Page 1 of
2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Bonfire of
puppy-tossers, and the beer
test By Julian Delasantellis
Five years now the bright nights of shock
and awe have turned into the never ending days of
blinding sorrow and affliction, but there is one
thing that even the fiercest critics of the war,
of which I include myself, must now admit. The
hoary shibboleth that states that Americans care
little or nothing for the non-combatant casualties
its armed forces are inflicting on the Iraqi civil
population has been demonstrated decisively wrong.
Recent events have proven that Americans care
deeply, passionately, even to and beyond the point
of breaking the laws about making direct criminal
threats, about those Iraqis injured by American
forces.
As long as those injured have four
legs and bark.
Viral is the current
adjective of choice for Internet content, be it
video, music or just a rumor or
joke, that gets copied and passed on in an
exponential fashion; soon it can be found on most
of the web servers of the world. Early this month,
a video so viral emerged from the muck and mire of
the Internet that Americans, looking up from their
NCAA basketball pool and their mental calculations
as to how many mortgage payments they'd have to
miss to be able to afford just one night with one
of disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer's
hookers, remembered that there were still over
150,000 US soldiers in Iraq.
The 17-second
video, apparently produced with a cell phone
camera, was posted on YouTube. It opens with a US
Marine, in current day marine battle dress, in
Iraq, holding a small puppy dog, maybe a newly
born St Bernard, by the scruff of the neck. The
marine is making cute cooing sounds to the dog -
"oh, so cute, little puppy", then without any
apparent warning or provocation heaves the puppy a
good distance through the air into a gully. The
dog can be heard yipping and yelping as it flies
through the air, and its body can be seen
twisting, until it lands, when it becomes still
and quiet, apparently dead.
"That's mean,
that's mean", says another marine, more jokingly
than serious, as if he knows he should care but
doesn't.
In the two days following the
video's arrival on YouTube, and even before the
news of its existence made it very far into the
mainstream media, it was viewed over 145,000
times. YouTube quickly pulled the video down, but,
demonstrating how difficult it is now to control
access to information and content in the Internet
age, others who had copied the video quickly
re-posted it on this, and many other Internet
sites.
Merciless outrage soon burned
across the web. For five years Americans had
mostly sat by and clicked on their remote controls
whenever there was coverage of alleged atrocities
by US military personnel against helpless Iraqi
civilians, but for those who transgress the laws
of war against cute Iraqi canines, well, dust off
those gavels at Nuremberg, what we got here is a
real crime against humanity!
The young
marine in the video was soon identified as being
from Monroe, Washington state, a small, semi-rural
community located in the foothills of the Cascade
Mountains about 60 kilometers northeast of
Seattle. The local major newspaper, the Everett
Herald, has recently reported on what happens
when, like a child using a magnifying glass
focusing the sun's heat to set an insect on fire,
the ability of the Internet to produce the
combined, concentrated power of middle-class rage
is focused on one little town.
"Threats
keep building toward the family of a man many
believe is the marine in the video, and from
across the globe Internet vigilantes are calling
the workplace of the man's mother in Monroe and
threatening acts of vandalism unless the mother is
fired."
But, obviously, evil abounds in
poor little Monroe, and it cannot be limited to
just the employer of the marine's mother. The
whole town must share the stain of sin, it truly
is the new Village of the Dammed.
Monroe
City councilman Mitch Ruth told the Herald that
the town's email address had been sent many
"abusive, profane and harassing" messages accusing
the city of tolerating animal cruelty. It's
apparently acceptable that the town's major
employer, the Washington State Reformatory,
contains the Internal Management Unit, which is
now housing the state's most violent criminal
offenders, and the Special Offenders Unit, which
holds the state's most criminally disturbed
offenders, including its sexual predators. But
allow the alleged puppy killer to walk the
streets, and the implication becomes that Monroe
makes Sodom and Gomorra look like Sherwood
Anderson's idyllic, innocent early 20th century
small town of Winesburg, Ohio.
My favorite
manifestation of Iraq puppy rage is this question
posted on the Yahoo-Answers bulletin board: "The
marine puppy killer. Does anyone know what church
if any his family attends? Please let me know?
Just think it would be fun to visit on Sunday."
Just what would this poster,
self-identified as "Scott B", expect to find at
this house of worship? Nazi jackbooted thugs?
