U.S. Armed Forces React to Charges Against Troops in Iraq

JEFFREY KAYE:

With Marines taking fire and locked in street-by-street combat, these scenes look like real fighting in Baghdad or Fallujah. But this is the Marine Corps' combat training center in Twentynine Palms, California.

Here, in a mock Iraqi village in the Mojave Desert, Marines scheduled to ship out to Iraq by the end of the summer are preparing for the kind of combat they're likely to face.

SOLDIER:

Tell him just to cooperate, and it will be over soon.

JEFFREY KAYE:

Here and at other bases, the U.S. military is refining its training, not only in tactics, but in ethics. That's because of a series of accusations that American servicemen have murdered noncombatants in Iraq.

Brigadier General Douglas Stone is the commander of the Twentynine Palms Marine base.

Brigadier General Douglas Stone, Commanding General, Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base:

The lesson is to teach them how to achieve their mission with the ethical use of force, and to ensure that they're always following the rules of engagement.

JEFFREY KAYE:

Rocked by the allegations of atrocities, the military is strengthening programs to educate soldiers and Marines about ethical conduct and the rules of war, what it calls values training.

Here, Marines get a sense of the dangers they're likely to encounter, car bombs, snipers, and civilians who may or may not be insurgents. They're also here to learn about cultural sensitivities. To assist them are up to 500 Arabic-speaking role players, many of them Iraqi-Americans.

Marines undergoing training say they have learned, the key to their success will be getting to know the Iraqis.

SERGEANT MATTHEW GRAFF, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment: I think it's just something that, as soon as we actually get on the deck over there, that we will establish our own relationships with the people around the area that we're working in. And it's something that will develop, and we will get better communication with them. And then we will start understanding who is bad, who is not, who can we trust, who can we not.

JEFFREY KAYE:

By inviting the news media to report on these exercises, the message the Marine Corps intends to send is clear, namely, the military is learning from mistakes in Iraq and adjusting its training.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANDREW KENNEDY, U.S. Marine Corps:

We have evolved, adapted, and made things as good as they can be, in order to give our guys the tools that they are going to need for the kind of fight that they have.

JEFFREY KAYE:

But human rights advocates say this kind of training only partially addresses the problem of military misconduct.

BRIDGET WILSON, Attorney:

I think you have to look at a failure of leadership when you start having a cluster of these kinds of cases.

JEFFREY KAYE:

Bridget Wilson, a San Diego lawyer who often represents service men and women, says the boundaries for acceptable military behavior are set in Washington.

BRIDGET WILSON:

I think that, when you have people very high up saying things to troops like, well, we think the Geneva Conventions are quaint and out of mode, and need to be changed, that kind of an attitude starts to filter down.

And when you see only fairly low-ranking people being prosecuted in these matters, it can get pretty cynicism-inducing.