­tem where U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cers are under orders to col­lect evi­dence for pos­si­ble future crim­i­nal cases, to be sub­mit­ted to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. Their col­lec­tion of evi­dence, how­ever, would be thrown out in any respectable court of law, and doesn’t com­ply with accept­able inter­na­tional stan­dards. Arguably, the new Iraqi courts do not respect those stan­dards either — see  this arti­cle orig­i­nally printed in the L.A. Times: http://iraqtunnel.com/php/index.php?showtopic=1364 If offi­cers are going to be col­lect­ing evi­dence, then they should be trained in the same rules of evi­dence col­lec­tion that police depart­ments use every day — noth­ing more, noth­ing less. Like any legit crim­i­nal case, bad evi­dence should be deemed inad­miss­able. Cer­tainly most Amer­i­cans would never tol­er­ate such evi­dence han­dling tech­niques as being accept­able, even if the sol­diers in ques­tion were just fol­low­ing orders. Sol­diers aren’t cops. If you send them in with­out suit­able train­ing to do a police officer’s duty, you’re going to have hor­ri­ble injus­tices take place. Given the past abuses we’ve seen in Iraq, this, frankly, should hardly be a  les­son that we need to learn once more. 26 June 2005. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 LT Grider June 26th, 2005 13:31 100 Let me start this off by stat­ing exactly who I am. My name is 1LT TJ Grider. I led the pla­toon attack that resulted in those insur­gents being killed. I per­son­ally killed some of them and I took the pic­tures that are being tossed around on the inter­net now. My actions and the actions of my men that day were law­ful, pre­cise, descrim­i­nat­ing, and com­pletely fol­lowed the rules of engage­ment. They did not vio­late the laws of land war­fare or the Geneva Con­ven­tions. My only wish is that Mr. Mark Kraft, who appar­ently fol­lows com­ments on this web­site would have tried to con­tact me and do a lit­tle more inves­ti­gat­ing prior to putting my name on an inter­net page asso­ci­at­ing me and my pla­toon, pos­si­bly the most dec­o­rated pla­toon in the 1st Infantry Divi­sion dur­ing OIF II, with war crimes. Now I will answer a few ques­tions that should put to rest this issue with the major­ity of the sen­si­ble peo­ple that read this. To those obsessed with con­spir­acy the­o­ries or already con­vinced that the U.S. is fight­ing an unlaw­ful war, I doubt these com­ments will change your views. On Octo­ber 22 2004, my pla­toon received a call to aid a friendly unit in con­tact in Buhriz. We moved to Buhriz and fought in the city for 8 hours against over 60 RPG attacks, mul­ti­ple snipers, and an array of insur­gents rang­ing greatly in age, dress, and level of skill. Through­out the day we engaged insur­gents very dis­crim­i­nately and never fired on any­one that was unarmed or not pre­sent­ing a threat. One exam­ple that I can think of specif­i­cally is when one of my sec­tion sergeants reported that 150 meters from him a man was video tap­ing the fight­ing. He asked if he should engage and I asked if the man was armed. He replied no and that he was not pre­sent­ing a threat. I told him not to engage the indi­vid­ual and con­trol the fires around him to ensure only indi­vid­u­als with weapons or pre­sent­ing a threat were engaged. He com­plied and the next day while eat­ing break­fast in the chowhall we watched part of the fight on CNN as the Al Jazeera cam­era­man had sold the video­tape to CNN. On that video insur­gents were inter­viewed and called them­selves the Fri­day Free­dom Fight­ers. They described them­selves as work­ing men from the town of Buhriz who were attempt­ing to expel the for­eign invaders. So you can see we were fight­ing against men, boys, any­one able to grab a weapon and take up arms against us. Some were dressed in scarves and masks, oth­ers looked just like those boys in the pho­tos. To con­tinue, we received an order to move to con­tact through the palm groves where a Kiowa War­rior heli­copter had just been hit by small arms fire and had to return to base. I led my pla­toon of 30 men into the palm grove. The vis­i­bil­ity was about 20 meters in the palm grove…imagine some­thing more like the jun­gles of Viet­nam than the deserts you might think of in Iraq. Over 4 hours we moved about 600 meters, mov­ing slowly to watch for booby traps and insur­gents hid­den in the under­growth (this was a dense palm grove…you can see in the pic­tures, these kids were not play­ing soc­cer in there as some of you have implied) . We saw one man dur­ing our move­ment who was hid­ing near a shack. He was a date farm owner and we obvi­ously did not engage him. We put him inside the shack with water and his dates for food in order to pro­tect him and told him not too come out until all the fir­ing and explo­sions had stopped. He was thank­ful and did as we told him. As we turned to move back to the city and com­plete the clear­ance of the palm grove we came under heavy RPG fire at a dis­tance of less than 50 meters. The RPGs exploded on the trees and foliage around us. I set in a sup­port by fire posi­tion with the lead squad and they returned fire to fix the insur­gents posi­tion and pre­vent them from accu­rately fir­ing on us. I got a sit­u­a­tion report from the lead ele­ment that five or six indi­vid­u­als wear­ing civil­ian clothes were fir­ing on us. I led the other two squads on a flank­ing move­ment to destroy the enemy. We moved quickly to the point of assault. As I prepped my men to move across and assault through a sol­dier next to me said he had eyes on the insur­gents mov­ing towards us. They were less than 25 meters from us. I