Part 12 (2/2)

Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Gary Quails, a public affairs soldier, also wrote to Rosen. ”I'm sure what you wrote was true, but I think you should tone it down, Nir,” he began. ”We came across as thugs in the article ... and I don't think that is an accurate portrayal. Yes, our soldiers were fired up, but if people were trying to kill you every day, you'd probably be fired up too.”

In the following months, the Army itself would conclude that some other 3rd ACR soldiers had indeed acted like criminals. Nine soldiers from a howitzer platoon in the 3rd ACR's 2nd squadron, who were a.s.signed to checkpoint duty in western Iraq, allegedly stole thousands of dollars from Iraqis, but they weren't prosecuted because investigators couldn't locate the alleged victims, according to an internal Army doc.u.ment obtained by the ACLU. One private confessed that ”the robberies occurred on nearly every TCP [traffic control point] he partic.i.p.ated in,” Army investigators reported. Another soldier said the criminal acts were common knowledge in the platoon.

Capt. Shawn Martin was the commander of the regiment's Lightning Troop, which was a.s.signed to occupy the isolated town of Ar Rutbah in far western Iraq, where Maj. Gavrilis's Special Forces company had operated so successfully- and so modestly-that spring. Martin took a different approach. ”He thought Ar Rutbah was his private domain,” Lt. David Minor later testified.

The captain ordered soldiers to fire a weapon over a prisoner's head and hit people with a baseball bat that was called his Iraqi beater, according to subsequent testimony. One detainee held by Martin was bagged over the head, driven deep into the desert, and ordered to dig the hole that, he was told, would be his grave. Another was told, through an interpreter, to ”kiss your family goodbye because I am about to bury you in the desert.”

After a roadside bomb exploded and Iraqis in the area were detained and handcuffed, Martin ”casually walked over to one of the detained Iraqi civilians and kicked him in his back, saying, 'Motherf.u.c.ker, did you have something to do with this?' and proceeded to kick him in his ribs at least an additional three times,” a soldier in his company wrote in a statement. Martin ”put his foot on the Iraqi civilian's neck and [said], 'Don't you know I'll kill you, motherf.u.c.ker?'” The a.s.saulted Iraqi was released a few hours later. Martin also threatened one of his own soldiers with a pistol for declining to fire a weapon near a detainee.

”I traveled everywhere” with Martin from mid-May to mid-June 2003, an Arabic-speaking Army lieutenant who was attached to the company as an interpreter said in a heartfelt statement given to investigators. ”On many occasions I saw him treat Iraqis in a very disrespectful manner, to include leaders of Rutbah, such as the police chief. He would yell at them, cuss them out, belittle them in front of their subordinates, put his finger in their face, etc. On numerous occasions I saw him draw his pistol and wave it around in people's faces as he yelled at them. They had presented no threat to us and were involved in no illegal activity. I have heard him say on numerous occasions how all Iraqis are crooks and thieves and his actions toward them would indicate that he truly believes this. I have often apologized to Iraqis for his treatment of them.”

Ar Rutbah, which had once seemed so tranquil and promising for U.S. forces, s.h.i.+fted into the loss column. By November 2004, insurgents were active in the town and attacking the police. In early June 2005 a Marine was killed by a roadside bomb in the town, and later in the month a soldier from the Army's 10th Mountain Division suffered the same fate. Later that summer another soldier was killed, and three more were wounded, by another bomb east of the city. Two Marines were shot to death there in October 2005, and another was blown up near the town a month later. On the first day of 2006, an Air Force F-15 conducted an air strike near it. In March 2006, an Army sergeant was killed there by another roadside bomb.

Col. Teeples, who commanded the 3rd ACR during its tour in western Iraq from April 2003 to March 2004, addressed Martin's wrongdoing with a written reprimand. But after a new commander took over, a review of the unit's operations in Iraq was conducted, and charges were brought in some cases. Capt. Martin was charged with ten counts of a.s.sault, obstructing justice, and conduct unbecoming an officer. He ultimately was found guilty of three counts of a.s.sault and sentenced to forty-five days of imprisonment and fined $12,000.

