Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Gods and monsters
By Tom Engelhardt
The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity
is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from,
lusted for and punished humanity without mercy, while taking the planet for a
spin in a manner that we mortals would consider amoral, if not immoral.
And it didn't bother them a bit. They felt - so Greek mythology tells us -
remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever
mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their
fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives. If they sometimes
felt sympathy
for the mortals whose lives they repeatedly threw into havoc, they were
incapable of real empathy.
Such is the nature of the world when your view is the Olympian one and what you
see from the heights are so many barely distinguishable mammals scurrying
below. The details of their petty lives naturally blur and seem less than
important.
In the last week, we've seen - literally viewed - a modern example of what it
means in our day to act from the heights, and we've read about another striking
example of the same. The website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video
of two US Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad. At least
12 Iraqis, including two employees of the news agency Reuters, a photographer
and his driver, were killed in the incident, and two children in the vehicle of
a good Samaritan who stopped to pick up casualties and died in the process,
were also wounded.
Without a doubt, that video is a remarkable 17-minute demo of how to
efficiently slaughter tiny beings milling about below. There is no way American
helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there - Sunni or Shi'ite,
insurgent or shopper, Baghdadis with intent to harm Americans or Baghdadis
paying little attention to two of the helicopters then so regularly buzzing the
city. Were they killers, guards, bank clerks, unemployed idlers, Ba'athist
Party members, religious fanatics, cafe owners? Who could tell from such a
height? But the details mattered little.
The Reuters cameraman crouches behind a building looking, camera first, around
a corner, and you hear an American in an Apache yell, "He's got an RPG!" -
mistaking his camera with its long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade
launcher. The pilot, of course, doesn't know that it's a Reuters photographer
down there. Only we do. (And when his death did become known, the military
carefully buried the video.)
Along with that video comes a soundtrack in which you hear the Americans check
out the rules of engagement (ROE), request permission to fire, and banter about
the results. ("Hahaha. I hit 'em"; "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards ... ";
and of the two wounded children, "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids
into a battle.") Such callous chit-chat is explained away in media articles in
the US by the need for "psychological distance" of those whose job it is to
kill, but in truth that's undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you,
have god-like access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity,
making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.
Similarly, in pre-dawn darkness on February 12 in Paktia province, eastern
Afghanistan, a US Special Operations team dropped from the skies into a village
near Gardez. There, in a world that couldn't be more distant from their lives,
possibly using an informant's bad tip, American snipers on rooftops killed an
Afghan police officer ("head of intelligence in one of Paktia's most volatile
districts"), his brother, and three women - a pregnant mother of 10, a pregnant
mother of six and a teenager. They then evidently dug the bullets out of the
women's bodies, bound and gagged their bodies, and filed a report claiming that
the dead men were Taliban militants who had murdered the women - "honor
killings" - before they arrived. (This was how the American press, generally
reliant on military handouts, initially reported the story.)
Recently, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded
British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while US
military spokespeople retreated step by step in a series of partial admissions
of error, leading to an in-person apology, including the sacrifice of a sheep
and $30,000 in compensation payments.
Ceremonial evisceration
Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies.
And both incidents are shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them,
however, is just how humdrum they actually are, even if the public release of
video of such events isn't. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders,
reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended
on was a traditional family ceremony. More than 25 guests had gathered for the
naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over these past nine-plus years, Afghan (and Iraqi) ceremonies of all
sorts have regularly been blasted away. Keeping a partial tally of wedding
parties eradicated by American air power at TomDispatch.com, I had counted five
such "incidents" between December 2001 and July 2008. (A sixth in July 2002 in
which possibly 40 Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has
since come to my attention, as has a seventh in August 2008.) Nor have other
kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather been immune from
attack, including funerals, and now, naming ceremonies. And keep in mind that
these are only the reported incidents in a rural land where much undoubtedly
goes unreported.
Similarly, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US forces in
Afghanistan, recently expressed surprise at a tally since last summer of at
least 30 Afghans killed and 80 wounded at checkpoints when US soldiers opened
fire on cars. He said: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my
knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Or consider 36-year-old
Mohammed Yonus, a popular imam of a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, who was
killed in his car this January by fire from a passing North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) convoy, which considered his vehicle "threatening". His
seven-year-old son was in the back seat.
Or while on the subject of Reuters employees, recall reporter Mazen Tomeizi, a
Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya satellite network of Dubai, who was
killed on Haifa Street in central Baghdad in September 2004 by a US helicopter
attack. He was on camera at the time and his blood spattered the lens.
Seif Fouad, a Reuters cameraman, was wounded in the same incident, while a
number of bystanders, including a girl, were killed. Or remember the 17 Iraqi
civilians infamously murdered when Blackwater employees in a convoy began
firing in Nissour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007.
Or the missiles regularly shot from US helicopters and unmanned aerial drones
into the heavily populated Shi'ite slum of Sadr City back in 2007-08. Or the
Iraqis regularly killed at checkpoints in the years since the invasion of 2003.
Or, for that matter, the first moments of that invasion on March 20, 2003,
when, according to Human Rights Watch, "dozens" of ordinary Iraqi civilians
were killed by the 50 aerial "decapitation strikes" the George W Bush
administration launched against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi
leadership, missing every one of them.
This is the indiscriminate nature of killing, no matter how "precise" and
"surgical" the weaponry, when war is made by those who command the heavens and
descend, as if from Mars, into alien worlds, convinced that they have the power
to sort out the good from the bad, even if they can't tell villagers from
insurgents. Under these circumstances, death comes in a multitude of disguises
- from a great distance via cruise missiles or Predator drones and close in at
checkpoints where up-armored American troops, fingers on triggers, have no way
of telling a suicide car bomber from a confused or panicked local with a couple
of kids in the back seat.
It comes repetitively when US Special Operations forces helicopter into
villages after dark looking for terror suspects based on tips from unreliable
informants who may be settling local scores of which the Americans are dismally
ignorant. It comes repeatedly to Afghan police or Army troops mistaken for the
enemy.
It came not just to a police officer and his brother and family in Paktia
province, but to a "wealthy businessman with construction and security
contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport" who, along with up
to 76 members of his extended family, was slaughtered in such a raid on the
village of Azizabad in Herat province in August 2008.
It came to the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander (away in
another province) whose "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named
Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government
department" were killed in April 2009 in a US-led raid in Khost province in
eastern Afghanistan. (Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of
Khan's cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.)
It came to 12 Afghans by a roadside near the city of Jalalabad in April 2007
when Marine Special Operations forces, attacked by a suicide bomber, let loose
along a 16-kilometer stretch of road. Victims included a four-year-old girl, a
one-year-old boy, and three elderly villagers. According to a report by
Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a "16-year-old newly married girl was cut
down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family's farmhouse ... A
75-year-old man walking to his shop was hit by so many bullets that his son did
not recognize the body when he came to the scene."
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