[A-List] Fwd: (Wikileaks) Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

The present floods and soon the deaths from befouled water and no food
for 14 to 20 million Afghanis will increas as the most vulnerable go
first like the newborns now.  The war is not stopped either.  Maybe
the fighters feel nature is helping them win?  Suzanne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 6:55 PM
Subject: Fwd: (Wikileaks) Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians
in Afghanistan and Iraq
To: "Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion."
<rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu>


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 11:23 PM
Subject: (Wikileaks) Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians in
Afghanistan and Iraq
To:




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:54 PM
Subject: (Wikileaks) Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians in
Afghanistan and Iraq
To: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>


TomDispatch.com
                                                       August 5, 2010

Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq

by Tom Engelhardt

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.
 He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as
the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing
Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange," Mullen
commented, "can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks
he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have
on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan
family."

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in
school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main
Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you
might be a bit taken aback by Mullen's statement.  After all, one of
the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online
had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was
already on American hands.

The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access
to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: "A huge
cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating
portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition
forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They
range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive
loss of life from air strikes..."  Or as the paper added in a piece
headlined "Secret CIA paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths":
"Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts
of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of
these so-called ‘blue on white' events, cover a wide spectrum of
day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties."  Or as
it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373,
an "undisclosed ‘black' unit" of U.S. special operations forces
focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda "senior officials": "The
logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and
children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its
path."

Admittedly, the events recorded in the Wikileaks archive took place
between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don't cover the last six
months of the Obama administration's across-the-board surge in
Afghanistan.  Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint
Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American
war machine for more than two of the years in question.

He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or
planes took out an Afghan bridal party -- 70 to 90 strong and made up
mostly of women -- on a road near the Pakistani border.  They were
"escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates."
The bride, whose name we don't know, died, as did at least 27 other
members of the party, including children.  Mullen was similarly
chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in
the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan's Herat Province was hit by
repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including
perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children. Among the dead were 76 members
of one extended family, headed by Reza Khan, a "wealthy businessman
with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base
at Shindand airport."

Mullen was still chairman in April 2009 when members of the family of
Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, were
killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan.
Among them were his "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named
Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a
government department." Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant
wife of Khan's cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.

Mullen remained chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of
Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, were
shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night
raid; as he was -- and here we move beyond the Wikileaks time frame --
when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters
struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including
women and children; as he also was when, in that same month, in a
special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl,
as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot to death in
their home in a village near Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.
After which, the soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the
bodies, washed the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover the
incident up.  He was no less chairman late last month when residents
of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claimed
that a NATO missile attack had killed 52 civilians, an incident that,
like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was
initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople and is now being
"investigated."

And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts
of such incidents, including enough repeated killings or woundings of
innocent civilians at checkpoints that previous Afghan war commander
General Stanley McChrystal commented: "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."  In other words, if your basic
Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at
all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds
of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian
highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan
informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the Wikileaks
documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman
Mullen.

In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on
something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice -- that,
with only slight alterations, Mullen's blistering comment about
Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. "Chairman
Mullen," that Martian might have responded, "can say whatever he likes
about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he
already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of
many Afghan families."

Killing Fields, Then and Now

Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was
apparent last week when the Wikileaks story broke.  Certainly, they
were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it
seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media.  If, for instance,
you read the version of the Wikileaks story produced -- with the same
several weeks of special access -- by the New York Times, you might
have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had accessed
a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew.

While the Guardian led with the central significance of those
unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the Times led with reports
(mainly via Afghan intelligence) on a Pakistani double-cross of the
American war effort -- of the ties, that is, between Pakistan's
intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper's major
sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost
Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan.  To stumble across
the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the Times coverage,
you had to make your way off the front page and through two full
four-column Wikileaks-themed pages and deep into a third.

With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of
last week's document dump.  And if you think about it, it gives a
certain grim reportorial reality to the term Americans favor for the
deaths of civilians at the hands of our forces: "collateral damage" --
that is, damage not central to what's going down.  The Guardian saw it
differently, as undoubtedly do Afghans (and Iraqis) who have
experienced collateral damage firsthand.

The Wikileaks leak story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless
saga in the U.S. until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates (who has overseen the Afghan War since he was confirmed in his
post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly
on blood -- specifically, the blood on Julian Assange's hands.  Within
a few days, that had become the Wikileaks story, as headlines like
CNN's "Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on
his hands" indicated.  On ABC News, for instance, in a typical "bloody
hands" piece of reportage, the Secretary of Defense told interviewer
Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange's legal culpability might
be, when it came to "moral culpability... that's where I think the
verdict is guilty on Wikileaks."

Moral culpability.  From the Martian point of view, it might have been
considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for
the last three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that
have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing,
wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and
Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed
visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might
have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes
blood and what constitutes collateral damage.  After all, one major
American magazine did decide to put civilian war damage front and
center the very week the Wikileaks archive went up.  With the headline
"What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan," TIME magazine featured a cover
image of a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had reportedly been
sliced off by a "local Taliban commander" as a punishment for running
away from an abusive home.

Indeed, the Taliban has regularly been responsible for the deaths of
innocent civilians, including women and children who, among other
things, ride in vehicles over its roadside bombs or suffer the results
of suicide bombings aimed at government figures or U.S. and NATO
forces.  The Taliban also has its own list of horrors and crimes for
which it should be considered morally culpable.  In addition, the
Taliban has reportedly threatened to go through the Wikileaks archive,
ferret out the names of Afghan informers, and "punish" them,
undoubtedly spilling exactly the kind of "blood" Mullen has been
talking about.

