What’s wrong with this picture? Reports death-squad activity one day; killed by sniper next
Motto of the sniper: One shot, one kill. It worked with Yasser Salihee. A single, well-aimed shot to the head killed him.
US Knight Ridder Exposes Systematic Torture, Murder Iraqi Sunnis; Writer Pays With Life
Jun 29, 2005
By Muhammad Abu Nasr, Free Arab Voice; Edited For Publication By JUS
Months after the stories began to surface in uncensored press, now American Knight Ridder newspaper has reported that so-called Iraqi security forces have been torturing and killing Iraqi Sunnis.
A story by Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee written for Knight Ridder was published on Monday 27 June 2005 and reported that “days after Iraq’s new Shi‘i-led [puppet] government was announced on April 28, the bodies of Sunni Muslim men began turning up at the capital’s central morgue after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.â€
The American agency reported that Fayiq Baqr, the director and chief forensic investigator at the central Baghdad morgue, said that the corpses first caught his attention because the men appeared to have been killed in methodical fashion. Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, their eyes were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases the dead men looked as if they had been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks, beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads.â€
The American news report said that marks on those bodies were similar to injuries found on prisoners that the so-called Iraqi “ministry for human rights,†prodded by families of victims, rescued from secret prisons run by the “interior ministry†according to family accounts and medical records.
Knight Ridder reported that American occupation authorities and collaborating Iraqi officials said that the so-called police murders are “not being investigated systematically.†The agency said, however, that in dozens of interviews with families and officials, and through a review of medical records a Knight Ridder reporter and two special correspondents found more than 30 examples of this type of killing in less than a week. They include 12 cases with specific dates, times, names, and witnesses who said they would be willing to come forward if asked to do so by the installed authorities.
The so-called “ministry of the interior,†which oversees the Iraqi police, denied any involvement in the murders, Knight Ridder reported. “But eyewitnesses said that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with [puppet] police markings.†Knight Ridder reported that “The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios, the witnesses said.â€
American occupation officials cover up the systematic murders claiming that the victims were killed by resistance fighters dressed as puppet police. American Steven Casteel, a senior US adviser to the so-called “ministry of the interior†and a former American Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief, admitted that the puppet forces at times “abused detainees†but denied reports of systematic sectarian abduction and murder by his charges. When Knight Ridder attempted to contact the “interior minister†to get his comment on the reports, the agency was told that the “minister†“could not schedule an interview.â€
The so-called “ministry of human rightsâ€, though more accepting of the stories, was similarly evasive about the matter of placing blame for the murders.
Ra‘d Sultan, an official in puppet “ministry of human rightsâ€, whose job is to monitor the treatment of Iraqis in prisons and detention centers, said some “interior ministry†employees have tortured Iraqis whom they suspected of supporting the Resistance.
For one thing, officials in the interior ministry’s intelligence division deny having any detainees, at all, claiming that they only question inmates in Iraqi prisons. But one investigation by the so-called “human rights ministry†found 32 detainees and another found 67 in “interior ministry†intelligence facilities. “The majority of the detainees had been tortured,†Knight Ridder quoted Sultan as saying.
Knight Ridder reported that “most of those who were tortured had their hands cuffed behind their backs, were blindfolded and had been beaten by cords or subjected to electrical shock, Sultan said.†The American news agency noted that “Fayiq Baqr, at the morgue, said the bodies that have been brought to him handcuffed and blindfolded had been similarly abused.â€
But when it came to assigning blame for the torture and murder, the human rights official was evasive. Knight Ridder quoted Sultan as saying, “when battered corpses turn up outside ‘interior ministry’ facilities, How can I prove it is the security forces who were guilty of the torture and murder?
While it is evident to forensic investigator Fayiq Baqr what is going on, he too fears to state bluntly what is going on. Knight Ridder reported that “asked who he thought was behind the upsurge in such executions, Baqr said, ‘It is a very delicate subject for society when you are blaming the [puppet] police officers. . . . It is not an easy issue.†But Baqr cites the clear evidence of what is going on: “We hear that they are captured by the police and then the bodies are found killed . . . it’s obviously increasing.â€
In fact the abductions, tortures and murders have been increasing at an overwhelming rate. Knight Ridder reported that Baqr said he had been unable to catalog the deaths because so many bodies have been brought through his morgue and because he doesn’t have enough doctors.
Before March 2003, he said, the morgue handled 200 to 250 suspicious deaths a month, about 16 of which included firearm injuries. He said he now sees 700 to 800 suspicious deaths a month, with some 500 having firearm wounds.
Many Iraqis say the giveaway that the abductors are at least connected to the police is the preponderance of reports involving Land Cruisers, Glocks and other expensive equipment.
Knight Ridder reported that on May 5, for example, 14 Sunni farmers were picked up from an east Baghdad vegetable market. The farmers had driven to the capital from al-Mada’in, a town south of Baghdad where the month before the puppet regime had concocted a false story about Resistance fighters kidnapping and executing Shi‘a – a story that later proved to be fabricated in an operation blamed on Iranian intelligence.
The bodies of the farmers were discovered in shallow graves the next day, Knight Ridder reported. They had been blindfolded and tortured, and their hands had been cuffed behind their backs.
In separate interviews this week, Knight Ridder reported, two men who were at the east Baghdad market at the time said they saw a large group of puppet police detain the farmers.
“A patrol of more than 10 police vehicles drove up and parked,†said ‘Ali Karim, a fruit vendor. “They were running through the street with their guns, saying that the farmers had a car bomb with them. They pushed them against the walls and asked them for their IDs.â€
Knight Ridder reported that another vendor, Ahmed ‘Adil, gave a similar account in a separate interview.
“We were sitting,†Knight Ridder reported ‘Adil as saying, “and the [puppet] police cars pulled up and spread in different directions. A neighborhood guard asked the [puppet] police what they were doing – he said these are just farmers – and the police said don’t get involved, they have a car bomb with them.â€
A brigadier general in the so-called “interior ministry,†who spoke to Knight Ridder on the condition of anonymity, said his brother was taken during a large raid on May 14 in his working-class Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad. The brother’s body was found a day later, bearing signs of torture.
The general, who was not present when his brother was detained, said he canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed one family after the next.
The descriptions of the abductors were identical in every case, he said: They came in white police Toyota Land Cruisers, wore [puppet] police commando uniforms, flak vests and helmets. They also had Glocks.
Knight Ridder reported that the general said he had tried, through the “interior ministry,†to find out which commando unit was in that neighborhood when his brother disappeared. He also said colleagues have told him that his own life is now in danger.
A day before the general’s brother disappeared in west Baghdad, Anwar Jasim, a Sunni welder at the puppet so-called “Iraqi ministry of industry and minerals,†went missing from his south Baghdad home.
Knight Ridder reported that Jasim’s family said he was taken by a large group of men dressed and equipped like puppet police commandos.
Another man taken in Jasim’s neighborhood, a local grocer who gave his name as Abu Ahmad, said he was taken to the same detention facility as Jasim. While he was there, he said, he and other men sat on the floor blindfolded and handcuffed. They listened to other prisoners screaming.
When the other prisoners were brought back into the room, Abu Ahmad said, they said they’d been pummeled with long wooden staffs.
“When we were in detention, they put blindfolds and handcuffs on us. On the second day, the soldiers were saying, ‘He’s dead,’†said Abu Ahmad. “Later, we found out it was Anwar.â€
Knight Ridder reported that the abductors dropped Jasim’s body at Baghdad’s al-Yarmuk hospital the next day, hospital staffers said. According to hospital records, Jasim had a bullet wound in the back of his head and cuts and bruises on his abdomen, back and neck.
The man in charge of the al-Yarmuk morgue, who gave his name as Abu ‘Amir, said he remembers the day the commandos brought Jasim’s corpse.
“The commandos told me to keep the body outside of the refrigerator so that the dogs could eat it because he’s a terrorist and he deserves it,†Abu ‘Amir said, according to the Knight Ridder Reporters.
The killings didn’t stop in May, Knight Ridder noted.
Sa‘di Khalif’s body was also found at al-Yarmuk. The 52-year-old Sunni, along with his brother Muhammad, was taken from his home in western Baghdad on June 10. His abductors rode up in pickup trucks painted with Iraqi puppet police insignia, his family said. About 10 came into the house, while about twice as many fanned out in the street outside, forming a security perimeter. They had radios, uniforms, flak vests and helmets, family members said.
