http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9009Iraqi Civilians Routinely Terrorized In Midnight Searches
by Sherwood Ross | Jul 28 2007
If polls show Iraqis overwhelmingly want the U.S. out, it may be because the civilian population is being terrorized in their homes, subjected to dragnet arrests, wrongfully imprisoned, run down on the highways, shot at the checkpoints, and demeaned as hajis.
That's the distressing picture painted by 50 returned veterans who, speaking on the record to reporters Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian of The Nation magazine(July 30), describe an American army of occupation that is frustrated, fearful, confused, calloused, arrogant, and quick on the trigger.
Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who served with the First Armored Division, and took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes in Baghdad, said his group of 10 would strike when the family was asleep, kick the door in, rush up the stairs, pull the man of the house out of bed in front of his wife, put him up against the wall, and then group the terrified family together. "Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us," Bruhns said.
Asked at gunpoint through an interpreter, "'Do you have any weapons or anti-American propaganda?'" the man "will normally say no, because that's normally the truth. So what you'll do is...if he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave the house looking like a hurricane just hit it.... And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred houses."
Sgt. Justin Flatt, 33, of Denver, Colo., who served with the First Infantry Division, and raided "thousands" of homes in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, added, "We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every house." Since Iraqis were paid for "tips" about insurgents, they frequently gave false leads. Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the First Infantry Division, said he searched more than 100 homes and "found the raids fruitless and maddening," according to the magazine. And Sgt. Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, of the First Infantry Division, said of the thousand or so raids he conducted in Iraq he came into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents."
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The magazine said U.S. troops lacked the training to communicate with or even understand Iraqi civilians and few soldiers spoke or read Arabic. Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, said, "a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want." Iraqi culture, identity and customs, according to the veterans who served in Iraq, were ridiculed in racist terms, with troops deriding "haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes." Haji denotes someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca but is "now used by American troops in the same way 'gook' was used in Vietnam or 'raghead' in Afghanistan," the magazine said.
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