turned, iden­ti­fied the insur­gents and began the assault by fir­ing my weapon. We had pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the these “kids.” They were only the sec­ond peo­ple we had seen in four hours, they were within 20 meters of where the RPG fire had come from. They were dressed in cloth­ing match­ing the cloth­ing that my lead squadleader said the indi­vid­u­als that fired the RPGs had on, and they had RPGs. I made the deci­sion because at that point I was a sea­soned com­bat leader and had com­plete con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion. Now I will describe the actions on the objec­tive. After we fired on the isur­gents and I felt com­fort­able that the sit­u­a­tion was under con­trol I led the assault across the objec­tive. As we assaulted across the objec­tive the first thing we do is remove weapons and secure the area. We set in a perime­ter. I rec­og­nized that two of the boys were still alive and we had cap­tured one detainee unin­jured and try­ing to flee. We were no longer tak­ing fire (because we had just neu­tral­ized the insur­gents that had fired on us) and so we called up our actions to higher and I ordered my medic and two other com­bat life­saver qual­i­fied sol­diers to begin treat­ing the enemy wounded while myself and the other squad lead­ers estab­lished secu­rity and planned our next move­ment. I then took pic­tures in accor­dance with the rules of engage­ment. The pic­tures were nec­es­sary for evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents as well as doc­u­men­ta­tion of the skir­mish. The ini­tial picu­tures were taken with­out weapons because we had con­sol­i­dated the RPGs away from the indi­vid­u­als and were guard­ing them while we set up secu­rity and treated the wounded. It was the tac­ti­cally right thing to do as well as the morally right thing to do by treat­ing the wounded even though they had just tried to kill us. In accor­dance with orders we then took a series of pic­tures of the insur­gents with the weapons that they had on them. You are cor­rect there was obvi­ously only one RPG launcher there and a few war­heads. The rest of the war­heads they had were already fired at us min­utes ear­lier. Were there more launch­ers that they dropped while attempt­ing to flee as they real­ized the over­whelm­ing force they had just engaged? I don’t know and we didn’t have time to search as we started tak­ing fire and had audio on small arms fire from nearly every direc­tion. At that point I had a deci­sion to make. We could have done the wrong thing and left the injured to die. I could have pulled out my 9mm and killed them myself. We could have threat­ened them to get fur­ther intel­li­gence or beaten them for fir­ing at us and putting our lives in dan­ger. We did not do this because we are pro­fes­sional sol­diers in the United States Mil­i­tary. I chose to do the right thing. We had secu­rity set in, I was com­fort­able with the sit­u­a­tion and so we con­tin­ued to treat the indi­vid­u­als, which you see in the pic­tures. When my medic said the wounded were sta­ble we picked them up, threw them over our backs, and moved with them and the detainee over 200 meters to the road where we had coor­di­nated for a field ambu­lance, at this time we were still tak­ing fire but could not locate the ori­gin. We saved the lives of the very kids that had shot at us and attempted to kill us. And what you all do not real­ize is that the detainee admit­ted to an inter­preter that he and his friends had attacked us and had been paid to fight by a local insur­gency leader. As far as the pic­tures go they were and are nec­es­sary. They will be used in the pros­e­cu­tion of the sur­viv­ing insur­gents, although their con­fes­sions, which have never been men­tioned by Mr. Kraft will prob­a­bly be enough to con­vict them. It was not my require­ment to take those pic­tures, but that of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. They specif­i­cally instructed the mil­i­tary to take pic­tures of insur­gents wit the weapons or con­tra­band they had on them. That is what we did that day. Yes the RPGs were ini­tially moved to secure the area and pic­tures were taken. What if we had not had time because of com­ing under fire to take pic­tures with the weapons? We needed to have pic­tures at least con­firm­ing the days events. Because we did not come under fire imme­di­ately we had time to go back and take the pic­tures accord­ing to how the Iraqi gov­ern­ment wanted them for evi­dence pur­poses. To sug­gest we planted them is ridicu­lous. I will say that when you shoot some­one at close range the scene is chaotic. Those “kids” did have shoes on but were lit­er­ally blown out of them just as the weapons were scat­tered about. The bot­tom line is that when we came upon the scene we couldn’t be sure which indi­vid­ual held the launcher and which car­ried the rounds. A scene like that is much too chaotic to deter­mine things like that in such a short period of time. When I took the pic­tures, I did so with the weapons in front of each because they were all trav­el­ling in a group and all guilty to some degree. They will have a trial and a chance to pre­vent evi­dence show­ing their inno­cence. The only evi­dence I saw was that of guilt. As I said maybe some of them ditched another launcher or some hand grenades as they tried to flee from us. The bot­tom line is those RPGs were on them and we had just taken fire from those “kids.” I do not see at the range the fight took place any way that we could have been more dis­crim­i­nat­ing with our fires. They had the weapons on them and the first pri­or­ity when on the scene was to elim­i­nate the threat by remov­ing