AMY GOODMAN: Marine Corps rifleman Vincent Emanuele testifying before Congress. We’ll be back with more from Winter Soldier on the Hill in a minute.


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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war.


ADAM KOKESH: I think my background can best be summarized by a form that I filled out 9 June, 1999 at the military entrance processing station after enlisting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, entitled “Why I Joined the Marine Corps." I feel a responsibility to take part in the national defense in some way. For whatever short amount of time or whatever miniscule part of it that I am, I would like to do my part, and I feel the Marine Corps is the best way for me to do it. I am also joining for the experience in self-growth that comes with being a Marine. The experiences are priceless, and many cannot be had anywhere else. I would only hope that anyone considering joining the military today for those reasons of which I am very proud of realize that they have a higher calling than serving their country: to restore faith in our system of governance, before they make themselves ready to fight and kill and die in the United States of America, knowing that they may end up dying for a lie.


I joined the Marine Corps. I shipped to boot camp June 18, 2000, and checked into my reserve unit at the end of that year after completing artillery training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and went to college at Claremont McKenna in Southern California.


And in the run-up to the war, I believed the narrative that was being put forth by this administration. I believed what Colin Powell said at the UN. And still, I believed that the war would not be in this nation’s best interest and was against it from the beginning.


But after the war, after the invasion, at the beginning of the occupation, I felt that what we were doing was cleaning up our mess and genuinely responsible foreign policy and trying to do good by the Iraqi people, so I volunteered to go with a civil affairs unit. And in the two weeks between being activated and deploying to Iraq, I learned that what we were doing in civil affairs was going to be working with the Iraqi people on schools and mosques and clinics and water projects, and to me it sounded like exactly what the President was promising that we would be doing in Iraq. And I was very excited about that. I thought that we were going to be the tip of the spear. And I had to go to Iraq myself to found out that that was not the case and that the greatest enemies of the Constitution are not to be found in the sands of Fallujah, but rather right here in Washington, D.C.


When I—on our way into Iraq, I was issued this rules of engagement card that is supposed to be the gold standard of conduct and use of force for the military in the occupation of Iraq. They couldn’t even cut the card square. But if I may, it begins with “Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. Section one. Enemy military and paramilitary forces may be attacked, subject to the following instructions. Positive identification is required prior to engagement. PID is, quote, ‘reasonable certainty,’ unquote, that your target is a legitimate military target. If no PID, contact your next higher commander for decision. Section one, delta. Do not fire into civilian populated areas or buildings unless the hostile force is using them for hostile purposes or if necessary for your self-defense.” Section three reads, “You may detain civilians if they interfere with mission accomplishment, possess important information or if required for self-defense.” It says at the end, “Remember, attack only hostile forces and military targets.” And at the very end, it says, “These ROE will remain in effect until your commander”—and then the rest of that sentence is actually cut off here.


And that just goes to show that not only are the rules of engagement, as they’re strictly outlined by this card, to contradict themselves and to be confusing and to put Marines in a situation where their morals, as defined by those rules, are put at odds with their survival instincts. And I think that it’s fundamentally criminal to put brave young Americans in that situation.


I was attached to Golf Company 2/1, my civil affairs team, before the siege of Fallujah, and we were called with them to support them in the blocking of the two bridges over the Euphrates River on the west side of Fallujah after four Blackwater security agents were killed and had their bodies burned and strung up on the northern bridge in April of 2004.


Shortly after arriving there—first slide, please—there was a checkpoint shooting to the west of our position where a man coming home from work at the end of the day did not see the newly emplaced Humvee, desert-colored, against the desert background, manned by Marines wearing desert-colored camouflage. And a Marine there decided that he was approaching at too fast a rate of speed and emptied into the vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun. We later justified this by saying that there were—that hearing the vehicle burning afterwards, there were rounds cooking off from the heat, although it’s clear from this picture and from every other examination that there were no rounds in the vehicle cooking off that would have made punctures in the outer body of the vehicle. Next slide, please. The second round or the round that hit this Iraqi gentleman in his chest, hit him so hard that it broke his chair and knocked him back in his seat.


Next slide, please. The vehicle was dragged into our compound where we were sleeping, as you can see in the background where the vehicles are parked in this picture. This is a picture that I’m very ashamed of, having posed with this dead Iraqi as a trophy picture. But what felt awkward to me at the time was not that—not so much that I was taking the picture, but rather that I had not killed this man, and I was almost—I was taking a trophy of someone else’s kill. And my entire team was present for this, including a major, and numerous members of my team took similar pictures. At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you. Don’t ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and this disregard for human life is acceptable or common.” And yet, we are still doing this to service members every day, as long as the occupation

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