James Mattis Is a War Criminal: I Experienced His Attack on Fallujah
Firsthand
Tuesday, 06 December 2016 00:00 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis
Marine Gen. James Mattis testifies during his confirmation hearing before
the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on July
27, 2010. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski / The New York Times)
Retired marine General James Mattis, who retired from being the head of
CENTCOM in 2013, has become known recently for his stance against what he
calls "political Islam."
"Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?" Mattis said
at the far right-wing Heritage Foundation in 2015. "I suggest the answer is
no, but we need to have the discussion. If we won't even ask the question,
how do we even recognize which is our side in a fight?"
Another controversial aspect of his selection that much of the media is
focusing on is the fact that in order to get the job, Mattis would need
Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law stating that it has
to have been seven years since defense secretaries have been on active duty.
Congress has only bypassed that law once in US history, and that occurred
over 50 years ago.
More importantly, Mattis, known to some by the nickname of "Mad Dog," has
shown a callous disregard for human life, particularly civilians, as
evidenced by his behavior leading marines in Iraq, comments he made about
enjoying fighting in Afghanistan because "it's fun to shoot some people. You
know, it's a hell of a hoot," and myriad other problems.
Mattis' Role in the Haditha Massacre
While Mattis has ample military experience -- serving as NATO's supreme
allied commander and with more than 40 years in the Marine Corps, his
nickname seems apt.
He also said, when speaking to a group of soldiers about how to behave in
Iraq during a 2003 speech, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to
kill everybody you meet."
But more importantly, he is clearly responsible for carrying out and/or
aiding and abetting in several war crimes.
In November 2005 US marines in Iraq committed a massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi
civilians. The slaughtering of unarmed men, women, children and elderly
people, shot multiple times at close range, was retribution for a roadside
bomb attack on a convoy of marines. The war crimes were extremely well
documented and the atrocity garnered international attention.
When it came time to bring the marines responsible for the massacre to
justice, Mattis was the convening authority over the eight charged with
crimes at Haditha.
Mattis went on to dismiss all of the charges leveled against the marines who
had been accused of killing the civilians and of the eight originally
charged, only one still faces possible prosecution, but one can guess how
that will end up.
Mattis' Role in Fallujah
Mattis was the head of Camp Pendleton's 1st Marine Division in Iraq and
played a lead role during both of the US sieges of Fallujah in 2004.
During the April 2004 siege, more than 700 civilians were killed by the US
military, according to Iraqi doctors in the city whom I interviewed in the
aftermath of that attack.
While reporting from inside Fallujah during that siege, I personally
witnessed women, children, elderly people and ambulances being targeted by
US snipers under Mattis' command. Needless to say, all of these are war
crimes.
During the November siege of Fallujah later that same year, which I also
covered first-hand, more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. Most were
buried in mass graves in the aftermath of the siege.
Mosques were deliberately targeted by the US military, hospitals bombed,
medical workers detained, ambulances shot at, cease-fires violated, media
repressed, and the use of depleted uranium was widespread. All of these are,
again, war crimes.
At that time I broke the story of the US military's use of white
phosphorous, an incendiary weapon similar to napalm in its ability to burn
all the way down to the bone. The use of white phosphorus was a violation of
international law, given that it was unleashed in the city during a time
when the Pentagon itself admitted to at least 50,000 civilians still being
present.
More than 200,000 civilians were displaced from their homes during the
November siege, and over 75 percent of the city was destroyed.
The horrific legacy of depleted uranium contamination continues, with
stillbirths and birth defects still occurring at astronomical rates,
creating a situation so extreme that some Iraqi doctors are calling it a
genocide.
Life Under Attack by Mattis-Led Forces
In this moment, as we countenance Mattis' planned ascension as secretary of
defense, I'd like to share an excerpt from my book Beyond the Green Zone.
Taken from a chapter about the April 2004 US siege of Fallujah, this report
offers a clear view of the war crimes over which Mattis presided, including
the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, widespread collective
punishment and more:
***
We rolled toward the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical
supplies. The small clinic was managed by Maki al-Nazzal, who was hired just
four days ago. He was not a doctor. The other makeshift clinic in Fallujah
was in a mechanic's garage. He had barely slept in the past week, nor had
any of the doctors at the small clinic.
Originally, the clinic had just three doctors, but since the US military
bombed one of the hospitals and were currently sniping at people as they
attempted to enter or exit the main hospital, effectively, there were only
these two small clinics treating the entire city.
