The Blogger-Bypass
I want to thank Liz Burbank for giving me the heads up on this story.
The Blogger-Bypass
Story of Inventing Insurgents Creates Allergic Reaction in the Press
The stark but informative site Cryptome.org is carrying a story with photos of how a Marine unit gathered the bodies of teenage boys from a soccer field, and rounded up nearby living teenaged boys, and posed them all with weapons that the Marines already had.
Before I riff a bit on this, let me suggest we cluster-blog these stories, or carpet-blog, whichever Air Force metaphor most suits you. Maximum distribution by linking and re-posting for those special stories that tear the mask off the real character of this war.
Those of us who spent time ‘humpin’ the boonies’ in Vietnam remember this practice very well. Inflating body counts, and transforming all the dead into enemy or “suspected” enemy. Anyone with an ounce of critical capacity and a gram of skepticism has figured this out about Iraq for a while now, but these stories that provide graphic evidence serve to overcome the more stubborn forms of denial and to open up the unwelcome discussion.
For those unschooled and inexperienced in war, and who have been exposed to a lifetime of television and film where “bad guys” always have poor marksmanship and “good guys” are Buffalo-fucking-Bill sharpshooters, where no one is ever stumbling under 50 pounds of LCE, tripping over rubble, falling into ditches, wheezing to catch their breath, firing suppressive fire around corners or over the lip of erosion ditches with no regard for bystanders, or “returning” fire in a general direction when they haven’t identified where shots came from (usually people fire wherever the first person who guesses out loud where the shots came from), and shooting each other in the confusion… people who have no experience of this plain, dumb, human confusion and fallibility in combat, they can be fooled by their own internalized images from those films where soldiers and cops are all highly-skilled, competent, atheletic, impervious to pain, and even well-read.
Ain’t so.
Moreover, these same people who have no real idea of the “banality of evil” as someone once called it, they don’t know much about human anatomy and how it interacts with the hazards of warfare — high velocity ammunition, shrapnel, explosive concussion, secondary missiles, and collapsing structures. The human body turns out to be a pretty durable thing that automatically fights to reproduce its own moment-to-moment vialibility. In any action, whether civilian or combatant, there are more people who are wounded than killed. Yet we never hear about “wounded” insurgents in these post-action tallies. And the press doesn’t ask these questions either, because the capitalist press is a sales-culture, inherently cowardly, and always seeking to offend the fewest people to hang onto market share, or standing on the sidelines at high-draw and lurid spectacles — like the Michael Jackson trial. They especially don’t want to offend advertisers or owners, who are often as not defense contractors, brokerage houses, and other such criminal elements.
But the other reality of war, and the one I am highlighting here with the able assistance of the linked story from Cryptome, is that bystanders always get beat up in urban combat actions worse than anyone, and are often attacked wihtout provocation because ot the trigger-happy paranoia and rage of the troops who are dropped into their cities — troops who are not unlike hornets screwed inside a Mason jar. What I am saying is that it is simply not possible that when 50 people are killed in one of these actions, that all 50 are “insurgents.” That’s an outrageous claim — on par with telling people that a piss-ant just ate a bale of hay — and the outrage is magnified by the fact that the press repeats these figures WITH THE UNQUESTIONED CLAIM that the dead (no wounded, mind you) were all “insurgents.”
After all the perfidy that has been exposed, not just this time around, but for decades and decades, from governments and from the military brass, the press still grants them the presumption of honesty. Yet they would have us believe that this so-called journalism is a “free press” checking and balancing power. And this is where people get fooled. They haven’t been sufficiently compelled to see the press for what it is, an apparatus of hegemony — an integral part of the ruling class system of population control, the self-policing drug… Soma is better than love, baby.
That’s why building these bypass media networks are so important. And they work… not as fast as we’d like, but they work.
And now we need to use them to break down this critical-lie. Critical-lies are lies that are essential to maintain the main fictions of empire. We have to systematically and relentlessly attack the lie that all the dead are insurgents, and we have to just as relentlessly beat down the capialist press — putting them on the defensive — about supporting this lie. We need to jam a pry-bar into this contradiction between image and reality and pull hard until we tear it off the hinges.
We can, too, because more each day, people are listening. They are tuning in.
peggy:
Stan - A big part of the problem is that many people do not _want_ to know. Therefore, making the information available, even massively available, may not in itself be a solution. Somehow it is necessary to overcome the intentional ignorance of the many who fear the destruction of their worldview. To hammer away at this worldview can make people even more fearful, and cause them to close their eyes even tighter. If we can slowly lead them to see the reality of something better, something more like what they want to be true, then maybe we stand a chance. That’s a tall order, but I remain with you in believing we can achieve it.
25 June 2005, 4:26 amShawn Redden:
Hey Stan,
Great idea, here. I’ve been passing out quite a few of your lectures out over the last couple years beginning with “The So-Called Evidence is a Farce,” which hit me like a ton of bricks.
Lately I’ve been mainly handing out your talk on Haiti that was loaded onto radio4all.net.
Anyway, after giving it another listen, I wanted to ask you what you thought of the recent article in HaitiProgresentitledGuerrillas Strike in Borgne, which seems to indicate something revolutionary happening among the Haitian peasants much like you’d suggested would occur months ago in that speech.
