http://blacklistednews.com/…
Source: IHT

The U.S. military has admitted that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.

The attack on June 25 killed three people, a man and two women, as they drove to work at a bank at Baghdad International Airport. The attack infuriated Iraqi officials and even prompted the Iraqi armed forces general command to call the shooting a cold-blooded murder.

It also bolstered calls from Iraqi politicians to pressure the U.S. military to leave Iraq after this year, when a UN mandate expires, unless the United States agrees to permit its soldiers to be subject to criminal prosecution under Iraqi law for attacks on civilians.

In a statement issued late Sunday, the U.S. military said that “a thorough investigation determined that the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq.” It added that the soldiers were not at fault for the killings because they had fired warning shots and exercised proper “escalation of force” measures before shooting the people in the car.

But the findings called into question the way the military handled the aftermath of the shootings.

For example, a key assertion of the news release issued by the military on the day of the killings was that “a weapon was recovered from the wreckage.” But the military admitted Sunday that no one claimed to have found a weapon in the car or had seen a weapon taken from it.

Instead, one of the soldiers at the scene reported seeing an Iraqi police officer pull something from the burned car and then place it in the front seat of an ambulance, according to Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, which patrols Baghdad.

The soldier never said the item pulled from the car was a weapon, he said. But somehow the soldier’s account formed the basis for a statement in an initial internal military assessment of the attack, which said a weapon had been pulled from the car.

“We don’t believe there was any cover-up,” Stover said. “We don’t believe there was any malicious intent.”

The investigation also revealed that the car had already passed through a major checkpoint leading into the airport, which required the occupants to submit to a thorough search for weapons and other dangerous objects. As they had many times before, the bank employees then drove down the main civilian road to the airport.

But this time they encountered a four-vehicle military convoy that was not supposed to be there; the convoy had taken the wrong road and failed to turn into a military checkpoint. Instead, the military vehicles had traveled down a road that serves as the main entryway for thousands of Iraqis who drive every week to the Baghdad airport.

The convoy had stopped on the side of the road to try to fix a problem with one vehicle when the passenger car approached. A soldier guarding the rear of the convoy fired several warning shots, according to Stover. When the car did not stop, 9 of the 18 soldiers in the platoon opened fire.

“This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident,” Colonel Allen Batschelet, chief of staff for the 4th Infantry Division, said in the statement issued Sunday night. He said the military would take “several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future.”

According to Stover, those measures include ensuring that troops do not accidentally travel down the civilian road to the airport as well as undertaking a review of “escalation of force” procedures “to see if they are meeting needs of the current environment.”