the weapons, secur­ing the area, treat­ing the wounded, then tak­ing pic­tures. What some of you don’t seem to under­stand is that regard­less of their age we took human lives that day. But it was out of neces­sity and self-preservation and in attempt­ing to accom­plish the mis­sions set forth for us by our unit. That mis­sion was to rid Iraq of insur­gents and ter­ror­ist attempt­ing to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment and ter­ror­ize the Iraqi peo­ple. We helped accom­plish that mis­sion that day. Once an able-bodied indi­vid­ual picks up a weapon and employs it against U.S. Forces they give up the right to claim that their age or gen­der should pre­vent us from engag­ing them to pro­tect our lives and com­plete the mis­sion. While I sup­port free­dom of the press and free speech rights, those pic­tures should never have been released by a sol­dier who was not even there. My job was to hand those pic­tures up the chain of com­mand which I did. Once out of my hands I can­not be sure of who had access to them or what story they con­cocted to go along with the pic­tures. Mr. Kraft, I am a pro­fes­sional sol­dier and a Ranger who lives my life and fights accord­ing to the Ranger Creed which I doubt you are famil­iar with. One stanza in par­tic­u­lar says…”Energetically will I meet the ene­mies of my coun­try. I shall defeat them on the field of bat­tle for I am bet­ter trained and will fight with all my might. Sur­ren­der is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen com­rade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no cir­cum­stances will I ever embar­rass my coun­try… My men and I did the right thing out there and I will not allow you or any­one else to insin­u­ate that we embar­rassed our coun­try by doing any­thing wrong. I believe that you, Mr. Kraft, should have done the right thing and attempted to con­tact me and do some inves­ti­ga­tion into this inci­dent before pub­lish­ing my name in con­junc­tion with any war crime. Although I feel it is not war­ranted, I wel­come any inves­ti­ga­tion into the events that day. I am con­fi­dent that my actions were right and in accor­dance with the Geneva Con­ven­tion and the laws of land war­fare. I hope you feel com­fort­able with your actions, Mr. Kraft. You have man­aged to skip any inves­ti­ga­tion and asso­ci­ated an hon­or­able, very accom­plished pla­toon with a crime that did not exist. Thank you for your time and con­sid­er­a­tion of these facts from the day. 22 June 2005. At the request of Mark Kraft the orig­i­nal 16 pho­tos have been reduced to half-size and cou­pled to speed down­load­ing and to ease com­par­a­tive view­ing. The orig­i­nal pho­tos: http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill02.htm http://eyeball-series.org/bkz/buhriz-kill02.htm 19 June 2005 Mark Kraft (http://insomnia.livejournal.com) writes: Awhile back, a U.S. cit­i­zen work­ing in Iraq sent me sev­eral pho­tographs he obtained from a sol­dier in Iraq. Appar­ently, they had been passed along between sev­eral sources before reach­ing me. I felt that the pic­tures were par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial and news­wor­thy, in that they appear to show U.S. sol­diers plant­ing weapons on Iraqi teenagers. As a result, I passed them on to Sey­mour Hersh of the New Yorker, who men­tioned them in an inter­view on May 11, 2005. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250 After I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of dig­i­tal pic­tures emailed me, and — was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some gen­eral rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehi­cles. One of them got blown up. The other two units — sol­diers ran out, saw some peo­ple run­ning, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys play­ing soc­cer. And in the dig­i­tal videos you see every­body stand­ing around, they pull the bod­ies together. This is last sum­mer. They pull the bod­ies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Amer­i­cans pulling bod­ies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see sol­diers drop­ping R.P.G.‘s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insur­gent kill. Unfor­tu­nately, Mr. Hersh has no plans to go for­ward with the story at this time, cit­ing the incon­clu­sive nature of what hap­pened, and the risk it could have to his sources. I, how­ever, have no such eth­i­cal prob­lem with releas­ing the pic­tures as is, as I think there is an over­whelm­ing pub­lic inter­est that they be released. It should be up to the media and the gen­eral pub­lic to deter­mine for them­selves what occurred that day. (It’s not for me to spec­u­late too much upon Mr. Hersh’s rea­sons for not going for­ward with the pic­tures. He has his rea­sons, which I assume are valid.) They indi­cate that a group of U.S. sol­diers planted weapons — the same weapon, in fact — in front of killed, wounded, and cap­tured Iraqi kids. I can­not authen­ti­cate whether Mr. Hersh is cor­rect and that the teens in ques­tion were inno­cent or not, but clearly, some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is amiss. At the very least, it indi­cates how uncer­tain the sit­u­a­tion is over there. Our sol­diers lit­er­ally do not know who the enemy is, and appar­ently are will­ing to manip­u­late the evi­dence in order to jus­tify their actions. The pic­tures were taken with a dig­i­tal cam­era in Buhriz, Iraq on Oct. 22nd, 2004, and their file names are num­bered, appar­ently from the dig­i­tal cam­era in ques­tion. They show the basics for you: no weapons in the first pho­tos, then weapons inserted into the pic­tures later. They also show pretty clearly that I didn’t stage