This post originally published at freeconcord.org.

Japanese Kempeitai officer, secret police

The Concord Monitor’s Felice Belman writes on her blog from the newspaper’s website that the Concord police have stopped including narratives of the events surrounding an arrest in releases to the press. Recently, they began only including the name and charges against an individual who has been seized by their organization. This is to have stemmed from complaints filed by an attorney on behalf of city councilor Fred Keach, who was arrested for attempting to drive while intoxicated in October 2010. Keach was unhappy with the amount of detail provided by the police in the account of the arrest as published in the Monitor.

The article also overviews that a statutory change pending in the NH legislature will specify the amount of information to be released by police following an arrest. It is hard to imagine anyone would support a more secretive local police force that didn’t work for the police or prosecutor’s office. In case you may be curious as to what a typical arrest narrative given to a defendant would look like, here’s a scan of the report I received with my discovery packet from the Chalking 8 trial.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement are apparently now operating under a policy of not disclosing information about those that they arrest. Making their arrests and ultimate deportations essentially disappearances, ICE operations have progressively degraded the civil rights of those deemed to be undocumented immigrants. When even the nativist NH newspaper, the Union Leader, criticizes the practices of the federal paramilitary organization, it is worth taking notice.

An unsigned editorial published today wanted to clarify that it was not advocating for the rights of those arrested to not be disappeared. In obedient praise of federal immigration policy, the newspaper so subjectively reported, “We are all for getting illegal bad guys off the street.” Language focused against a targeted demographic couldn’t get more presumptuously loaded than “illegal bad guy”. But while the UL is happy to report the word of the federal government that the immigrants arrested were all dangerous criminals, they will not idly accept news of NH arrests without the most basic unit of information attached: the name of the arrested party.

This isn’t the first time that ICE has made secret (they used the nomenclature “private”) arrests in the state. Last year, during a publicity show to announce 2,900 arrests around the country, agency spokesmen listed six secret arrests in New Hampshire. This year’s show boasted 3,100 arrests, twenty-four of them in the state, with sixteen in Manchester alone. In the newspaper’s editorial, it is implied that this year’s entire list of arrestees is being kept confidential. At the end of the article, it is announced that the Union Leader will be filing a federal freedom of information lawsuit to secure the right of the public to know who is being arrested in their name.

While I find it hard to support the limits of the position taken on why federal agents shouldn’t make arrests in secret, I do wish the newspaper luck in its legal conquest. Their victory would have the unintended consequence of securing some of the civil rights of the accused, in allowing their family and friends to know where they are and what is happening to them.

The issue of censorship has recently been raised in the Concord Monitor, in pieces by Felice Belman which appeared last week as well as today. In a March 27 article, the editor discussed how some individuals who had been quoted from stories in the past wished to conceal themselves from a search query, as they no longer wished to be associated with their statements. While addressing their concerns, the matter is concluded flatly that, “The Monitor isn’t in the business of rewriting history. Our online news archives are an important historical resource, for the public and for the newsroom staff.”

In a story published today titled The Letter You Won’t Read, we learn about a retracted letter to the editor. The letter included a name in the attached contact information, but was signed as anonymous. With the Monitor having a policy against publishing unsigned articles (except when someone is able to sign their article as ‘Monitor Staff’), they contacted the author, informing her that they would be willing the publish the article with an authentic name attached. On those conditions, she withdrew the letter.

Censorship of a form of media, no matter what the content may be, automatically adds interest to the item being censored. The extent to which we are told the content of the letter is confined to two sentences. “The writer had composed a strong and succinct argument against casino gambling. She was distressed to learn that the same lobbyists were working for both the New Hampshire Police Association and a casino company and that the cops had come out in favor of casinos.” The Monitor’s editor expresses her depression in feeling that someone would so fear repercussions in our open society that they would self censor to such an extent. Her suggestion was countering such fear with more letters to the editor.

While more honest and intelligent letters to newspapers are appreciated, by editor and audience alike, preferably one chooses to publish their work in another medium which suits their needs rather than to trash content that they have taken the time to create. If the author of the self-censored letter wishes to get her story viewed by interested parties, I certainly hope that she takes the initiative to do so.

Robert Bales

A soldier accused of having gone on an unauthorized killing spree in an Afghan village was identified by the military yesterday. On the night of March 12, 2012, it is alleged that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales sneaked out of Camp Belambay in the Kandahar province and gunned down 16 civilians in their homes, nine of whom were children. The 38 year old soldier was on his fourth tour since enlisting after 9/11/2001, and is noted to have suffered at least two injuries on duty. One of the injuries resulted in a concussion, though no brain damage was detected after a military health screening. He was identified after being flown to the United States to await trial in the Fort Leavenworth detention center.

The Army had an article posted on their site which had quoted Bales after a January 2007 battle in Iraq. The detached description of combat feels as though it could have been penned by Matthew Modine’s character Private Joker from Full Metal Jacket. The article, dated February 9, 2009, vanished from servers at army.mil days ago. A cached copy provided an archived version of the story, which thanks to the power of the internet did not disappear. One of the more circulated quotes from Bales in the article is the following, “I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day, for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

In the interest of combating censorship, below is the full text of the Don Kramer’s original article, since removed from the army’s public information site.

FORT LEWIS, Wash. – With the trappings of World War I and II tactics and 21st Century weaponry, the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment’s fight in January 2007 to recover a downed Apache helicopter south of Najaf stands as unique among Operation Iraqi Freedom engagements.

Counterinsurgency operations carry their own metrics, different from those that measure success in combat against an enemy who stands and fights. But by all military standards, Lt. Col. Barry Huggins’ 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division Stryker battalion achieved a smashing success in what might have been the most traditional battle of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It ended in such a one-sided victory for U.S. and Iraqi forces that anticoalition media attempted to frame it as a “massacre” – until details came to light of the enemy’s plans, detailed preparations and prodigious arsenal of weapons and equipment.

