Alas, a Blog

From a US Army press release, July 13, 2007:

Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, both operating in eastern Baghdad under the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, along with their Iraqi counterparts from the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1st Division National Police, were conducting a coordinated raid as part of a planned operation when they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition Forces returned fire and called in attack aviation reinforcement.

Nine insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight. One insurgent was wounded and two civilians were killed during the firefight.

The two civilians were reported as employees for the Reuters news service.

“There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col Scott Bleichwehl, spokesperson and public affairs officer for MND-B.

Yesterday, a leaked video of the incident was released by Wikileaks (the US has confirmed that the video was authentic). What’s below is footage edited by Wikileaks; a longer, unedited version is available at their site. (Trigger warning: The footage shows 10-15 adults shot to death by US soldiers in helicopters. Two children are also shot, but survived.)

The video shows a group of adults, some of whom may be armed, or maybe not. Two of them are carrying large cameras strapped on, which the American soldiers mistake for weapons. The soldiers shoot all of the adults, creating a huge cloud of dust obscuring all the people on the ground.

After the dust has cleared, all of the adults appear to be dead, except for one who is wounded and attempting to crawl away. A soldier in the helicopter appears eager for a reason to shoot the wounded man (“Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”) After a while, a black van pulls up; unarmed men get out of the van, pick up the wounded man, and carry him towards the van. The soldiers in the helicopters fire on the van, apparently killing all the adults and (we learn later) wounding two children in the van, who are taken for treatment at an Iraqi hospital.

Most of the discussion I’ve read about this video focuses on whether or not the shooting was legal under the Rules of Engagement operating at the time; or discussing the attitude of the soldiers. Unsurprisingly, the US Army investigation found that the soldiers and their command did nothing wrong; and the soldiers’ attitude about killing seems not only unsurprising but probably a necessary defense mechanism for them to be able to do their jobs.

What’s more interesting to me is that the US Army clearly lied about the incident. (You can parse the press release to not be a lie, as the Weekly Standard does, but it’s really a stretch. The plain and obvious interpretation of the press release is that the Iraquis were actively in a mutual fight with US soldiers when they were killed, and that’s obviously not true. Additionally, the press release lies by omission by not mentioning the people killed trying to rescue the wounded man). And then the army covered up the incident, by refusing to release the video.

So how do we know the army lied? Because of the convergence of two unlikely events. First, that two of the people shot were Reuters employees, causing Reuters to press for information about the shooting. And secondly, that an anonymous person (presumably someone in the army) had access to this video, and was courageous and heroic enough to leak it.

It is extremely unlikely that something like this happened just once, and by a massive coincidence that one completely atypical incident just happened to involve two Reuters employees and a video being anonymously leaked. What’s much more plausible is that there are many incidents of this kind, but only rarely do Americans find out about them. It’s entirely possible that incidents like these happen all the time.

One thing we can conclude for certain from this incident is that the US Army is untrustworthy. They can, and will, cover up dubious acts by US soldiers, and for all we know do so routinely. The US Army is not a credible source.

Tragedies like this are inevitable in war, and particularly in an occupation. This is as true in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq:

In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”

The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the “escalation of force” problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which “we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it.”

In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.

Which is why wars should happen only as a last resort. War of choice is a monstrous evil. People who favor the US going to avoidable wars are favoring a situation in which — inevitably — innocent civilians are going to be shot to death by US troops, over and over again. Think about the two children who got shot while witnessing their own fathers being shot to death. That’s the inevitable byproduct of war.

It’s notable that, although in the US the major news outlets typically report whatever the US military claims as if it were fact, that’s not true in other countries. Discussing a different cover-up by US troops of the killing of innocent civilians (this time in Afghanistan), Glenn Greenwald writes:

Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

One reason that the US looks so different “on the ground” throughout the middle east than it does here is that we’re reading and watching different news sources. And sometimes, the news that we Americans are watching is lying to us, in a way which makes our forces seem less harmful, and those objecting to US forces seem less justified.

They hate us, in part, because we slaughter them from helicopters. That’s not unreasonable of them.