KEY POINTS:
WASHINGTON - It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism.
Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn.
Aside the odd bad apple in Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.
That perception has taken a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with fifty combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the United States.
In thousands of pages of typewritten interviews, veterans described in stark detail the everyday acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.
The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities - such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005 - but instead unearths instead a pattern of human rights abuses through the testimony of veterans of the war in Iraq.
"It's not individual atrocity," said Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armor Battalion, "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
A number have themselves returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population.
Many war veterans interviewed have come to actively oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the United States that views the war as futile.
This view is being echoed in Washington where increasing numbers of Democrats and Republicans are now openly calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq.
And the Iraqi quagmire has pushed President George W.
Bush's poll ratings to an all-time low.
Journalists and human rights groups have published numerous reports, drawing attention to the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces.
The Nation's investigation has for the first time presented named military witnesses who openly back those assertions - some participated themselves.
Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits acts of cold-blooded violence, with innocent civilians often bearing the brunt.
A number of interviewees revealed that the military frequently attempts to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents, often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of unarmed Iraqis.
The war veterans also provided disturbing evidence that the troops involved would round up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifled beside corpses to make it appear like they had died in combat.
"It would always be an AK because they have so many of these weapons lying around," said Joe Hatcher, 26, a scout with the Fourth Calvary Regiment.
He revealed that the army also planted 9-millimeter handguns and shovels--to make it look like the civilians were shot while digging a hole for a roadside bomb.
"Every good cop carries a throwaway," Hatcher said of weapons planted on otherwise incident victims incidents that occurred while he was stationed between Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005.
"If you kill someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em."
Any civilians who survived such shootings were sent off to jails like Abu Ghraib for further interrogation.
There were also deaths caused by the reckless behaviour of military convoys.
Sgt Kelly Dougherty with the Colorado National Guard described a hit and run incident in which a military convoy ran over a 10-year-old boy and his three donkeys, killing them all.
"Judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically--basically, your order is that you never stop."
The worst abuses seem to have occurred during raids on private homes when soldiers were hunting insurgents.
Thousands of such raids have taken place in Iraq, usually in the dead of night.
The veterans point out that the overwhelming majority are futile and serve only to terrify the civilians whose homes were invaded, while generating sympathy for the resistance.
Sgt John Bruhns, 29 of the Third Brigade, First Armour Division, who raided nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes while serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib during 2003 described the casual brutality of a typical encounter.
"You want to catch them off guard," he explained.
"You want to catch them in their sleep... You run in, You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds. You'll ask the interpreter to ask...: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda?'"
'Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth,' Sergeant Bruhns told The Nation.
'So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. 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 his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.
"And at the end, if the soldiers don't find anything, they depart with a 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening'."
Sergeant Dougherty described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian in the back in 2003.
"It was just, like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado," she said.
"He just, like, seemed to view every Iraqi as like a potential terrorist."
- INDEPENDENT