On Jan. 28 and 29, 2007, a fanatic and well-armed Shiite paramilitary faction stood and fought in southern Iraq against two companies of 2-3 Inf. augmented with engineers, 8th Iraqi Army elements and two Special Forces detachments, on a compound the insurgents had prepared for months. Riddled on three sides with deep trenches, high berms and antitank positions and protected on the fourth by the Euphrates River, nearly 600 Jund as-Sama’, “Soldiers of Heaven,” fired all of their considerable ordnance and launched one assault after another throughout the night in attempts to surprise and outflank the Patriot Battalion task force. For the Shiite fighters, they had begun an apocalyptic battle they believed would hasten the return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam.

In the end, the most important metric was the casualty count: 250 enemy fighters killed, 81 wounded and 410 detained and not a single 2-3 Inf. Soldier hurt or killed. Sophisticated, relentless firepower defeated superior numbers on ground of the enemy’s choosing. As the company commander of the lead element, Capt. Brent Clemmer, now a major enrolled at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. paraphrased a Ranger epigram, “Forget the fair fight.”

Every commander’s most optimistic intent on the battlefield had been realized – decisive victory with no loss of life to his unit.

What cannot be measured occurred at the end of the battle. Defining “agility,” American Soldiers seamlessly shifted into humanitarian operations. The Charger Company first sergeant, 1st Sgt. Viriato Ferrera, hastily organized detainee and casualty collection points at the outskirts of the village. He was shocked to see women and children join the trickle of demoralized fighters, which turned rapidly into a stream and then, a flood.

Within minutes of surrender, 2-3 Inf. Soldiers began a 10-hour struggle to save the lives of the same Jund as-Sama’ members they had battled all night long. Along with them came hundreds of their wives and children, completely taxing the unit’s medical supplies and personnel.

Some of the Patriots said they felt fated to take part in the surreal mix of fighting and lifesaving in Zarqa, since their involvement in the episode happened by chance.

The situation

The Patriot Battalion, which had already moved in late December from Mosul to Baghdad, had been detached from 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division to 4th Brigade, 25th Infantry Division to assist with its large southern battle space. Spartan Brigade leaders had asked for reinforcements based on the identification of several targets by intelligence during the Ashura season, the commemoration of the battle of Karbala in 680 A.D., during which the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, died. As the holiest day of the year among many Shiites, it represents a key moment in their historical separation from Sunni Islam. Ashura is marked by pilgrimages to Karbala by Shiite faithful who often become targets for Sunni zealots.

The Soldiers of 2-3 Inf. had been on their own journey.

“We’d been on a long odyssey for the last week and a half before this whole thing started,” Clemmer said. The battalion left FOB Liberty in Baghdad for Karbala “on a 15-minute string,” and hadn’t returned to refit and resupply. Meanwhile, two of Clemmer’s three C Company platoons lost vehicles in the course of subsequent movements.

“We weren’t supposed to even be with the brigade we were with at the time,” said the company commander. “There weren’t any other Strykers down there at (Forward Operating Base) Kalsu when it happened. Who would have come to the rescue’”

On Jan. 28, 4th Bde., 25th Inf. Div. received a call for help from Operational Detachment Alpha 563, a Special Forces team that had answered an earlier call from another SF A-team, 566, in Zarqa, a village south of Najaf. The following account is taken from the introduction to the DVD produced by the Leader Development Team in the I Corps Battle Command Training Center at Fort Lewis:

Iraqi police received a tip that Jund as-Sama’ based in Zarqa were planning to assassinate Shiite leaders including the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr, during Ashura.

Provincial authorities reported the information to the 8th Iraqi Army, which sent a scout platoon with American advisers to conduct reconnaissance and report on the gathering in Zarqa. Once on site, the Iraqi scouts were attacked by a battalion-sized element with small arms and heavy machine guns. The scouts requested assistance.

U.S. Army SF Detachment ODA 566 arrived at 8 a.m., Jan 28. The ODA reported a large insurgent element had occupied hasty fighting positions in existing drainage canals and was placing effective small arms, machine gun and rocket-propelled-grenade fire on the Iraqi Forces.

ODA 566 requested reinforcements. A joint patrol of Iraqi SWAT and another SF detachment, ODA 563, moved to the site. After close air support from F-16s and A-10s failed to disrupt the insurgent defense, ODA 566 requested attack aviation. An attack weapons team of two AH-64 Apache helicopters departed FOB Kalsu and arrived at 12:30 p.m., simultaneously with the arrival of Hillah SWAT and ODA 563. Coordinated attacks began on the insurgent positions.

At about 1:30 p.m., one of the Apaches was shot down near the enemy position, killing both pilots. Insurgent direct fire, now augmented with mortars, prevented the SF from securing the aircraft. The coalition forces on site established an overwatch of the crash site, and effectively fixed the insurgent force with direct fire, additional attack aviation and continuous close air support.

The 4th Bde., 25th Inf. Div. commander, Col. Mike Garrett, directed that his attached Stryker battalion task force answer the call.

“The best force I’ve got, the most ready force to move 97 kilometers quickly into this unknown situation is the Strykers that are attached to me,” Lt. Col. Adam Rocke, current 2-3 Inf. commander, then the 3rd Bde., 2nd Inf. Div. operations officer, paraphrased Garrett.

Movement to Zarqa

Huggins got the call and said he could have his companies together in 15 minutes. They had planned to conduct raids that night anyway, so the planning sequence was already completed. When Clemmer’s radio squawked, in fact, he thought it was part of the rehearsal for that night’s operation.

“No sir, it’s not a practice, sir,” said the voice of his operations sergeant. “Brigade’s calling us and there’s a helicopter down.”

“We’re focused on a helicopter needs to be recovered,” Huggins said. “We get the word that there’s an (SF) ODA at the scene securing it and there’s some light contact. About an hour later we get the word to launch. I send the initial company forward, Charlie Company with Brent Clemmer, and he’s moving within 10 minutes of that launch. I assemble the logistics support trains with my Bravo Company and my battalion TAC. We’re still trying to figure out the situation on the ground.”