“The doctor told us he was choked and tortured before they shot him,†said Ahmad Khalif, one of Sa‘di’s brothers. “He looked like he had been dragged by a car.â€
Muhammad Khalif, 47, also beaten and shot, still had on metal handcuffs at the al-Yarmuk morgue.
The Knight Ridder report concluded by noting that Yasser Salihee was a special correspondent who worked on the report. He was shot and killed last week in Baghdad in circumstances that remain unclear. Special correspondent Mohammed al Dulaimy also contributed to the report from Baghdad, Knight Ridder added.
*******
“Yasser Salihee, 30, was killed while driving alone in Baghdad on June 24, his day off. A single bullet pierced his windshield and struck him in the head. It appeared that a U.S. sniper shot him.” – The Guardian, June 30, 2005.
Salihee’s widow at his funeral
nuttymango:
Thank you for speaking out.
I wish I could do more to help. I just put a link at dkos. Best I can do right now.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/30/225743/118
30 June 2005, 11:09 pmEd:
Here we go again. Details for those who want them:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12026482.htm
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12016097.htm
1. It’s a shame this guy was killed. It’s a shame when anyone innocent is killed, but especially this guy. Good Iraqi reporters and media are exactly what that country needs right now.
2. The evidence that he was killed by a US bullet is slim and circumstantial. There’s really no proof other than a reporter saying it “appeared” to be US. What about the Iraqi troops at the same checkpoint?
3. You have no basis for your implication that it was an intentional “hit”, that Salihee was targeted because of his reporting. Read the second link. He was on his way to get gas on his day off and ran into a joint US-Iraqi checkpoint. Intersection of two random events. Some dipshit, maybe US, maybe Iraqi, fired a shot and killed him. There is zero evidence and near-zero probability that he was specifically targeted, despite your clear innuendo to the contrary. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unfounded conspiracy theory is the stock and trade of the propagandist. Don’t let yourself be drawn there, not if you value your hard-earned credibility.
1 July 2005, 6:57 amStan:
Conspiracy theory… hmmm. Not even a remote chance that the coalition conspires, eh? Things have changed a good deal since I worked in this field. Read Haney’s book if you want to know about Special Ops snipers.
Circumstantial. Big legal word, Ed. I note that the legalisms are unholstered any time “our side” is under suspicion, but you yourself have stated that detainees are not entitled to legal protection. And that’s why I post this. We can’t just go on hearing one side of this — and a side with an agenda, that has a track record oflying its ass off early and often.
Here’s the circumstance in circumstantial. Google up Yasser Salihee, and you’ll see that this guy was not just a journalist, but an exceptional and courageous one, who was not afraid to dig into the nefarious affairs of coalition forces. Again and again.
Now, take note that he was killed by a single (!) shot to the head at a US roadblock. A single shot to the head. Quite a circumstance, and one that does NOT pass any smell test I know.
Finally, note how many reporters have been attacked by the coalition – so many, in fact, that the notion that these were all “tragic accidents” becomes ludicrous.
Pretty compelling circumstances, I’d say. Enough at least to warrant bringing it up in a blog, since the mainstream media will avoid the implications like the plague, cowardly mercantilists that they are.
I do what I do. Others will assess my crediibility, and how they assess it is something I have no control over. In 2001, I said the US was looking for the excuse to go regional and occupy SW Asia to exercise control over the energy patch. I was right. In 2002, I said that Iraq was no threat to the US and that the US was manufacturing intelligence about WMD. I was right. In 2003, as early as April I said publicly (on CNN) that this was a quagmire in the making. I was right. All this stuff I said, based on circumstantial evidence.
Lots of us said these things, and we were told we were conspiracy theorists, or the foolish porters of sinister ideological agendas. We were right, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the other so-called “respectable” media were not only wrong, at times we thought they were going to be absorbed into the Department of Defense.
Right now, I’m not going to sweat the credibility thing. We are too busy pointing out that our government has done more to slaughter its own credibility than anyone we can think of.
1 July 2005, 7:48 amKenneth T. Tellis:
Knight Ridder Journalist Yasser Salihee died for the FREEDOM of the PRESS, which today is no loger permitted by the Bush regime in the USA, Afghanistan or Iraq. His murder by a U.S. sniper was not by accident, any more than the attempt on Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena’s life. One thing is clear in all of this, that the Bush regime will brook no interference, and will kill if out of nessity if challenged.
1 July 2005, 8:32 amQavi:
Stan,
This story needs to be told in the American press so badly! This is the reall story, this is what war is about. Phsyco, criminal bastards with expensive weapons that are trained by our tax money to shoot and and kill brave and innocent people. I have not watched cable news since the Michael Jackson trial began, but I am 100% positive this story will not make it there. when I read the story about Yasser Salihee I cried. not just for Yasir but for all the innocent people who have had thier life ended like 18 year old brother was shot in the head by a soviet sniper in afghanistan.
My brother was not thier enemy he was just a college kid who returned home after being away for three years. but he was shot because he looked like an insurgent.
My condolence to Yasser Salihee’s family and friends.
1 July 2005, 10:09 amastras:
talking about credibility. sadly, but true: the us-army has absolutely no credibility left. absolutely none. after it became obvious they lied about wmd, after it became obvious they routinely torture people, no where in the world is their any trust in their claims. concrete heads, in whose warped world view lying, killing under false pre-tense, torture, etc is ‘morally and legally justified’ might seriously underestimate the level of distrust and plain hatred this war has created all over the world.
1 July 2005, 6:31 pmm:
in case anyone’s interested, here’s a (most likely incomplete) list of media people who have apparently been targeted and killed in iraq:(http://www.geocities.com/ywaciv/bodies.html#journalists).
as a result of keeping this list (and others), i’ve been branded with the tired old “conspiracy theorist” tag – as though conspiracies haven’t been the stock-in-trade of people seeking power as long as humans have had political structures.
i just keep a record.
thanks for your unceasing efforts, stan.
1 July 2005, 7:45 pmmany blessings.
peggy:
Ed – Reporters are prime targets of oppressive governments. That is why there is this:
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=20
It certainly looks from the evidence like Salihee was deliberately murdered. The very fact that he reported the truth under these circumstances made him a target. When someone is murdered, the first question one asks is, who would have a motive to do this?
It may well have been someone among the Iraqi troops, who are working under the supervision of the US. “Some dipshit”? No doubt. But a dipshit who knew what he was doing, and knew he could get away with it. And the very fact that the US Gov and its spokespeople are trying to brush off this murder as some kind of foolish accident casts doubt on their own credibility.
No intelligent and knowledgeable person can believe that the United States Government is above assassinating individuals who threaten its efforts to monopolize “the truth”.
2 July 2005, 1:11 amHubris Sonic:
hmmm.. single shot? in a car?, hmmm… not that its that tough a shot. if you are setup for it certainly deserves investigation. but… no.. it will go down the memory hole, like everything else.
2 July 2005, 4:26 amnuttymango:
m,
Your list of “collateral damage”, so to speak, caused by the Bush administraion is great work. I wonder if there’s a place on there for Bunnatine Greenhouse who used to be the top contracting officer for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Her repeated attempts to get to the bottom of no-bid contracts to Halliburton and subsidiaries (now exceeding $12 billion) got her demoted. Full story here:
http://www.whistleblowers.org/html/bunny_greenhouse.htm
2 July 2005, 6:15 amm:
nuttymango:
you bet. thanks. i’ll also link her testimony june 27, 2005, at “An Oversight Hearing on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in U.S. Government Contracting in Iraqâ€:
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/hearings/hearing22/greenhouse.pdf
and thanks again to stan.
2 July 2005, 9:42 pmm:
sorry i didn’t get this in the previous comment:
Khalid al-Attar, who worked for al-Iraqiya television, was abducted from a Mosul neighbourhood by unidentified armed men and found shot to death on Friday, the state-funded station said.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said al-Attar’s death was the ninth killing of a journalist in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city 360km northwest of Baghdad.
The organisation called on Iraqi and US authorities to investigate, saying Mosul has become “Iraq’s most dangerous city for the press after Baghdad”.
Al-Attar, 43, worked for a satirical programme that poked fun at the government’s perceived carelessness and inability to deal with major issues in the country, including frequent water shortages and power cuts.
