[Peace-discuss] We have to kill them (II)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The BBC spent a good bit of time today talking about this picture -- and the 
question was the ethics of publishing it, rather than the ethics of causing it.
This is something of a corrective to official media.  --CGE]


"The words 'decency' and 'unconscionable' coming from [Bob Gates] are fetid with 
hypocrisy ... A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of 
decency. He has none."

	Killing America’s Kids
	by Fred Reed
	September 08, 2009

The Web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated 
Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had 
just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a lance corporal of 21 years. 
When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense [sic] furiously 
tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To 
quote one of many accounts on the Web:

"Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. 
The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard’s family is feeling right 
now, and that Curley’s ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put 
out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple 
newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy, or constitutional 
right – but judgment and common decency.’"

I thought a long time before writing about this matter and was not pleasant to 
be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another 
pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless secretary, I too was a Marine 
lance corporal of 21 years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this 
kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally 
blind following my (I think) 13th trip to eye surgery as a result of an 
identical foreign policy.

Big f*cking deal. Sh*t happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. 
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The other kid is dead.

But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the 
matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me 
poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional 
bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than 
Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the U.S.

But Gates. The words "decency" and "unconscionable" coming from him are fetid 
with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. "Intelligence" agencies are moral 
dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries 
leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, Stasi, SAVAK – 
they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not 
speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead 
kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send 
them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

It could almost make you turn against the war. Some 6,000 American kids have 
died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has 
killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently 
disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Antiwar.com by Joe 
Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled "Afghanistan Isn’t Worth One 
More American Life." I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another 
headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed 95 Afghans in another 
witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis.

Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin 
is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a 
democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping, acquiescent, ignorant 
beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of 
this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing 
military from Vietnam – they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as 
before – but they learned something more important: their most dangerous enemy 
is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly 
important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer 
contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the 
American public can.

Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster 
than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling, 
somnolent, inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.

In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with 
a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunk rolls out of 
his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the 
trinity of the badly wounded: mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy 
jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from 
gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.

Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, 
and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it 
aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. 
Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA 
ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional 
sadists do things to people that would make you gag.

Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even 
in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three 
decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to 
Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war 
with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, 
the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the 
troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw 
what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t 
sign.

Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on 
afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers 
refuse to show the charred bodies still… slowly… moving, the dead children, the… 
never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And 
the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. 
Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.

Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished 
from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it 
as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to 
refer to smarmy, over-groomed, bloodthirsty office warts as p*ssies, saying that 
they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that 
Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, 
Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzales, Clinton, Perle, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, 
Krauthammer, George Will, Dershowitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is 
appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.

http://original.antiwar.com/reed/2009/09/07/killing-americas-kids/