Friendly fire in Iraq -- and a coverup | Salon News

Helmet-cam footage from Ramadi, Iraq (12-min. edited version). Warning: Contains graphic violence and profanity.

Once a cop, always a cop. Asked if she wanted to see a graphic battle video showing her son Albert bleeding to death, Jean Feggins, retired from the Philadelphia Police Department, said yes.

"Listen, I've moved dead bodies of people I don't even know," she told me, as she sat on a brown couch in the den of her West Philadelphia row house. "I need to know everything. Because he is not a stranger. That's my baby. That's my child."

When Pfc. Albert Nelson died in Iraq in 2006, the Army first told Feggins that he might have been killed by friendly fire, and then that it was enemy mortars. She says she never believed the Army's explanation. "I always felt like they were lying to me," she said. "I could never prove it."

"I would ask the casualty officer what was going on. I'd be told they are still working on the report," she said. "They were still doing their investigation. What could I do? It's the U.S. military. I had no control."

She did not know that there was a video of his death until I contacted her recently. Salon has obtained evidence -- including a graphic, 52-and-a-half minute video -- suggesting that friendly fire from an American tank killed two U.S. soldiers in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, and that the Army ignored the video and other persuasive data in order to rule that the deaths were due to enemy action. Feggins watched the video with me in her den.

Shot from the perspective of the soldiers taking fire from what they clearly believe is an American tank, the footage shows how Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez-Gonzalez died. It also records soldiers trying to save Nelson's life, and the sound of a platoon sergeant attempting to report over a radio that the casualties were due to friendly fire. He then seems to be overruled by a superior officer who insists it was an enemy mortar attack. Troops from Nelson's unit interviewed by Salon, including three soldiers there that day, blamed friendly fire from a U.S. tank for the deaths. "A tank shot us," said a soldier. "That is what happened."

An Army investigation, however, found the deaths were caused by enemy fire. Soldiers from Nelson and Suarez's platoon, based at Fort Carson, Colo., described what they felt was pressure from above to accept this official story despite evidence to the contrary -- including the video, which has circulated widely. Jean Feggins, after watching the video, said it was more evidence that the Army had misled her about the circumstances of her son's death. The Army told Feggins that her son had died instantly, while the video shows a painfully protracted attempt to get Nelson to a field hospital before he bled to death.

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The only reason there is a video of what happened in Ramadi is because Sgt. 1st Class Jack Robison, who was there that day, wanted to record a firefight. The video, which is all from the point of view of Robison's helmet camera, begins immediately before the shell's impact. It records the explosion, the effort to help the wounded -- in bloody detail -- and long patches of conversation in which the soldiers present describe how they were shot by an American tank.

(more at the link)