There have been 61 journalists killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/311F2A67-6BE6-40DD-A7D3-B77AC5A85D81.htm
2 July 2005, 9:46 pmEd:
Stan,
Well it goes without saying that you decide what you print on your blog. I tossed in the credibility comment only to remind you why I persist in posting to your blog, despite the fact that my posts will always receive a hostile reception. Surely you of all people can appreciate the value of a good OPFOR to keep you sharp?
Back to the case. I’m fairly familiar with SOF sniper capabilities, being a currently serving SF officer with recent experience. Thanks for the book tip, but I’ll visit the unit if I need more background.
The shot wasn’t that hard, and probably wouldn’t have taken a true sniper. At the ranges common in checkpoint operations in the city, probably less than 50 meters and coming straight at the shooter while decelerating, most anyone with a 3X ACOG could have taken it. Nearly all US infantry troops have access to ACOGS now. Labeling everyone who takes single aimed shots as a ‘sniper’ is a rookie reporter chump move.
And that presumes the shot was intentional. It’s equally plausible that an Iraqi soldier was shooting at the engine and fired high. I’ve seen Iraqi “police commandos” who didn’t know what the rear sight was for. They just looked over it and lined up the front sight post on the target. On a 25m zero range, they missed the 8 foot high wall that the targets were pasted on. Shot right over it. True story.
But it would be a mistake to focus on the shot. You have enough experience to know that taking the shot is the easy part. The hard part is setting up the shot. Man hunting, Stan. Targeting a person requires foreknowledge that they will be at a specific place and time.
It would be one thing if he were shot in his front yard or at his office. But he was shot on his day off, at a vehicle checkpoint some distance away from his home, while on a trip of his own initiative. That implies a very sophisticated operation, with surveilliance to establish his patterns of movement and predict his likely routes and activities on his days off. Even with that, how would they have known he was going to go for gas at that specific time, in order to set up that temporary roadblock? It just doesn’t add up.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. Just not likely. Too many resources involved, too much risk. If someone really wanted to knock that guy off, there would be much easier ways to do it.
I’ll also state this categorically, though I know everyone here will scoff at me. The US does not assassinate reporters in Iraq. Period. I would know about it. It ain’t going on. Naturally I don’t expect you to take my word for it. But I know what I know, and it necessarily informs my opinions.
Have a nice 4th. I will.
2 July 2005, 11:03 pmStan:
State it categorically all you want.
And the roadblock was between his house and the only functional gas station. Parabolic microphone alerts surveillance, roadblock goes in, and like you say – easy shot.
Not complicated at all.
3 July 2005, 7:00 amEd:
STAN: “And the roadblock was between his house and the only functional gas station.”
ED: Provide your source, please.
3 July 2005, 8:08 amStan:
Please. You posed a hypothetical situation to show the extreme difficulty of an assassination. I posed one to show the extreme simplicity of it in a place where you occupy it militarily. I don’t have a source for parabolic mikes either. We might presume from the many reports of gas shortages that people have limited options, and we might further presume that people – like they do here – establish patterns with regard to where they buy things. It doesn’t take a surveillance guru to figure this out, and it doesn;t have to happen on the first try, when you are targeting someone out of their home who does not know he is a target.
3 July 2005, 10:09 amEd:
Stan, what hypothetical situation did I pose?
3 July 2005, 8:05 pmStan:
That he was killed by an Iraqi who was shooting at the engine when he refused to stop. Note here, HIS culpability, and the IRAQI inability to shoot straight. Positiviely pregnant with content, this hypothetical.
How exactly did the mortality rate of journalists critical of the opposition get so high on account of “tragic errors?” How did al Jazeera get bombed accidentally, twice. What happened at the Palestine Hotel? A lot of circumstantialism I’d say.
3 July 2005, 8:49 pmEd:
The trip to get fuel was not hypothetical. It was factual. You answered it with a condition, “the roadblock was between his house and the only functional gas station”, that you admit is hypothetical. Answer facts with facts.
His own bureau chief, Hannah Allam, had this to say: ” There’s no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work.”
STAN: How exactly did the mortality rate of journalists critical of the opposition get so high on account of “tragic errors?â€
So you’ve done the statistical analysis that shows the mortality rate is “so high” in comparision to other groups? Let’s hear it.
3 July 2005, 9:16 pmAaron:
I found the following info at the end of a good article on Yasser Salihee’s murder at Portland indymedia (see URL):
“Two more Iraqi journalists have been killed in the days since Yasser Salihee’s death. On June 26, Maha Ibrahim, a news editor with a television station operated by the anti-occupation Iraqi Islamic Party, was shot dead when US troops opened fire on her car as she and her husband drove to work. Two days later, Ahmad Wail Bakri, a program director for Iraqi al-Sharqiya television was killed by American troops as he reportedly tried to drive around a traffic accident in Baghdad.”
If this is true, it seems pretty clear that U.S./Iraqi-puppet death squads are working overtime!
4 July 2005, 6:05 amTom in Sydney:
Why would the US Military need a policy of targeting journalists, (notwithstanding the whitewashed bombings of Al-Jazeera and the shelling of The Palestine Hotel), when there’s 20,000+ mercenaries operating in theatre with no oversight?
4 July 2005, 8:39 amStan:
Mercs have advantages and disadvantages. Advantage – no Congressional ovesight. Advantage – don’t show up on casualty counts. Disadvantage – are not under direct institutional control, and so may not keep their big, drunken, macho mouths shut.
4 July 2005, 9:20 amStan:
Dead journalists:
http://icasualties.org/oif/journalist.aspx
http://expage.com/bushbustersaab
http://www.cascfen.org/contents.php?cid=57
http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/JournalistKillings_Fisk.html
Deadliest conflict yet for journalists, and US killings of journalists predominate among Arab journalists.
Perhaps there is an explanation for how al Jazeera offices keep showing up in US bomb damage assessments.
Targeting the media for manipulation and when necessary, interdiction, is SOP.
4 July 2005, 2:46 pmEd:
Just as I suspected. Even the most rudimentary look at the numbers blows your claims apart.
In the most recent tally I could find, the Electronic Iraq project, (an anti-war media alliance), it is clear that the great predominance of media deaths are NOT due to US action: http://electroniciraq.net/news/1973.shtml
“These latest killings bring to 85 the number of journalists and media staff killed in Iraq since the US and British invasion in March 2003. Of this number, some 62, almost 80 per cent, are Iraqi. The number also includes 14 deaths at the hands of US troops, which have prompted the IFJ and others to demand independent reports on the circumstances.”
US forces are responsible for 14 out of the total 85 killed. That’s only 16%. Yet you gloss over the other 84%.
Those figures are confirmed by Reporters Sans Frontieres (link provided by Peggy). According to RSF, as of May 2005 there have been 56 journalists killed, only 8 (14%) of them by US forces. Go read for yourself in their detailed report: http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/Etude_Irak_Eng_PDF.pdf
Finally, according to a link that YOU provided, as of Aug 2004 the insurgents had killed twice as many journalists as US and Iraqi troops: http://www.cascfen.org/contents.php?cid=57
“According to INSI’s records, 24 were killed by terrorists or other irregular gunmen, nine by US forces and two by Iraqi troops. Two, plus one missing, were victims of US and Iraqi crossfire and six were killed by gunfire of unknown origin. Eight died in accidents or from health-related reasons.”
The numbers don’t lie. The insurgents are killing journalists at a far greater rate than US or Iraqi forces.
4 July 2005, 8:03 pmStan:
Only 14 deaths (that we know) are at the hands of US forces?!
Ed, how many journalists in other conflicts have been killed at this rate by US forces? Six by “gunfire of unknown origin”? Sorry, but with 14 confirmed, no one in their right mind – unless they were acting as apologists for the occupation – would grant the US forces the presumption of innocence here. On the contrary!
And “terrorists or other gunmen” is a weasel-word that likely includes peshmerga and the “wolves” who work for the US right now.
My “claims” are that there are an unusually high number of journalists’ deaths in Iraq, and an unusual involvement of US forces in that number. You are premise-shifting. I showed you the numbers in response to your challenge to provide data about mortality rates among journalists. When I provided that, you say there were ONLY 14 of them killed (that we know of) by US forces, and attempt to conflate both sides in the US’s little civil war there as “resistance,” which of course is something none of you will acknowedge exists, so you have to call them “terrorists, foreginers, dead-enders,” etc. What Salihee was reporting on, at least one of his stories, was the use of these death squad-like formations by the so-called coalition.
You still haven’t answered my question about the Palestine Hotel, nor the one about how al Jazeera gets “accidentally” bombed… twice. But you will say “categorically” that the US does not target journalists. Forgive my being short, but bullshit.
