Illegitimate Sniping

Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iraqi returning from a fellow tribesman's home in the afternoon heat. To gain some shade, you step off the main road and decide to take a shortcut down a path through a grove of trees. Before you, on the path, is a spool of wire often used by insurgents in building IEDs. Seeing no one around, you pick it up with the intention of giving it you your brother, a soldier in the Iraqi Army...

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a member of the Islamic State of Iraq. You wear no uniform, no insignia that identifies you as anything other than a civilian. Late to a meeting with cell members at a nearby safehouse, you step off the main road to take a shortcut down a path through a grove of trees. Before you, on the path, is a spool of wire often used by your fellow insurgents in building IEDs. Seeing no one around, and wondering if one of your fellow cell members may have use for it, you warily pick it up with the intention of giving it to you cell's bomb builder...

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a U.S. Army sniper in a concealed position a hundred meters away, watching these scenarios play out. Can you cipher their intentions and determine which man is the insurgent, and which is the civilian, based merely upon the decision to pick up the spool of wire?

If a Washington Post story this morning is correct, that is precisely the determination that an elite sniper platoon was asked to make as part of a classified baiting program hoping to identify and eliminate insurgents in one area of Iraq.

"Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy," Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. "Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces."

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military's Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the "drop items" to be used "to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight."

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined "quite meticulously" because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

"In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," Fidell said.

In a country where every household is expected to have small arms for protection, using bait such as small arms, magazines, or ammunition for these small arms would be entirely and unquestioningly unacceptable. It would be far too tempting for civilians to pick up such found implements that they could legally own, use, or sell.

On the other hand, if the unit was using bait items that could only be use by insurgents and terrorists--say, artillery rounds or plastic explosives--then the baiting becomes more targeted and less likely to ensnare innocent civilians. But when the penalty for picking up such objects and attempting to carry them away is a marksman’s bullet, is it acceptable to take that gamble?

The story reported by Josh White and Joshua Partlow, unfortunately, immediately begins to purposefully conflate unlike things almost immediately after raising very legitimate questions about the baiting program.

Citing two soldiers who only revealed the program in revenge for pending disciplinary actions is problematic, as is conflating murder charges pending against soldiers for planting evidence after a shooting took place with the program of leaving bait to hopefully identify insurgents worth shooting.

It is one thing to shoot someone because they are holding a hand grenade as the approach your position, but quite another to shoot someone coming down the same path and then plant the grenade on their body after the fact. White and Partlow spend the majority of their article blurring the distinctions between the two, while admitting begrudgingly in one sentence on the second page of the article:

Though it does not appear that the three alleged shootings were specifically part of the classified program, defense attorneys argue that the program may have opened the door to the soldiers' actions because it blurred the legal lines of killing in a complex war zone.

The reporters present the defense team arguments of murder suspects as their "evidence" of a failed program, but it is nothing of the sort.

The men they speak with are on trial for planting weapons on men they've killed, after the fact, to justify a killing that they felt was questionable under their rules of engagement. The baiting program, while a legitimate topic for vigorous debate and legal review in it’s own right, has nothing to do with planting evidence at all.

The "throwaway" gun is a staple of television shows and films going back decades based upon the dishonorable practice of a very few real-life law enforcement officers who planted guns on the bodies of criminals to justify a "bad" or questionable shooting. That this practice also occurs in war zones is unsurprising, if regrettable.

That White and Partlow would be so gullible as to immediately and uncritically swallow defense team arguments that the program is to blame for the alleged criminal acts of their clients planting evidence to justify a shooting is an unconscionable act of criminal advocacy to advance apparent personal biases against a program only tangentially related, if newsworthy in its own right. Put another way, they don’t like the program, and are willing to use the club provided for them by the defense team, without any critical eye towards the merits of the defense, which are few.

The illegitimate sniping in this case clearly doesn't stop with the soldiers, and we deserve better from our professional journalists than this.