Marc Garlasco

Marc Garlasco is a senior military expert for Human Rights Watch (HRW) specializing in battle damage assessment, military operations, and interrogations for the Emergencies Division. Before HRW he served for seven years in the Pentagon as senior intelligence analyst with his last position being chief of high-value targeting during the Iraq war in 2003. Garlasco left his Pentagon job in 2003 and joined HRW where he has investigated human rights issues in a number of different conflicts zones. He is the author of a World War II German anti-aircraft medals reference book. Garlasco was suspended by HRW with pay, “pending an investigation,” on September 14, 2009 after media reports revealed his interest in Second World War artifacts and he was accused of being (in the words of the New York Times and other newspapers) an "avid collector" of Nazi memorabilia.

Background

Marc Garlasco was born in Manhattan on September 4, 1970. He was raised in Queens where he attended St. Leo's grammar school and Archbishop Molloy High School.

Garlasco has a B.A. in Government from St. John’s University 1988 — 1992 and a M.A. in International Relations from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University(1992-1995) PhD in international relations 2007 — 2010 (expected). He lives in Pleasantville, New York.

Career

Garlasco is the senior military analyst in Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Emergencies Division. He specializes in battle damage assessment, military operations, and interrogations. He is also Board Member for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC).

The Pentagon

Before working for HRW he worked with a defense contractor before being hired as an intelligence professional at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was Chief of High Value Targeting in The Pentagon during the Second Gulf War where he led the effort to track and target Saddam Hussein. Garlasco was a member of the Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) Battle Damage Assessment team in 1998, led a Pentagon Battle Damage Assessment team to Kosovo in 1999 and recommended several thousand aimpoints on targets during military operations in Iraq and Serbia. Later that year Gerlasco debriefed Iraqi nationals to gather intelligence about Saddam Hussein. He described it as "contingency planning for a war that was probably never going to be fought". He also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert. In total, Garlasco served for seven years in the Pentagon.

In 2003, Garlasco was responsible for dropping two, laser-guided, 500-kilogram bombs on a house in the Tuwaisi, neighborhood of Basra, Iraq, that he believed to contain Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, the man responsible for launching poison gas attacks on Kurds in Iraq beginning in 1988. Watching the attack via satellite form a room in the Pentagon, Garlasco threw his arms in the air and shouted: "I just blew up Chemical Ali!" However, Chemical Ali was not in the house; 17 other people were killed instead. Garlasco left his Pentagon job in 2003 two weeks after the failed attack to take a position as senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch.

Garlasco explained the calculus of civilian deaths in high value targeting to the television news program 60 Minutes this way, "Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem. But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld." Garlasco told the interviewer that prior to the invasion of Iraq, he personally recommended 50 high-value targets -Iraqi officials for air strikes, but, according to Garlasco, none of the targets on his list was actually killed. Rather, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed in strikes he recommended. Garlasco defended the efforts made by the American military to minimize civilian casualties, "I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians." He responded to the question "If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?" by stating "Because the Taliban are violating international law, and because the U.S. just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.”

Human Rights Watch

After leaving the Pentagon, Garlasco joined Human Rights Watch as a senior military analyst; his task was to document laws-of-war violations and other atrocities committed during significant conflicts around the world. In an interview he gave for the Washington Post Garlasco described the transition from targeter to human rights advocate; "I had been a part of it, so it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It really dawned on me that these aren't just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time."

In December 2003, Garlasco co-authored the report 'Off Target - The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq' after carrying out field work with two other HRW staff to investigate the effect of the air war, ground war, and the immediate post-combat environment on civilians after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. led Coalition forces in the Iraq War. Garlasco and collegues focused on the main fighting areas in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys where civilian deaths had been reported visitng ten cities in total. The report focused on the identification and investigation of potential violations of international humanitarian law by both Coalition and Iraqi forces together with the identification of patterns of conflict which may have resulted in avoidable civilian casualties. Garlasco and his co-author stated that Iraqi forces had committed various violations of international humanitarian law which may have resulted in significant civilian casualties and claimed that the widespread use of cluster munitions in populated areas by Coalition forces killed or wounded more than 1,000 civilians.

Garlasco has made it a personal objective to prevent the use of cluster munitions. He co-authored the 2006 Human Rights Watch report condemning Israel’s use of such weapons in Lebanon and a report in 2008 documenting how civilians living in South Ossetia suffered the use of cluster munitions by both the Russian and Georgian armies. Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said that Garlasco "knows more about airstrikes than anyone in the world who isn't in the military currently", adding that "when Marc says stuff is messed up, the military has to take it seriously. It's not some wing nut in a human rights group out to get the military."

Maariv has strongly criticized Garlasco's reports on Israel military activity and described him as "the linchpin of past poisonous reports against Israel". According to Haaretz, Garlasco worked in the Pentagon for seven years and "was known over the last years of his career for his harsh condemnation of Israel."

In a September 2009 critique of HRW's work, NGO Monitor made a number of specific accusations against Garlasco. The report accused him of ignoring evidence that contradicts his conclusion and of basing his report on the Gaza beach explosion (2006) on "unverifiable Palestinian allegations." It accused him of basing his conclusions about the use of white phosphorous on observations made from a distance and alleged that his claims revealed a "lack of expertise regarding white phosphorous" and "contradict well-established facts regarding the munition." The report also alleged that Garlasco's report on the Gaza War "relies on Palestinian claims of hearing and seeing weapons that are neither audible nor visible from the distances alleged."