these pic­tures. It appears to me that these teenagers are not insur­gents, in that they showed no signs of hav­ing either weapons or wear­ing khafiyas, or head­scarves, which are typ­i­cally used as a kind of uni­form by insur­gents, as dis­played in the Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos below. To me, the whole sit­u­a­tion is indica­tive of the ter­ri­ble uncer­tainty of the con­flict, where every­one is a poten­tial insur­gent, and where that fear and uncer­tainty leads to a sit­u­a­tion where U.S. sol­diers try to manip­u­late the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion. It’s also worth not­ing that med­ical treat­ment was appar­ently not offered until shown in the later pic­tures, lead­ing me to won­der whether the assis­tance, in itself, was part of the “staged” ele­ment of these pho­tos. Here is what I know hap­pened with the inci­dent in ques­tion: A US patrol led by 1st Lt. Terry “T.J.” Grider’s pla­toon — 1st Infantry Divi­sion troops based out of FOB Gabe — were on a “move­ment to con­tact” mis­sion — basi­cally try­ing to draw fire. At approx­i­mately 7:20 am, they were report­edly fired upon by small arms and RPGs while dri­ving near Buhriz. A Cap­tain Bill Cop­per­noll from the 1st Infantry Divi­sion told AFP that nine insur­gents were killed and three wounded that day. A hos­pi­tal from Ba’aquba reported that it received three dead and eight wounded from the fight­ing. The dead appear to have been turned over within 48 hours to some other party — I sus­pect one of the hos­pi­tals at Ba’aquba. Al Jazeera appar­ently had a reporter/photographer on the scene who took pic­tures of these teens prior to their funer­als. Some of their clothes have been changed, pos­si­bly in prepa­ra­tion for their funer­als. Fig­ur­ing out from Al Jazeera what their reporter saw and what the locals told him would prob­a­bly be very reveal­ing as to what hap­pened that day. See the fol­low­ing links for details: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1–292925-466310.php http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/23–10-2004/main/main10.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20041110005515/http://www.alchahed.net/bah241004p1.htm At least one of these Iraqi kids was “framed and arrested,” so I think it’s impor­tant that some kind of inves­ti­ga­tion be done to deter­mine whether or not he is guilty of any­thing. He could still be rot­ting away in Abu Ghraib for all I know. I’ve attached all the pic­tures I have avail­able, named Buhriz 2004 22OCT 074–091. (#083 and #087 are miss­ing for some rea­son, prob­a­bly because the sol­dier who took the pic­tures didn’t want to pass them on.) Please dis­play them in that order. Also, I attached pho­tos “aljazeerabahraz1-4,” which I found in a Google search at the time I orig­i­nally researched this issue. The site that hosts these pic­tures is down now, but archive.org still has a mir­ror of them. It shows what is obvi­ously sev­eral of the same teens. These should be shown after the other pic­tures, with their sep­a­rate source explained. (Cryp­tome added two Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos of the same time period. Cryp­tome notes under pho­tos.) This per­son also appears in No. 2, No. 6, No. 10, and No. 11. Per­son at top in grey t-shirt appears in No. 4, No. 8 (turned face up), No. 13 (head at left), and No. 14 (at left, lower cloth­ing removed, t-shirt cut away). Per­son at cen­ter in blue t-shirt appears in No. 7, No. 13 (cen­ter, partly nude), and No. 14 (at right). Both these per­sons appear to be alive. Two per­sons in No. 5 appear in No. 12. Per­son at cen­ter (white shirt) also appears in No. 9. Weapons have been added in the fol­low­ing pho­tos. aljazeer­abahraz 1–4 Asso­ci­ated Press Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Abu­raya) Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Aburaya) […]

  24. Eyeballing the Buhriz Body Count says:
    February 14, 2007 at 10:18

    […] Eye­balling the Buhriz Body Count 6 July 2005. A writes: Pulled this from the U.S. Army White Pages. The email for Lt Terry Jonathan Grider from the arti­cle: terry.grider [at] us.army.mil Phone Num­ber: 09643–205-339 Assigned to 2–2 Infantry. 1 July 2005. Mark Kraft responds to Lt. Grider: I wanted to reply to http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361#comment-3600 the anony­mous com­ment from roadstoiraq.com, made, appar­ently, by Lt. Grider. First off, Lt. Grider seems to think that my post­ing of the the pic­tures was a per­sonal attack on him. In fact, he was men­tioned once in my orig­i­nal post, as being the leader of the par­tic­u­lar unit involved at Buhriz that day. My source for this infor­ma­tion was straight out of the news­pa­per reports of what hap­pened that day, and I never said that Lt. Grider was per­son­ally involved in the pic­tures them­selves. Lt Grider’s claim that I should have inves­ti­gated this mat­ter fur­ther before com­ing for­ward with the pic­tures over­looks sev­eral impor­tant things. 1. I make no claims to being a reporter. I am a weblog­ger who went pub­lic with pic­tures sent to me by a U.S. cit­i­zen in Iraq. A cit­i­zen who found the inci­dent trou­bling and felt that they should be released. 2. I had no clear way to get in touch with Lt. Grider. 3. Had I got­ten in touch with Lt. Grider first, I still would not know if he was telling the truth about the pic­tures. Denial does not equal inno­cence. 4. I feel that the pub­lic has a right to see the pho­tographs in ques­tion, regard­less of Lt. Grider’s per­ceived guilt or inno­cence. 