U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to understand and observe the rules on interrogations and deadly actions when they committed crimes against local civilians, say documents released on Wednesday.
The report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) showed it was common that U.S. soldiers believed they did not break any law when killing local citizens.
Among the killings, U.S. soldiers pushed a Iraqi man into the Tigris River because he broke curfew and a former Iraqi general suspected of helping insurgents was suffocated during interrogation, according to the documents.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, who was convicted by a January 2006 court-martial of negligent homicide in the death of an Iraqi general during the interrogation, still insisted his actions were not against the rules, the documents show.
"An interrogation without stress is not an interrogation -- it is a conversation," he said in a letter to the court.
Through a federal Freedom of Information Act, ACLU requested for all documents concerning U.S troops involvement in the deaths of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, only the Army responded.
ACLU is to file a lawsuit, by which compel the military to disclose all documents on all civilian deaths incidents U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were accounted for since January 2005.
Source: Xinhua
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