Documents regarding crimes committed by US soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed them. 
The documents, released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts martial summaries, transcripts and military reports about 22 incidents.
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.
Soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord in what they insisted was an approved technique.