5. The pub­lic release of the pic­tures was, I felt, a nec­es­sary step in order to deter­mine more about them. In his account, Lt. Grider basi­cally says that the pic­tures were taken accord­ing to the orders of engage­ment. While I do not deny that he was most cer­tainly fol­low­ing his orders, the ques­tion is, why was it nec­es­sary to take the sec­ond set of pic­tures, show­ing the same weapon, an RPG launcher, being placed in front of each of the Iraqi teens, to be used, as he said, for “evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents”? Didn’t the ini­tial pic­tures more accu­rately reflect the real­ity of the situ­aiton for the great major­ity of the Iraqi teens in ques­tion? Clearly, if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of tak­ing an addi­tional pic­ture to indi­cate which Iraqi his men had taken the RPG launcher from, this would’ve bet­ter reflected the inci­dent, right? The impli­ca­tion here is that it is accept­able, stan­dard behav­ior when U.S. troops clear a given area, for them to view Iraqis who are killed, wounded, or cap­tured as insur­gents, regard­less of whether they are armed or not, and to take pho­tographs which reflect this “real­ity”. The end result is, we have two Iraqi teens in prison, pre­sum­ably for fir­ing an RPG launcher at Amer­i­can troops, who risk these pic­tures being used against them when they finally get a trial. What is at fault here, basi­cally, is a wide­spread sys­tem where U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cers are under orders to col­lect evi­dence for pos­si­ble future crim­i­nal cases, to be sub­mit­ted to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. Their col­lec­tion of evi­dence, how­ever, would be thrown out in any respectable court of law, and doesn’t com­ply with accept­able inter­na­tional stan­dards. Arguably, the new Iraqi courts do not respect those stan­dards either — see  this arti­cle orig­i­nally printed in the L.A. Times: http://iraqtunnel.com/php/index.php?showtopic=1364 If offi­cers are going to be col­lect­ing evi­dence, then they should be trained in the same rules of evi­dence col­lec­tion that police depart­ments use every day — noth­ing more, noth­ing less. Like any legit crim­i­nal case, bad evi­dence should be deemed inad­miss­able. Cer­tainly most Amer­i­cans would never tol­er­ate such evi­dence han­dling tech­niques as being accept­able, even if the sol­diers in ques­tion were just fol­low­ing orders. Sol­diers aren’t cops. If you send them in with­out suit­able train­ing to do a police officer’s duty, you’re going to have hor­ri­ble injus­tices take place. Given the past abuses we’ve seen in Iraq, this, frankly, should hardly be a  les­son that we need to learn once more. 26 June 2005. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 LT Grider June 26th, 2005 13:31 100 Let me start this off by stat­ing exactly who I am. My name is 1LT TJ Grider. I led the pla­toon attack that resulted in those insur­gents being killed. I per­son­ally killed some of them and I took the pic­tures that are being tossed around on the inter­net now. My actions and the actions of my men that day were law­ful, pre­cise, descrim­i­nat­ing, and com­pletely fol­lowed the rules of engage­ment. They did not vio­late the laws of land war­fare or the Geneva Con­ven­tions. My only wish is that Mr. Mark Kraft, who appar­ently fol­lows com­ments on this web­site would have tried to con­tact me and do a lit­tle more inves­ti­gat­ing prior to putting my name on an inter­net page asso­ci­at­ing me and my pla­toon, pos­si­bly the most dec­o­rated pla­toon in the 1st Infantry Divi­sion dur­ing OIF II, with war crimes. Now I will answer a few ques­tions that should put to rest this issue with the major­ity of the sen­si­ble peo­ple that read this. To those obsessed with con­spir­acy the­o­ries or already con­vinced that the U.S. is fight­ing an unlaw­ful war, I doubt these com­ments will change your views. On Octo­ber 22 2004, my pla­toon received a call to aid a friendly unit in con­tact in Buhriz. We moved to Buhriz and fought in the city for 8 hours against over 60 RPG attacks, mul­ti­ple snipers, and an array of insur­gents rang­ing greatly in age, dress, and level of skill. Through­out the day we engaged insur­gents very dis­crim­i­nately and never fired on any­one that was unarmed or not pre­sent­ing a threat. One exam­ple that I can think of specif­i­cally is when one of my sec­tion sergeants reported that 150 meters from him a man was video tap­ing the fight­ing. He asked if he should engage and I asked if the man was armed. He replied no and that he was not pre­sent­ing a threat. I told him not to engage the indi­vid­ual and con­trol the fires around him to ensure only indi­vid­u­als with weapons or pre­sent­ing a threat were engaged. He com­plied and the next day while eat­ing break­fast in the chowhall we watched part of the fight on CNN as the Al Jazeera cam­era­man had sold the video­tape to CNN. On that video insur­gents were inter­viewed and called them­selves the Fri­day Free­dom Fight­ers. They described them­selves as work­ing men from the town of Buhriz who were attempt­ing to expel the for­eign invaders. So you can see we were fight­ing against men, boys, any­one able to grab a weapon and take up arms against us. Some were dressed in scarves and masks, oth­ers looked just like those boys in the pho­tos. To con­tinue, we received an order to move to con­tact through the palm groves where a Kiowa War­rior heli­copter had just been hit by small arms fire and had to return to base. I led my pla­toon of 30 men into the palm grove. The vis­i­bil­ity was about 20 meters in the palm grove…imagine some­thing more like the jun­gles of Viet­nam than the deserts you might think of in Iraq. Over 4 hours we moved about 600 