Next you’ll be telling me that there is no P2OG out there or in planning by the DoD.
I have had conversations with soldiers who told me how they were told to simply fire in a general direction in cities as “suppression,” and Jimmy Massey’s book is coming out in December, that will name names, as well as dates and locations, where orders were issued to fire into unarmed crowds. The orders were followed, too. Obviously I don’t know the ROE, but this violates Geneva, so it has to violate the ROE
Nothing here passes the smell test. But it all passes the occupation test. It smells like quite a few places I have known… Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador… very familiar. Especially Vietnam, because this is exactly like Vietnam in two respects. Politically, this administration can’t get out, and militarily, they can’t win. Been there, done that.
And this time, the US is targeting journalists.
4 July 2005, 9:31 pmEd:
Ok, well forgive me for being short too, but you are tapdancing your ass off trying to salvage this one.
In your previous post, you claimed that “US killings of journalists predominate among Arab journalists.” Your words verbatim. However, the data by anti-war and neutral media groups clearly and undeniably establish that many more Arab journalists have been killed by non-US killers than by US forces. The numbers prove you wrong.
For instance, 62 Iraqi journalists have been killed according to EIP. Since the US doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt with you, let’s worst-case everything. If every single one of the 14 journalists killed by US forces were Iraqi, and every single one of the 6 “gunfire of unkown origin” were Iraqis killed by US forces too, then the US would have killed a MAXIMUM of 20 Iraqi reporters, in comparison with AT LEAST 42 Iraqi reporters killed by non-US forces. So at worst, the US could have killed half as many Iraqi journalists as the other side has.
Again I challenge you to produce some numbers establishing otherwise. Answer facts with facts.
4 July 2005, 10:36 pmSks:
Ed,
One basic question:
Had the USA been in Iraq, would there be any doubt as to whom killed the reporter?
That for me is the bottom line. Putting troops in a position in which they have to kill and die for the profits of a few corporations, makes all moot.
The mission is all wrong, ergo, anything that happens is the mission’s fault.
K.I.S.S.
5 July 2005, 1:23 amHubris Sonic:
The US does not assassinate reporters in Iraq. Period
The numbers don’t lie. The insurgents are killing journalists at a far greater rate than US or Iraqi forces.
dude, your fucking merc’s are part of the problem.
at a vehicle checkpoint some distance away from his home, while on a trip of his own initiative.
you seem to know alot about this. how hard was the shot, again?
The US does not assassinate reporters in Iraq. Period
5 July 2005, 3:50 amDan:
Ed, looking at the links provided, and looking at the Committee for the Protection of Journalists site, one finds that, yes, in fact, the majority of journalists are being killed either by the militants or by “unknowns”…and that the US has been confirmed to have killed only 14 (only?) journalists…
Look at the ethnicity and employer of those killed.
Compare to those killed by the militants.
Why is it that primarily foreign (both Euro and Semitic) journalists working for primarily foreign agencies (Euro and Arabian/Persian) have been killed by the US?
5 July 2005, 4:04 amStan:
My point exactly. The PREDOMINANT numbers of journalists killed by US forces have been Arab. Not that Americans have killed the MOST Arab journalists.
I’m still waiting for my answers on al Jazeera, et al. And how that squares with “categorically” not targeted by US forces. At what level is a bombing target approved? With the Chinese Embassy, the target folder came directly from the CIA. But at what level did the al Jazeera offices get approved?
Journalists who tell the truth about what they see there are being transformed into enemy combatants by Abazaid’s forces, and in all likelihood by Abazaid and his boss. Everyone knows what a legedary micromanager that twit Rumsfeld is.
5 July 2005, 6:31 amDan:
Let’s break it down:
1. It will remain impossible to determine intent without proof of direct orders or policy targetting investigative and/or critical journalists from US command or political leadership. Clearly what we are going on here is a combination of precedent, suspicion, and … for lack of a better word … the stunning convenience of so many of the deaths of certain journalists at the hands of US forces.
2. Given the suspicions regarding torture in US prison camps, the initial driblets of evidence of torture in US prison camps, the subsequent flood of reports of torture in MANY US prison camps, ranging from Bagram to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, coupled with the various Gonzales, Rumsfeld, and other memoranda from leadership, the Taguba Report, and so on…the initial suspicions proved to be rather tame – similar tactics, similar leadership decisions, similar units, and similar circumstances found across the globe and constituting clear evidence that the WORST we thought was actually much less than what was going on.
3. Given the suspicions regarding the lead-up to war, the pimping of hyped claims of nuke programs, aluminum tubes, Nigerien uranium deals and mobile chemical labs… the initial claims of “going to war based on lies” have been shown by both the direct evidence, AND by the now-revealed strategy and tactics as seen in the Downing Street Memos, to have been absolutely accurate. It now is very clear based on now-public documents coupled with the facts on record that the war was a foregone conclusion and that the facts were ginned up, constructed, fabricated, and carefully cherry-picked to fit the desired outcome.
5. Given the suspicions at the onset of the war regarding the role played by private contractors in all aspects of the operation, from basic supply chains all the way to heavily armed security, counter-insurgency, and “special operations”-like activities, training and so on…and given the now-revealed massive extent – beyond anything suspected by all but the most shrill of “conspiracy theorists” – of the actual mercenary armies and operations active in Iraq…
Taking all those latter points, it seems clear to me that the targetting of journalists, specifically targetting of journalists that provide deeply disturbing and damning reports of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, brutality in un-impeachable format, is nowhere near being beyond conception, nor, given the murky nature of the combattant forces (mercenaries, secret armies, special operations and special forces, “insurgents” – made of of at least 5 and probably more like 10 different, often hostile factions), it seems to me that there is really no argument beyond “we don’t have a memo proving that the targetting of independent, european, and arabic/persian journalists working for “hostile” press outlets is official policy”…
To which I would reply: Given the history of other such suspicions, I would qualify such a “you don’t have the memos” statement with a prominently placed “Not yet, sucker”
I just hope Hersh, Fisk, and Cockburn (among many others) are watching their backs.
5 July 2005, 6:50 amDan:
“US killings of journalists predominate among Arab journalists.†Your words verbatim. However, the data by anti-war and neutral media groups clearly and undeniably establish that many more Arab journalists have been killed by non-US killers than by US forces.
ah, the wonders of strawmen.
The point is not the numbers, Ed, the point is the ratio.
The ancillary point is not the specific ethnicity of the journos killed, but the tone, tenor, provenance, and target of their reporting, regardless of their ethnicity.
First, there is a clear predominance, in terms of proportion, or ethnically arab/persian journos killed by the US. Second, the journos killed by the US were, regardless of ethnicity, most commonly working for non-us, often critical news outlets…
Given those stats, I find it hard to believe that you cannot see why suspicion is so widespread.
And, again, you say we have no evidence…and I say “Wait til we get the memos” just like in the torture and WMD/Lies cases.
5 July 2005, 7:32 amEd:
DAN: “Why is it that primarily foreign (both Euro and Semitic) journalists working for primarily foreign agencies (Euro and Arabian/Persian) have been killed by the US?”
Because the threat to US forces is 100% Semitic, so US troops are more likely to mistake an Arab journalist for a threat. Salihee said so himself.
STAN: “My point exactly. The PREDOMINANT numbers of journalists killed by US forces have been Arab.”
If that’s your main point, you don’t really have much of a point. The predominant number of journalists killed by EVERYONE have been Arab.
DAN: “The point is not the numbers, Ed, the point is the ratio.”
Ok fine, establish the ratio, and compare it to something else meaningful. Be sure to eliminate all variables but the US from the comparison. Until then, you’ve got nothing.
DAN: “First, there is a clear predominance, in terms of proportion, or ethnically arab/persian journos killed by the US.”
In proportion to what? Without context, that statement is meaningless. You could cut out the phrase “by the US” and your statement would still be just as true. What does that say?
It says you don’t have the slightest statistical foundation for your claim that the US deliberately targets journalists. If you did, then both of you would be presenting it, instead of trying to deflect the argument with counter-accusations, peripheral issues, and rhetoric.
Answer facts with facts.
5 July 2005, 1:40 pmStan:
Answer the al Jazeera question. Or is al Jazeera not a case od journalists being targeted?