The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open
immediately by the desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest
and face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little
boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his
father's arms. Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and
children who had been shot by the US soldiers and were now being raced into
the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping
family members carrying in their wounded. One 18-year-old girl had been shot
through the neck. She was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors
frantically worked on her amid her muffled moaning. Flies dodged the working
hands of doctors to return to the patches of her vomit that stained her
black abaya.
Her younger brother, a small child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head
from a marine sniper, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually
vomited as the doctors raced to save his life while family members cried
behind me. "The Americans cut our electricity days ago, so we cannot vacuum
the vomit from his throat," a furious doctor tells me. They were both loaded
into an ambulance and rushed toward Baghdad, only to die en route.
Another small child lay on a blood-spattered bed, also shot by a sniper. The
boy's grandmother lay nearby, shot as she was attempting to carry children
from their home and flee the city. She lay on a bed dying, still clutching a
bloodied white surrender flag. Hundreds of families were trapped in their
homes, terrorized by US snipers shooting from rooftops and the minarets of
mosques whenever they saw someone move past a window.
Blood bags were being kept in a food refrigerator, warmed under running
water before being given to patients. There were no anesthetics. The lights
went out as the generator ran dry of fuel, so the doctors, who had been
working for days on end, worked by light provided by men holding up
cigarette lighters or flashlights as the sun set. Needless to say, there was
no air-conditioning inside the steamy "clinic."
One victim of the US military aggression after another was brought into the
clinic, nearly all of them women and children, carried by weeping family
members. Those who had not been hit by bombs from warplanes had been shot by
US snipers. The one functioning ambulance left at this clinic sat outside
with bullet holes in the sides and a small group of shots right on the
driver's side of the windshield. The driver, his head bandaged from being
grazed by the bullet of a sniper, refused to go collect any more of the dead
and wounded.
Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki told us, "They [US
soldiers] shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his
car, inspected his car, and knew that he was carrying nothing. Then they
shot him. And then they shot the ambulance. And now I have no ambulance to
evacuate more than 20 wounded people. I don't know who is doing this and why
he is doing this. This is terrible. This has never happened before. And I
don't know who to call because it seems that nobody is listening."
The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat
with me as we shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic.
"For all my life, I believed in American democracy," he told me with an
exhausted voice. "For 47 years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and
the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and
freedom. Now I see that it took me 47 years to wake up to the horrible
truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy or freedom.
"Now I see it has all been lies. The Americans don't give a damn about
democracy or human rights. They are worse than even Saddam." I asked him if
he minded if I quoted him with his name. "What are they going to do to me
that they haven't already done here," he said.
Another car skipped over the curb outside and a man who was burned from head
to toe was carried in on a stretcher. He surely died shortly, as there was
no way this clinic could treat massive burns. Maki, frustrated and in shock,
said, "They say there is a cease-fire. They said 12 o'clock, so people went
out to do some shopping. Everybody who went out was shot and this place was
full, and half of them were dead."
More than 20 dead bodies had been brought to this clinic during the last 24
hours of the "cease-fire." Shortly after this, another car skidded to a
stop, and a man hit with cluster bombs was unloaded. "The Americans have
been using cluster bombs often here," Maki tells me somberly. "And of course
they love their DU [depleted uranium]."
***
It is clear that Trump's secretary of defense selection of Mattis, an
unprosecuted war criminal, is yet another egregious act against justice and
the rule of international law.
Mattis was a high-level marine commander overseeing both sieges of Fallujah
who then played an active role in making sure eight marines involved in a
massacre walked away from any appropriate punishment.
These are just a few of his highlights from Iraq.
Imagine what he could do to the rest of the world.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
DAHR JAMAIL
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist:
Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books,
2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist
in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more
than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last
10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative
Journalism, among other awards.
His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who
Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on
Amazon.
Dahr Jamail is the author of the book, The End of Ice, forthcoming from The
New Press. He lives and works in Washington State.
RELATED STORIES
Fallujah Babies: Birth Defects Blamed on US Weapons
By Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera English | News Report
Iraq's Depleted Uranium Threat
By John LaForge, Consortium News | Report
Civilians in Iraq Face Violence From All Sides, UN Says
By Aisha Maniar, Truthout | News Analysis
________________________________________
Show Comments
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James Mattis Is a War Criminal: I Experienced His Attack on Fallujah
Firsthand
Tuesday, 06 December 2016 00:00 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
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reference not valid.