meters, mov­ing slowly to watch for booby traps and insur­gents hid­den in the under­growth (this was a dense palm grove…you can see in the pic­tures, these kids were not play­ing soc­cer in there as some of you have implied) . We saw one man dur­ing our move­ment who was hid­ing near a shack. He was a date farm owner and we obvi­ously did not engage him. We put him inside the shack with water and his dates for food in order to pro­tect him and told him not too come out until all the fir­ing and explo­sions had stopped. He was thank­ful and did as we told him. As we turned to move back to the city and com­plete the clear­ance of the palm grove we came under heavy RPG fire at a dis­tance of less than 50 meters. The RPGs exploded on the trees and foliage around us. I set in a sup­port by fire posi­tion with the lead squad and they returned fire to fix the insur­gents posi­tion and pre­vent them from accu­rately fir­ing on us. I got a sit­u­a­tion report from the lead ele­ment that five or six indi­vid­u­als wear­ing civil­ian clothes were fir­ing on us. I led the other two squads on a flank­ing move­ment to destroy the enemy. We moved quickly to the point of assault. As I prepped my men to move across and assault through a sol­dier next to me said he had eyes on the insur­gents mov­ing towards us. They were less than 25 meters from us. I turned, iden­ti­fied the insur­gents and began the assault by fir­ing my weapon. We had pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the these “kids.” They were only the sec­ond peo­ple we had seen in four hours, they were within 20 meters of where the RPG fire had come from. They were dressed in cloth­ing match­ing the cloth­ing that my lead squadleader said the indi­vid­u­als that fired the RPGs had on, and they had RPGs. I made the deci­sion because at that point I was a sea­soned com­bat leader and had com­plete con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion. Now I will describe the actions on the objec­tive. After we fired on the isur­gents and I felt com­fort­able that the sit­u­a­tion was under con­trol I led the assault across the objec­tive. As we assaulted across the objec­tive the first thing we do is remove weapons and secure the area. We set in a perime­ter. I rec­og­nized that two of the boys were still alive and we had cap­tured one detainee unin­jured and try­ing to flee. We were no longer tak­ing fire (because we had just neu­tral­ized the insur­gents that had fired on us) and so we called up our actions to higher and I ordered my medic and two other com­bat life­saver qual­i­fied sol­diers to begin treat­ing the enemy wounded while myself and the other squad lead­ers estab­lished secu­rity and planned our next move­ment. I then took pic­tures in accor­dance with the rules of engage­ment. The pic­tures were nec­es­sary for evi­dence against the sur­viv­ing insur­gents as well as doc­u­men­ta­tion of the skir­mish. The ini­tial picu­tures were taken with­out weapons because we had con­sol­i­dated the RPGs away from the indi­vid­u­als and were guard­ing them while we set up secu­rity and treated the wounded. It was the tac­ti­cally right thing to do as well as the morally right thing to do by treat­ing the wounded even though they had just tried to kill us. In accor­dance with orders we then took a series of pic­tures of the insur­gents with the weapons that they had on them. You are cor­rect there was obvi­ously only one RPG launcher there and a few war­heads. The rest of the war­heads they had were already fired at us min­utes ear­lier. Were there more launch­ers that they dropped while attempt­ing to flee as they real­ized the over­whelm­ing force they had just engaged? I don’t know and we didn’t have time to search as we started tak­ing fire and had audio on small arms fire from nearly every direc­tion. At that point I had a deci­sion to make. We could have done the wrong thing and left the injured to die. I could have pulled out my 9mm and killed them myself. We could have threat­ened them to get fur­ther intel­li­gence or beaten them for fir­ing at us and putting our lives in dan­ger. We did not do this because we are pro­fes­sional sol­diers in the United States Mil­i­tary. I chose to do the right thing. We had secu­rity set in, I was com­fort­able with the sit­u­a­tion and so we con­tin­ued to treat the indi­vid­u­als, which you see in the pic­tures. When my medic said the wounded were sta­ble we picked them up, threw them over our backs, and moved with them and the detainee over 200 meters to the road where we had coor­di­nated for a field ambu­lance, at this time we were still tak­ing fire but could not locate the ori­gin. We saved the lives of the very kids that had shot at us and attempted to kill us. And what you all do not real­ize is that the detainee admit­ted to an inter­preter that he and his friends had attacked us and had been paid to fight by a local insur­gency leader. As far as the pic­tures go they were and are nec­es­sary. They will be used in the pros­e­cu­tion of the sur­viv­ing insur­gents, although their con­fes­sions, which have never been men­tioned by Mr. Kraft will prob­a­bly be enough to con­vict them. It was not my require­ment to take those pic­tures, but that of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. They specif­i­cally instructed the mil­i­tary to take pic­tures of insur­gents wit the weapons or con­tra­band they had on them. That is what we did that day. Yes the RPGs were ini­tially moved to secure the area and pic­tures were taken. What if we had not had time because of com­ing under fire to take pic­tures with the weapons? We needed to have pic­tures at least con­firm­ing the days events. Because we did not