Documents on crimes committed by US soldiers show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The documents, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ahead of a legal action, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, who was convicted of negligent homicide over the death of an Iraqi general during interrogation
The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.
In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man's head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a "stress position" they insisted was an approved technique.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide over the death of Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a January 2006 court martial.
Even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents showed.
"The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information," Welshofer wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. "To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation - it is a conversation."
The documents were obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act request the ACLU filed with the military more than a year ago asking for all documents relevant to US military involvement in the deaths of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Only the army responded.
The ACLU lawsuit seeks to compel the military to produce all documents related to all incidents of civilian deaths at the hands of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 2005. The ACLU says the materials are releasable under the law.