Garlasco appeared as an expert in the documentary film No End in Sight, which examined in detail some of the key decisions made by the US military and the Pentagon in the early days after the invasion of Iraq. He was also featured in a 60 Minutes story on US military targeting practices that aired October 28, 2007.

Controversy over World War II German and Nazi memorabilia

File:Marc Garlasco.jpg

Marc Garlasco, German Combat Awards forum.

Garlasco has written a book entitled The Flak Badges of the Luftwaffe and Heer, examining the Anti-aircraft qualification badges of the German Air Force and Army in World War II.

On September 9, 2009, quoting blogger Omri Ceren, the Israeli tabloid Maariv asserted that Garlasco is "a collector of Nazi memorabilia" and posts pictures of them "on the forums of similar collectors". Other newspapers such as The Guardian, The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz wrote articles about the issue in the following days. The Guardian reported on what it described as "the mounting internet attacks on Garlasco" that pro-Israeli bloggers questioned the appropriateness of Garlasco's hobby and had found one blogpost in which Garlasco wrote "The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!" on a military collectors website. NGO Monitor described Garlasco's hobby as "problematic" and "insensitive". Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's policy director subsequently said that Human Rights Watch's employment of "a man who trades and collects Nazi memorabilia" as its senior military expert is a "new low," accused HRW of turning "into an organization that facilitates the assault of some of the worst regimes and terror groups against the very democratic countries that uphold human rights" and that the reports about Garlasco made this "easier to understand".

HRW Communications Director Emma Daly at first responded to the charge by saying, "Marc Garlasco is not pro-Nazi. These allegations are monstrous. He does not delve into Nazi memorabilia. Garlasco is a student of military history and he has an interest in military history." HRW later issued an official statement that the accusation against Garlasco "is demonstrably false and fits into a campaign to deflect attention from Human Rights Watch's rigorous and detailed reporting on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by the Israeli government". HRW added that Garlasco "has never held or expressed Nazi or anti-Semitic views." HRW associate director Carroll Bogert accused The Guardian of "repeat[ing] defamatory nonsense unworthy of [the] newspaper", adding that "[t]he allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies are part of a larger campaign to smear non-governmental organisations which criticise the Israel Defence Forces' conduct of the Gaza offensive".

Garlasco himself responded to the allegations under the pen name Flak88, writing "I would reply, but I don't want to encourage them... Anyway, I doubt if they read my book. More than anything else, it is related to my work." Subsequently, Garlasco apologized, writing on Huffington Post, "I deeply regret causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts". Garlasco added, "I've never hidden my hobby, because there's nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren't fascinated by military history." He also wrote that the allegations of Nazi sympathies were "defamatory nonsense, spread maliciously by people with an interest in trying to undermine Human Rights Watch's reporting", adding "[p]recisely because it's so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things." Gerald Steinberg, head of NGOWatch replied that "It's too little, too late."

According to the New York Times, HRW Middle East advisory committee member Helena Cobban wrote on her blog whether Garlasco’s military collecting activities were "something an employer like Human Rights Watch ought to be worried about? After consideration, I say Yes." She also said on the same blog, "I'm looking at this page on NGO Monitor's website, and agreeing with much of what they have there on this topic." Cobban also notes that these revelations threaten to distract attention from the well-documented claims that "many excellent organizations—not just HRW—" have assembled about "the many laws-of-war violations committed by Israel (and some by Hamas) during last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza".

Yaron Ezrahi said he did not believe that Mr. Garlasco’s interest in memorabilia could support allegations of "premeditated bias" though he said that it may hurt Human Rights Watch’s credibility. He said that the revelations had "armed the right-wing fanatics" who try to "demonize" anybody who questions the effects of Israeli military operations.

In what has been described as "abrupt change of tact" for Human Rights Watch, Garlasco was "suspended with pay" from HRW pending an investigation. According to Bogert, "[W]e have questions as to whether we've learned everything we need to know." Regarding the suspension, HRW has indicated "This is not a disciplinary measure. Human Rights Watch stands behind Garlasco's research and analysis."

An editorial in the Ottawa Citizen said that the Gerlasco's "thing for Naziism" explains why "Human Rights Watch reports attacking Israel always were a bit puzzling, being so one-sided and hostile."

Bibliography

Book

• The Flak Badges of the Luftwaffe and Heer, 2008, B&D Publishing LLC.

Human Rights Watch reports co-authored by Marc Garlasco

• A Dying Practice: Use of Cluster Munitions by Russian and Georgia in August 2008

• Rain of Fire: Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza

• Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan Human Rights Watch, 2008, ISBN 1564323625

• Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006

• No Blood No Foul": Soldier's Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq

• Leadership Failure: First Hand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division

• Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip

• Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq

External links

• Human Rights Watch

• The Pentagon Official Who Came in From the Cold, Spiegel International (2009)

• In the Field with Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch (2008)

• Assessing the Human Cost of Air Strikes in Iraq, NPR (April 8, 2008)

• The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate, The Washington Post (2008)

• Bombing Afghanistan, CBS News(2007)