News-Info-Alerts

Re: POW War Crimes Investigated

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 23, 2003

"War crimes: mistreatment of American POWs could lead to the courtroom

by: Jim Adams / Associate Editor / Indian Country Today

WASHINGTON - The fate of Pfc. Lori Piestewa and the other casualties of the 507th Maintenance Unit will be central issues as the U.S. military prepares for war crimes trials in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

Piestewa, a Hopi from Tuba City, Ariz., is the first American Indian woman in the history of the U.S. military to have been recorded as killed in combat. She died in still undetailed circumstances on or after March 23 when her maintenance unit took a wrong turn in the early advance north into Iraq and ran into an ambush in the city of an-Nasariyah.

Piestewa’s friend and service roommate Pfc. Jessica Lynch became a national hero after a Special Operations unit rescued her from a hospital bed in Iraqi-held Nasariyah, in what was called the first successful recovery of a POW since World War II. Five other POWs from her unit were found in relatively good shape by U.S. Marines advancing on Tikrit north of Baghdad. But senior military officials are making clear that the initial treatment of the 507th unit is first on the list for an American-run war crimes tribunal.

"It’s all under investigation," Cmdr. Chris Isleib told Indian Country Today. Isleib, a Navy commander detailed to the press office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said the U.S. military intended to hold as many Iraqi officials as possible accountable for their actions. "They had very low regard for human life," he said, "and very low regard for the law of war."

Isleib said investigative teams were still active throughout Iraq, compiling evidence on cases not only in the current conflict but also in the 1991 Gulf War. Both the U.S. and Kuwait already have extensive dossiers on the 1991 war, he said. The Iraqis, he said, "were just brutal in everything."

Time and place of the trials is still not determined, Isleib said. "The schedules are still tentative." But he indicated they would very likely take place "in-country over there," in Iraq.

According to an earlier Pentagon briefing, crimes against American personnel will be prosecuted in an American-run tribunal. W. Hays Parks, special assistant to the Army Judge Advocate General, and Pierre-Richard Prosper, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, emphasized in an April 7 presentation that the U.S. had "the sovereign ability and right" to conduct cases involving its own people. They ruled out recourse to the new International War Crimes Tribunal, observing that neither the U.S. nor Iraq had signed the treaty setting it up.

Parks added that other countries, including the successor Iraq regime, might also prosecute crimes against their own citizens. Kuwait in particular has a long list of charges from the Iraqi occupation in 1990-91 and is still seeking more than 600 missing POWs.

(Although the role of Iran was not mentioned, it too suffered severely from an unprovoked Iraq invasion in 1981 and suffered thousands of casualties in chemical attacks that violated international treaties.)

But Parks began his list of American charges with the treatment of Piestewa’s 507th Maintenance Unit.

"First," he said, "Iraqi television and Al-Jazeera have aired a lengthy tape of deceased U.S. or coalition service members." The tape, shown repeatedly on the Arab satellite television channel, was reported to show bodies of members of the 507th unit with bullet wounds indicating they had been executed. That portion of the tape was not shown on U.S. television, and the alleged victims were not identified.

"I will not describe the tape in detail," said Parks. "Suffice it to say that the tape, made at the direction of the Iraqi regime, shows fundamental violations of the Geneva Convention obligations, to include prohibitions on pillage and ill-treatment of the dead, the duty to respect the personal dignity of all captured combatants, and possibly prohibitions against willful killing, torture, inhumane treatment, or the willful causing of great suffering or serious injury to body or health of the POW."

Parks also singled out a tape in which the surviving 507th soldiers were questioned "in humiliating and insulting circumstances designed to make them objects of public curiosity, in violation of the prisoner-of-war convention."
Ambassador Prosper added, "For any war crimes committed against U. S. personnel, our policy is that we will investigate and we will prosecute.
"There will be accountability for these abuses."

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