In another case, on November 26, 2003, four soldiers from the 3rd ACR put an Iraqi general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, into a sleeping bag, sat on him, and rolled him around the floor. That abuse followed two weeks of brutal interrogations of Mowhoush by Iraqis working under U.S. supervision, who began with slaps and punches, then used a hose, and finally turned the interrogation into a melee in which ”the room collapsed” on Mowhoush, according to testimony by Curtis Ryan, an Army criminal investigator. Redacted doc.u.ments obscure whether the Iraqis who did this were supervised by the U.S. military or by CIA personnel, but reporting by the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Josh White found that they were members of the Scorpions, a group of Iraqis recruited before the war by the CIA to carry out small-scale subversion, and then employed afterward for help in interpreting and interrogations. The Scorpions had a technique of holding someone's tongue, then using a rubber band to wrap a rag around it, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to that information. ”It just swells up inside your mouth like a giant Tampax,” making the victim painfully thirsty, he said. Josh White found that they were members of the Scorpions, a group of Iraqis recruited before the war by the CIA to carry out small-scale subversion, and then employed afterward for help in interpreting and interrogations. The Scorpions had a technique of holding someone's tongue, then using a rubber band to wrap a rag around it, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to that information. ”It just swells up inside your mouth like a giant Tampax,” making the victim painfully thirsty, he said.

Mowhoush was a former head of Iraqi air defenses who had walked into Forward Operating Base Tiger in Qaim two weeks earlier, seeking the release of his sons from custody. (At the time the U.S. military incorrectly stated that he had been captured in a raid.) He told interrogators at the outset that he was commander of al Quds Division, an organization supplying the insurgency with mortars, RPGs, and small arms. He died of smothering and chest compression, a subsequent Army report found. ”He had what's referred to as 'facial suffusion,' which is blood basically being congested in the face,” Maj. Michael Smith, a military forensic pathologist, later testified. ”He also had numerous bruises on his chest, abdomen, arms, legs, one bruise on the head, and he also had several rib fractures”-five, in fact. After a lengthy investigation three of the soldiers were charged with murder, while the fourth was given immunity so he could testify against the others.

Teeples said that he didn't have enough troops to do a better job. ”The year that we were there, we were in an 'economy of force' organization, and that means that we are put into a position to perform a very large mission with a small force,” he told investigators. Nor did he have some of the right sort of troops, he added: ”In the realm of detainees and interrogation, we did not have official interrogators.”

This isn't to conclude that the 3rd ACR did terribly in its first tour in Iraq. Rather, what is significant is that despite the killing of a detainee, the abuse of others, and the taint of criminality in one unit, it was in the middle of the pack- not as effective as the 101st Airborne, but not as wanton as the 4th Infantry Division. Like the 82nd Airborne, it began badly, but unlike the paratroopers, it had a strong learning curve, and did better with the pa.s.sage of time.

”PUCf.u.c.king” in the 82nd Airborne ”s.h.i.+t started to go bad right away,” an infantry fire team leader in the 82nd Airborne later told Human Rights Watch, looking back at September 2003. Beating prisoners until they pa.s.sed out or collapsed quickly became routine at his outpost near Fallujah, Forward Operating Base Mercury, he said. ”To 'f.u.c.k a PUC [for person under control, and p.r.o.nounced ”puck”] means to beat him up,” he recalled. ”We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day.”

These attacks weren't inflicted to collect intelligence but simply to blow off steam. ”Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport.” One day in the fall of 2003, a cook came by, ordered a prisoner to hold a metal pole, and ”broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat.” Broken bones from beatings occurred ”maybe every other week,” the sergeant added. ”I think the officers knew about it but didn't want to hear about it.”

Another sergeant told the organization that he saw ”hard hitting” and heard other things, but didn't pay much attention because ”I was busy leading my men.” He faulted the Army for putting soldiers in the position of watching over groups of prisoners that included men who had attacked them.

Gen. Swannack said in 2005 that all abuse allegations were investigated, but that he never received ”any prisoner abuse allegations from Camp Mercury.”

