Unseen Photographs of U.S. War Crimes Emerge

Thanks to The New Yorker, photographs of the 2005 U.S. massacre at Haditha, Iraq have come to light. So many more remain hidden

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE AT THE LINK AND THEY'RE YOURS! COMIC STORES NEED TO ORDER THE FIRST ISSUE BY SEPTEMBER 9, SO GET YOUR ORDERS IN TODAY!

This edition of FOREVER WARS is dedicated to our beloved Mary Walker Baron, whose departure leaves us bereft and whose memory is a blessing. 

"THE ONLY THING THAT IS UNBEARABLE," said Arthur Rimbaud, "is that nothing is unbearable." I first encountered that quote as a teenager, thanks to a hardcore band. I sometimes go back to it when I'm reminded of how easy it is to normalize atrocity. (The key to normalization is persistence.) 

A team from The New Yorker spent four years litigating the release of photographs depicting the 2005 massacre committed by a detachment of U.S. Marines in Haditha during the 2003-11 U.S. occupation of Iraq. Haditha is not exactly a mystery whose details are emerging only now. It was one of the highest-profile U.S. atrocities in Iraq, leaving 24 Iraqi civilians slain, mostly women and children. Tom Ricks begins his book about the Iraq Surge, The Gamble, with Haditha, to illustrate the horror that the U.S. occupation descended into. But we never saw the vast majority of photographs from Haditha. As The New Yorker team recounts, U.S. commanders considered the lesson of Abu Ghraib, the torture prison from which imagery of U.S. depravity emerged, to be no more pictures of Abu Ghraibs, not no more Abu Ghraibs. 

Because there was no imagery of the massacre, what happened in Haditha could be contested—and in the contest, the reality of the massacre could be overwhelmed by a jingoistic proxy battle over the sanctity of the reputation of the Corps. Rep. Jack Murtha, a Marine veteran of Vietnam turned a belatedly antiwar congressman, publicly decried the "cold-blooded murder and war crimes" committed by the Marines at Haditha, and accused the Pentagon of a cover-up. Murtha, it is important to remember, had turned against the war, but he didn't go so far as to call Haditha emblematic of the war. 

Still, Murtha became an example of being Un-Trooped, as I call it in REIGN OF TERROR. Once he used plain language to decry what U.S. forces had committed, his detractors attempted to excommunicate him from the military community. That was a more expedient option than recognizing what the U.S. occupation had produced, and what their complicity had enabled. One of the perpetrators of the massacre sued Murtha for slander in a bogus lawsuit to silence him. Jim Mattis, The New Yorker reminds us, weighed in on behalf of that perpetrator. Anger at Murtha within the Corps lingered for years after his death. Marines often say there's no such thing as an "ex-Marine"—they prefer to style themselves retired—except, some add, for Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Murtha. One of those people assassinated a president and the other accurately described U.S. war crimes.

Nearly 20 years later, the photographs of Haditha published by The New Yorker, working with Iraqi survivors, vindicate Murtha. There was no real doubt that they would. The point of attacking Murtha was not to defend the Marines so much as to seize narrative territory so the occupation that produced Haditha and other horrors could retain maximal freedom of action. The honor of the Marines was merely a jingoistic cudgel to discourage others from turning against an occupation whose failure even its most ardent defenders now concede. With the stakes of Iraq no longer as high in the U.S., it is easier to see that nothing, it turns out, was unbearable. The squad leader at Haditha who sued Murtha served no prison time. 

Haditha is not unique, no matter how figuratively you want to interpret "Haditha." There are many such photographs depicting U.S. atrocities, and they remain hidden under official cover. For the persistence of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the typical reason offered in court for keeping them hidden was to protect the lives of U.S. troops against the anger of those who lived under their occupation. The end of those occupations has not produced any disclosure and accordingly reveals the hollowness of that defense. I write in the afterword to REIGN OF TERROR: 

The facade of the War on Terror has been cracked, but we won't learn what the war truly was for decades. … Consider that at least eighteen hundred photographs of military torture have been barred from public release after a yearslong legal battle. Not even Dan Jones' torture report could tell the story of CIA renditions, operations that we know applied to more people than the CIA directly jailed and tortured. Some aspects of the War on Terror are likely lost to history altogether. 

But in the face of such atrocity and so many lies of convenience, you and I know there are things that remain unbearable. They must remain unbearable. They will only remain unbearable if we ensure they remain unbearable, even as so many, whether through enthusiasm or resignation, prefer to bear them.

HA'ARETZ, AUGUST 28: "According to open-source aviation data, starting from the end of July, there has been a spike in arms shipments from the United States. August appears to be the second-busiest month at the Nevatim Airbase since the beginning of the war, with dozens of flights by U.S. military transport planes, as well as both civilian and military Israeli cargo planes, mainly from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware." Just one for the working-tirelessly-for-a-ceasefire files. 

This piece ran on the day the Israeli military launched its largest offensive in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the Israelis should treat the West Bank like Gaza—sit with that, as well—and endorsed the "temporary evacuation of residents," which I don't think he intends to be temporary. 

