[Peace-discuss] It's not an aberration

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Many American were shocked when the My Lai massacre became public knowledge in 
1969; but it was hard to take the next step and realize that the massacre - with 
its gang-rapes and killing of children - wasn't an aberration, but the way we 
fought that war against the people of South Vietnam. Something similar is 
happening here.  --CGE]

	Tuesday, Apr 6, 2010 06:07 EDT
	Iraq slaughter not an aberration
	By Glenn Greenwald

{Previously classified footage of a July 2007 attack by U.S. Apache helicopters 
that killed a Reuters journalist and several other non-insurgents, published on 
WikiLeaks.}

I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the 
Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to 
emphasize.  Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical 
precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents 
myth and propaganda from distorting those realities.  That's why the 
administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the 
military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the 
same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real 
journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. 
  The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of 
what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is 
exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.

But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed 
in a piecemeal and unusual fashion:  namely, the tendency to talk about it as 
though it is an aberration.  It isn't.  It's the opposite:  it's par for the 
course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and 
occupation.  The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is 
that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video.  And we're seeing 
it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result 
in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than 
the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are 
killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. 
But what is shown is completely common.  That includes not only the initial 
killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but 
also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their 
children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though 
there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take 
an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.

A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in 
Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do.  This is 
why so many of those civilians are dead.  What one sees on that video is how we 
conduct our wars.  That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some 
"liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that 
objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys 
are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time."  That is 
blatantly false.  Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu 
Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with 
photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with 
authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is 
some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false.  In a 
perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these 
killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is 
some sort of rare and unusual event:  those who support having the U.S. invade 
and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.

As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step 
-- including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded -- 
without first receiving formal permission from their superiors.  Beyond that, 
the Pentagon yesterday -- once the video was released -- suddenly embraced the 
wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called 
"investigations" it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from 
Reuters).   Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken 
by those soldiers was completely justified -- including the firing on the 
unarmed civilian rescuers -- but also found that there's no need for any 
remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence.  What we see on that 
video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, 
and it's what we've been doing for years.  It's obviously consistent with our 
policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly 
what those investigative reports concluded.

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- 
at least not primarily.  Of course those who aren't accustomed to such 
sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers 
seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when 
unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're 
taught and trained and told to do.  If you take even well-intentioned, young 
soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and 
train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result.  The 
video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

All of this is usually kept from us.  Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are 
shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don't usually see 
what is done by us.  We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare 
instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it's 
all very unusual and rare.  That's how we collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib 
photos, and it's why the Obama administration took such extraordinary steps to 
suppress all the rest of the torture photos:  because further disclosure would 
have revealed that behavior to be standard and common, not at all unusual or 
extraordinary.

Precisely the same dynamic applies to the Pentagon's admission yesterday that 
its original claims about the brutal February killing of five civilians in 
Eastern Afghanistan were totally false.   What happened there -- the slaughter 
of unthreatening civilians, official lies told about the incident, the 
dissemination of those lies by an uncritical U.S. media -- is what happens 
constantly (the same deceitful cover-up behavior took place with the Iraq 
video).  The lies about the Afghan killings were exposed in this instance not 
because they're rare, but because one very intrepid, relentless reporter 
happened to be able to travel to the remote province and speak to witnesses and 
investigate the event, forcing the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth.

The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that 
they exposed unusually horrific events.  The value is in realizing that these 
event are anything but unusual.

* * * * * *

Here's the Democracy Now segment I did this morning with Assange.  The bulk of 
the discussion, appropriately, is devoted to hearing from him about the 
videotape, and it's very worth watching; my participation begins at roughly 
35:30 (the transcript is here):



UPDATE: The Atlantic's James Fallows:

     I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at 
face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib 
prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the 
people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had 
been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and 
again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the 
operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people 
down. That's not where the real responsibility lies.

Precisely.  In less than 24 the 36 hours since the video was first posted 
online, 1.3 2.5 million people have viewed it just on YouTube alone; millions 
more have undoubtedly viewed it on various television outlets and other venues.

And, of course, imagining what Fallows asks us to imagine -- that this was all 
being done to us, rather than by us -- is exactly the exercise which is most 
steadfastly avoided.  Besides, even if it were to be engaged, it would be 
dismissed as an exercise in "moral relativism."  When we do X, it is right; when 
others do X to us, it is wrong.  That's the benefit of being so Exceptional.



UPDATE II: Here's a one-and-a-half minute video update on the two children who 
were severely wounded when the Apache helicopter fired on the rescue van.  It 
was their father who was killed when he was attempting to rescue the wounded 
photographer from the initial attack:



And here is the angry statement of Nabil Nour El Deen, the brother of the 
22-year-old Reuters photographer killed in the shooting, after he viewed the 
video.  Imagine how frequently we create this type of fury in the people we are 
"liberating":



UPDATE III:  The Washington Post's David Finkel covered the "surge " in Iraq 
when this incident occurred, and also wrote a book that, among other things, 
examined this Apache attack.  In his online chat today, he was asked whether he 
agreed with the point I made here, and said:  "Well, I don't want to agree or 
disagree with Glenn Greenwald, but I think it's fair to say that there have been 
many many bad days for Iraqis and Americans, and this was one of them."  He was 
then asked whether this was a common or exceptional occurrence, and he replied: 
  "The answer is both. . . . This was an extreme version of what went on 
constantly during this period. It was one bad day in a surge that was filled 
with such days."

Indeed, all anyone has to do is look at the enormous death toll of Iraqi 
civilians to know that events like this were anything but rare.



UPDATE IV:  An active duty U.S. soldier currently deployed in Southeastern 
Baghdad, where this incident occurred, writes a very thoughtful and nuanced 
analysis of this matter to Andrew Sullivan, and says:

     90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 
7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the 
gentlemen killed were journalists.

     War is a disgusting, horrible thing. As cliche as that excuse has become, 
for people to look at the natural heartbreaking nature of it and say that 
they're somehow anomalous just shows how far people who have not experienced war 
have to go to understanding it.

Precisely.  This incident is commonplace, not unusual, because it's what war is 
and it's what has been happening in our wars throughout the decade.  We just 
don't usually see it, and this time we did.  That -- and the fact that Reuters 
journalists were killed and it thus generated more pressure than normal -- are 
the only things that make it unusual.



UPDATE V:  John Cole has some important insights into how we deceive ourselves 
into believing that events like this are rare.  As he notes, that is one major 
factor accounting for the huge gap in perception between Americans and the 
Muslim world:  they know such incidents are anything but rare, because they live 
in the midst of them.  Of course, the American media plays a vital role in 
maintaining our collective delusion, as nicely illustrated by this.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/06/iraq/index.html

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