Trouble in the 4th Infantry Division Of all the major conventional combat units operating in Iraq in 2003, the one that most consistently raised eyebrows was Gen. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division. The warning signals, first picked up by the Marines who temporarily occupied Tikrit in April 2003, grew steadily louder. In July, a member of a psychological operations team attached to the 4th's artillery brigade, which was known as Task Force Iron Gunner, filed a formal complaint about how its soldiers treated Iraqis. (Artillery units seem to have been particularly p.r.o.ne to abuse in Iraq, perhaps because their core mission involves indirect fire, which may make them less comfortable with face-to-face confrontation.) Psyops and civil affairs are parts of the Special Operations Command, but in Iraq they were frequently placed under the command of regular combat units, such as infantry, armor, or artillery, where they often were unhappy with what they saw. In this case, the psyops specialist said his team was especially concerned that the brigade's commander was employing ineffective tactics. ”Few of the raids and detentions executed by Task Force Iron Gunner have resulted in the capture of any anti-coalition members or the seizure of illegal weapons,” he wrote. He placed the blame squarely with the artillery unit's commander, Col. Kevin Stramara. ”This team has witnessed the colonel initiate these events.” He charged that detention practices were capricious, sometimes based on the whim of the commander or because more than one hundred dollars in Iraqi dinars had been found in someone's possession.

One day in June, the psyops soldier said, a Bradley fighting vehicle had opened fire on a house, causing it to burst into flames. In a separate incident, a father of a twelve-year-old boy who had been accidentally killed by U.S. forces and then buried was made to dig up the body himself. In a subsequent sworn statement, this member of the team, whose name was blacked out in the doc.u.ments released by the Army, conceded that some of his charges were based on hearsay, but he stood by his bottom line: ”My overall feeling of the treatment of the civilian population is negative. I go out to the civilian community about three times a week to communicate with the Iraqi population to get an overall a.s.sessment of how the people see us. Through interpretation the Iraqi people ask us why we are so unfair to them.”

One of the sworn statements filed by a civilian employee of the Defense Department working at the brigade's jail-apparently as an interpreter, although he didn't say so-seemed to back up that conclusion. ”I think 80 percent of the people we bring in are 'at the wrong place at the wrong time' [and] have no intelligence value,” he said.

The Army's investigation found credible explanations for most of the specific charges. The house was fired on, the investigation concluded, because it had a bunker on its roof that was found to contain mortars and artillery rounds. The dead boy was buried because there was no place to keep his body, and unearthed without U.S. help because the family had asked that there be no U.S. partic.i.p.ation. But the fundamental question of whether the brigade's tactics were misguided wasn't addressed by the investigation.

Lt. Col. West joins an interrogation There was one unexpected bit of fallout from this inquiry: Investigators learned that Lt. Col. Allen West, commander of an artillery battalion in Stramara's brigade, had threatened one night in August to kill an Iraqi prisoner, fired his pistol next to the man's head, and been present while the man, a policeman, was beaten. Trying to obtain information about an alleged a.s.sa.s.sination plot against him in the town of Saba al Boor, West had personally questioned the policeman, who had been taken prisoner as a suspected member of the conspiracy. ”We're here for one reason, and that's to find out who's trying to kill me,” West said as he entered the detainee's cell, according to the young soldier who served as the gunner on West's Humvee.

Everyone questioned by investigators agreed that West then removed his 9 millimeter pistol from its holster and ”told the detainee he would be shot if he did not provide information.”

First the female interpreter kicked the man. Then the gunner grabbed him and shouted, ”Who the f.u.c.k is trying to kill him?” Then, according to several accounts, everyone in the room but West beat the man for some time-”about an hour or so,” according to one private.

During this a.s.sault, the Iraqi ”kept contradicting himself, and he would say, T love you' to Lieutenant Colonel West, cry and scream,” a staff sergeant told investigators.

West then took the man outside. ”Either you answer the questions, or die tonight,” West said, according to his gunner. He then had two soldiers hold the man's head inside a clearing barrel-a sand-filled oil barrel that is tipped sideways, and which soldiers use when returning to a base to ensure that there isn't a live round in a weapon's firing chamber. ”If you don't start giving answers, I will kill you,” West said, according to one of the soldiers who held the man. West then fired one or two shots past the prisoner's ear into the barrel. ”As Lieutenant Colonel West pulled the trigger, the individual went stiff,” this soldier added.

At that point, the senior sergeant present decided he had seen enough. ”Sir, I don't think he knows,” he said to West. (”It was something I had never experienced before and don't care to again,” the sergeant first cla.s.s added in his statement.) ”Put him back in the cell,” West responded.

