Weekly Shredder 22:
The Fallujah Video
by James Norton
"He's fucking faking he's dead!" says a Marine in a video shot by freelance journalist Kevin Sites.
"Yeah, he's breathing," another Marine is heard saying.
"He's faking he's fucking dead!" the first Marine says.
A Marine then raises his rifle. He points it at an injured Iraqi prisoner lying on the floor of a mosque in Fallujah. The video, censored for broadcast, goes black; there is the sound of a rifle discharging.
"He's dead now," a Marine is heard saying.
Three shameful words delivered like a punchline from a Terminator movie. Like the scandal of Abu Ghraib, video of a US soldier shooting a defenseless prisoner will likely raise hackles on the left, be dismissed as evidence of a "bad apple" by the right, drive a lot of Web traffic and then fade away like a hangover.
After all, atrocities are as old as war itself. In Deuteronomy, chapter 7, verses 1-2, Old Testament God hands down memos to his Chosen People about who to spare and who to massacre.
When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.
For archives, audio, and background about the column, click here.
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In "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon wrote about the barbarian army of Alaric rampaging through Greece near the end of the Fifth Century AD.
...the fertile fields of Phocis and Boeotia were instantly covered by a deluge of barbarians who massacred the males of an age to bear arms, and drove away the beautiful females, with the spoils and cattle of the flaming villages. The travellers who visited Greece several years afterwards could easily discover the deep and bloody traces of the march of the Goths.
And you haven't been conscious over the past few months if you can't recall, almost word for word, Sen. John Kerry's description of stories told to him by troops who had returned from Vietnam.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
War is cruel; atrocities are inevitable, and regrettable. The soldier who shot the Iraqi has been charged, the military justice system will grind through the facts and a verdict will be delivered.
But this is not good enough.
How many members will Al Qaeda recruit when Muslims watch a US Marine kill an unarmed man inside of a mosque? How many US soldiers will die — or be tortured — by enemies who mistakenly assume that treating prisoners cruelly is part of the American way of war?
These are the kind of questions that people like Senator Joe Biden brought up when the story of Abu Ghraib broke, exposing the administration's efforts to get around the "quaint" and "obsolete" parts of the Geneva Conventions that pertain to prisoner torture.
SENATOR BIDEN: There's a reason why we sign these treaties: to protect my son in the military ... so when Americans are captured, they are not tortured.
These are the kind of questions that should force an administration to take stock of its war effort, take stock of the "hearts and minds" thing, take stock of what "democracy" now means to the Arab world, and take stock of the original goals that propelled it so relentlessly toward war.
Unfortunately, if the Bush administration is likely to learn anything from this video, it's that you shouldn't let journalists carry video cameras. Right-wing trolls have taken it ever further, based on this series of Freerepublic.com comments about Kevin Sites reprinted at MyDD.com:
No need for anything overt. Unfortunate things happen in combat zones, and if the reporter fails to hear someone yell "Sniper!!", well, c'est la guerre. 9 posted on 11/16/2004 1:11:50 PM PST by Charles Martel
I wish. This guy Sites shouldn't walk away from this unscathed. Red America wants justice.
21 posted on 11/16/2004 1:57:26 PM PST by faithincowboys
I wrote Mr. S.......suggested he best hope he never needs one of our heroes to watch his back. 24 posted on 11/16/2004 2:01:10 PM PST by OldFriend
He's an effin traitor. He is aiding the enemy. He should be tried and killed.
66 posted on 11/16/2004 4:31:36 PM PST by I got the rope
While the administration's reaction to the tape has been considerably more moderate than that of the bloodthirsty wingnuts over at Free Republic, its ignorance-is-bliss approach shone through at a recent White House press briefing. At the event, Scott McClellan was asked about a new Johns Hopkins study that suggests that as many as 100,000-plus Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war.
Q: Johns Hopkins, in its public health — last month estimated that the war in Iraq resulted in 100,000 Iraqi deaths. The administration has said in the past that it doesn't do body counts, but do you consider 100,000 to be in the ballpark of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the war?
MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know of any specific estimates on the civilians. I know that the United States military goes out of its way to minimize the loss of civilian life. And what we are working to achieve in Iraq is an important cause that will make America more secure. And we're working side-by-side with the Iraqi —
Q: So you're killing Iraqis to make America more secure?
MR. McCLELLAN: — with the Iraqi people to move forward on free elections, because a free Iraq will help transform a dangerous region of the world and make America more secure. And our men and women in the military are doing an outstanding job; they are serving and sacrificing in a very important cause.
Q: If I could follow up on that, did the president have an estimate before him on the number of Iraqis killed —
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not aware of any precise estimate or estimate of that nature.
How odd; this is a large, reputable study. And there is another project, called Iraqi Body Count, that only documents Iraqi civilian deaths documented by the press; it's therefore a conservative estimate that is currently at 14,000 and climbing.
This is the documentation of more than 10,000 innocent people: wives, brothers, mothers, sisters, grandchildren. That's five big high schools. Three Sept. 11 attacks. Every single person in East Lyme, Ct.
Their killers, through overzealousness, carelessness or plain bad luck, include American military men and women.
This is a worthwhile thing for a president to care about. Dying Iraqi civilians help fuel the rage of the insurgency. They help justify the horrible acts of terrorists. And they represent an incredible moral challenge — something, you would think, that would really, really resonate for our intensely Christian leader.
Shedding the blood of the innocent is inevitable during war, but that doesn't mean the deaths of Iraqi civilians — or prisoners — shouldn't matter.
A Christian president should care because Jesus cared about the innocent, the poor, and the powerless. A competent president should care because the deaths of civilians, and videos like the one shot by Kevin Sites, fuel the occupation and prolong the war.
These deaths are worth being aware of.
E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.
— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)
