This has garnered, as far as I can tell, almost no attention in the U.S. corporate media (or the blogosphere, for that matter), but it's sensational. As
this story in the UK Daily Telegraph reports:
After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces. Ben Griffin told commanders that he thought the Iraq war was illegal. He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human. The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds.
Griffin says (interview is linked on the above site):
The Americans had this catch-all approach to lifting suspects. The tactics were draconian and completely ineffective. The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib, or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured.
"The Americans had a well-deserved reputation for being trigger happy. In the three months that I was in Iraq, the soldiers I served with never shot anybody. When you asked the Americans why they killed people, they would say 'we were up against the tough foreign fighters'. I didn't see any foreign fighters in the time I was over there. I can remember coming in off one operation which took place outside Baghdad, where we had detained some civilians who were clearly not insurgents, they were innocent people. I couldn't understand why we had done this, so I said to my troop commander 'would we have behaved in the same way in the Balkans or Northern Ireland?' He shrugged his shoulders and said 'this is Iraq', and I thought 'and that makes it all right?'
"As far as I was concerned that meant that because these people were a different colour or a different religion, they didn't count as much. You can not invade a country pretending to promote democracy and behave like that.
I think this makes a lot of the history of the U.S. in Iraq clear, for those who have been living in the fantasy world of U.S. political culture for the past four years. But of course, we just ignore it.