When the charges came out five years ago, it was easy to write them off as lies or exaggerations. Iraqi police accused U.S. military forces of capturing 11 people — including women and children — and then simply executing them.
Even those of us who oppose the war found that hard to believe. It had to be lies, because Americans soldiers just don’t do things like that. Except … well … it appears there’s a good chance U.S. soldiers did do that, based on at least one of the secret U.S. cables released last week by Wikileaks.
The initial news report from 2006 quoted the Iraqi police report:
“The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”
The U.S. military denied everything. In fact, a military spokesman denied ever having even heard of the allegations. There were promises to “get to the bottom of this” and find out the truth, but we never heard anything more about it.
It turns out that a UN special investigator — a law professor now teaching at New York University — pursued the story at the time, because his investigation told the same story that the Iraqi police had concluded. One of the newly released secret cables includes a document from the investigator:
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