5 July 2005, 3:14 pmEd:
Your continued attempts to deflect the discussion are a clear sign that you can’t sustain your original claims. You have yet to put up a single statistic about press fatalities that supports your argument that the US targets journalists. The numbers don’t support you, so you dodge them.
Fine, what about the bombing of al Jazeera? I’m not going to play some dialectic game. State your position and I’ll be glad to respond.
5 July 2005, 3:52 pmStan:
Targeting: Proof requires proof of MOTIVE.
Statistic: An enumeration.
One cannot prove a motive with a statistic. One can only infer a motive from the preponderance of evidence and circumstances.
Is bombing the offices of al Jazeera targeting the press? It’s not a position. It’s a question.
5 July 2005, 4:25 pmEd:
In comment #3 of this thread, you said: “Finally, note how many reporters have been attacked by the coalition – so many, in fact, that the notion that these were all ‘tragic accidents’ becomes ludicrous.”
You inferred motive based on numbers, until you realized that the numbers didn’t support you. Now you want to create wiggle room for more subjective “evidence”.
STAN: “Is bombing the offices of al Jazeera targeting the press?”
Only if it was deliberate. Do you have evidence that it was?
5 July 2005, 6:57 pmStan:
No, Ed. The United States military publicly castigasted al Jazeera then coincidentally and accidentally bombed them… twice. That’s not courtroom evidence. I’d have to have access to the operations orders, which will be classified until after I am dead.
5 July 2005, 7:11 pmEd:
I concede that courtroom evidence is not a standard we can meet in this case. That would be an unreasonable expectation.
However, a logical analysis of all the publicly available facts to draw an informed conclusion is not impossible. Presumably you did this before you concluded that it was probably intentional. If so, I am genuinely interested in hearing it, since I have not looked closely at those two incidents.
We will probably draw opposite conclusions from the facts. However, that should not deter us from examining them.
5 July 2005, 9:03 pmDan:
OK, after perusing the Reporters Sans Frontiers and other sites, here’s the deal:
Terry Lloyd UK ITN US (accident/friendly fire)
Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed Kurd BBC US (accident/Friendly fire)
Jose Couso Spain Telecinco US (palest. Hotel)
Taras Protsyuk Ukraine Reuters US (Palest. Hotel)
Tareq Ayyoub Jordan Al Jaz US (Al Jaz bombing)
Mazen Dana Pal Reut US (Shot point blank)
Ali Abdelaziz Iraqi Arabiya US (Shot)
Ali al-Khatib Iraqi Arabiya US (Shot)
Mahmoud Hamid Abbas Iraqi ZDF US (US bombing? unclear)
Mazen Tomeizi Pal Arabiya US (Helicopter missile strike)
Dhia Najim Iraqi Reuters US (US sniper, disputed)
Maha Ibrahim Iraqi Bag-TV US (Shot by troops)
Ahmed Wael Bakri Iraqi Sharqiya US (Shot, convoy)
Yasser Salihee Iraqi K-R US (Shot, sniper?)
Of the 14 journalists killed by US or coalition forces, 3 are western (21%), and 11 are Middle Eastern (79%). Of the Middle Eastern journos, 8 are Iraqi (57% of the total), and the rest are Palestinian and Jordanian (21% of the total). Compare to the overall statistics from the Reporters Sans Frontiers PDF, and there is a distinct, although small difference in the proportions – fewer Iraqi, more Arab, and fewer western journalists killed.
4 out of the 14 worked for news outlets from coalition countries (ITN, BBC, Telecinco, Knight Ritter) the rest worked for european outlets or for Arabic News outlets (4 Arabic – Al Jaz, Arabiya; 2 Iraqi- Sharqiya, Baghdad TV) or European non-coalition outlets (4 – ZDF, Reuters).
There is a disproportion between the statistics for journalists killed by the US as compared to the overall population of journalistic casualties, both in terms of ethnic origin and in terms of employer.
Couple those observations with the treatment of journalists held captive by US forces (search the RSF site for that information), and there emerges a pattern that is very suspicious.
As Stan points out, it will remain impossible to prove intent without memoranda in hand.
However, given the experiences of WMD/Lies, and Torture, and given the experiences related by Stan and others regarding the a) operational difficulty of SOME of the above killings, b) the clear targetting of Al Jazeera HQ, c) The clear targetting of the Palestine Hotel, d) the mishandling, torture, and maltreatment of several journalists “captured” by US troops, and e) the blatant shooting of clearly marked and openly stationed journalists (Dana, Abdelaziz, Khatib) with permissions and passes…
It becomes very easy to apply Occam’s Razor to the available data…
6 July 2005, 1:26 amEd:
Dan, thanks for posting that. I’m busy now, but I’ll look at your numbers and get back to you later today.
Stan, I wasn’t being sarcastic when I said I’d like to hear the details of the Al Jazeera bombing. With our combined experience, we should be able to provide some insight. In particular, I’d like to know the operational situation and the weapon system employed.
7 July 2005, 8:26 amMike:
Stan:
No, Ed. The United States military publicly castigasted al Jazeera then coincidentally and accidentally bombed them… twice. That’s not courtroom evidence. I’d have to have access to the operations orders, which will be classified until after I am dead.
How to commit a murder and get away with it? Commit it in a place where dozens occur every single day and where chaos rules.
I saw the movie “Control Room”, so I suppose I’m biased.
Ed, for what it’s worth, you simply have too many leaks to plug in this argument, so you’re doing what I see many defenders of Bush’s Misadventure in Iraq: a desperate request for facts, minutiae ad nauseam.
You focus on each individual leaf and bud, and ignore the huge menacing forest behind you.
12 July 2005, 12:26 pmDan:
Mike,
Note that I actually ran the numbers and provided a breakdown showing that there are clear discrepancies between the results of US action and the overall data set. To put it another way, if we look at an entire population and show that the incarceration rate of one particular minority is 25%, and then we look at one sub-community within that larger population and show that the incarceration rate of that same minority in that sub-community is 60% we have demonstrated a clear anomaly. There may be a case to be made for bias, but it rests on circumstantial evidence…what it DOES call for is further investigation, probing, and analysis.
Note that I demonstrated a similar disparity, although clearly not of the same magnitude.
Note that Ed indicated he would respond…and hasn’t…I read not much into such lack of response – people are busy…on the other hand, Ed was very heavily engaged in this discussion as a contrarian and devil’s advocate, and made several assertions quite strongly…and then disappeared in the face of my argument.
So what happened, Ed?
12 July 2005, 8:22 pmMike:
Dan, I hope my post wasn’t misleading, I am not familiar with sticking in the “<>” stuff.
Statistics are fun for those who love them, but I go for the patterns of behavior or historical occurrences.
What caught my eye, and urged me to post here was Stan’s comment “No, Ed. The United States military publicly castigasted al Jazeera then coincidentally and accidentally bombed them… twice.”
It’s just like the Rove controversy going on now. Joe Wilson disputes the Bushies’ contention that Saddam was close to having nuclear weapons, and soon after, his wife’s CIA cover is blown.
Now, considering Rove’s previous history in political contests, what would an average normal curious human being conclude?
13 July 2005, 1:36 pmEd:
Sorry Dan, no I’m not dodging you. Yes, I’ve been busy.
So lets look at your numbers. You only provided half the data, and thus half the picture. Here are your calculated numbers killed by US action, compared to the casualty rates of all journalists in Iraq according to RSF. The “Expected” column is the number of journalists expected to be killed by US forces according to the overall casualty rates, and the “difference” column is the difference between the expected and actual numbers of journalists killed by US forces:
NATIONALITY: Your data RSF DATA Expected Difference
Western 3/14 = 21% 23% 3.2/14 -0.2 people
Arab 11/14 = 79% 77% 10.8/14 +0.2 people
Iraqi Arab 8/14 = 57% 66% 9.2/14 -1.2 people
Other Arab 3/14 = 21% 11% 1.5/14 +1.5 people
DAN: “there is a distinct, although small difference in the proportions – fewer Iraqi, more Arab, and fewer western journalists killed.”
ED: Small, I’ll say. No wonder you didn’t give the actual difference in the proportions. The difference between the number of expected and actual Arab journalists killed is 0.2 people. Wow, that’s some “anomaly”. Do you really wish to argue that 0.2 out of 14 people is statistically significant?
It’s abundantly clear from your own numbers that US forces are NOT disproportionately killing Arab journalists. We are killing them in exactly the same proportion to Western journalists as the enemy is. Yours to the contrary are false.
