U.S. military widely criticized for covering and downplaying scandals
By Li
Zhiwei, People’s Daily
In recent
years, the U.S. military has been facing extensive criticism from the international
community for frequent maltreatment of prisoners.
The
number of cases of sexual harassment and sexual assaults keeps rising in the
U.S. troops. In countries including Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, armed
forces of the U.S. frequently use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to carry out
air strikes, causing massive civilian casualties.
What’s
more, the U.S. government has been trying to cover up and downplay the fact
that the U.S. military has killed innocent people and mistreated prisoners. It
has even obstructed investigations conducted by the United Nations (UN) into
these cases, arousing uproar around the world.
“Charlie Company shot a rocket into the
wrong house and killed a family of four. We gave cash to the relatives who
remained,” recalled Thomas Gibbons-Neff,
Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times, in an article titled “A Marine
Looks Back at His Battles in Afghanistan” published on website of The New York
Times this September.
“We
didn’t understand the Afghans. They mostly hated us for destroying their homes,
accidentally killing them……” wrote Gibbons-Neff,
who has been to the battlefield in Afghanistan as a marine.
The case
of killing innocent civilians that Gibbons-Neff mentioned in the article is a
common occurrence in overseas operations of the U.S. military.
As shown
by statistics recently released by the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan (UNAMA), in the first quarter of this year alone, military operations
of the U.S. military and its allied forces caused the death of 305 Afghan
civilians.
This May,
U.S. air strikes on alleged drug-processing facilities in Western Afghanistan
accidentally killed at least 30 innocent civilians, including 14 children and a
woman, according to a report released by the UNAMA this October.
However,
the U.S. military denied reports of civilian casualties and claimed that it had
targeted Taliban-run methamphetamine labs. Moreover, it expressed protest
against the investigation report of the UN.
Widespread
abuse of prisoners and detainees has also been found in the wars waged by the
U.S. military around the world.
Early in
the Iraq war, the U.S. troops were notorious for maltreatment of Iraqi
prisoners. In recent years, such deeds of U.S. military as abusing prisoners
and extorting confessions by torture have not been curbed.
The
exposed methods used by the U.S. military to interrogate prisoners include
slapping in the face, striking stomach, sleep deprivation, striping them naked,
waterboarding, and forcing prisoners to hit the wall.
Chief prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court (ICC) Fatou Bensouda
spent 10 years trailing the crimes the U.S. military
might have committed in Afghanistan, and affirmed that U.S.
military personnel and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives
“committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity,
rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and
other locations.”
Bensouda asked
for authorization in November 2017 to officially investigate the war crimes
that might have been committed in Afghanistan by U.S. military and the CIA.
After
that, the U.S. government threatened
to impose sanctions against the ICC
officials, and revoked Bensouda’s visa to the U.S., forcing the
ICC to give up investigation into potential war crimes of the U.S. military.
The
UN Commission of Inquiry
(COI) censured the U.S. military for “launching
indiscriminate attacks that result in death or injury to civilians amounts to a
war crime in cases in which such attacks are conducted recklessly.”
Meanwhile,
the U.S. government has spared no effort to cover up the fact that U.S.
soldiers have killed civilians and abused prisoners, and indulged
the U.S. military’s misdeeds, shocking people around the world.
Edward Gallagher,
former Special Operations Chief of the U.S. Navy,
was accused of intentional killing in Iraq,
but was eventually acquitted.
In 2017, Gallagher stabbed a 15-year-old boy in the neck multiple
times with a knife, killing the boy who was receiving treatment in Mosul, Iraq,
after being captured. After killing the boy, Gallagher took photos of
himself with the corpse, holding up his knife in one hand and grabbing the hair
of the corpse with his other hand.
“I
thought everyone would be cool, next time I will do it so no one sees,”
Gallagher wrote to his platoon.
Besides, Gallagher was accused of shooting two Iraqi civilians when
there was no security risk. Still, he was absolved and had his rank
restored.
The list
goes on. Clint Lorance, a former U.S. Army first lieutenant who had ordered soldiers to shoot at three
civilians in Afghanistan and was convicted of second-degree murder, and Maj.
Mathew L. Golsteyn, a U.S. Army officer who was facing trial for killing
an unarmed Afghan he believed was a Taliban bomb maker, have both been absolved
by U.S. government recently.
Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
condemned the U.S. government for the decision, saying that the three cases
involve serious violations of international humanitarian law and the
perpetrators must be punished.
Rupert Colville,
Spokesperson for the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,
said the decision of the U.S. government sent a disturbing signal to
militaries, according to Reuters.
Such move
of the U.S. government is explicitly prohibited in international conventions
including Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, and
perpetrators of severe war crimes should be investigated and held responsible
for the misdeeds, said Colville.
Colville
said that the decision to terminate criminal proceedings in the case of Mathew
L. Golsteyn was “particularly troubling as it cuts short the regular judicial
process”, according to Reuters.
The U.S.
government only takes international law serious when it fits the interests of
the U.S., pointed out James
A. Goldston, executive director of a U.S. legal aid
research initiative.
U.S. military widely criticized for covering and downplaying scandals
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