i had heard rumors about AI, but..wow...

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http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0816-01.htm

Published on Friday, August 16, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

The Powell Doctrine: Baghdad/Jenin/My Lai

by Heather Wokusch

 

With the US poised to attack Iraq, it's helpful to recall what

pushed us over the brink last time ... the invisible steps and the

unspoken consequences.

 

In the fall of 1990, when the US Congress was debating going to

war, Amnesty International (AI) released an explosive report

detailing how Iraqi soldiers had taken Kuwaiti babies out of

incubators and left them to die on hospital floors. Many US

Senators later claimed it was the Amnesty " dead baby " report that

finally convinced them to use vicious force against the Iraqis.

 

Minor glitch. It was soon revealed that the Amnesty report was a

complete sham - Kuwaiti propaganda put together by the PR firm

Hill & Knowlton. The Summer 2002 edition of Covert Action

Quarterly describes how political infighting at AI had pitted a

board member (who said the report was too " sloppy " and

" inaccurate " to release) against a high-level official at Amnesty

UK, now suspected of having been an undercover British

intelligence agent, who released the sham report anyway.

 

Regardless, the attack on Iraq had already begun and television

viewers worldwide were absorbing endless footage of laser-guided

bombs, pinpoint missiles and other " precision warfare " that

miraculously seemed to destroy machinery without harming

civilians. Back home, flag-waving hysteria followed Operation

Desert Storm to its climax, and returning conquerors, including

then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, were

feted as national heroes.

 

Minor glitch. A few months later it was revealed that actually

100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis, many of them unarmed civilians, had

died during the six-week attack, including tens of thousands mowed

down in aerial assaults as they were trying to flee along what

became nicknamed " The Highway of Death. "

 

Equating civilians and combatants is integral to " The Powell

Doctrine " which recommends using overwhelming force on the enemy,

regardless of civilian casualties. In his autobiography, Colin

Powell discusses the Vietnam War and explains the benefits of

destroying the food and homes of villagers who might sympathize

with the Viet Cong: " We burned the thatched huts, starting the

blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters ... Why were we torching

houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said people were like

the sea in which his guerillas swam. We tried to solve the problem

by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war,

what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or starved him

to death? "

 

Unmentioned is the moral implication of targeting civilians, or

why doing so would make them want to sympathize with the US.

 

A few years later, Colin Powell was an up-and-coming staff

officer, assigned to the Americal headquarters at Chu Lai,

Vietnam. He was put in charge of handling a young soldier, Tom

Glen, who had written a letter accusing the Americal division of

routine brutality against Vietnamese civilians; the letter was

detailed, its allegations horrifying, and its contents echoed

complaints received from other soldiers. Rather than speaking to

Glen about the letter, however, Powell's response was to conduct a

cursory investigation followed by a report faulting Glen, and

concluding, " In direct refutation of this (Glen's) portrayal, is

the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the

Vietnamese people are excellent. "

 

Minor glitch. Soon after, news surfaced about the Americal

division's criminal brutality at My Lai, in which 347 unarmed

civilians were massacred; Powell's memoirs fail to mention the

Glen incident.

 

Fast forward to April 2002, and having risen to Secretary of

State, Colin Powell reported to a US congressional panel about his

visit to the Jenin refugee camp, site of a recent Israeli attack.

Powell testified, " I've seen no evidence of mass graves ... no

evidence that would suggest a massacre took place ... Clearly

people died in Jenin - people who were terrorists died in Jenin -

and in the prosecution of that battle innocent lives may well have

been lost. " In the same vein, Amnesty International issued a short

release stating that while it appeared " serious breaches of

international human rights and humanitarian law were committed ...

only an independent international commission of inquiry can

establish the full facts and the scale of these violations. " For

its part, the White House also claimed more facts were needed, and

then Bush called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a " man of

peace. "

 

So in essence, the whole Jenin attack would need to be swept under

the carpet because (since Israel had not allowed a UN

investigation and NGOs had come up with very little) there was not

enough solid information to support accusations.

 

Minor glitch. Unmentioned is the fact that the US military, under

the auspices of learning about urban warfare, had accompanied the

Israeli military on its attack on Jenin (Marine Corps Times,

5-3-2002). Or the fact that dozens of foreign journalists

witnessed 30 Palestinian corpses being buried in a mass grave

right near the hospital. Or the fact that local hospital personnel

describe seeing the Israeli military loading other corpses " into a

refrigerated semi-trailer, and taking them out of Jenin " (which

would answer the question posed in Amnesty's release, " What was

striking is what was absent. There were very few bodies in the

hospital. There were also none who were seriously injured, only

the 'walking wounded'. Thus we have to ask: where are the bodies

and where are the seriously injured?'').

 

Moral of the story? Truth is often the first casualty of war.

Before we hang our hopes on heroes or unquestioningly believe what

we hear from even the most reliable sources, we need to dig deeper

to find the real story. Second, while the US was appropriate to be

outraged at the targeting of its civilians in the September 11

attacks, we should extend that outrage to scenarios in which our

government targets, or is complicit in targeting, civilians

elsewhere.

 

Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer. She can be contacted via

her web site at www.heatherwokusch.com