West then reported his actions to his commander, but nothing happened until the officers conducting the general investigation of the climate of command in the brigade stumbled across the incident. ”I accept full responsibility for my actions and accept punishment,” West wrote in a sworn statement a month later. ”I acted in the best interest for my soldiers and yes myself.” He ultimately was charged with aggravated a.s.sault, fined five thousand dollars, removed from his position as a commander, and then retired from the military.

”I was and am proud to say that I never lost a troop in a combat engagement in my time as a battalion commander,” West, who went on to teach high school in Florida, said a year later. ”We were tough, and it kept my men alive and Iraqis in my area secure____ We also let the local people know that we would not tolerate attacks and that our response would be quick and equitable, not wanton violence------------------------ Rules and regulations are necessary and proper, but I have never seen one cry at a funeral or accept an American flag after it had been taken off a casket of one of my fallen comrades.”

That view represents the logical outcome of making force protection a top priority in U.S. military operations. Every commander wants to take care of his or her troops, and few of West's peers would fault him for his concern. Yet the relentless pursuit of that goal can undercut what should be a higher priority for a commander: winning. After all, if keeping soldiers alive is the top goal, that could be achieved simply by staying at home.

A shot in the stomach A subsequent instance of abuse in the 4th ID carried no such moral ambiguity. On September 11, a soldier shot a handcuffed Iraqi detainee named Obeed Radad in an isolation cell in a detention center in Camp Packhorse near Tikrit, supposedly when the Iraqi attempted to cross a barbed-wire fence. Radad had turned himself in nine days earlier, after learning that U.S. forces were looking for him. The bullet pa.s.sed straight through his forearm and lodged in his stomach. Eighteen hours later an Army investigator began to look into the incident, according to an internal Army summary of the case. Maj. Frank Rangel, Jr., the executive officer of a military police battalion attached to the 4th ID, was a.s.signed to investigate. He didn't believe the soldier's account that Radad was trying to escape. ”I thought the suspect might have committed negligent homicide” and lesser offenses, Rangel said later. Lt. Col. David Poirier, Rangel's boss as commander of that MP battalion, which was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, thought the shooter should be court-martialed. ”This soldier had committed murder,” Poirier said.

But the division commander, Maj. Gen. Odierno, overruled that recommendation, and ultimately the soldier was simply discharged from the Army for the good of the service. ”I made the decision to dishonorably discharge him because of mitigating circ.u.mstances,” Odierno said. ”He was a cook, he didn't get proper training, and this detainee was very aggressive, a bad guy.”

”They are terrorists and will be treated as such33 A few months later another 4th ID soldier, the staff sergeant overseeing the interrogation section at the division's main detainee holding pen in Tikrit, was reprimanded after an Iraqi was beaten with a baton while being questioned. ”These acts could... bring extreme discredit upon the U.S. Army,” Lt. Col. Conrad Christman, the commander of the 104th Military Intelligence Battalion, warned him in writing on November 6. The incidents of abuse of the detainee, his letter added, ”show a lack of supervisory judgment on your part.”

Surprisingly, the sergeant hurled those very conclusions straight back at his chain of command. His detailed and eloquent response amounted to a powerful critique of the U.S. Army's entire approach to Iraq. What previous cases of abuse had implied, he now stated explicitly: The Army wasn't prepared for this mission, so soldiers were being trained, equipped, and led poorly. ”With the exception of myself, all interrogators at the TF IH ICE [Task Force Iron Horse Interrogation Control Element] were, and most remain, inexperienced at actual interrogation,” wrote the sergeant. The division's intelligence efforts generally were ”cursory,” he added, because of ”insufficient personnel, time and resources.” Nor had the Army prepared the sergeant and his soldiers for the job they'd been a.s.signed. ”Our unit has never trained for detention facility operations because our unit is neither designed nor intended for this mission.... [My soldiers] are a.s.signed a mission for which they have not trained, are not manned, are not equipped, are not supplied and ... cannot effectively accomplish.”

What's more, he wrote, the inst.i.tutional Army hadn't even taken the proper steps to prepare for this kind of war. ”To my knowledge, no FM [field manual] covers counterinsurgency interrogation operations.”