. Marine Gen. James Mattis testifies during his confirmation hearing
before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on
July 27, 2010. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski / The New York Times)
. Retired marine General James Mattis, who retired from being the head
of CENTCOM in 2013, has become known recently for his stance against what he
calls "political Islam."
"Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?" Mattis said
at the far right-wing Heritage Foundation in 2015. "I suggest the answer is
no, but we need to have the discussion. If we won't even ask the question,
how do we even recognize which is our side in a fight?"
Another controversial aspect of his selection that much of the media is
focusing on is the fact that in order to get the job, Mattis would need
Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law stating that it has
to have been seven years since defense secretaries have been on active duty.
Congress has only bypassed that law once in US history, and that occurred
over 50 years ago.
More importantly, Mattis, known to some by the nickname of "Mad Dog," has
shown a callous disregard for human life, particularly civilians, as
evidenced by his behavior leading marines in Iraq, comments he made about
enjoying fighting in Afghanistan because "it's fun to shoot some people. You
know, it's a hell of a hoot," and myriad other problems.
Mattis' Role in the Haditha Massacre
While Mattis has ample military experience -- serving as NATO's supreme
allied commander and with more than 40 years in the Marine Corps, his
nickname seems apt.
He also said, when speaking to a group of soldiers about how to behave in
Iraq during a 2003 speech, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to
kill everybody you meet."
But more importantly, he is clearly responsible for carrying out and/or
aiding and abetting in several war crimes.
In November 2005 US marines in Iraq committed a massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi
civilians. The slaughtering of unarmed men, women, children and elderly
people, shot multiple times at close range, was retribution for a roadside
bomb attack on a convoy of marines. The war crimes were extremely well
documented and the atrocity garnered international attention.
When it came time to bring the marines responsible for the massacre to
justice, Mattis was the convening authority over the eight charged with
crimes at Haditha.
Mattis went on to dismiss all of the charges leveled against the marines who
had been accused of killing the civilians and of the eight originally
charged, only one still faces possible prosecution, but one can guess how
that will end up.
Mattis' Role in Fallujah
Mattis was the head of Camp Pendleton's 1st Marine Division in Iraq and
played a lead role during both of the US sieges of Fallujah in 2004.
During the April 2004 siege, more than 700 civilians were killed by the US
military, according to Iraqi doctors in the city whom I interviewed in the
aftermath of that attack.
While reporting from inside Fallujah during that siege, I personally
witnessed women, children, elderly people and ambulances being targeted by
US snipers under Mattis' command. Needless to say, all of these are war
crimes.
During the November siege of Fallujah later that same year, which I also
covered first-hand, more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. Most were
buried in mass graves in the aftermath of the siege.
Mosques were deliberately targeted by the US military, hospitals bombed,
medical workers detained, ambulances shot at, cease-fires violated, media
repressed, and the use of depleted uranium was widespread. All of these are,
again, war crimes.
At that time I broke the story of the US military's use of white
phosphorous, an incendiary weapon similar to napalm in its ability to burn
all the way down to the bone. The use of white phosphorus was a violation of
international law, given that it was unleashed in the city during a time
when the Pentagon itself admitted to at least 50,000 civilians still being
present.
More than 200,000 civilians were displaced from their homes during the
November siege, and over 75 percent of the city was destroyed.
The horrific legacy of depleted uranium contamination continues, with
stillbirths and birth defects still occurring at astronomical rates,
creating a situation so extreme that some Iraqi doctors are calling it a
genocide.
Life Under Attack by Mattis-Led Forces
In this moment, as we countenance Mattis' planned ascension as secretary of
defense, I'd like to share an excerpt from my book Beyond the Green Zone.
Taken from a chapter about the April 2004 US siege of Fallujah, this report
offers a clear view of the war crimes over which Mattis presided, including
the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, widespread collective
punishment and more:
***
We rolled toward the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical
supplies. The small clinic was managed by Maki al-Nazzal, who was hired just
four days ago. He was not a doctor. The other makeshift clinic in Fallujah
was in a mechanic's garage. He had barely slept in the past week, nor had
any of the doctors at the small clinic.
