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5 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Death from
above By Tom Engelhardt
The first news stories about the most
notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked
up the morning after from a US Army publicity
release. These proved fairly typical for the war.
On its front page, the New York Times labeled the
operation in and around a village called My Lai 4
(or "Pinkville", as it was known to US forces in
the area) a significant success.
"American
troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer
movement on the central
coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy
soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press
International termed what happened there an
"impressive victory", and added a bit of patriotic
color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their
hideout tunnels. Six and a half hours later, 'Pink
Village' had become 'Red, White and Blue
Village'."
All these 1968 dispatches from
the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales.
(There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took
over a year for a former GI named Ronald
Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre
from participants, and a young former Associated
Press reporter named Seymour Hersh working in
Washington for a news service virtually no one had
ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that
"red, white, and blue village" had just been red
village - the red of Vietnamese peasant blood.
More than 400 elderly men, women, children, and
babies were slaughtered there by Charlie Company
of Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit commanded by
Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Barker Jr, in a nearly
day-long rampage.
Things move somewhat
faster these days - after all, Vietnamese
villagers and local officials didn't have access
to mobile telephones to tell their side of the
slaughter - but from the military point of view,
the stories these past years have all still seemed
to start the same way.
Whether in
Afghanistan or Iraq, they have been presented by
US military spokesmen, or in military press
releases, as straightforward successes. The
newspaper stories that followed would regularly
announce that 17, or 30, or 65 "Taliban
insurgents" or "suspected insurgents" or "al-Qaeda
gunmen" had been killed in battle after "air
strikes" were called in. These stories recorded
daily military victories over a determined,
battle-hardened enemy.
Most of the time,
that was the beginning and end of the matter: air
strike; dead enemies; move on to the next day's
bloody events. When it came to Iraq, such
air-strike successes generally did not make it
into the US press as stories at all, but as
scattered, ho-hum paragraphs (based on military
announcements) in roundups of a given day's action
focused on far more important matters - suicide
car bombs, mortar attacks, sectarian killings. In
many cases, air strikes in that country simply
went unreported.
From time to time,
however, another version of what happened when air
strikes were called in on the rural areas of
Afghanistan, or on heavily populated neighborhoods
in Iraq's cities and towns, filtered out. In this
story, noncombatants died, often in sizable
numbers. In the past few weeks "incidents" like
this have been reported with enough regularity in
Afghanistan to become a modest story in their own
right.
In such news stories, a local
caregiver or official or village elder is reached
by phone in some distant, reporter-unfriendly spot
and recounts a battle in which, by the time the
planes arrive, the enemy has fled the scene, or
had never been there, or was present but, as is
generally the case in guerrilla wars, in close
proximity to noncombatants going about their daily
lives in their own homes and fields. Such accounts
record a grim harvest of dead civilians - and they
almost invariably have a repeated tagline when it
comes to those dead: "including women and
children". In an increasing number of cases
recently, reports on the carnage have taken not
more than a year, or weeks, or even days to expose
the scene, but have actually beaten the military
success story on to the news page.
In the
past, when such civilian slaughters were reported,
often days or even weeks after the initial
military account of the battle, what followed also
had a pattern to it. The first responses from the
US military would be outright denials (undoubtedly
on the assumption that, without reporters present,
the accounts of Afghan peasants or Iraqi slum
dwellers would carry little weight). Normally,
given the competing he says/she says frame for the
reports and the inability of journalists to make
it to the scene of the reputed slaughter, sooner
or later the story would simply fade away.
If, against all odds, evidence of civilian
deaths piled up, the military would, in strategic
fashion, fall back from one heavily defended
position to the next. The numbers of noncombatant
dead or wounded would be questioned and lowered.
Regrets would be offered. Explanations would be
proffered. It was perhaps an "accident" (a missile
missed its target or faulty local intelligence was
responsible); or it wasn't an accident, because
"the bad guys" meant it to happen as it did. (In
their cowardly way, they had turned the civilian
population into "human shields", thus causing the
deaths in question when US forces reacted in
"self-defense".)
If the story nonetheless
persisted, an "investigation" (by the military, of
course) would be announced - again, meant to fade
away. In rare cases, "consolation payments" and
limited apologies would be offered. In extreme
instances, when the killings of civilians were
especially grotesque and the result of boots on
the ground - as at Haditha - lower-ranking
soldiers might finally be brought up on charges.
With the exception of a friendly-fire incident in
which two US National Guard pilots killed four
Canadian soldiers and injured six others on the
ground in Afghanistan, air strikes were exempt
from such charges, no matter what had happened.
(In the Canadian case, the US pilot, originally
threatened with a court-martial on manslaughter
charges, was found guilty of "dereliction of
duty", reprimanded, and fined US$5,600.)
US (and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) officials regularly make the point
that the enemy's barbarism - and from car bombs to
a six-year-old boy sent to attack Afghan soldiers
wearing a suicide vest, their acts have indeed
been barbarous - is always intentional; the
killing of noncombatants by US planes is always an
"inadvertent" incident, an "accident", and so, of
course, the regrettable "collateral damage" of
modern warfare.
Recently, however, in
Afghanistan, such isolated incidents from US or
NATO (often still US) air attacks have been
occurring in startling numbers. They have, in
fact, become so commonplace that, in the news,
they begin to blur into what looks, more and more,
like a single, ongoing airborne slaughter of
civilians.
Protest over the killings of
noncombatants from the air, itself a modest story,
is on the rise. Afghan President Hamid Karzai,
dubbed "the mayor of Kabul", has bitterly and
repeatedly
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