But most striking from this NCO was a lengthy denunciation of the strategic confusion of those leading the Army in Iraq. This was, after all, not a stately war college symposium or a retired colonel pondering the past in the quiet of his study, but a staff sergeant writing in the field under near combat conditions responding to a formal admonition issued three days earlier. He laid the mess squarely at the feet of Gen. Odierno and other top officers in the 4th ID. ”I firmly believe that [name of subordinate soldier redacted in doc.u.ment] took the actions he did, partially, due to his perception of the command climate of the division as a whole. Comments made by senior leaders regarding detainees such as, 'They are not EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War]. They are terrorists and will be treated as such' have caused a great deal of confusion as to the status of detainees.” (Odierno said that he had made that comment not about detainees but in discussing combat operations. ”In some cases, because of their acts, I would call them terrorists,” he said. ”And we would treat them as such, not in detention, but in operations.” But that does not appear to have been the universal practice in his division's detention centers.) As was occurring elsewhere in Iraq, the NCO also reported signs of U.S. forces practicing a form of hostage taking, detaining family members of suspected insurgents in order to compel those suspects to surrender. ”Personnel at the ICE regularly see detainees who are, in essence, hostages,” he charged. ”They are normally arrested by coalition forces because they are family of individuals who have been targeted by a brigade based on accusations that may or may not be true, to be released, supposedly, when and if the targeted individual surrenders to coalition forces.” In fact, the U.S. tended not to keep its end of the bargain because the detention system was so badly operated: ”In reality, these detainees are transferred to Abu Ghraib prison and become lost in the coalition detention system regardless of whether the targeted individual surrenders himself.” This coercive taking of such prisoners had at least the ”tacit approval” of senior leaders in the division, he said, because it had been discussed in front of them at briefings.

The military intelligence commander, Christman, impressed by the staff sergeant's arguments, came to think that it would be wrong to fault him for lack of supervision, and so decided against making the written reprimand part of the staff sergeant's permanent record. ”It became apparent to me that since we were dealing with far too many detainees for the small number of personnel and the limited facilities we had available, a close supervisory relations.h.i.+p was not feasible,” he later explained.

On September 21, 2003, Odierno issued a memorandum on the treatment of detainees to everyone in his division. ”Soldiers will treat all detainees with dignity and respect, and, at the very least, will meet the standards for humane treatment as articulated in international law,” he ordered. ”While detainees in U.S. custody may be interrogated for intelligence purposes, the use of physical or mental torture, or coercion to compel individuals to provide information, is strictly prohibited_____ Neither the stresses of combat, nor deep provocation, will justify inhumane treatment.”

That sounded good, but it isn't clear how much effect it had. A subsequent review by the Army inspector general said interrogators reported ”detainees arriving at the cage badly beaten. Many beatings occurred after the detainees were zip-tied by some units in 4ID. Some units wouldn't take THTs [Tactical Human-Intelligence Teams] on raids because they didn't want oversight of activities that might cross the line during capture.” An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that soldiers in Iraq sometimes would lie about injuries inflicted in interrogations, having learned that there would be no questions asked if they told medical a.s.sistants that the damage had been done during the capture.

Sa.s.saman's battalion reacts to a loss The most striking instance of abuse in the 4th ID occurred shortly after January 2, 2004, when Capt. Eric Paliwoda, an engineering company commander in the division's 3rd Brigade, was killed by a mortar attack while in his command post. Most losses. .h.i.t comrades hard, but Paliwoda's death was a particularly cruel blow. Like Lt. Col. Nathan Sa.s.saman, the commander of the battalion of which his company was part, Paliwoda, who stood out at six foot seven inches, had been an athlete at West Point. He was well liked. Sa.s.saman held the dying officer before putting him aboard a medical evacuation helicopter. Paliwoda ”basically died in Nate's arms,” said Col. Frederick Rudesheim, commander of the brigade that included Sa.s.saman's battalion.

”When Captain Paliwoda died, it pretty much ruined the war for me,” Sa.s.saman said later in sworn testimony. ”It ruined my experience in Iraq. Not that the previous deaths didn't, but he had been a friend of mine. I kind of leaned on him.”

At West Point twenty years earlier, Sa.s.saman had quarterbacked the Army football team, taking it to its first bowl game, the 1984 Cherry Bowl, where Army beat Michigan State University, 10-6. He had made headlines back then for playing much of the season with three cracked ribs. He would take a similarly tough approach in Iraq.

