SubscribeAn Iraqi police document accuses U.S. troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, after a raid Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.So much for democracy and the rule of law.
The villagers were killed after U.S. troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers, the parent company of The Inquirer. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals, and blew up the house, the document said.
The report did not specify how the villagers were killed, but a local police commander said autopsies indicated all had bullet wounds to the head.
The antagonism between liberators and liberated together with the boredom and cultural contempt that American soldiers felt for the Filipinos created an unstable mixture that soon exploded. On the evening of February 4, 1899, Private William Walter Grayson from Beatrice, Nebraska, was at a guard post in an eastern suburb of Manila when four shadowy figures appeared in the gloom. They did not react as Grayson and his fellow sentry expected them to do when they were challenged. Frightened, thinking his orders had been purposely defied, Grayson leveled his single-shot Springfield rifle and fired. His comrade followed suit, and soon three Filipinos lay dead. Then Grayson shouted the alarm: "Line up, fellows, the niggers are in here all through these lines." Rifle fire broke out along the ten-mile length of American pickets. Soldiers moved through Manila and beyond with barely a semblance of discipline in an action that more nearly resembled a race riot than a coordinated military operation. Within twenty-four hours, they killed 3,000 Filipinos while suffering losses of fifty-nine dead and close to 300 wounded. The American commander, Major General Elwell S. Otis, ordered one division to the south of the island of Luzon and another to the north in the hope of quelling what promised to become a general revolt against American rule. Arthur MacArthur led the latter group into Aguinaldo's capital at Malolos. The goal, according to an American official in Washington, was to fight "without cessation until the authority of the United States in the Philippines should be, as far as the natives were concerned, undisputed.The continuation is interesting, too:
The fighting proved tough work. Private Edwin Segerstrom of the First Colorado Volunteers complained that the enemy was "a treacherous lot" who would treat other Filipinos as the Spanish had "treated them." He guessed that "our war with them is for the best, no matter what papers far off in the states may say." Another Coloradan, Private Selman Watson, wanted his family to know that reported "skirmishes" were more than that. The insurgents were "getting to shoot straight and close and doing closer shooting every day." Watson had "had all the fighting I care for but I won't quit if a call comes as long as I feel like I do now" Segerstrom agreed; nonetheless, he wrote, despite "frequent drubbings" at the hand of the Americans, the insurgents "'bob up serenely' at different points and it seems to be quite a job to subdue them." Segerstrom had no real idea of what would happen or how long the fighting would continue; he could only hope that "it wont be long now until they give up and behave themselves."You could pick out similar examples from any period in history. It's always been this way.
But the Filipinos did not behave themselves, and the American troops soon discovered that no matter how many they killed, how many towns they destroyed, or how much territory they took, they could not suppress the insurgency...
In December [1900], MacArthur announced "a new and more stringent policy" against the rebels and their allies, who seemed able to move in and out of the civilian population at will. The general sanctioned tougher military patrols, purges of municipal governments, harsher treatment of prisoners and civilians, destruction of property, confinement of civilians, and starvation. Filipinos were forcibly "concentrated" in "protected zones," under U.S. military control; those who resisted relocation could be treated as rebels, just as recalcitrant Indians had been. By analogy to Indians who refused to stay on their reservations, Filipinos who tried to escape from their designated zones were presumed to be "hostiles" and shot on sight. MacArthur's troops used torture to extract information, break the will of resisters, and intimidate anyone who happened to fall into their custody. No reliable information exists on the incidence of torture because such practices were not officially sanctioned but left to the discretion of local commanders. The physical coercion of prisoners, however, seems to have been widespread. American soldiers wrote of Filipinos being "kicked and beaten" and hung by their thumbs. Prisoners who proved recalcitrant might be given the "water cure," in which "the victim [was] laid flat on his back and held down by his tormenters. Then a bamboo tube [was] thrust into his mouth and some dirty water, the filthier the better, . . . [was] poured down his unwilling throat."Nothing ever changes.
Public support for the war was further eroded by reports of brutality against Mexican civilians. Newspaper reporters claimed that the chapparal was "strewn with the skeletons of Mexicans sacrificed" by American troops. After one of their members was murdered, the Arkansas volunteer cavalry surrounded a group of Mexican peasants and began an "indiscriminate and bloody massacre of the poor creatures." A young lieutenant named George G. Meade reported that volunteers in Matamoros robbed the citizens, stole their cattle, and killed innocent civilians "for no other object than their own amusement." If only a tenth of the horror stories were true, General Winfield Scott wrote, it was enough "to make Heaven weep, & every American of Christian morals blush for his country."And so it goes.
In July 1915 thousands of Marines responded to an uprising in Haiti by occupying the country. Before they finally took their leave in 1934, the Marines had suppressed an armed insurgency, dissolved the Haitian Congress, dictated a new constitution, suppressed a second rebellion, and created a new national government that welcomed foreign investment. The cost in Haitian lives amounted to at least 3,000 (perhaps as many 11,500) killed for resisting the occupation.I'm not attacking the Marines; my favorite uncle was a Marine and was a genuine WWII hero. If you've got to subdue an enemy entrenched on a rocky island in time of war, the Marines will do the job for you. But sending the Marines to police a hostile civilian population is asking for trouble. I hope you have the intellectual honesty to admit that.
"worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."
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They are trained to kill people and break things.
posted by shnoz-gobblin at 11:18 PM on March 19, 2006