U.S. military killing trials reflect public fatigue

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In one Iraqi city U.S. Marines kidnapped and killed an Iraqi grandfather. In another, enraged forces killed 24 civilians, most in their homes, after the death of a popular American comrade. One Marine urinated on a corpse.

Yet many Americans outraged three years ago by nonlethal U.S. abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are tuning out deadlier acts, reflecting growing public fatigue with a messy war and hope that American involvement in an unending conflict will fade.

This week, military courts in Camp Pendleton, California convicted the last of eight Americans charged in the 2006 killing of the Iraqi grandfather in Hamdania. Later this month, hearings start against the suspected leader of the killings of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, in Haditha.

Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo gained fame with his 1971 experiment in which ordinary people turned abusive when given authority. Yet he is surprised that the Hamdania and Haditha cases involving ordinary Marines have sparked far less outcry than Abu Ghraib, in which startling photographs depicted prisoners piled into a naked pyramid.

At Abu Ghraib, "The deeds were horrendously humiliating but I think pale in comparison to these new revelations and of the Marine who got only bad conduct discharge and no jail time for cold-blooded murder of a middle-aged Iraq citizen," Zimbardo said.

"Where is the ... outrage?," he said.

Zimbardo referred to the July 20 verdict against Cpl. Trent Thomas, one of two Marines who shot the Hamdania man. U.S. forces then placed a shovel and an AK-47 rifle by the corpse to make it appear he was caught digging a hole for a roadside bomb.

RAGE IN IRAQ, U.S. DISTRACTION

Incidents of illegal killings by U.S soldiers in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have enraged ordinary Iraqis and many other people around the world, including in Arab countries and Europe.

Yet after news broke last year of the Haditha killings, a Pew Research Center poll found just 24 percent of U.S. adults closely following the investigation.

"America has taken little interest in the war ... and even even less interest in the disciplinary proceedings of the military," said Gary Solis, a former military judge now an adjunct Georgetown University Law School professor.

A Factiva database search of news articles over the past year finds Paris Hilton mentioned 50 times more often than Hamdania.

Polls suggest most Americans have turned against the Iraq war.

Reports of frequent bombings in which dozens of Iraqis die typically appear deep inside American newspapers and some analysts see a public numbing to the carnage, even when Americans are involved.

Rarely do Americans see photos of Iraqi dead or the caskets of the more than 3,600 Americans who have died there.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib raised questions of whether they reflected Pentagon policies -- a factor unseen in the more recent trials, said John Brady Kiesling, a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 to protest the war. "The trials of small fry (for Abu Ghraib) attracted global interest as a surrogate for war-crimes trials at a much higher level."

For many Americans the Haditha and Hamdania cases, which occurred without the photographs that made Abu Ghraib so startling, have become footnotes to a war gone bad.

"Highlighting the Haditha/Hamdania trials offers no clear benefit to anyone," said Kiesling, author of the 2006 book "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower." "I suspect most Americans would share my ... sense that these are the all-too-ordinary war crimes of angry, grieving, heavily-armed young soldiers and junior officers dropped into an environment they were helpless to understand."

Lawyer Paul Bergrin, who represented one of the convicted U.S. Abu Ghraib defendants, said the Abu Ghraib photos awoke many Americans to a bitter reality about the Iraq war and its impact on the behavior of soldiers.

"There were different expectations about what to expect from the American soldier," he said. "Abu Ghraib occurred when the war was in its very early stages and the perception about what the American soldier experienced in Iraq was a lot different in the American mind."