As orders to saddle up moved through the companies, the common expectation among the Soldiers was that they would be back in their racks at FOB Kalsu by midnight. No one had heard of the brisk fighting going on 100 kilometers to the south.

Charger Company left an hour after the launch order and Blackhorse followed a half hour later with Huggins, the TAC and battalion support trains in tow. The way south from FOB Kalsu took C Company through the city of Hillah, which they found full of Ashura pilgrims. The movement halted in its tracks.

“There’s a couple thousand people flailing themselves, big banners and everything else,” Clemmer said. “Here’s where some of the lessons of Mosul came into effect because we had worked with the police so well.”

The Iraqi police escorted the fast-moving Stryker convoy around the crowds and with the help of its escort, had quickly cleared the city and resumed its pace. Clemmer’s company made it to the outskirts of Zarqa in about 90 minutes total, despite the slowdown in Hillah.

As he arrived on site, Clemmer saw a humvee with steer horns mounted on the grill along the road. “It was Special Forces, no doubt about that,” Clemmer said. “I roll in there, jump out of the truck and the first thing I hear is .50 cal down the road just going off. So much for a secure site.”

A brief hand-off of control of the site focused on the recovery operation at hand.

“We go and confirm we have two people in the helicopter, and that was the most important thing – make sure the two guys were there,” Clemmer said. “We were there. No one else was going to get to them. It took hours to get them out, but we were going to get them out.”

Forget the fair fight: Part 2: ‘It was like a match lit up’

Captain Brent Clemmer’s C Company was the tip of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment spear on Jan. 28, 2007. He had tested the limits of his Stryker vehicles to cover the ground from FOB Kalsu to Zarqa, leading his Charger-Company convoy on a 97-kilometer dead gallop in 90 minutes.

Almost as soon as the convoy arrived at 5:30 p.m. to take control of the crash site of an AH-64, automatic fire erupted, touching off a fire fight that would last all night.

The situation was confusing at first. Iraqi 8th Army and SWAT elements had been heavily engaged in the hours prior to the arrival of the small task force and were unable to provide a detailed picture of the battleground.

A berm complex, a series of tree lines and a small cluster of farm buildings obstructed views of what Patriot Soldiers later learned was a fortified compound at the edge of a hardened village full of zealots prepared to fight to their deaths.

“The SF did a good job covering the crash site by fire,” said Staff Sgt. Brian Butler, then weapons squad leader of 2nd Platoon, C Co., “but they didn’t have the means to build a perimeter around it. The only enemy they were seeing were the ones trying to go out to the crash site to get the pilots.”

The twilight had turned to darkness, through which the Charger platoons prepared to maneuver around the helicopter. Clemmer issued orders to his platoon leaders to envelop the crash. As the platoons stepped off, AK-47s opened up from four huts to the north.

“The SF was still in control of the birds at that point,” Butler said. “That’s when the first Hellfire went off.” “It was like a match lit up,” said Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, team leader in C Company’s 1st Squad, 1st Platoon. “It looked like a toy with a candle lit underneath it. Fire straight up.”

By 5:45 p.m., the Charger platoons had formed a horseshoe around the downed Apache. They had begun the assault in their Strykers, then dismounted to sweep back across the site. Until then, there had been no mortar- or rocket-propelled-grenade fire to argue against tactical exposure.

By a few minutes after 6 p.m., they had secured the site enough to let the engineers do their work. Sappers traveling with C Company recovered the first pilot while Patriot Soldiers provided cover.

The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, arrived with Capt. Bill Parsons’ B Company, which was task-organized with recovery vehicles and his own engineer platoon.

Charger Company’s 1st Platoon took up positions on the eastern side of the chopper while 2nd Platoon settled to the Southeast, directly in front of the still-burning wreckage. Third platoon occupied berms to the west.

Small-arms fire started almost immediately from farther to the southeast. As the platoons were aligned, only 3rd could answer to suppress it without firing through its own lines.

“The bad guys were not afraid to shoot a lot but had no (aiming lights) and were poorly trained,” Clemmer said. “The result was they shot high. Most of my guys will tell you they had parts of the trees around us falling onto them, cut down by enemy fire.”

Clemmer called forward his company mortar section and oriented his section sergeant, Staff Sgt. Scott Muetz, on the targets to the east and southeast. Muetz and his section leader, Staff Sgt. Larry Neal, had endured merciless ribbing from the rest of the battalion for their insistence on training on their guns while artillery Soldiers in OIF were used overwhelmingly as infantry assets. Every Charger mortarman was thankful that night for his long hours of training and certification on the guns. With its thicket of deep trenches, Zarqa was more than anything an indirect-fire fight.

“All we had visual on was a little farm shack,” Muetz said. “(The compound and village were) farther back in. But at first we were wondering, ‘What’s all this firing about””

The mortar section fired missions and alternately dug in. By the early morning, the 60 mm tubes were ensconced inside fighting positions. The platoons on the crash-site perimeter were also using shovels in throwback defensive tactics.

“The cool part about this was World War II style, you dug in,” Bales said. “Guys were out there digging a fighting position in the ground. You’re taking a shovel and digging as fast as you can.”

“It’s no problem digging when you have rounds zinging by and the vehicle behind you is getting hit,” Muetz said. Soon after he arrived, Parsons conducted a reconnaissance-in-force and placed his engineer platoon in security overwatch on the main road into the site known as ASR Miami. Soon after he arrived, he conducted his own battle handoff with ODA 563 personnel.

En route from FOB Kalsu, Parsons had already attended to convoy security by sending his executive officer, 1st Lt. Patrick Horan, and a small team to neutralize a machine-gun ambush at a choke point along their route to Zarqa. By the time they arrived on the high ground where the enemy position had been sited, the machine gun and its crew were gone.

