Soldier In Iraq

As a journalist who has reported extensively on the death and destruction that is U.S.- occupied Iraq, perhaps I should be happy about the prosecution of former Marine Corps Sergeant Jose Luis Nazario Jr. Standing accused of killing unarmed four detainees in Fallujah in 2004, Nazario is the first Iraq War veteran to be tried for war crimes in a civilian court. His trial, which began in Southern California this week, marks a new chapter in American jurisprudence – with the long arm of the law reaching past the jurisdiction of a military court martial. If convicted of all charges, Nazario could face more than 10 years in prison, according to the Associated Press.

The problem is that Nazario's prosecution hardly represents justice. Consider for a moment the context of the November 2004 U.S. attack on Fallujah, during which Nazario allegedly killed the detainees. That attack, code-named Operation Phantom Fury, was one of the fiercest of the entire U.S. occupation. Independent human rights groups estimate it left 4,000 Iraqi civilians dead. "Fallujah was declared a ‘free-fire zone' in November 2004 and we told the civilian population that they had to leave because the entire city was going to be deemed hostile territory," explains Zollie Goodman, a former U.S. Navy petty officer who served in Fallujah and doesn't know Nazario. "Some of them left. They carried TVs or food and sat outside the city and waited for the firefight to be over so they could go home." But, Goodman said, "some of them didn't leave," leading to many innocent civilian casualties. "We would just leave the dead Iraqis in the streets and they piled up," Goodman said. "It was disgusting. We ended up sighting in our weapons on these dead bodies. We'd been trained to keep our weapons 'on point.' You always want your weapon to be sighted in. So when we didn't have a target to shoot we sighted our weapons on dead people and dead animals. That happened a lot at the tail end of Operation Phantom Fury."..

BBC News

Fallujah Fall Guy Foreign Policy In Focus - 3 hours ago ... veterans who testified this spring at Iraq Veterans Against the War's Winter Soldier gathering in Washington, DC One by one, the former soldiers spoke ...