In large part, the lack of high-level accountability stems from the fact that the key instigator of both the illegal invasion of Iraq and the harsh tactics employed in the "war on terror" is President Bush.
Not only did he order an aggressive war - a concept condemned by World War II's Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - but Bush pumped U.S. troops full of false propaganda by linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks.
Bush's subliminal connections between the Iraq War and 9/11 continued years after U.S. intelligence dismissed any linkage. For instance, on June 18, 2005, more than two years into the Iraq War, Bush told the American people that "we went to war because we were attacked" on 9/11.
Bush's rhetorical excesses, though primarily designed to build and maintain a political consensus behind the war at home, had the predictable effect of turning loose a revenge-seeking and heavily armed U.S. military force on the Iraqi population.
Little wonder that a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq - taken in January and February 2006 - found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was mainly "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks." Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was "to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq."
In that context, many Americans sympathize with the individual U.S. soldiers who have to make split-second life-or-death decisions while thinking they are operating under legitimate rules of engagement that allow killing perceived enemies even if they are unarmed and showing no aggressive intent.
"Salvador Option"
By early 2005, as the Iraqi insurgency grew, an increasingly frustrated Bush administration reportedly debated a "Salvador option" for Iraq, an apparent reference to the "death squad" operations that decimated the ranks of perceived leftists who were opposed to El Salvador's right-wing military junta in the early 1980s.
According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the adoption of that brutal "still-secret strategy" of the Reagan administration as a way to get a handle on the spiraling violence in Iraq.
"Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy [in El Salvador] to have been a success - despite the deaths of innocent civilians," Newsweek wrote.
The magazine also noted that many of Bush's advisers were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, including Elliott Abrams, who is now an architect of Middle East policy on the National Security Council.
In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter committed by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children near the town of El Mozote in 1981.
The Reagan administration's "Salvador option" also had a domestic component, the so-called "perception management" operation that employed sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly reality of the wars.
[For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George H.W. Bush, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege. For more on the Salvador option, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Death Squads," Jan. 11, 2005.]
In the Iraqi-sniper case, Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man near the town of Iskandariya on April 27 after a skirmish with insurgents. Sandoval testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was suspected of being an insurgent posing as a farmer.
The second killing occurred on May 11 when a man walked into a concealed location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoot the man in the head by Hensley and did so, according to Vela's testimony at Sandoval's court martial.
