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 seventeen-minute demonstration of how to efficiently slaughter tiny beings from on high. There is no way American helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there—Sunni or Shiite, 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, Baathist 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, 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 chitchat is explained away in media articles here by the need of those whose job it is to kill for “psychological distance,” but in truth that’s undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you, have godlike access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.
Another example of our Olympian detachment came in predawn darkness on February 12, 2010, in Paktia Province, eastern Afghanistan, when a U.S. 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 based on 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 ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager. They then evidently dug the bullets out of the women’s bodies, bound and gagged them, and filed a report claiming that the dead men were Taliban militants who had murdered the women—“honor killings”—before they arrived.
That was how the American press, generally reliant on military handouts, initially reported the story. Fortunately, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while U.S. 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 were. 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 twenty-five guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over the past decade, 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 forty Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has since come to my attention, as has a seventh that took place in August 2008. Other kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather have not 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.
Even General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, expressed surprise at a tally of at least thirty Afghans killed and eighty wounded at checkpoints when U.S. 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.”
Take thirty-six-year-old Mohammed Yonus, a popular imam of a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, who was killed in his car by fire from a passing 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 in a U.S. 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 seventeen 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 U.S. helicopters and unmanned aerial drones into the heavily populated Shiite slum of Sadr City back in 2007 and 2008. 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 in the fifty aerial “decapitation strikes” the 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 to close up at checkpoints where armored American troops, fingers on triggers, have no way of telling a suicide bomber from a confused or panicked local with a couple of kids in the backseat.
It comes repetitively when U.S. 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 soldiers 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 seventy-six 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 seventeen-year-old daughter named Nadia, a fifteen- year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department” were killed in April 2009 in a U.S.-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 twelve 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 ten-mile 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
It came in November 2009 to two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture, who were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in another special operations night raid. It came in Uruzgan Province in February 2010 when U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of minibuses, killing up to twenty-seven civilians, including women and children. And it came on April 5, 2010, in an airstrike in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan in which a residence was hit and four civilians—two women, an elderly man, and a child—were killed along with four men, immediately identified in a NATO press release as “suspected insurgents.” And it came one week later on the outskirts of Kandahar, when U.S. troops opened fire on a bus, killing five civilians (including a woman), wounding more, and sparking angry protests.