While B Company settled in, Huggins moved his command post and battalion support trains forward near the C Co. mortar section, now fully engaged in firing 60 mm missions. He was still unaware of the village in front of him, hidden behind the complex of farm shacks and a grove of date palms. After receiving Clemmer’s initial reports of spirited resistance and a thorough report from Capt. Roy Kempf, team leader of ODA 563, Huggins began to grasp the capability and dedication of the enemy still menacing the downed Apache in his battle space.

The plan changes

Huggins decided to modify the mission to engage the large concentration of enemy fighters they had encountered; he called in Parsons and Clemmer and issued an order to destroy enemy forces in the vicinity, while continuing recovery operations.

“We had not yet completed the recovery of the crash site, but had the site well secured,” Huggins wrote later in his commander’s summary of the battle. “I developed a plan to coordinate the airspace and allow close-air support, mortars, and rotary-winged aircraft all to participate in the fight. (I) figured we had a lucrative target and should develop it.”

“One of the main reasons we were successful,” Parsons said, “was Lt. Col. Huggins’ simple but effective plan that fixed the enemy and facilitated coordination between the different units on the ground.”

He assigned the Joint Theater Air Control System to Parsons to coordinate air assets and ordered him to lead his company south to seal off the bottom of the site. With Blackhorse Soldiers in place by 9 p.m., C Company to the west and the river to the east, Huggins concentrated air power on the northern sector to complete the box around the compound.

“They had a kill box where aircraft were looking for their own targets and calling to make sure everything was clear,” said C Co. fire support NCO, Staff Sgt. Jason Sims. “We had our indirect fires to the west of that, fixed wing and Spectre (gun ships) coming in. They were deconflicting themselves for the most part.”

Muetz’s mortar section switched to 120 mm rounds with low charges to keep the rounds below the flock of swirling aircraft. The Stryker mortar variant delivered round after pinpoint round to foil a number of insurgent attempts to regroup or mount charges.

“Those 120s were dead on,” Bales said. “We were getting (target) refinements from Spectre that were no refinements at all with the 120s. They were just dead on, just that accurate.”

“We were hearing reports that we’d killed a hundred in this trench line and I’m saying ‘Come on now, who’s slinging this bull” Clemmer said. “I’ve been in Iraq twice now and we’ve never faced 100 bad guys. It ended up being incredibly accurate, but in our minds, a hundred guys!”

Meanwhile, the careful work continued of extricating the second Apache pilot from the wreckage. Along with ducking enemy fire, the helicopter itself created a greater danger to the engineers attached to Charger Company.

“One Apache has so much (unexploded ordnance),” Butler said. “There was UXO scattered all over that field. I didn’t want to blow up trying to dig in so we didn’t dig in our hasties.”

At 10:27 p.m., brigade engineers accomplished the solemn task of securing the remains of the second pilot. “My infantry was forward fighting and those studs got the bodies out,” Clemmer said. “This was not an easy or pleasant task.”

Fire superiority

As the night wore on, despite the murderous volume of fire from all sides and above, the Soldiers-of-Heaven fighters showed incredible resiliency.

“There was a north-south running road with a big berm, behind which they were able to run and reinforce behind and a trench line that also ran east and west,” Butler said. “They’d come up on that berm and we’d shoot them; they’d pull that guy back, do buddy aid on him and replace the guy. So as they were taking casualties they were pulling guys back.”

A half-dozen times during the night, enemy fighters made suicidal rushes, some getting to within 100 to 150 meters of Patriot positions, Butler estimated. Every time, they were cut down by the weapons platform most available at the moment.

“Throughout the night, the enemy came up out of their positions and would come towards us,” Clemmer said. “It wasn’t fair and that was fine with me. As 3rd Battalion, 75th Infantry (Rangers) used to say, ‘forget the fair fight.’ Our thermals would see them and that .50 cal and the remote weapon station is wicked, wicked, wicked.”

Specialist Rodrigo Moreno had a front-row seat with 2nd Platoon, C Company directly in front of the crash site.

“When we were shooting I kind of stood up a little bit and tried to shoot,” Moreno said, “but I remember when they were dropping the 500 pounders, we got up on our knees even though bullets were still going over us and we got blown back.”

“We had so much control, we were bringing munitions in as close as we could according to military standard,” Sims said, “having the control and confidence and everybody knew where everybody was on the battlefield.”

It was clear that no amount of fanaticism would stand up to the sophistication and fire superiority of the array of U.S. weapons systems.

As midnight passed, Huggins directed B- and C-Company commanders to offer surrender terms over the public address systems in their command Strykers. They promised a lull to allow enemy fighters to gather themselves and come forward. Instead, the insurgents used the time to regroup and counter-attack.

“By (1 a.m. the enemy) was re-engaging with heavy machine guns and repositioning forces,” Huggins said. “We re-engaged with all assets. Among other things, we hit a truck carrying ammunition; it continued to cook off for half an hour. At another point, we hit an underground cache, with sympathetic detonations and small-arms ammunition cooking off for some time afterwards.”

The battle wanes

The volume of fire decreased through the early hours of Jan. 29, to the point that by some time between 3 and 4 a.m., 1st Sgt. Viriato Ferrera said it stopped altogether.

“That was the point where I think we broke their will,” Ferrera said.

Tarps and more recovery equipment arrived with ammunition resupply, allowing the sappers to complete their work dismantling the helicopter and loading the pieces onto two flat racks.

In the early morning the dangerous mission of trench clearing fell to B Company. Huggins’ battle plan from the beginning was for a Blackhorse assault from the south in the morning.

“At first light my 1st Platoon, led by 1st Lt. Austin Jones, moved up the eastern side of the objective to prevent some enemy from escaping,” Parsons said. “Then we got on-line, all four platoons, and cleared the trenches.”

While B Company mopped up the southern trenches, Clemmer was preparing his company for daylight assault from the west. He dismounted with his platoons and advanced to the berm closest to the compound. Charger Soldiers were going through final checks before the attack.