come under fire imme­di­ately we had time to go back and take the pic­tures accord­ing to how the Iraqi gov­ern­ment wanted them for evi­dence pur­poses. To sug­gest we planted them is ridicu­lous. I will say that when you shoot some­one at close range the scene is chaotic. Those “kids” did have shoes on but were lit­er­ally blown out of them just as the weapons were scat­tered about. The bot­tom line is that when we came upon the scene we couldn’t be sure which indi­vid­ual held the launcher and which car­ried the rounds. A scene like that is much too chaotic to deter­mine things like that in such a short period of time. When I took the pic­tures, I did so with the weapons in front of each because they were all trav­el­ling in a group and all guilty to some degree. They will have a trial and a chance to pre­vent evi­dence show­ing their inno­cence. The only evi­dence I saw was that of guilt. As I said maybe some of them ditched another launcher or some hand grenades as they tried to flee from us. The bot­tom line is those RPGs were on them and we had just taken fire from those “kids.” I do not see at the range the fight took place any way that we could have been more dis­crim­i­nat­ing with our fires. They had the weapons on them and the first pri­or­ity when on the scene was to elim­i­nate the threat by remov­ing the weapons, secur­ing the area, treat­ing the wounded, then tak­ing pic­tures. What some of you don’t seem to under­stand is that regard­less of their age we took human lives that day. But it was out of neces­sity and self-preservation and in attempt­ing to accom­plish the mis­sions set forth for us by our unit. That mis­sion was to rid Iraq of insur­gents and ter­ror­ist attempt­ing to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment and ter­ror­ize the Iraqi peo­ple. We helped accom­plish that mis­sion that day. Once an able-bodied indi­vid­ual picks up a weapon and employs it against U.S. Forces they give up the right to claim that their age or gen­der should pre­vent us from engag­ing them to pro­tect our lives and com­plete the mis­sion. While I sup­port free­dom of the press and free speech rights, those pic­tures should never have been released by a sol­dier who was not even there. My job was to hand those pic­tures up the chain of com­mand which I did. Once out of my hands I can­not be sure of who had access to them or what story they con­cocted to go along with the pic­tures. Mr. Kraft, I am a pro­fes­sional sol­dier and a Ranger who lives my life and fights accord­ing to the Ranger Creed which I doubt you are famil­iar with. One stanza in par­tic­u­lar says…”Energetically will I meet the ene­mies of my coun­try. I shall defeat them on the field of bat­tle for I am bet­ter trained and will fight with all my might. Sur­ren­der is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen com­rade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no cir­cum­stances will I ever embar­rass my coun­try… My men and I did the right thing out there and I will not allow you or any­one else to insin­u­ate that we embar­rassed our coun­try by doing any­thing wrong. I believe that you, Mr. Kraft, should have done the right thing and attempted to con­tact me and do some inves­ti­ga­tion into this inci­dent before pub­lish­ing my name in con­junc­tion with any war crime. Although I feel it is not war­ranted, I wel­come any inves­ti­ga­tion into the events that day. I am con­fi­dent that my actions were right and in accor­dance with the Geneva Con­ven­tion and the laws of land war­fare. I hope you feel com­fort­able with your actions, Mr. Kraft. You have man­aged to skip any inves­ti­ga­tion and asso­ci­ated an hon­or­able, very accom­plished pla­toon with a crime that did not exist. Thank you for your time and con­sid­er­a­tion of these facts from the day. 19 June 2005 Mark Kraft (http://insomnia.livejournal.com) writes: Awhile back, a U.S. cit­i­zen work­ing in Iraq sent me sev­eral pho­tographs he obtained from a sol­dier in Iraq. Appar­ently, they had been passed along between sev­eral sources before reach­ing me. I felt that the pic­tures were par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial and news­wor­thy, in that they appear to show U.S. sol­diers plant­ing weapons on Iraqi teenagers. As a result, I passed them on to Sey­mour Hersh of the New Yorker, who men­tioned them in an inter­view on May 11, 2005. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250 After I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of dig­i­tal pic­tures emailed me, and — was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some gen­eral rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehi­cles. One of them got blown up. The other two units — sol­diers ran out, saw some peo­ple run­ning, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys play­ing soc­cer. And in the dig­i­tal videos you see every­body stand­ing around, they pull the bod­ies together. This is last sum­mer. They pull the bod­ies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Amer­i­cans pulling bod­ies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see sol­diers drop­ping R.P.G.