Originally, the clinic had just three doctors, but since the US military
bombed one of the hospitals and were currently sniping at people as they
attempted to enter or exit the main hospital, effectively, there were only
these two small clinics treating the entire city.
The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open
immediately by the desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest
and face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little
boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his
father's arms. Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and
children who had been shot by the US soldiers and were now being raced into
the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping
family members carrying in their wounded. One 18-year-old girl had been shot
through the neck. She was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors
frantically worked on her amid her muffled moaning. Flies dodged the working
hands of doctors to return to the patches of her vomit that stained her
black abaya.
Her younger brother, a small child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head
from a marine sniper, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually
vomited as the doctors raced to save his life while family members cried
behind me. "The Americans cut our electricity days ago, so we cannot vacuum
the vomit from his throat," a furious doctor tells me. They were both loaded
into an ambulance and rushed toward Baghdad, only to die en route.
Another small child lay on a blood-spattered bed, also shot by a sniper. The
boy's grandmother lay nearby, shot as she was attempting to carry children
from their home and flee the city. She lay on a bed dying, still clutching a
bloodied white surrender flag. Hundreds of families were trapped in their
homes, terrorized by US snipers shooting from rooftops and the minarets of
mosques whenever they saw someone move past a window.
Blood bags were being kept in a food refrigerator, warmed under running
water before being given to patients. There were no anesthetics. The lights
went out as the generator ran dry of fuel, so the doctors, who had been
working for days on end, worked by light provided by men holding up
cigarette lighters or flashlights as the sun set. Needless to say, there was
no air-conditioning inside the steamy "clinic."
One victim of the US military aggression after another was brought into the
clinic, nearly all of them women and children, carried by weeping family
members. Those who had not been hit by bombs from warplanes had been shot by
US snipers. The one functioning ambulance left at this clinic sat outside
with bullet holes in the sides and a small group of shots right on the
driver's side of the windshield. The driver, his head bandaged from being
grazed by the bullet of a sniper, refused to go collect any more of the dead
and wounded.
Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki told us, "They [US
soldiers] shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his
car, inspected his car, and knew that he was carrying nothing. Then they
shot him. And then they shot the ambulance. And now I have no ambulance to
evacuate more than 20 wounded people. I don't know who is doing this and why
he is doing this. This is terrible. This has never happened before. And I
don't know who to call because it seems that nobody is listening."
The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat
with me as we shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic.
"For all my life, I believed in American democracy," he told me with an
exhausted voice. "For 47 years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and
the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and
freedom. Now I see that it took me 47 years to wake up to the horrible
truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy or freedom.
"Now I see it has all been lies. The Americans don't give a damn about
democracy or human rights. They are worse than even Saddam." I asked him if
he minded if I quoted him with his name. "What are they going to do to me
that they haven't already done here," he said.
Another car skipped over the curb outside and a man who was burned from head
to toe was carried in on a stretcher. He surely died shortly, as there was
no way this clinic could treat massive burns. Maki, frustrated and in shock,
said, "They say there is a cease-fire. They said 12 o'clock, so people went
out to do some shopping. Everybody who went out was shot and this place was
full, and half of them were dead."
More than 20 dead bodies had been brought to this clinic during the last 24
hours of the "cease-fire." Shortly after this, another car skidded to a
stop, and a man hit with cluster bombs was unloaded. "The Americans have
been using cluster bombs often here," Maki tells me somberly. "And of course
they love their DU [depleted uranium]."
***
It is clear that Trump's secretary of defense selection of Mattis, an
unprosecuted war criminal, is yet another egregious act against justice and
the rule of international law.
Mattis was a high-level marine commander overseeing both sieges of Fallujah
who then played an active role in making sure eight marines involved in a
massacre walked away from any appropriate punishment.
These are just a few of his highlights from Iraq.
Imagine what he could do to the rest of the world.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist:
Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books,
2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist
in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more
than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last
10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative
Journalism, among other awards.
His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who
Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on
Amazon.
Dahr Jamail is the author of the book, The End of Ice, forthcoming from The
New Press. He lives and works in Washington State.
Related Stories
Fallujah Babies: Birth Defects Blamed on US Weapons
By Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera English | News ReportIraq's Depleted Uranium
Threat
By John LaForge, Consortium News | ReportCivilians in Iraq Face Violence
From All Sides, UN Says
By Aisha Maniar, Truthout | News Analysis
Show Comments