“I’m right behind my middle platoon, and we’re prepping hand grenades,” Clemmer said. “We’re going to go over the berm and seize this foothold to establish our support-by-fire line for B Company.”

As they popped up to go over the berm, fires that had burned overnight met another arms cache that exploded immediately in front of the C Co. position.

“Everyone was hitting the deck, diving over berms,” Clemmer said. “The next thing that happens is you start seeing white flags coming out. I’m looking up and my 2nd Platoon leader is in front of me saying, ‘Sir, they’re surrendering.’”

Zarqa: Forget the fair fight – Part 3: Warriors to life-savers

Patriot Battalion Soldiers were wary of the first group of Shiite fighters who walked out of Zarqa under white flags.

Special Forces officers had warned Huggins of the Soldiers of Heaven using flags of truce in attempts to sucker U.S. forces into ambushes, word of which he passed through his subordinate commanders.

Huggins’ plan before the surrender called for B Co. to clear trenches and assault from the south in the early morning hours of Monday, Jan. 29. For C Co. to assume unobstructed positions from which it could support Blackhorse Soldiers by fire, its platoons were forced to move forward, then intended to pivot on-line and orient with fields of fire across the trenches and the southern edge of the village.

Clemmer had dismounted and was following his 2nd Platoon forward on foot when the white flags appeared. After fighting throughout the night the Chargers took cover on line behind a berm, distrustful of their enemy. Clemmer ordered his platoons to halt in place to let the situation develop, ensuring this surrender was genuine.

“Everyone was exhausted at this point,” said C Company platoon leader, 1st Lt. Steve Smith. “Everyone was tense and waiting to see what would happen. We’d been shot at all night by these guys.”

First Lieutenant Jon Lowe’s 2nd Platoon, B Company Soldiers moved out to clear the largest swath of the Blackhorse sector. Lowe “had a tougher task because they had to clear a portion of the rubble-strewn village that was more heavily populated,” Parsons said, as well their share of the trench line. Lowe’s platoon also linked with the right flank of C Co. to prevent fratricide. The companies swept forward across the open areas south and west of the village and into the village itself without major incident.

“The fight was out of the enemy,” Parsons said.

Parsons’ B Co. was still clearing forward of its fighting positions from the previous night when the small group surrendered to C Co. Within a few minutes, the group in the C Company sector grew bolder.

“My assessment later is they were the bravest ones,” Clemmer said. “They probably thought we would kill them.”

The operational pause was the first chance for the 2-3 Inf. Soldiers to get a good look at what was in front of them, their first pictures that weren’t through the sites of weapons. It was their first realization that there was a village ahead rather than a few random farm buildings.

Two women followed the first group out of the village. When the Americans held their fire for the first several minutes, more followed.

The Charger 3rd Platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Tausala Faamausili, was the first to see severely wounded villagers ahead, calling out “We’ve got three litter urgents.” From that point, the floodgates opened.

“All of the sudden we go from five or 10 people to 50, then 100,” Clemmer said. “Now two platoons are fully engaged from putting the pins back in grenades, calling the trucks up, whipping the concertina wire off the trucks to start building some pens.”

Clemmer did a quick handoff with his first sergeant, who set up detainee- and casualty-collection points. The company commander culled out two squads from each platoon and pushed forward to continue clearing the village, while 1st Sgt. Viriato Ferrera took charge of the rest to quickly organize a field medical site.

Shifting on the fly

With no formal order or declaration, the mission of the first sergeant’s half of C Company shifted from combat to humanitarian operations.

“I took most of my combat lifesavers, my emergency medical technicians,” Ferrera said. “As I started getting flooded with people I called everybody else up and said, ‘Look, I need your CLSs, I need all your EMTs down here. I need your medics down here with me.’”

Huggins directed Parsons’ company to keep its medics in case his Blackhorse Soldiers met resistance in the trenches. Every other able bodied medic or Soldier with medical training streamed into the impromptu aid station to help.

The battalion surgeon, Lt. Col. Dean Pedersen, prepared his medical-evacuation-variant Stryker to receive patients, then moved out to start categorizing the wounded.

“I jumped into sort of a triage mode,” Pedersen said. “I let the medics do what treatment they could and just became an adviser, running from medic to medic saying ‘Here, do this, do that … This woman we need to evac urgently; this one isn’t going to make it no matter what we do, go to the next.’ There were all kinds (of injuries); the extent of the injuries were massive – extremity amputations to bullet wounds to fractured pelvis, intra-abdominal wounds.”

By 9 a.m., the pens were filling fast. There seemed an unlimited number of seriously wounded.

“I had the vehicles positioned so that the people getting treated weren’t in view of the detainees,” Ferrera said. He set up a field surgical site with Pedersen treating the most seriously wounded.

“Once we started getting the initial casualties in we identified some litter-urgents we had to get out of there,” Ferrera said. “I started calling battalion requesting a bird because we needed to get them air evaced out of there because they were going to pass away.”

The sun appeared blood red that morning, Clemmer said, in part because of sand in the air from desert winds. By the time the three medevac helicopters approached, the formation with the call sign “Spirit 11″ flew into a full-on sandstorm, somehow touching down exactly on the landing zone that had been scratched out for them.

Weather conditions allowed only one medical sortie, however, with the three birds taking 16 of the worst injured. Two died, but 14 were saved as a direct result of the heroic efforts of the Spirit 11 pilots.

Clearing the village

Charger Company Soldiers not engaged in the medical effort moved into the village. Clemmer said it looked like a scene from hell, wrought by the combination of Air Force and Army weapons, from indirect and his own direct fire.

The scene in the village invaded all Charger Soldiers’ senses at once.

“I’ve tried to forget the smell,” Clemmer said. “The coppery, charred, sickly sweet smell of it all was overpowering. My radio-telephone operator, Spc. (Zachary) Parsons, and I were moving all around the town and had to keep passing by a couple of the worst spots. He’d just keep lighting the smokes and passing them too me. They were a great distraction to the carnage.”

