The war and policy blogs have been abuzz for the last few days over the leak of the 2007 classified Apache helicopter video of U.S. military personnel opening fire on a group of armed men, suspecting two video journalists of carrying RPGs (TV cameras), and then opening fire on a civilian vehicle that stopped by to pick up one wounded man.

This is the lead paragraph from The Atlantic’s report on the 2007 incident in a April 6 news report:

“In the Pentagon’s telling of a July 2007 incident long shrouded in mystery, two Reuters staffers were accidentally killed in a firefight between insurgents and U.S. forces including an Apache attack helicopter. Yesterday, leaked video taken from that helicopter tells a very different story. The chilling footage, released by the non-profit website WikiLeaks and reproduced below, shows no one firing on the helicopter, and that the Reuters staffers, far from incidental bystanders, were the intended targets. The Americans apparently believed the Reuters journalist’s shoulder-mounted camera to be a rocket-propelled grenade and considered the nearby armed Iraqi men to be imminent threats, though they showed no threatening behavior.“

On the face of it, there seems to be little that deviates from the history of such military incidents. One of the most famous in the U.S. – and yes, this is a Vietnam War reference – took place in My Lai in 1968. The official report filed by the U.S. military after that incident to the news media also claimed that the U.S. military had engaged and killed several enemy combatants – and that is how The New York Times reported it on March 17, 1968. It wasn’t until Nov. 1969 that a freelance reporter in the U.S. – not in Vietnam but in the U.S. – uncovered and reported the truth about the massacre in My Lai based on his investigative reporting of the military’s secret investigation into the incident.

And so we have it. Secret reports, secret files, secret videos, secret verdicts. And who is all this kept secret from? Not the Vietnamese – they certainly knew what had happened in My Lai, just as Iraqis knew what happened in various incidents in Iraq. The secret, as always, was and is kept from the home audiences. The enemy already knows, it is the domestic blowback that such classified reports are meant to avoid.

Let’s now move on to the main issue here, beyond the need for such secrecy, which is the Rules of Engagement that permit and approve of incidents such as the one disclosed by Wikileaks. We know that journalists with cameras have been targeted and killed in various wars. In 1982, the Israelis claimed they thought a camera crew reporting on their invasion of Lebanon was an anti-tank missile unit. That was the 1980s, the cameras were bigger, the surveillance technology was spotty, and the Arab journalists were disposable. Jump to 2007, and the story remains the same – I should also remind readers here that the U.S. military made similar mistakes earlier, when it destroyed Al Jazeera’s offices in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, and also when U.S. forces fired on a hotel full of journalists on the day that armor rolled in to Baghdad.

So, evidently, new technology and better defensive armor have not provided for any lowering of the threat profile of a ratty faced videographer.

There is also, then, the matter of the shooting of the civilian vehicle in the Wikileaks video, wherein the fault of the unarmed driver, with two children (both girls) in the front seat of the van, was that he decided to stop and help carry an unarmed wounded man. I believe the military personnel in the Apache video communique dismisses the report of the wounded children by insinuating that the driver was at fault for bringing children into a war zone. But, really, he didn’t. It is the Apache and the insurgency that brought the war zone to him.

It might be the presumption in the mind of the military personnel that a civilian should keep driving even when they see their fellow countrymen lying wounded and dying on the road, and not stop to help them, but these are certainly not Rules of War or Rules of Engagement that have been explained to Iraqis, let alone to Americans. And yes, they do violate international conventions regarding the treatment of civilians in general, and the treatment of the wounded, even combatants but especially unarmed wounded, in specific. Of course, as long as no one is willing to bear the political risk of pursuing charges against the U.S.-led coalition, the international conventions are worthless – the law is an ass unless someone is willing to enforce it.

There has been no news of any changes in the Rules of Engagement since 2007, and while the Iraq theater of combat is drawing down for U.S. forces, the political-insurgency problems created by civilian casualties in Afghanistan are intensifying.

There is a lesson that few military, and fewer political, leaders care to learn from wars: Killing civilians is not good for business, especially in such times and places where small arms are abundant, weapons technology is freely available and simple to learn, and the level of motivation for punitive reprisals is high, due to the tribal nature of such societies. Of course, the same would also be true of the Americans fighting the British in, say, 1774 – the important distinction is that both parties in that insurgency spoke the same language and shared similar cultural traits. The U.S. and the Afghans, not so much.

For those who would dismiss the entire Wikileaks incident as an aberration, rather than what it really is – business as usual – I point to the conversation between Glenn Greenwald and Spc. Josh Stieber at Salon.com; Spc. Stieber served in Iraq in 2007. The transcript of Greenwald’s interview with Spc. Stieber is available here.

Of course, there are some who would argue that such criticism of the ROE is based in some type of hatred for the military – on the contrary, the ROE need to be evaluated specifically because civilian casualties and abuse are the most effective recruiting tools for the insurgency and the global terrorist networks. Pretending that these problems don’t exist in America is not going to stop the enemy from exploiting these problems to strengthen their ranks.