You confuse me with your second set of data (on employer). I can’t quite tell which RSF data you are comparing it to. Please lay it out side by side.
DAN: “It becomes very easy to apply Occam’s Razor to the available data”
Occam’s Razor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As I see it, you are doing the exact opposite of Occam’s Razor. You take a multitude of individually tenuous claims and attempting to stitch them together to support your preordained conclusion.
13 July 2005, 7:32 pmEd:
That table didn’t hold together. Let’s try a different spacing method:
NATIONALITY: .. Your data .. RSF DATA .. Expected … Difference
13 July 2005, 8:52 pmWestern …… 3/14 = 21% …. 23% …… 3.2/14 …. -2% = 0.2 people
Arab …….. 11/14 = 79% …. 77% ….. 10.8/14 …. +2% = 0.2 people
Iraqi Arab … 8/14 = 57% …. 66% …… 9.2/14 …. -9% = 1.2 people
Other Arab … 3/14 = 21% …. 11% …… 1.5/14 … +10% = 1.5 people
Dan:
Ed, given the small numbers involved (making serious statistical analyses inoperative), given that no critical attention to the individual details (for example, a couple of the journalists killed by US/Coalition forces are very clear cases of “friendly fire” or accidental casualties), I think that your revisitation of my initial observation (in which you come to the same conclusion), is essentially making a distinction without a difference.
First, clearly, as both you and I showed, journalists killed by the US are more likely to be non-Iraqi Arabs, and are more likely to be Arab, than journalists killed by all parties taken as a whole.
Second, the second breakdown of data pertains to the employers of journalists killed. Non-US employers are far more likely to have their journalists killed than US employers.
You can rerun my numbers and support my arguments some more if you wish – I appreciate it.
But, as is clear from my previous statements, statistics do not an indictment make, and correlation is not causation…what is needed is clear intent.
In the case of the multiple episodes of targetting of Al Jazeera, the targetting of the Palestine Hotel, and is implied very strongly by several other cases listed, there is at least a tendency to target journalists and journalistic outlets that are critical of US policy.
Until we find witnesses or memoranda to that effect, we are, simply put, working with raw data.
The raw data indicate that suspicion is warranted and that more investigation is worthwhile.
19 July 2005, 4:02 amEd:
The original thesis of this thread was that the US is intentionally targeting journalists in Iraq. One of the arguments made by Stan and others was that the disproportionate number of Arab journalists killed by US forces was proof of that thesis. The figures that you derived clearly establish that the number of Arab journalists killed by the US is not disproportionate to the overall casualty rates among journalists in Iraq. In fact, it is exactly the same, within 0.2%. So if the best you can do now to salvage the argument is claim “suspicion”, then you’re pretty much proved my original point.
25 July 2005, 3:29 pmDan:
Ed?
Disproportion was shown. You reiterated that disproportion.
You can quibble about the statistics all you want – first, a sample of 14 is hardly even close to statistically significant, second, there are a large number of other cases that are still under investigation or that we have no idea as to who killed whom, third, as was originally stated by both Stan and myself, the statistics themselves provide only circumstantial evidence – they, at best, provide basis for suspicion.
So, based on a very small sample that has not been evaluated for applicability (accidents and friendly fire are included in the 14 cases), and that may very well be incomplete (50% of the journalist casualties have not been attributed to either the US or the “insurgents”)…
We can, in fact, show disproportion. 2% (NOT 0.2%) overall, and ~10% disproportion when comparing within the Arab population of journalists. Further, we can show disproportion in the employers of those journalists (A higher proportion of employees of non-US, Arabic, or Independent outlets have been killed by the US than by other forces).
Again, the numbers are too small for statistical significance (14 is too small a data set).
And again, we never argued that circumstantial evidence would prove the charges, nor that correlative evidence would prove the charges.
Circumstance –> Correlation –> Causation is NOT an automatic progression.
However, the circumstances indicate cause for suspicion and investigation.
The individual accounts of particular events indicate that there is a basis for making the original charge.
The fact that Al Jaz was specifically identified, warned, and subsequently targeted several times despite the fact that their exact coordinates were given to US commanders prior to any activity (in both Afghanistan and in Iraq) provides yet more grist.
And the pattern of behavior on the part of US command and civilian leadership with respect to Torture, with respect to Extraordinary rendition, with respect to WMD and the Downing Street Memos, and so on and so forth (the list is far too long to recount here)…
Provides us with means, motive, and modus operandi to go along with our circumstantial evidence.
All we need to find are the memos (you know, like the ones that Gonzales authored about Torture, or the Downing Street Memos, and so on and so forth…).
You got nothing, Ed.
26 July 2005, 8:52 pmDan:
Oh, and Ed?
Your ability to argue and reason has been to some degree demonstrated on prior threads and earlier in this discussion.
That means that when you say “One of the arguments made by Stan and others was that the disproportionate number of Arab journalists killed by US forces was proof of that thesis.”, I am fully justified in accusing you of deliberately misconstruing to the point of LYING.
See, because I can “scroll” using my “mouse” and “read” using my “eyes” and then “compare” what Stan actually wrote…One cannot prove a motive with a statistic. One can only infer a motive from the preponderance of evidence and circumstances.”.
Ed, you’re obviously not stupid. You can obviously read, argue and reason. So why do you resort to lying about what was said about 5 posts upthread?
26 July 2005, 8:56 pmchris:
Story from Salon. Interview with sniper, etc.
“The Victim and the Killer
By Phillip Robertson
Salon.com
Wednesday 27 July 2005
Yasser Salihee was an Iraqi journalist. Joe was an American sniper. On June 24, 2005, fate brought them together on a Baghdad street.
Baghdad, Iraq — In the Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah in west Baghdad on June 24, a 33-year-old Iraqi man named Yasser Salihee was driving alone as he approached a small number of soldiers from a mixed U.S. and Iraqi patrol. Salihee was driving west. It was midday and most of the soldiers in the patrol had just entered a four-story building on the south side of the street to search for suspected insurgents on the roof. A few stayed down on the street to provide security. On the north side of the street stood two U.S. snipers; across the street an American from the same unit and at least one Iraqi soldier were posted. The street was left open to traffic: The patrol had not blocked off the street with cones and concertina wire, as they normally would for a cordon and search operation. The soldiers decided to stop cars by standing in the street and aiming their rifles at the drivers.
As Salihee approached the patrol from the east, another car was turning around in front of him. He began to drive around it to the right. Exactly what happened next is in dispute. What is certain is that as Salihee went around the car, the two U.S. snipers, thinking he was a suicide bomber, opened fire. At least four rounds were fired. One blew out the car’s right front tire; another ricocheted off the ground and pierced the gas tank. The final 7.62 millimeter round pierced the driver’s side of the windshield, entering Salihee’s right eye and shattering his skull. Salihee died instantly.
The American troops left the car in the street and moved to a different position. An hour after the shooting, an Iraqi policeman found Salihee’s phone and called his wife, Raghad. Raghad arrived at the scene and found her husband’s body still slumped in the car, and she called an ambulance. Then she sat down on the curb and wept.
Salihee was not a suicide bomber. He was a physician and journalist who was going to his house on his day off to pick up his 2-year-old daughter, Dania, and take her swimming. Barely able to make ends meet on the meager salary paid doctors by the Iraqi Health Ministry, Salihee had talked his way into a reporting job at Knight-Ridder in early 2004. He earned bylines in the San Jose Mercury News and other major U.S. papers by writing about detainees who had been tortured by Iraqi police and the dangers faced by men driving alone in the city. After his death, anguished tributes from colleagues and friends flooded the Internet and the papers, even NPR.
I first met Yasser Salihee in May, through his younger brother, Ayman, who works as my interpreter. Whenever Ayman needed a contact or a piece of advice, he called his older brother for the answer, which meant they were on the phone all the time. They were very close, and it wasn’t long before I met Yasser, who wanted to help on an investigative story. Over the course of a few weeks, we grew to be friends as we worked to find leads and uncover the past of the main subject, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Yasser worked in his off-hours to find leads and would show up at the hotel with his latest haul of phone numbers and ideas. In his rimless glasses and perfectly pressed shirt, Yasser came across more as a scientist than a reporter. He was a man with a great deal of curiosity and respect for facts. He also had no problem telling me what to do. Once, when he thought I needed a haircut, he sent the barber to my hotel room so there would be no escape.