Clemmer wasn’t a smoker, but inhaled an entire pack as he and his RTO surveyed the damage.

Bill Parsons’ Blackhorse Soldiers encountered the same scenes in the southern sector of the village they cleared.

“I just couldn’t understand, faced with this overwhelming firepower, why someone would stand and fight to your death,” Parsons said.

Their own plentiful supply of arms and ammunition had apparently given the cult members a false security. Most of the dead were fully outfitted for combat.

“I thought when we were coming up on the objective that like a lot of times it was going to be pretty hard to tell who were combatants and who were not,” said Staff Sgt. Brian Butler, weapons squad leader in 2nd Platoon of C Co., “but it wasn’t actually. About 95 percent of everybody who was fighting against us, they had some gear on. They had full kits on and they were fully armed. It was clear cut: bad guys here, good guys there. If you were male, you were fighting. That’s the way they were doing it. Older males and younger, teen-age and above, they were all kitted up. They had night observation devices, sniper rifles – they had everything.”

One C Co. squad gunned down a Soldiers-of-Heaven fighter carrying an AK-47 as he dashed toward a heavy machine gun.

Another squad returned fire as they cleared a building, killing a holdout who attempted to ambush its members.

But these were the exceptions. Most combatants were too injured, exhausted or shell shocked to resist.

“One by one we started pulling these males out,” said platoon leader, 1st Lt. Gregory Weber. “About 50 percent of them had some sort of injury, whether it was minor with shrapnel and scratches to some amputees, loss of hearing and eyesight.”

After a while, however, the clearing operation morphed with the humanitarian. As Soldiers pulled out the injured, it became apparent to their horror that these fanatics had brought their families to the fight.

“Once we started clearing the town we actually started carrying people back out,” said Staff Sgt. Bales, a team leader in 1st Platoon, C Co. “We’d go in, find some people that we could help, because there were a bunch of dead people we couldn’t, throw them on a litter and bring them out to the casualty collection point.”

Heavy toll

From mid-morning through mid-afternoon, the medical aid station brimmed with bloody customers. The Charger first sergeant estimated that 90 percent of the wounded and detainees were combatants, about half of those humiliated at their loss, but most of them visibly grateful to no longer be fighting.

The nature of the casualties demonstrated the precision of U.S. firepower. Huggins said the highest battle-damage estimate of noncombatants killed was 10, a statistic verging on miraculous considering the ordnance visited upon the Shiite fighters, testimony to the accuracy of U.S. weapons and the remarkable discipline exercised by the pilots, artillerymen and Soldiers pulling the triggers.

“I was glad for the pilots that they saw it from afar because we were dealing with most of that,” Butler said. “They did an outstanding job of target discrimination because most of the dead were all enemy (combatants).”

As the day wore on, the relentless flow of casualties took its toll on C Company’s stores of supplies.

“That’s the first time I saw the MEV completely empty of all first aid equipment,” Ferrera said. “We went completely black on equipment and first aid supplies.”

The number and nature of the wounded also took an emotional toll.

“The hardest thing they had to deal with (among) all the guys that were treating that day, as well as myself because I have four children, was treating the children,” Ferrera said.

He stopped one NCO from fleeing after treating a 5-year-old girl with a grievously injured arm.

“‘I need you here to do your job, Sergeant,’” he told the exhausted, overwhelmed medic. “‘These people need you.’ That was probably the largest battle that day – treating the children.”

Faamausili, who was named an “Armed Forces Real Hero” by the Rainier Chapter of the American Red Cross for his combat- and lifesaving actions that day, found two children dead along the road leading to the village. The platoon sergeant’s men watched as he wrapped them in a rug and, eyes glistening, gently placed them away from traffic.

“Just the grief on his face for the loss of a child’s life,” Clemmer said. “The guy’s almost 6’6″ and 300 pounds, and in this tender way wrapping up someone who had been killed, treating them like his own kids. I try to get most of the images of that place out of my head, but that’s one of the few that always sticks there.”

Ferrera stayed on task but remembered thinking at the end of the day, “Why would you bring your family, your children to something like this if you know what you were going to do’”

By 3 p.m., they had treated most of the wounded and around 4 p.m., transferred responsibility for them and the site to the Iraqi Security Forces.

Pedersen, exhausted by his lifesaving efforts, knelt and took a moment to catch his breath. He had trouble getting back on his feet.

Aftermath

Interrogators’ interviews with detainees began to paint an intelligence picture later confirmed by materials collected at Zarqa. The Soldiers of Heaven were a Shiite splinter group that had prepared and trained for combat. They had imminent plans to travel to Najaf and murder three Shiite leaders during Ashura to foment strife and exacerbate an already tenuous security environment that some were in January 2007 calling a civil war in Iraq.

“This is a cult who had bought this farm, like the Branch Davidians,” Huggins said. “It was their base. They had stockpiled medical supplies, ammunition, a significant number of weapons, literally hundreds and hundreds of small arms, RPGs.

I don’t know what the result would have been had all those folks been assassinated during Ashura. It’s probably not unreasonable to assume that a collapse would have ensued. And it was headed off because they shot a helicopter down and we got sucked into what went from a search-and-rescue to a recovery to a hasty defense to an attack to humanitarian relief.”

The current commander of 2-3 Inf. saw the battle as validation for the tactics, configuration and agility of the Stryker brigade combat team.

“Zarqa demonstrated that we have an expeditionary mindset, a mindset unlike any other unit in the Army today,” Lt. Col. Adam Rocke said. “It shows that a Stryker infantry task force is capable of doing things that no other unit in the Army is capable of doing, exemplifying flexibility, agility and lethality like no other unit.”

Rocke said the battalion’s exceptional chain of command helped the SBCT produced the one-sided victory.

“Leadership is paramount,” he said, “leaders who are seasoned, who understand commander’s intent and who act with disciplined initiative and who understand the offensive mindset.”

The ability to conduct full-spectrum operations and transition to humanitarian activities proved how unique Stryker Soldiers are, he said.