Meanwhile, after Hamas apparently shot to death six hostages, including the dual American-Israeli citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the Biden administration has adopted rhetoric that suggests it's preparing for the collapse of ceasefire talks that it will blame on Hamas despite Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence. Kamala Harris said that Hamas' threat to Israel "must be eliminated" and it "cannot control Gaza" which is a return to Israel's original post-October 7 position. It crucially puts her to the right of President Biden's May 31 position justifying a ceasefire that Hamas can't pull off another October 7 and that's as much as Israel can achieve militarily. I note as well this line was a mainstay of Harris' rhetoric before May 31. 

Not to be outdone, Biden said, "make no mistake, Hamas will pay for their crimes," which is typically what presidents say when they intend direct or indirect reprisal. 

On Sunday night, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin talked to his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant and issued the following statement about IDF operations in the West Bank that sounded to me like a green light: 

Secretary Austin also conveyed his condolences for three Israeli police officers killed in an apparent terrorist attack in the West Bank this morning and expressed his concern over rising tensions and increased terrorist activity there this week.

Shortly before massive labor-led protests for a ceasefire/hostage deal began to convulse Israel, Haaretz's Amor Tibon wrote that Netanyahu had turned the administration's "bridging" proposal—a bridge between Israel and the U.S., remember, not between Israel and Hamas—into "a joke." Biden, he wrote, needs to tell the truth about that if the ceasefire talks prove fruitless in what the Washington Post reports is a last-ditch attempt. 

MOHAMMED EL-KURD wrote something on Instagram that I think is worth sitting with: "'Ceasefire' has become what the '2-state solution' and 'peace process' have always been: empty lullabies to serenade the world while the Israeli regime, its allies, and mercenaries continue to kill more of our people and steal more of our land." 

EMILY RUSSELL, WRITING IN SCALAWAG, traces the continuities between Guantanamo Bay and your local county jail, and earns it by visiting both, or attempting to. (I gather by the lack of Gitmo scenes that the arbitrariness of the Guantanamo bureaucracy foiled an effort that went as far as Andrews Air Force Base, which is the only embarkation point for civilians accessing Guantanamo.) This one struck me because Russell is too young to remember 9/11 or life before it. But she sure recalls the lingering aftermath, from the surveillance expansions to the consent-manufacturing and violence-licensing paranoia, to the wars that "help to explain America's continued apathy in stopping the ongoing Palestinian genocide." I definitely thought of that line when considering the Haditha photographs. 

Speaking of Guantanamo, Carol reports another continuity with county jails. Several detainees had to be moved from Camp 5 after "several weeks of failing infrastructure at Camp 5, including water gushing through the prison’s walls."

MICHAEL BRENES READS Kamala Harris' national-security adviser Phil Gordon's book so we don't have to, although I, specifically, probably should. His conclusion is that Gordon is "an insider with empathy for the outsider." That makes Gordon someone who sees all the wreckage caused by the U.S.' addiction to geopolitical primacy but blames the people atop the institutions of U.S. foreign policy, rather than the institutions and the incentive structures driving them. And that in turn sounds a lot like Harris herself, who signals an empathy for Palestinians that doesn't extend to stopping Israel from slaughtering them with American weaponry. We're seeing a pattern here.

"Above all, [Gordon's] writings and policy record reveal a faith in liberal internationalism and the promise of American power—a faith chastened by bad outcomes but unwilling to deny the potential for better results," writes Brenes, who is moved to observe that 

The United States has proven to be reliably bad at making hegemony more benevolent or effective. The problem is not the people who oversee U.S. foreign policy but the structures of American power themselves—its global archipelago of military bases, the budgets and largesse of the national security state, the relentless militarization of America’s foreign policy. The idea that primacy can be improved—without recourse to international law or multilateral institutions—is historically blind.

I love how every presidential election now is a contest between a candidate of a failed, doomed status quo and a candidate who seeks to make that status quo more racist, extractive and violent. Gonna just tap the sign again. 

A few days after Brenes' piece, Alexander Ward profiled Gordon in the Wall Street Journal and didn't present anything to complicate the picture Brenes painted. This line toward the end caught my eye: "He is known for avoiding direct interventions in meetings, preferring to keep his views private until they need to be shared." That makes me think: bureaucrat who needs to know everyone else's position before he figures out his own.  

DRONE MAKER AEROVIRONMENT got a nearly $1 billion Army contract to provide a drone/loitering munition small enough to deploy with an infantry detachment that provides firepower "capable of destroying tanks, light armored vehicles, hardened targets, defilade and personnel targets." This is vastly more firepower than such sized drones currently provide. 

HAYA AYLAN writes in the New York Times:

Using the threat of a more violent future under Mr. Trump to get people to fall in line with politicians who are already funding violence isn’t emblematic of — if I may — good vibes or brat energy or femme power. It carries the logic of abuse: What’s on the other side is worse, so you might as well sit down and be quiet. It is maddening how people advocating the freedom of Palestinians are spoken about — as though their invocation of the genocide is the real problem, the downer, the Trump-enabler. It implies that mentioning this administration’s material support to massacre Palestinian civilians is what “ruins the vibes,” not the act of sending billions of dollars in unconditional military aid to Israel. It is an obnoxious magic trick that makes naming the crime the crime.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY is launching a podcast that I'm sure won't be a collection of self-serving lies in the guise of patriotic scientific advancement. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.