In early June, Yasser stopped by and we talked about what he was going to do after his stint as a journalist. I said he shouldn’t give up on it, that Iraq needed reporters. “Yeah, but this isn’t going to last forever,” Yasser said.
Three weeks after that conversation, just after I returned from a trip to Fallujah, Ayman called and said that his brother had been shot and killed by U.S. soldiers. Ayman was in shock. I felt revulsion toward the soldiers, a sense of betrayal. At the end of the conversation he told me, “Don’t worry, you are still my brother. Don’t worry.” He wanted me to know we were still friends despite his shattered trust in the U.S. Later on he would say, “You don’t know what I’m feeling,” and it was true. There weren’t words for it.
A few days after Ayman told me about Yasser’s death, I decided to search for the soldier who pulled the trigger and look for answers about the shooting. I wanted to hear what happened in the soldier’s own words. The story presented a serious difficulty: I could not tell the U.S. military that I was working on Salihee’s killing: Third Infantry Division Public Affairs officers will not help a reporter who is working on a “negative” report about civilian casualties, and one such officer told me as much. To date, the U.S. military has refused to release any figures about the civilians it has killed, although it keeps very detailed records of every incident.
So I requested an embed slot in western Baghdad without mentioning the killing and hoped to find the soldiers involved by tracking down which unit was at the intersection of Amel Al Shabi and Rafaee streets. Two weeks later, after a lucky break, I was able to find the unit and the man who fired the fatal shot. To increase the chances of finding the soldier, I asked to embed with the company that patrolled the area, part of the 256th Brigade Combat Team. It was a matter of knowing which unit identifying numbers were on the vehicles in the neighborhood and making a rough guess whom to embed with. Ayman and I visited the intersection where the shooting occurred so I could see it and talk to eyewitnesses. The street is full of people, mostly men selling bread or hardware. It’s a busy commercial district that borders a major artery in the western sector of the city, and an easy place to recognize.
A day after I started the embed with the company in Amariyah, I was riding in a Humvee taking a tour of the neighborhood, when we suddenly turned down Rafaee street and then turned right on Amel Al Shabi, the same intersection where Salihee was killed. The patrol had gone over the exact spot, so there was no doubt that this was not only the right company, but the same platoon. Not long after that, a number of soldiers in the company came forward to tell me that they were nearby when Salihee was shot. I also knew from Ayman that snipers had fired on Salihee’s car, so it came down to asking a young specialist from Louisiana who the snipers were in the unit. As we talked in his room and looked at video his buddies had shot during their tour in Iraq, the specialist gave me two names. One of the men worked in the company headquarters, the other sniper was still going on patrols. The next night, the 13th of July, I walked into the command post after dinner and recognized one of the men the young soldier had mentioned. The man was working on a notebook computer at a big table in the front room of the command post. We struck up a conversation.
A Sniper with the 256th Brigade Combat Team
The sniper was working the night shift at the command post. He was a tall, good-looking man who didn’t have trouble getting girls back home. He showed me photographs on his computer, describing them in a deep Southern baritone. It was late and there weren’t a lot of people around at that time of the night. Radios chirped and hissed in the next room with traffic from the patrols outside the wire as they made their way through the neighborhoods of western Baghdad. Satellite maps of the capital marked “SECRET” covered the walls of the trailer. It was a quiet night, and there were no roadside bombs or rocket attacks as the patrols called in their positions.
The soldier showed a picture of himself kneeling on the ground, surrounded by Iraqi men who were giving the camera the thumbs up. One of the young cousins was throwing a gang sign, his fingers spread out in a sideways “V.” The men were smiling. One of the older brothers had his hand on the sniper’s shoulder. In the foreground, laid out in front of the American, was his trophy, a dead fox.
The sniper explained to me that he had befriended the Shiite family in the photograph while his unit spent some days near the town of Taji. He was ordered to watch a road and posted on their roof. “They were so respectful and wanted to learn things about us, and learn about our culture. It was like we were very important people, stopping in at their house,” he said with some amazement. It was one of his happiest memories of Iraq.
“On our last day at that position, while we were waiting to be extracted after midnight, we were sitting with the father, sons and cousins. Then the old man looked out and saw a fox near his chickens. I looked through my night vision system and saw the fox on a roof on the far side of a courtyard. The father said, ‘Would you mind shooting the animal that is killing our chickens?’ I said, ‘Not a problem.’ So I fired and it disappeared, but they didn’t believe I hit it. I told the kid to go out and see for himself and he went out there and came back with the fox, smiling. The old man was so happy.”
The sniper said he wanted to go back to see how the family was doing, but the unit changed locations and he couldn’t keep his promise to return. He brought up more photographs of his sniper positions, and told me he could hit a quarter at 300 meters. It is a distance of nearly a thousand feet. The sniper also told me his first name was Joe.
Back home, Joe hunts white-tailed deer with a bow and arrows he carves out of cedar shafts. “You have to know how to stand,” he said. “You only have 20 yards.” Like most of the men in his unit who are from the deep South, he can talk about the woods for hours, and his descriptions of his favorite places are unusually vivid, but the world beyond the forests and bayous, the chain of command and military politics, makes him uncomfortable. In the war zone, Joe remains close to the noncommissioned officers he trusts and avoids officers as much as he can. Joe is the son of a fighter pilot who died a year after he returned from Vietnam. There have been soldiers in his family for generations. When he started talking, I could see that he was struggling to make sense of his experiences in Iraq.
Joe went through the pictures on his laptop one by one, talking about near misses where his hiding place was nearly discovered, and the hot days where he had to lie perfectly still while Iraqis walked a few feet away from his position.
We looked at photographs of Joe crouching in fields, surrounded by tall grass where he can barely be distinguished in his camouflage suit. In many of the shots, he’s flipping off the camera. “That’s just something we do,” he told me. “I don’t think you can use any of those pictures,” he said and laughed.
Then he brought up a photograph of a white Daewoo Espero sedan on a Baghdad street. The sedan had a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield. Behind the wheel there was a lifeless man, slumped in the seat with a shattered skull and a torrent of blood staining his shirt. The image carried a sudden shock of recognition and despair. The dead man behind the wheel of the car was my friend and colleague, Yasser Salihee.
The sniper lowered his voice when he talked about the pictures of the car and the man inside it. His self-assured manner disappeared and he became nervous. “Here is one of ours. I really hope he was a bad guy. Do you know anything about him?” Then he said, “See, I don’t know if I should be talking about this.”
“Did you fire the shot that killed him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
Joe said that it was true that he fired the shot through the Espero’s windshield, but he wasn’t positive if it was the lethal shot. There was no doubt that it was, but Joe seemed to be genuinely uncertain about it. It was clear that he did not want it to be true.
The next day, I asked Joe if I could interview him about what happened that day. He agreed, but asked me not to use his full name because he was afraid of retribution in the United States. “I don’t want someone coming after me,” he said. I did not reveal that I’d been looking for him for two weeks.
The day after I looked at the photos on Joe’s laptop, I went out with his platoon on a patrol in Amariyah. It was July 14 and it was 125 degrees. Within a few minutes we were drenched with sweat. “This is a perfect place for a vee-bid,” the platoon sergeant said as he stood outside the concertina wire on a busy street. (For security reasons, none of the soldiers involved will be named.) He was halfway through handing out a thousand frozen chickens in a part of the city that has been flooded by refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi. It was not a good place to stand on the street for longer than a few minutes and no one wanted to be there. “Vee-bid” is U.S. slang for a Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device, a weapon otherwise known as a car bomb, which insurgents prefer to use against U.S. forces because there is no defense against it. The armor on Humvees will not stop the force of a blast fueled by artillery shells and anti-tank mines. Whenever soldiers talk about vee-bids, their sense of dread comes through.
The soldiers were not enthusiastic about giving the chickens away. One man called it “Operation Chicken Choker” because he didn’t want to be blown up giving food to people who were sympathetic to the insurgents. It was easy to see what he was talking about. Amariyah, which is mostly a Sunni neighborhood, was home to high-level military officers for the previous regime, and many of them have fled to Jordan and Syria where they provide funds for the insurgency. There is a constant sputter of gunfire in Amariyah. If it’s not coming right down on the soldiers, they barely look up.
The platoon managed to finish the mission in 45 minutes, throwing the chickens in careful arcs to the sergeant, who relayed them gracefully to the surprised passengers of passing cars. The platoon had been waiting for the chickens for hours because they had been stuck on the highway behind a roadside bomb, and when they were finally gone, there was a sense of relief. Knowing the intensity of violence in Amariyah, sending soldiers to deliver frozen chickens in the insurgent-controlled neighborhood seemed insane.