That sentiment was shared by the NCOs who were there, many of whom remain in the Patriot Battalion.

“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” Bales said now a member of 2-3 Inf. headquarters, “for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

Clemmer, who won a Silver Star for his leadership through all phases of the complex battle, saw it as a moral victory as well as a tactical one.

“There is not an army in the world, in my opinion, that can go from taking pins out of grenades and throwing them over trenches to receiving wounded, treating the wounded and taking care of an enemy that we had killed throughout the night – treating enemy combatants with that humanity.”

For its actions in the Battle of Zarqa, 2-3 Inf. has been submitted for the Valorous Unit Award. The recommendation received the endorsement of the current commanding general of Central Command, Gen. David S. Petraeus, and is awaiting final approval at Human Resources Command.

Mar 22 2012: US Defense Department officials announced earlier today that the number killed in the massacre has been increased to seventeen. Two government spokespersons gave vague details suggesting that either another body had been found at the scene, or that an injured victim had succumb to their injuries. Bales is expected to be formally charged tomorrow.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye

Abdulelah Haider Shaye is a name most in the western world aren’t familiar with, and Barack Obama would like to keep it that way. Shaye is a Yemeni independent journalist who was covering the impact of military activities in Yemen. He was daring enough to interview some of the most wanted men in the world. Anwar Al-Awlaki met for an interview with Shaye which later broadcast on Al-Jazeera, prior to it becoming known that Awlaki was the first US citizen added to a CIA kill list. In the same month that the interview was aired, Shaye took the initiative to investigate a missile attack claimed by the Yemeni government to have been orchestrated by their military. It was December of 2009 when the village of Majala was targeted as the alleged site of an Al-Qaeda training camp. After the bombing, Shaye traveled to the area and took the pictures which were broadcast by news media around the globe. His report revealed remnants of tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs. Neither of these weapons being in the Yemeni national arsenal, the Made in the USA stamp emblazoned on the debris revealed the true source of the attack. The pentagon refused to comment on the photos and Yemeni officials denied all involvement by the US government. Wikileaks later published a US diplomatic cable which documented Yemeni officials admitting to lying to their parliament about US military coordination. Fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed in the strike (the number of males killed is not known, and assuredly all are automatically assumed to be Al-Qaeda terrorists). The Majala bombing was the first of what would be an ongoing deadly string of aerial assaults by the US military in association with Yemeni state militants.

Unexploded cluster munitions in Majala.

The following July, Shaye was at a grocery store when armed men put a hood over his head and threw him into a waiting car. Shaye was detained for days, threatened, and released. Before he was released, one of his captors told him, “We will destroy your life if you keep on talking about this issue.” Within a month, he was kidnapped again, and after a kangaroo court proceeding, which his lawyer denounced from the beginning, he was sentenced to five years in prison on accusations of coordinating with Al-Qaeda.

Such an uproar was caused by his conviction that tribal leaders pressured then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh to pardon him. It was national news that the pardon was to be signed this past February. But then the president’s phone rang, and it was the president of the United States.

The White House acknowledged that Barack Obama telecommunicated to Saleh that he had concerns over Shaye’s impending release. After the phone call, Saleh decided not to pardon the imprisoned journalist.

Anwar Al-Awlaki was targeted in large part because he was seen as a public relations arm for Al-Qaeda. It was cited that he had a facebook page and published youtube videos, implying that those abilities among Islamic terrorists are lacking. Perhaps Shaye is being targeted for daring to talk to untouchables, terrorists.

Read the detailed story by Jeremy Scahill at truthout.org. Embedded below is video coverage by Democracy Now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=phrXBQZg_AU

Friday afternoon, I went out to record some scenes of the new indoctrination center for Keene’s young adults. There I found this violent woman who, unprovoked, attacks me with her sign. She wouldn’t give her name.

9-Second Version in which she attacks.
53-Second Version in which she explains.
3-Minute Version in which I forgive her.
Raw Version featuring the Keene Police rejecting the Police Hugging Squad coming soon!

Miami journalist Carlos Miller was in the area following the NH Liberty Forum. He visited Keene on Monday to survey the status of right to record issues plaguing courts in the southwest portion of the state. For a while, a camera ban had been enforced in Keene courthouses but surprisingly today, bailiffs allowed Ademo Freeman through security with a video camera. Previously, cameras were only permitted through once the validated motion to record was in hand. As Carlos filmed the security theater, bailiffs noticeably kept their gaze away from the lens until they were prompted to give a response. Within forty seconds of the operating camera being made an issue of by bailiff Fredrickson, a call is made to sheriff’s deputies that, “We’ve got somebody who refuses to turn off a camera.” Within two minutes, deputy Caleb Dodson had backed Carlos and his camera out of the lobby with quickly repeated threats of arrest. It is at this point that deputies arrest Ian Freeman and Kelly Voluntaryist for violating no trespassing orders they had previously been given by sheriff Dick Foote. Footage of the arrests is difficult to discern as the camera is forced out just ahead of the seizure.

Carlos Miller had, prior to the arrests, done the activity which had caused the original no trespassing orders to be issued to the three arrested. He waited in the parking lot to question court officials — more specifically, judges who use unwritten laws to suppress photography and videography. No word yet on how fruitful the stakeout was.

Ian was released on PR bail around noon. Kelly was released a few hours later, and there was a delay in Derrick’s release when the bail commissioner left the jail before returning to liberate him. A court hearing on the matter is scheduled for April 17. To date, seven Free Keene activists have been given no trespassing orders to prevent them from appearing at the courthouse under penalty of arrest.

The video linked below features the action yesterday morning, as well as some footage from relevant past experiences at the courthouse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This article originally published at freeconcord.org.

Photo: Carlos Miller

The police have deleted the footage he had taken in the moments leading up to his arrest. Another journalist is believed to have captured footage of the arrest, which has yet to be released. There is a reason that the United States has recently been downgraded to 47th place on the global Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.