Our Martian might have noticed as well that the TIME cover wasn't a
singular event in the U.S.  In recent years, Americans have often
enough been focused on the killing, wounding, or maiming of innocent
civilians and have indeed been quite capable of treating such acts as
a central fact of war and policy-making.  Such deaths have, in fact,
been seen as crucially important -- as long as the civilians weren't
killed by Americans, in which case the incidents were the
understandable, if sad, byproduct of other, far more commendable plans
and desires.  In this way, in Afghanistan, repeated attacks on wedding
parties, funerals, and even a baby-naming ceremony by the U.S. Air
Force or special operations night raids have never been a subject of
much concern or the material for magazine covers.

On the other hand, the Bush administration (and Americans generally)
dealt with the 9/11 deaths of almost 3,000 innocent civilians in New
York City as the central and defining event of the twenty-first
century.  Each of those deaths was memorialized in the papers.
Relatives of the dead or those who survived were paid huge sums to
console them for the tragedy, and a billion-dollar memorial was
planned at what quickly became known as Ground Zero.  In repeated
rites of mourning nationwide, their deaths were remembered as the
central, animating fact of American life.  In addition, of course, the
murder of those civilian innocents officially sent the U.S. military
plunging into the Global War on Terror, Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

Similarly -- though who remembers it now? -- one key trump card played
against those who opposed the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's
"killing fields."  The Iraqi dictator had indeed gassed Kurds and,
with the help of military targeting intelligence provided by his
American allies, Iranian troops in his war with Iran in the 1980s.
After the first Gulf War, his forces had brutally suppressed a Shiite
uprising in the south of Iraq, murdering perhaps tens of thousands of
Shiites and, north and south, buried the dead in mass, unmarked
graves, some of which were uncovered after the U.S. invasion of 2003.
In addition, Saddam's torture chambers and prisons had been busy
places indeed.

His was a brutal regime; his killing fields were a moral nightmare;
and in the period leading up to the war (and after), they were also a
central fact of American life.  On the other hand, however many Iraqis
died in those killing fields, more would undoubtedly die in the years
that followed, thanks to the events loosed by the Bush
administration's invasion.  That dying has yet to end, and seems once
again to be on the rise.  Yet those deaths have never been a central
fact of American life, nor an acceptable argument for getting out of
Iraq, nor an acknowledged responsibility of Washington, nor of Admiral
Mullen, Secretary of Defense Gates, or any of their predecessors.
They were just collateral damage.  Some of their survivors got, at
best, tiny "solatia" payments from the U.S. military, and often enough
the dead were buried in unmarked graves or no graves at all.

Similarly, in Afghanistan in 2010, much attention and controversy
surrounded the decision of our previous war commander, General
McChrystal, to issue constraining "rules of engagement" to try to cut
down on civilian casualties by U.S. troops.  The American question has
been: Was the general "handcuffing" American soldiers by making it
ever harder for them to call in air or artillery support when
civilians might be in the area?  Was he, that is, just too COIN-ish
and too tough on American troops?  On the other hand, little attention
in the mainstream was paid to the way McChrystal was ramping up
special operations forces targeting Taliban leaders, forces whose
night raids were, as the Wikileaks documents showed, repeatedly
responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians (and so for the anger
of other Afghans).

Collateral Damage in America

Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might
notice: in almost nine years of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan
and more than seven years of the same in Iraq, the U.S. has filled
metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical
bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings,
night raids, artillery and missile fire, and in some cases, the direct
act of murder.  Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to
count (though some have tried).  Among those deaths was that of a good
Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street, in July 2007,
to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter
attack to the hospital.  In repayment, he and his two children were
gunned down by that same Apache crew.  (The children survived; the
event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for
it; and, despite the fact that two Reuters employees died, the case
was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even
reprimanded.)

That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars
that Americans have known little or nothing about.  Now, Bradley
Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern
Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to Wikileaks and
may have been involved in leaking those 92,000 documents as well, is
preparing to face a court-martial and on a suicide watch, branded a
"traitor" by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the
ranking minority member of the House of Representatives' subcommittee
on terrorism, and almost certain to find himself behind bars for years
or decades to come.

As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video
(and, without doubt, many similar ones similarly cloaked in the
secrecy of "national security"), their fates are no less sure.  When
Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly
have the choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he
cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense
contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him.
Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide
range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably
get a million-dollar contract to write his memoirs.  Both will be
praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars.  Neither will be
considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead
civilians in distant lands.

Moral culpability?  It doesn't apply.  Not to Americans -- not unless
they leak military secrets.  None of the men responsible will ever
look at their hands and experience an "out, damned spot!" moment.
That's a guarantee.  However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood
and didn't want it on his hands, who found himself "actively involved
in something that I was completely against," who had an urge to try to
end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause "worldwide
discussion, debates, and reforms," will pay the price for them.  He
will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars
have caused.  He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar
movement that wasn't.

The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over
our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the
intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will
have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept,
speeches to give, honors to receive.  They will be treated with great
respect, while Americans -- once we have finally left the lands we
insistently fought over -- will undoubtedly feel little culpability
either.  And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first
suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered,
but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our
society "collateral" damage.

So much blood.  So many hands.  So little culpability.  No remorse.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way
of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books), has just
been published. You can catch him discussing it on a TomCast video by
clicking here.  Check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which
he discusses the three stages of the developing Wikileaks story by
clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.