In the evening, I went back to the company headquarters to look for Joe, who was working the night shift again. We had trouble finding a good place for the interview because people kept coming through the trailer. We eventually ended up in the first sergeant’s office and closed the door. After a few minutes, I told Joe that I did know Salihee, that he was a friend, and that I wanted to hear his side of what happened. I asked him to go over the events of that day.
His answers didn’t come out in a linear chronology. Instead, Joe went back and forth over the same stretch of time, describing the block where the killing happened, trying to explain what it was like to drive down that street. The American names for the crossroads where Salihee died, Screaming Lady and Cedars, came up many times when he talked about attacks on the soldiers. “We’ve had a lot of problems right there from Cedars at the intersection with Screaming Lady — that is the worst part of our sector is right there,” Joe said. It is a place where soldiers from Joe’s company regularly come under small-arms fire and sniper attacks. The day before Salihee was killed, an insurgent sniper had shot and critically wounded a soldier in Joe’s platoon named Root, less than 300 feet from the intersection. On the 24th of June, Joe and his spotter were sent out with the platoon as a counter-sniper team.
Not long after the patrol entered the area, someone spotted a man on the roof of the four-story building at the corner of Amel Al Shabi, and the platoon moved in immediately for a search, while Joe and the spotter stayed down on the street to provide security. Joe also said that the platoon was taking small-arms fire in the neighborhood and that they had to move from cover to cover to reach their final position at the intersection. This is when two cars approached the U.S. snipers, with Salihee behind the wheel of the second. I asked him to describe the moment he started firing at Salihee’s car.
“I was shooting to disable when he swerved around the other car. He was going more than 20 miles an hour. We aren’t used to seeing someone drive that fast.” I wanted to know if Salihee had time to react, if he had time to stop. The car turning around in front of Salihee could have obscured his vision of the American patrol ahead. Joe said, “He had to have seen us, he had to have. I was standing in the middle of the road. I made eye contact with him after the warning shots. I thought, Oh my God it’s a vee-bid, we’re done.” Joe said he was firing from a standing position and that he had moved out into the street to stop Salihee. “I fired the first warning shot at 150 meters and the last shot at 20 or 30 meters. His hands never went up. It looked like he was ducking behind the steering wheel at 70 or 80 meters. It looked like there was a small silhouette of his head.” Joe said that Salihee didn’t respond to the warning shots, that he didn’t slow down.
When I asked Joe about the total elapsed time between the warning shots and the lethal shot he said, “The total elapsed time was 6 or 7 seconds.” When Joe talked about his decision to fire at Salihee, he sounded anguished, but he kept coming back to the moment when Salihee passed the first car, the moment he decided that Salihee was a bomber attacking the U.S. position.
Two Iraqi eyewitnesses contradicted Joe’s account. Falah Hassan Jasim, a plumber who was standing on the south side of the street when the shooting happened, told me, “There was a Lada car turning in the road and he [Salihee] tried to pass it, and then he pulled over. The Americans shot him, they were standing in the middle of the street.” According to Hassan, Salihee was stopped with his hands up when the snipers fired at him. I asked Hassan about the interval between the shots and he said, “It was like this, pop, pop, pop,” saying the bullets were fired in less than a few seconds.
Another witness, Hamid Mohammed Aboud, a 25-year-old ice seller who works at the corner of Amel Al Shabi and Rafaee streets, said, “Both Americans were firing at the same time, the shots were very close together.” When the shooting started, the ice seller said he ran to seek shelter in a nearby store. “I am talking about this because I might be in the same place one day.”
Was Salihee’s car stopped? There does not appear to be definitive proof one way or the other. Ayman Salihee, Yasser’s younger brother, said that when he arrived at the intersection, he saw that the Espero’s transmission was in neutral and that his brother’s feet were on the brake. In the police report, a diagram shows that Salihee’s car was pulled all the way over to the left side of the street, parallel to the curb.
The evidence suggests that Salihee might have had his hands raised. Four fingers on Salihee’s right hand were missing. Although it’s possible that a bullet other than the fatal bullet caused the injury (there were conflicting stories that an Iraqi soldier might also have fired), the missing fingers and the angle of fire are consistent with a bullet striking a raised hand.
The details may be murky, but in retrospect it is fairly clear what happened. The real problem was that the platoon did not put out cones and wire — if they had Yasser would have stopped. Then came the fateful turning car, followed by another car coming around it. The soldiers were on edge, but they seem to have followed their rules of engagement. It was a typical misunderstanding, of the sort that happens all the time in Iraq.
After Joe fired at the windshield he walked to the car and saw that Salihee was covering his eye with his right hand, but as he watched the hand fell and blood poured from the wound in the man’s head. Not long after the shooting, Joe’s unit left the area. “We had to leave the scene and that was fucked up, but we had to continue our mission. Then we came back and I saw the lady crying and it got to me because I’m not out here to kill innocent people at all. When I saw her, that’s when I knew something was wrong.” The woman Joe saw was Raghad Salihee, Yasser’s wife, and in our conversation he returned several times to the moment he saw her near Salihee’s car. It’s an image that deeply troubles him.
On 2nd of July, before I found the sniper, Ayman had taken me out to the Salihee house in Saydiyah where I met Raghad Salihee for the first time. She is a lovely woman, also a physician. When we arrived, the entire family was in mourning. Raghad came into the living room and she was weeping when she said, “If I find the soldier, I will kill him.” After I came back from the embed with Joe’s unit, I spoke to her at the hotel about the killing of her husband. She spoke calmly as her daughter played nearby. “I want many things but I want the Americans to stop running in the street, they are killing anyone. I also want them to stop using these types of destructive bullets. I see the injuries in the hospital. If a bullet strikes someone in the abdomen or leg, the person dies. If they are shot in the brain, they die immediately.”
Raghad went on to say, “I want the Americans to go back to America, but I know they won’t go.” She asked me if I knew a lawyer in the United States who could take her husband’s case. As her daughter gazed hypnotically at the hotel pool, Raghad said, “Can you help me? Please, can you help me?”
Yasser Salihee’s name has been added to a steadily growing toll of civilian casualties of the Iraq war. A Web site, Iraqbodycount.net, has estimated that at as many as 26,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion. Because the organization compiled the number from verified news reports, the true toll is higher, since not all of the civilian casualties appear in the press.
The Army is conducting an investigation of Salihee’s shooting, as it does in all shootings of civilians that result in death. Considering the murky circumstances and the Army’s rules of engagement, it seems unlikely that any disciplinary action will be taken. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the spokesman for coalition troops in Iraq said he did not know of any soldier who had been punished for shooting a civilian in traffic or at a checkpoint.
One day in early June, Yasser found a set of X-rays in my hotel room. He said, “Hey, man, what are you doing with X-rays?” I explained that they belonged to a boy named Rakan Hassan, who was wounded by American soldiers when they fired on his parents’ car in Tal Afar earlier this year. The boy’s parents were killed. Yasser held the X-rays up to the light and read them, pointing out the fractures and the damage to the boy’s spine. This was the moment I learned he was a doctor, that he could do more than report the news and find sources for stories. Yasser would put down his notebook and help tend to wounded people. Yasser Salihee’s talents were not solely his own, they reached beyond him, into possibilities for his wounded country. But his future is gone, and with it goes a measure of hope for Iraq.
Before I left Joe at his company headquarters at Camp Victory, he said he wanted to tell the Salihee family he was sorry and that he’d never had to fire to stop a car before the 24th of June. “If I’d seen his hands up, no way would I have fired a shot. We didn’t murder him. No way was it murder,” Joe said. But there was desperation in his voice, as if he wasn’t sure.”
29 July 2005, 6:57 pmchris:
Just for the record…I’m not convinced that the targeting of journalists is always accidental. I provided the story above since it was an interview with the shooter by the victims friend.
30 July 2005, 4:46 pmDrew:
well i think that sometimes when our troops see to much war they become like this…. also these terrorists now adays try to make them selfs look like regular people so i can blame the soldier. but he should atleast confirm that he was a civilian rather than a terrorist. but then again all these soldiers see is death fighting and shooting others. so they are sort of used to it, and this doesnt effect them. i think that much shorter rotations rather than a 5 year rotation is much better. lets say 3 year rotations might lower this.
1 May 2008, 2:44 pm