You can read the first hand account of the arrest at the Photography Is Not A Crime blog. I especially appreciate Carlos’ activism and reporting, as he was the first of many bloggers to feature coverage of my Lemonade Liberation outreach last August.

Carlos Miller will be speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire on Saturday, February 25 at this year’s Liberty Forum.

This article was originally published at freeconcord.org.

Feb 4 2012: Some of the footage that was deleted by police has been recovered, and the slightly choppy video is embedded below. In a blog published today, it is noted that data recovery services will be used to restore more of the footage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video is briefly prefaced with text stating, “If a person walked in to vote in the 2012 New Hampshire Primary, and said the names of multiple DEAD people…Could he receive a ballot to vote without showing any ID?” “© Project Veritas” is watermarked on the screen. If you watch for the entire ten minutes, you’ll see the same scene repeated multiple times. A man walks into a polling location wearing an inconspicuous camera on his person. He says, “Do you have a (name) on your list?” When asked to confirm the address and party registration, he says, “That is the address” and, “That is the registration”. Upon receiving a ballot, the man returns the ballot and insists on retrieving identification before casting a vote. The video ends with a less than climactic interview of poor audio quality with ward moderator Ryk Bullock.

There was much publicized discontent over a plan by some house republicans earlier last year to mandate voters provide photographic identification at the polls. Currently, potential voters are entitled to a ballot so long as they are willing to sign an affidavit affirming their residence within a particular ward. It is clear what the political motivation of the actors in the video are when they insist that poll workers check their IDs.

On this point, I don’t concur with the producers of the video, who sign off with, “Reporting for the Project Veritas, James O’Keefe and Spencer Meads”. While they made a noteworthy point about the ability to receive a ballot while impersonating the deceased, they did not prove that photo IDs are an imperative necessity for New Hampshire’s election process.

The first editorial published in the Concord Monitor critical of the actions of Project Veritas was penned by Zandra Rice Hawkins, the director of Granite State Progress. Zandra characterizes the actions of O’Keefe and Meads as breaking the law and obstructing the New Hampshire primary. To justify the claim that they had broken the law, she cites the voter fraud statute. In the statute, the act of impersonating another voter is criminalized, in addition to actually casting the fraudulent ballot. While the impersonation may be technically illegal, clearly the spirit of the law is to prevent illegitimate votes from being cast.

Another law alleged to have been broken by the duo is the infamous wiretapping statute. Many who haven’t dug deeply into the applications of the statute falsely believe the law to require consent to audio record an individual. Despite the word “consent” appearing in the RSA, all that is required in the statute is that someone be aware that they could be recorded. When out in public, there’s no expectation of privacy, and apart from the voting booth itself, the polling location is considered to be a particularly public space. The process is considered so open that campaigns are permitted to host poll watchers, whose job it is to monitor the checklist for who has voted as poll workers check names off. On primary day, I volunteered in this capacity for the presidential candidate I dislike the least. While poll watching, a cameraman, likely from WMUR, set up his equipment near the entrance and got several wide shots of the slow action. He did not survey those in the room for consent to be recorded, nor was this his responsibility.

Zandra does not elaborate on how Project Veritas disrupted the primary. Nobody was prevented from voting, and it is not as though one particular poll worker is singled out in the video or made to look irresponsible. She analogizes, “It’s like saying that a bank could be robbed, then filming yourself robbing it to prove your point.” At this point, one is not even comparing apples and oranges. Robbing a bank and not casting fraudulent ballots go together like honeydew melons and predator drones.

While I strongly disagree with Zandra’s suggestion that making criminals of O’Keefe and company is a good idea, I appreciate that while making such strong statements, she was open enough to attach her name. The following day’s Concord Monitor included a follow-up piece, written under the anonymous moniker of the Monitor Editorial Board. The piece which ran on January 20 corrected the mistaken claim that Project Veritas had violated the wiretapping statute, but it took no shame in endorsing a prison sentence and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for the participants in the video. I suggest the editorial board of the Monitor give a second reading to the New Hampshire constitution, which humbly suggests in article 18 that “No wise legislature will affix the same punishment to the crimes of theft, forgery, and the like, which they do to those of murder and treason.” Amateur journalism ought be affixed the same penalty that every other nonviolent, victimless crime ought have: absolutely nothing. Those who call for noncriminals to be imprisoned are mobs endorsing institutional violence. The anonymous author exposes that (s)he cares less for election security than (s)he does seeing political opponents purged. Opening and closing with similar lines, the piece ends with, “The best way to ensure the sanctity of the vote is to make the penalty for daring to obstruct, defraud or otherwise game the system so onerous that only a fool would risk it.”

This approach is as shortsighted as the assumption that executing people for lesser offenses (such as narcotics as in Singapore and Saudi Arabia) will result in people choosing not to commit those offenses. The failure of this assumption is demonstrated as people continue to be executed in those countries year after year. In openly acknowledging in the middle of the article that nobody knows how much voter fraud goes on in the state, the author underscores the fact that putting up a tough front does nothing to deter actual criminals who are free to continue their clandestine activities.

A cheap and easy solution that doesn’t require the mass of voters to carry ID and would greatly deter the type of potential fraud that Project Veritas exposed would be to list dates of birth alongside name, address, and party registration on the voter rolls. Throwing more people in prison and putting them under tremendous financial distress does nothing but increase the State’s threshold for violence.

This article originally published at freeconcord.org.

Jan 30 2012: Yesterday’s Monitor featured a fair biographical piece on James O’Keefe. He directed the actions seen in the NH primary video from New Jersey, where he is prohibited from leaving. In early 2010, he pled guilty to entering a federal building under a false pretense, in connection to a phone jamming incident regarding a Louisiana senator. His probation is scheduled to expire in May of 2013. It turns out that O’Keefe is technically not an amateur to the extent that he is paid heavily for his exploits. Whether an amateur is defined by quality of work over whether one is paid up front, the videos that O’Keefe has produced speak for themselves.