Aliens from out of The X Files? Motorcycle
gangs? Maybe, in the spirit of Hannah Arendt's
account of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf
Eichmann, "Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the
Banality of Evil"; Scott B might be surprised and
disappointed to see at this church just average
looking Western Washingtonians at a very average
religious observance.
But what "fun" was
Scott expecting at this church? Was he going to,
in the spirit of Jesus in Matthew 21:12, drive the
puppy killers from the temple? Was he going to
seize the pulpit like Savonarola, thundering to
the gathered faithful that they must repent? Or,
in the more modern fashion of AIDS activists
pelting attendees at Roman Catholic services with
prophylactics in order to spur their consciences,
was he going to hurl dog chewies and cans of Alpo
at the ashamed congregates?
But a much
better question is why Americans can care so
deeply over one dead Iraqi dog, and so little over
hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi humans? It is
in understanding this dichotomy that the real
purpose of the war to America can be understood,
and the risks that those who advocate its quick
conclusion are taking. Every so often, the US
media report on estimates on the numbers of Iraqi
civilians killed since the beginning of the war.
The highest numbers invariably originate out of a
joint project of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health and al-Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad, and are published in the
British medical journal Lancet. They reported
655,000 civilian war dead up to June 2006;
extending their counting methodology two years to
the present would put the figure now near a
million.
Others question the Johns
Hopkins/Lancet methodology, and produce different,
lower figures. The World Health Organization-Iraqi
Health Ministry study, published in the
prestigious New England Journal of Medicine,
estimated between 104,000 and 230,000 excess
civilian deaths during the war's first three
years. The most conservative tabulation, produced
by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count Project,
currently estimates Iraqi civilian dead at between
82,000 and just under 90,000.
But whatever
the estimate, the American reaction is the same:
ho-hum.
It's the same with the story of US
military personnel accused of abusing or killing
civilian Iraqis. Military prosecutors have had a
devil of a time obtaining serious convictions of
US military personnel accused of such offenses.
The reports and photographs of detainee abuse at
the Abu Ghraib prison shocked and outraged the
world, but not so much in America that anybody in
a senior position in the command chain faced much
of any sanction for them.
US Army
Lieutenant Colonel Steven L Jordan, the director
of the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center at
Abu Ghraib, was acquitted of all charges related
to the detainee abuse. Most of the other personnel
made famous in the abuse photographs pled guilty
to reduced charges in exchange for reduced
sentences; only Specialist Charles Graner and
Private Lyndie England (the Romeo and Juliet of
Abu Ghraib guards and poster children for a
morally depraved archetypal American heartland
upbringing) were convicted at full trial to
receive serious sentences.
In much of the
civil society debate over Iraq, the Abu Ghraib
guards received not approbation but praise. Rush
Limbaugh both praised and defended them, saying
that the guards were just "blowing off steam" and
likening the abuse that so enraged the Muslim
world to a fraternity initiation. But even the
toughest frat house does not require pledges to
undergo initiations like what happened to citizens
in Haditha, Iraq, on November 19, 2005.
Prosecutors for the US Marine Corps have
alleged that on that date a squad of US Marines,
enraged by the death of one of their comrades,
Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, stormed into a
house in Haditha, Iraq, and randomly killed at
least 15 Iraqi men. When officers arrived at the
scene, they commenced a cover up to make the
killings look as if a result of an improvised
explosive device (IED).
For two of the
four marines directly charged with unpremeditated
murder in the incident, charges have been dropped.
An investigating officer is recommending that
charges for another, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum,
also be dropped. Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich
remains to face trial; at his support web site,
appeals are made for help with funding for his
legal defense as a way that Americans can "support
the troops". According to a recent posting on the
"leatherneck.com" web site, over $200,000 has been
raised from Americans for the defense of Wuterich
and Tatum.
Prosecutors have had more
success with the perpetrators of the outrages of
Mahmudiya, in which a squad of soldiers from the
US Army's 502d Infantry Regiment raped a
14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdered her and
her family. Convictions and guilty pleas have
already been obtained against four of the
perpetrators, the alleged ringleader of the plot,
former Private Stephen Green, will face trial and
the death penalty in a civilian court next year.
"Mahmudiya killings" returns 22,300 hits
on Google. In contrast, in less than a month,
"Iraq puppy killing" returns 737,000 hits.
It is perhaps Marine Corps Sergeant Ilario
Pantano that best represents the poster child for
America's indifference to the civilian
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
