Quotes of the Day
Rules of engagement. That's code for what U.S. soldiers are allowed to do on the battlefield, and it's never simple. So when troops prepped for the invasion of Fallujah, a city filled with rebels without uniforms, their commanders warned them they could shoot only armed men. But the brass also told them they could shoot first and ask questions later. Maddeningly, both orders made sense, depending, as the worn caveat goes, on the circumstances.
On Nov. 13, a freelance photojournalist working for NBC videotaped a Marine shooting first, apparently killing a wounded Iraqi lying on the floor of a Fallujah mosque. Three days later, the footage aired around the world — and the damage was done.
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At the Pentagon, military officials say the video lacks enough context to draw any firm conclusion about whether the Marine had legitimately defended himself or committed a war crime. But several officers interviewed by TIME concede that the images look bad and could indeed lead to a court-martial. In the battle for Fallujah, during which 51 Americans, 8 Iraqi allies and an estimated 1,200 insurgents have been killed, it was a propaganda coup for the other side. "I'm upset if this Marine murdered in cold blood," says Bernard Trainor, a retired Marine three-star general who faced combat in Korea and Vietnam. "But I also feel a great deal of sympathy for him." In the streets of Iraq, the verdict is already clear. "Shame on America," says Laila Hamid, a Fallujah-born Baghdad secretary. "All their lectures on democracy and human rights ... and then they show us what is really in their hearts."
Aside from the public-opinion debacle, questions still outnumber answers when it comes to the circumstances of the shooting. The bare facts are these: a unit of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment went to the mosque with cameraman Kevin Sites in tow. The mosque had been taken the day before by other Marines, but Sites' unit had heard that insurgents had reoccupied it. As the Marines approached, shots rang out, but they could not tell if the shots had come from the mosque. The widely aired footage shows the Marines entering the mosque, their strides confident but their voices clenched with anxiety. Inside, they see five wounded Iraqis lying on the floor. One voice says that these are the same men wounded the day before. Suddenly a Marine gestures toward one of the Iraqis and yells, "He's f____ing faking he's dead!" Another Marine responds, "Yeah, he's breathing." The injured Iraqi did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way, Sites reported later. "In fact there were no weapons visible in the room, except those carried by the Marines." But without pause, a Marine in the camera's eye raises his rifle and shoots the Iraqi in the upper body, splattering his blood against the wall. "He's dead now," a Marine says.
Afterward, off camera, Sites informed the Marine he had killed a wounded prisoner. The Marine replied, according to Sites: "I didn't know, sir. I didn't know." Sites reported that three other injured Iraqis may also have been shot in the mosque that day. The corpses of four Iraqis have been shipped to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for autopsies, and the Marine shooter in the video, who has not been identified, has been removed from the battlefield. Marines in Fallujah have launched an investigation into the shooting.
Sites, the civilian who knows the most about what happened that day, has said little since his initial reports aired on NBC. A network spokeswoman says he expects to be deposed. But three days before the shooting, Sites, 42, an experienced war correspondent, had posted a telling dispatch on his weblog. "The Marines are operating with liberal rules of engagement," he wrote. As the unit entered Fallujah, a staff sergeant announced that "everything to the West is weapons free." That meant, Sites explained, the Marines could "shoot whatever they see." Many of the Americans were grieving and exhausted, he wrote. "Almost to a man, the Marines I'm embedded with have all lost friends in this protracted war of attrition. They are eager 'to get some,' to pay [the enemy] back for the car bombs and improvised explosive devices that have killed or maimed so many of their brother 'Devil Dogs.'"
Some officials point to other potentially mitigating circumstances. The Marine who shot the Iraqi had been wounded the day before. There were stories circulating of fellow Marines being killed by booby-trapped Iraqi bodies. "These are insane conditions," says Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a partner in a Washington law firm that defends soldiers who get in trouble. "Everything you thought was off the chart in terms of enemy behavior is turning out to be possible. Who could think of anything so ghoulish as booby-trapped bodies?"
But booby-trapped bodies are hardly new. U.S. soldiers encountered them in Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War and Afghanistan. The strain of this war may be unimaginable to civilians Stateside, but it is nevertheless what the troops are trained to manage. And they know that under the Pentagon's Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva convention, a soldier who shoots an unarmed, wounded combatant can be found guilty of murder.
This case is not the only shooting in Iraq under U.S. investigation. Several soldiers have been charged in connection with the death of an injured teenager in Baghdad last August. An Army captain is accused of murder for finishing off the wounded driver of an aide to militant leader Muqtada al-Sadr. One of his men has called it a mercy killing.
In interviews with some 20 Iraqis last week in Baghdad, not one gave the Marine in the mosque the benefit of the doubt. "I can only imagine how many other Fallujans were killed like that," said Jassim Abu Hamid, a schoolteacher. The outrage will probably grow once residents return en masse to Fallujah, a deeply conservative place known as the City of Mosques. Dozens of mosques have been hit by heavy fire, and some were obliterated. Journalists embedded with U.S. forces said some soldiers had urinated and defecated in mosque rooms where worshippers ritually cleanse themselves.
In Arab countries last week, the furor over the NBC video drowned out news of the atrocious execution of Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE International in Iraq and the wife of an Iraqi. Al-Jazeera, the most-watched news network in the region, received a tape of Hassan's killing but declined to air it to protect the sensitivities of viewers and of hostages' families, according to spokesman Jihad Ballout. Al-Jazeera has shown parts of other executions before, censoring the gore. The network did air the unedited Marine shooting repeatedly. U.S. channels blacked out the actual killing.
Meanwhile, on U.S. blogs, while many have expressed a complicated compassion for the Marine and the insurgent, some have posted death threats against Sites, accusing him of betraying the Marines by sharing the footage. The accusation stands in vivid contrast to Sites' blog, which shows his clear affection for the troops. He had posted poignant portraits of Marines, and their relatives had thanked him in a message board linked to the site. "Mr. Sites, my son sent me your site so I could see what he is going through," wrote a mother the day before the footage aired. "Thank you for your courage and for being our eyes to what is happening." Last week, that message board was shut down.
- Amanda Ripley