“And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves around him, and he became a captain over them.” (1 Samuel 22:2).

There is no need to fear, but fear needs you.

Twisted, but true, as all fear mongers do.

Nick Burns talks to Charlie Rose, who hosted panelists from the Columbia study on Iran's nuclear program options

I saw this panel discussion on Charlie Rose (1/22/10 edition), and felt this was one of the rare events where American scholars actually thought Iran’s policy moves through with an Iranian perspective.

Most of the Iran coverage on the MSM (mainstream  media, for those who haven’t picked up on the conservative talking points yet) takes the perspective that Iran is deviant, and therefore most commentators are denouncing Iran in the news. This show featured experts representing the policies of various countries involved in the conflict (U.S., Israel, Iran reps were on the panel) who mapped out the possible outcomes of current foreign policies with respect to Iran’s nuclear program.

Definitely worth 29 minutes of your time:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10829

Former CIA intelligence officer Sabrina deSousa says the US "abandoned and betrayed" her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003. (ABC News)

The Italian government has stepped in to reassure the U.S. government that it will not seek the extradition of 23 U.S. agents who were convicted by an Italian judge last week for criminal conduct over the rendition of a Muslim cleric from Milan. Here is an excerpt from today’s Press TV report:

(Quote)

Last week, a court in Milan convicted 22 former CIA agents and a retired US Air Force colonel for the abduction of Milan imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, in 2003.

Nasr, who was kidnapped over alleged suspicions of recruiting fighters, was taken to a US military installation in northeastern Italy, then flown to a US base in Germany, and then on to Cairo, where he says he was tortured and threatened with rape.

Despite a successful government suit invoking secrecy that ruled out much of the evidence and resulted in three CIA operatives obtaining immunity, Italy’s judiciary went ahead with the case.

Two top former Italian security agents were also cleared of all charges due to secrecy norms while two less senior operatives were convicted.

The 23 former US agents are not likely to serve time behind the bars, but will not be able to return to Europe, where their arrest warrants remain active.

The two-year Milan trial was the first case in which the controversial US practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ was challenged in court.

(End quote)

According to Reuters, the Italian judge Oscar Magi convicted the 23 Americans in absentia for involvement in Nasr’s rendition to Egypt but “dropped the case against three Americans, including a former CIA Rome station chief, because of diplomatic immunity.”

Meanwhile, The Belfast Telegraph has reported that one of the 23 Americans convicted of rendition has admitted to breaking the law on ABC News:

(Quote)

One of the Americans convicted in absentia by an Italian court for her part in the 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric by CIA operatives has acknowledged they “broke the law” and complained she was given insufficient protection by her superiors in Washington.

Sabrina deSousa, employed in the US consulate offices in Milan at the time of the abduction, made clear in an interview with ABC News that she was disgruntled that she and the other 22 Americans who were convicted by a Milan court on Wednesday had been left to fend for themselves by their country.

Ms deSousa, who has not explicitly said she was working for the CIA, was sentenced to five years by the judge in the case. Indeed on the day that the cleric, known as Abu Omar, was taken from the street and whisked first to Germany and thereafter to Egypt, she was out of the city on a skiing break.

The longest sentence, of eight years, was given to the former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady. There seems little likelihood that the convicted Americans will serve their terms, not least because Italy has declined to seek their extradition from the US, partly in the interest of US-Italian relations. It is probably true, however, that the 22 will always run the risk of arrest if they leave the US territory.

Saying she felt “abandoned and betrayed” as the trial unfolded over three years, Ms deSousa said “everything I did was approved by Washington… and we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorised this.”

That so many former and current CIA operatives should have been dragged through a foreign court has begun to rankle Capitol Hill. “I think these people have been hung out to dry,” complained Republican congressman Pete Hoekstra of the House Intelligence Committee. “They’re taking the fall for a decision that was made by their superiors.” The CIA will not comment on the case, which is seen as a rebuke to the administration of George W Bush.

In an interview earlier this year with an Italian newspaper, Mr Lady was candid about the seizure of the cleric. “Of course it was an illegal operation,” the newspaper quoted him. “But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism”.

(End Quote)

The UPI has reported an uptick in the activity of jihadist groups, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, in Lebanon and Gaza.

While the UPI report provides adequate details – names of radical Sunni groups, claims of terror activities – I am intrigued by the sources for the funding and logistical support for such groups.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the Bush administration did reportedly support Saudi Arabian efforts in the mid-2000s to use radical Sunni elements as a tool to put pressure on Shiite groups backed by Iran in Lebanon and Iraq. The latest UPI reporting leads me to believe that these tactics have also included hostile measures to oppose or destabilize the perceived Iran-supported Hamas rule in Gaza.

Of course, if the Bush administration did coordinate with the Saudis in order to fund and provide logistical support for said radical Sunni groups, then someone, somewhere in the U.S. intel services knows a lot about these activities. Are they waiting for blowback before they finally shut this misadventure down?