The Real Story
My Essay
A disturbing video hit the Internet on Monday, acquired and released by a group known as Wikileaks, an organization that likes to release transcripts and videos showing official misconduct by governments, politicians, corporations, police departments, the military, etc. Consider them to be a modern day Daniel Elsberg sneaking a copy of the Pentagon Papers to the NY Times, or Deep Throat feeding information to the Washington Post.
When Wikileaks first announced they had received such material and would be releasing it soon for public consumption, they found themselves with an unprecedented amount of harassment by the FBI and other organizations, claiming the material they had acquired was ill-gotten. But they finally got it out to social web-sites where copies were made to YouTube and other sites so the video couldn't be easily banner or buried.
The video is a 30 minute run of raw footage taken from an American Apache helicopter in Iraq as it supposedly responds to a report of small arms fire against a battalion of American troops in the New Baghdad area of Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. What follows is a black and white video but fairly sharp, like looking through the viewfinder of a camcorder, as they sight a group of about 10 men in an alleyway and square in the general area of where the reported small arms fire may have been coming from.
The video contains a lot of radio chatter between ground forces, the helicopter gun crew, and the command head quarters of the operations. Subtitles are provided but probably are unnecessary. Ninety per cent of the chatter is military jargon describing locations, positions, requesting permission to engage, etc. But the 10 per cent of the dialogue that pertains to the action is quite disturbing.
I say this because I had an odd symbiosis with the video on a personal level. Last November a new video game was released, called Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare, which my son bought and invited me to play with him. Played on an Xbox 360 on an HDTV, there is a segment in the game where you are the gunner on a military airship and are receiving communications about possible hostile elements you need to engage, without accidentally killing your own troops.
The quality of the video game and the methodology of the tactics you use playing the game was strikingly similar to what was seen on the video. I would almost say the game developers must have had access to the same military videos as the ones shown as they developed the game. And so when I played the game and I got to this part of the campaign, as I watched the video my God I thought, was the similarity striking.
Now some people would argue, c'mon, no video game could compare to real military hardware. That's not the point. What I experienced in the game was almost identical to what I saw while watching the video. While my son was gleefully killing everything that moved, thrilled with the superiority of American firepower to the hapless insurgents that got in our way, I kept thinking back then, is this how it really is? And if so, how can you identify true targets from innocent civilians? And then as you listen to the chatter of the military personnel, you realize, that they too are treating the real life scenario as if they were playing a video game.
Comments like the gunner pleading for permission to engage; listening to them as they rationalize that the men had weapons and so were legitimate targets even though later it turned out the men were news reporters and had cameras and tripods, made me shake my head. Watching as a gravely wounded man is crawling toward a nearby building, and the gunners wishing out loud that he would reach for a weapon so they can finish him off; watching as a van arrives to help the wounded man and then getting permission to mow down the van and its occupants and the wounded man under the pretense that they may have been collecting weapons, gave you the feeling the U.S. personnel just wanted to kill something, anything, that day.
Later, as ground troops arrive, they announce that there are wounded children in the van. The gunship operators shake it off saying combatants shouldn't bring their kids to a war. Later as a Bradley tank drives over a bump, the gunship men laugh that it may have gone over a body, but it didn't matter as it was probably dead already, they comment.
As if all this slaughter wasn't enough, later the ground troops again report gunfire, and the gunship sites a building that they think might be the source. You listen as they rationalize to themselves that some people going in must have had weapons (no one is seen firing from the building). After again securing dubious permission, the gunship fires three hellfire missiles and destroys the building, later commending each other with the comment, "Good missile."
It's at this point that you suddenly realize, no wonder they hate us, the people of the Middle East, where we are warring. With the slightest provocation, American forces unleash massive firepower destroying buildings, vehicles, and people walking the streets. Wounded people are shot at. People holding cameras are "close enough" to looking like they're holding weapons and so become legitimate targets and can be killed on the spot, including everyone standing around them.
The video is the rage of the social networking sites currnetly. Commentary by pro and anti war opinions is raging. Sympathy for the soldiers is asked for because it's tough out there and the men are trained in a kill or be killed fashion. It's not their fault they kill so efficiently with such lethal firepower.
The major media outlets are kind of quiet. No mention on CNN or MSNBC. FoxNews actually has a short article describing a "disturbing" video. Of course foreign news outlets like BBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera make it front page news, but we know who control the news media outlets in the United States now.
The US Military responds that the events had been investigated and no wrongdoing found under the permissible rules of engagement. You get the feeling like someone was asking the head fox was the raid on the chicken coop conducted under the normal rules of engagement when a fox meets a chicken.
"Shouldn't bring your kids to a war," becomes the rationalization for putting several 50mm rounds into a small girl. Later, instead of medivac'ing the girl to a hospital, the troops simply turn the wounded children over to the local Iraqi police and let it be their problem.
Abu Ghraib was supposed to be an anomaly. I've always been anti-war, but perhaps I haven't been anti-war enough. I always thought our military personnel after Viet Nam had the right to question authority when they thought orders to kill were wrong. Now I was witnessing soldiers begging for permission to kill, and the commanders were the reasonable ones asking the men were they sure before granting permission.
And in the display of firepower, whether massive, withering machine gun fire or building destroying Hellfire missiles, though the accuracy was fairly good, just like the video game I played, a lot of other things were hit that weren't part of the target. But in war, collateral damage has now become acceptable in the American psyche. It's your problem for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yet to me, none of this was acceptable. You don't kill everyone and destroy everything in the local area just because your troops took some small arms fire. That's how the Nazi's the the Soviets operated, not the U.S. I still support our troops, the reasonable ones with a conscience, who don't really want to be over there but are doing it out of a sense of duty. But those that have a bloodthirsty zeal for killing, I'm not so sure about anymore.
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