| Publish Date: Saturday,5 May, 2007, at 08:45 AM Doha Time |
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| Iraqi police commandos guard a bridge during the Friday curfew, in which motorists are not allowed to circulate, in Baghdad yesterday |
The study by an army mental health advisory team also found continuing problems with morale and said acute mental health issues were more prevalent among troops with extended tours or on their second and third deployment to Iraq.
“They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at,” said Ward Casscells, the Pentagon’s health affairs chief.
For the first time ever, soldiers and Marines in combat units were questioned on issues of character and ethics, and their answers suggested hardened attitudes toward civilians among front line troops:
- About 10% of soldiers surveyed reported mistreating non-combatants or damaging their property when it was not necessary;
- Less than half of the soldiers and Marines would report a team member for unethical behaviour;
- More than a third of all soldiers and Marines reported that torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow soldier or Marine.
Major General Gale Pollock, the army’s acting surgeon general, sought to make a distinction between soldiers’ thoughts about torture and their actions.
“These men and women have been seeing their friends injured and I think that having that thought is normal,” she said at a Pentagon news conference.
“But what it speaks to is the leadership that the military is providing, because they’re not acting on those thoughts. They’re not torturing the people,” she said.
General George Casey, then the commander of US forces in Iraq, asked the survey team to include questions on ethics.
It came at a time when the US military was beset by a string of high profile cases involving civilian killings by soldiers and Marines, and concerned that some commanders had done little about it.
The team surveyed 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines between August and October 2006 in Iraq. Although the report was completed in November, it was only released yesterday in censored form after its findings began to leak to the press.
On whether torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or marine, 44% of the Marines surveyed said it should, as did 41% of the soldiers.
When asked if torture should be allowed to gather important information about insurgents, 39% of marines and 36% of soldiers surveyed said it should.
Only 38% of marines and 47% of soldiers surveyed agreed that “all non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect.”
Among both soldiers and Marines, 17% said “all non-combatants should be treated as insurgents.”
Only about one in four soldiers or Marines surveyed said they would put themselves at risk to help a non-combatant in danger.
In terms of battlefield behavior, 7% of Marines and 4% of soldiers admitted to having physically hit or kicked a non-combatant when it was not necessary.
Twelve percent of Marines and 9% of the soldiers said they had damaged or destroyed Iraqi property when it was not necessary.
Asked whether they would report a member of their unit for injuring or killing a non-combatant, only 40% of the Marines surveyed said they would. Fifty-five percent of the soldiers answered affirmatively to that question.
Only about a third of the Marines said they would report a member of their unit for mistreating a non-combatant, not following orders, violating the rules of engagement, or unnecessarily destroying private property.
Fewer than half the soldiers responded positively to those questions.
The study found that morale among soldiers was worse than among Marines, which it said was explained in part by the Marines’ shorter six-month tours. – AFP
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