‘s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insur­gent kill. Unfor­tu­nately, Mr. Hersh has no plans to go for­ward with the story at this time, cit­ing the incon­clu­sive nature of what hap­pened, and the risk it could have to his sources. I, how­ever, have no such eth­i­cal prob­lem with releas­ing the pic­tures as is, as I think there is an over­whelm­ing pub­lic inter­est that they be released. It should be up to the media and the gen­eral pub­lic to deter­mine for them­selves what occurred that day. (It’s not for me to spec­u­late too much upon Mr. Hersh’s rea­sons for not going for­ward with the pic­tures. He has his rea­sons, which I assume are valid.) They indi­cate that a group of U.S. sol­diers planted weapons — the same weapon, in fact — in front of killed, wounded, and cap­tured Iraqi kids. I can­not authen­ti­cate whether Mr. Hersh is cor­rect and that the teens in ques­tion were inno­cent or not, but clearly, some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is amiss. At the very least, it indi­cates how uncer­tain the sit­u­a­tion is over there. Our sol­diers lit­er­ally do not know who the enemy is, and appar­ently are will­ing to manip­u­late the evi­dence in order to jus­tify their actions. The pic­tures were taken with a dig­i­tal cam­era in Buhriz, Iraq on Oct. 22nd, 2004, and their file names are num­bered, appar­ently from the dig­i­tal cam­era in ques­tion. They show the basics for you: no weapons in the first pho­tos, then weapons inserted into the pic­tures later. They also show pretty clearly that I didn’t stage these pic­tures. It appears to me that these teenagers are not insur­gents, in that they showed no signs of hav­ing either weapons or wear­ing khafiyas, or head­scarves, which are typ­i­cally used as a kind of uni­form by insur­gents, as dis­played in the Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos below. To me, the whole sit­u­a­tion is indica­tive of the ter­ri­ble uncer­tainty of the con­flict, where every­one is a poten­tial insur­gent, and where that fear and uncer­tainty leads to a sit­u­a­tion where U.S. sol­diers try to manip­u­late the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion. It’s also worth not­ing that med­ical treat­ment was appar­ently not offered until shown in the later pic­tures, lead­ing me to won­der whether the assis­tance, in itself, was part of the “staged” ele­ment of these pho­tos. Here is what I know hap­pened with the inci­dent in ques­tion: A US patrol led by 1st Lt. Terry “T.J.” Grider’s pla­toon — 1st Infantry Divi­sion troops based out of FOB Gabe — were on a “move­ment to con­tact” mis­sion — basi­cally try­ing to draw fire. At approx­i­mately 7:20 am, they were report­edly fired upon by small arms and RPGs while dri­ving near Buhriz. A Cap­tain Bill Cop­per­noll from the 1st Infantry Divi­sion told AFP that nine insur­gents were killed and three wounded that day. A hos­pi­tal from Ba’aquba reported that it received three dead and eight wounded from the fight­ing. The dead appear to have been turned over within 48 hours to some other party — I sus­pect one of the hos­pi­tals at Ba’aquba. Al Jazeera appar­ently had a reporter/photographer on the scene who took pic­tures of these teens prior to their funer­als. Some of their clothes have been changed, pos­si­bly in prepa­ra­tion for their funer­als. Fig­ur­ing out from Al Jazeera what their reporter saw and what the locals told him would prob­a­bly be very reveal­ing as to what hap­pened that day. See the fol­low­ing links for details: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1–292925-466310.php http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/23–10-2004/main/main10.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20041110005515/http://www.alchahed.net/bah241004p1.htm At least one of these Iraqi kids was “framed and arrested,” so I think it’s impor­tant that some kind of inves­ti­ga­tion be done to deter­mine whether or not he is guilty of any­thing. He could still be rot­ting away in Abu Ghraib for all I know. I’ve attached all the pic­tures I have avail­able, named Buhriz 2004 22OCT 074–091. (#083 and #087 are miss­ing for some rea­son, prob­a­bly because the sol­dier who took the pic­tures didn’t want to pass them on.) Please dis­play them in that order. Also, I attached pho­tos “aljazeerabahraz1-4,” which I found in a Google search at the time I orig­i­nally researched this issue. The site that hosts these pic­tures is down now, but archive.org still has a mir­ror of them. It shows what is obvi­ously sev­eral of the same teens. These should be shown after the other pic­tures, with their sep­a­rate source explained. (Cryp­tome added two Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tos of the same time period. Cryp­tome notes under pho­tos.) 1 This per­son also appears in No. 2, No. 6, No. 10, and No. 11. 2 3 Per­son at top in grey t-shirt appears in No. 4, No. 8 (turned face up), No. 13 (head at left), and No. 14 (at left, lower cloth­ing removed, t-shirt cut away). Per­son in blue t-shirt appears in No. 7, No. 13 (cen­ter, partly nude), and No. 14 (at right). Both these per­sons appear to be alive. 4 5 These two per­sons appear in No. 12. Per­son at cen­ter (white shirt) also appears in No. 9. 6 7 8 9     Weapons have been added in the fol­low­ing pho­tos.   10 11 12 13 14 15 16   aljazeer­abahraz 1–4 Asso­ci­ated Press Pho­tos Photo cap­tions by Asso­ci­ated Press. Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Abu­raya) Masked gun­men take up posi­tion in Buhriz, out­side Baqouba, 60 km north east of Bagh­dad, Iraq, dur­ing a bat­tle with U.S. troops, Fri­day, Oct. 22, 2004. Armed gun­men and U.S. troops bat­tled near Buhiz, exchang­ing gun, rocket and artillery fire as U.S. forces scoured palm groves in search of hid­den rebel weaponry, the mil­i­tary said. (AP Photo/Sami Aburaya) […]

  25. BELLACIAO - Story of Inventing Insurgents Creates Allergic Reaction in the Press - stan goff - Collective Bellaciao says:
    June 7, 2007 at 22:33

    […] US troops do kill Iraqi chil­dren http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 […]

US troops do kill Iraqi children (Update)

This article was written June 21st, 2005, with the mathematical number of 315 contributions.