Sa.s.saman and his men in the 1st Battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment were already deeply unhappy with the situation around them when Paliwoda was killed. ”I was angry because the previous battalion could not get the job done,” Sa.s.saman would later say. ”I mean, I actually went over there and tried to win. I tried to win the peace, and I actually really did try to help the Iraqi people.” He pointedly added: ”I can't say that for every other unit that was over there.” He singled out another 4th ID unit, the 1st Battalion of the 66th Armored Regiment, which was operating just to the north of him in the unruly Tigris River city of Samarra. ”They lost control,” he said; ”1/66 Armor failed in their mission. They failed in their mission to secure the city and to set it up for civil infrastructure projects.”

Sa.s.saman had spent months trying to pacify the town of Balad, and thought he had done so, when he was ordered in mid-December to move most of his men about 30 miles north to Samarra, in an operation the Army dubbed Ivy Blizzard. ”We went in hard,” he recounted. ”There is a reason why 1/8 Infantry was sent up there, and it wasn't to go up there and babysit. So we used explosive breaches on the target we went into.... No one really told us to win the hearts and minds, but they did tell us to bring the peace, to stop the insurgency, stop the fighting, so that we could make the life better and build projects.”

While there he was quoted by the New York Times New York Times as saying, ”With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.” At that time, there was an incident, not known outside the unit, in which some of his troops forced an Iraqi to jump from a bridge into the Tigris near Balad. The man survived, complained, and later sought compensation. as saying, ”With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.” At that time, there was an incident, not known outside the unit, in which some of his troops forced an Iraqi to jump from a bridge into the Tigris near Balad. The man survived, complained, and later sought compensation.

While Sa.s.saman was fighting in Samarra there was trouble back in Balad, he testified at the court-martial of one of his subordinates, Lt. Jack Saville. ”While I'm in Samarra, seven of my Iraqi police that we had trained, that Lieutenant Saville had trained, were killed in an IED blast. Four ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers], which are now considered Iraqi National Guardsmen, were killed, and we lost two Americans, Captain Paliwoda and then another engineer soldier up on the ad Diwanijah bridge.” Then, at the end of the three weeks, he was told to head back to Balad and clean up the mess that had erupted there in his unit's absence.

He and his men were feeling put upon: ”I mean, I just felt like, 'Does anybody want to help us here with the fight, besides 1/8?”'

The death of Paliwoda had left the unit in the mood for revenge-and it knew how to exact it. When the sun went down that chilly January night, soldiers from 1/8 set out to kill some specific Iraqis. At about nine-thirty a patrol from Sa.s.saman's Alpha Company was stopping drivers outside of Samarra who were violating the curfew. The patrol was led by Lt. Saville. The first car his men stopped had a family returning from a hospital, where the mother had just given birth. They were told to go home. The second was a city council member, who also was given leave to go. The third vehicle was a white pickup truck. Its two occupants were handcuffed, driven to the Tigris, and forced from the ledge of a pump house into the river, a drop of about six feet. One of the men, Zaidoun Fadel Ha.s.soun, age nineteen, drowned, according to the other, Marwan Fadel Ha.s.soun, twenty-three, his cousin.

When 1/66 Armor learned of the incident and pa.s.sed the word to Gen. Odierno, he tried to check it out but was lied to by his subordinates, he said. ”I went to 1/8, and they said, 'Didn't happen,'” he recalled in an interview. ”The bottom line on the Sa.s.saman case is ... he directed a cover-up of an incident, and didn't come clean until he realized the CID had figured it out.”

Sa.s.saman's soldiers at first insisted that they had released the men-without mentioning that they had ”released” them into the river. Pressed, they subsequently said they'd seen both men swim to sh.o.r.e and emerge. That was a lie, Saville later testified. In fact, he had gone out that night with an order from his company commander, Capt. Matthew Cunningham. ”I understood he was directing me and my subordinates to kill certain Iraqis we were seeking that night who were suspected of killing the company commander in our unit,” he testified, referring to the death of Paliwoda. ”I understood that the order meant that if they were captured, regardless of the circ.u.mstances of their capture, they were not to return alive.” That order was given twice that night, he added. Saville also testified that his company commander had given him a list of five Iraqis who ”were not to come back alive” if captured during the patrol.

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