25 June 2005, 9:15 amEd:
STAN: “… a Marine unit gathered the bodies of teenage boys from a soccer field, and rounded up nearby living teenaged boys, and posed them all with weapons that the Marines already had.”
ED: Other readers will now post your summary on other sites until it becomes “fact”. Yet your sources support very little in your opening paragraph, and directly contradict some of it.
For instance, where did you get the identity of the troops? Marines, Stan?
And how do you know the Soldiers in the photo were already in possession of the RPG, instead of capturing it during that engagement?
And where did you get the part about “rounding up living teenaged boys”?
26 June 2005, 8:48 amStan:
Nonsense, Ed, You carefully start the sentence where you want to, omitting the preceding words that say A STORY OF…
I point the story out for the very reasons elucidated in my comments. This story is MORE credible than the notion that US bombs and bullets kill ONLY “insurgents” and “suspected terrorists”… which is exaclty what you are trying to divert attention from with your comment — the absurdity of these claims, and the marketplace-cowardice of the press in giving the Pentagon and the adminsitration the presumption of honesty.
Answer those issues, and quit fishing for these red herrings.
Roundups happen all the time, and you know it. That’s why Bucca is bursting at the seams with people who have never been given a chance to establish how they were rounded up, and some have enven been held hostage to put pressure on their relatives…but then again on other posts, you have indicated your disdain for the Geneva Conventions.
You are a decent but confused man, Ed, and you are working for a criminal class. That criminality reaches all the way to your commander in chief, and all the way down into the ranks who have now been put in this situation. But it originates from on high, and it is woven into the very fabric of imperial occupation.
26 June 2005, 11:11 amastras:
at the following link the a soldier who says he lead the troop who killed the iraqis in the pictures gives his side of the story. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=364
26 June 2005, 2:22 pmactually he makes some pretty lame excuses, but blames the media for bringing this up.
Ed:
Stan, please set aside the ad-hominem personal attacks for a moment. I merely asked you to cite the passages in the Cryptome story from which you got your facts.
I will help you with the first one. Those troops were not Marines, they were Army soldiers from the 1st ID. The Cryptome story and the accompanying links make that very clear.
26 June 2005, 3:52 pmEd:
Which excuses do you consider lame?
26 June 2005, 9:33 pmEd:
Astras: sorry, I forgot to thank you for posting that link.
26 June 2005, 9:35 pmTom in Sydney:
Gee Ed, you sound like I did in response to you claims about Yugoslavia.
I wonder if HRW or AI have any reports on this.
26 June 2005, 10:31 pmSks:
Ed,
Be serious. Live by the gun, die by the gun. You ad hominemize our ass all the time. Don’t whine. We don’t.
Now, you got Stan on that one. It is 1LT TJ Grider’s Platoon from the 1st ID of the Army, not a Marine unit. Hey, the man is not perfect, althought of course, as a military man, you are keen on perfection, I pressume.
Now, more fat to the fire:
This is a 11/8/04 US News & World Report on 1LT TJ Grider’s platoon.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/041108/8iraq.htm
Now, this means, to me, this just another psyop half truth blog pollution thing. Doesn’t sound to you, Ed?
Get this up and coming “comabt seasoned” young 1LT, who describes killing other people as “fun”, to be defended or vilified by blog pundits (erm, I supposed that include us), but ultimately detract attention from the real issue:
Even “lawful” combat in Iraq is morally wrong because the USA has no business being there. Period. So every Iraqi who shoots back if actually defending his right to rule his own land, and every last one of them who dies is a murder and a crime. Now, this might sound harsh. I got nothing personally against any soliders in the US Armed Forces. I don’t expect them to stand idly while under attack. I mean, if some godawful AQ came my way, I would make sure it was him rather than me who went to Hell. But this is a distrtaction and a logical fallacy. They wouldn’t need to defend themselves, come back to wrecked marriages and PTSD as a result of killing babies by accident, if they weren’t in Iraq in the first place.
I got family in burn units somewhere in Texas because of Iraqi IEDs. Can’t say am happy. Can’t say the kid wasn’t told he had it coming either.
But must say that there would be at least one less burn victim and EID planter and would be murderer if the USA didn’t meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. I mean, wtf, the USA has 2 million people in jail and going up, and 12 million children go to sleep every day hungry, and the USA presumes they can tell others how to live?
THE SHEER BRAVADO OF IT ALL!!!
Hey, am not saying Saddam was some kind of angel. He wasn’t. He is in fact, to understate, a major SOB. Yet, and this I believe is not the first time I raised it, he was trained, paid for, installed, and supported by the USA from the very beginning. From this initial fact all other things stem. Failure to recognize, ostrich like, this fact, is the biggest point of difference we have in our discussions.
What TJ Grider says about the incident echoes the same attitude you have expressed here, which amounts to a Party line:
“What some of you don’t seem to understand is that regardless of their age we took human lives that day. But it was out of necessity and self-preservation and in attempting to accomplish the missions set forth for us by our unit. That mission was to rid Iraq of insurgents and terrorist attempting to destabilize the government and terrorize the Iraqi people. We helped accomplish that mission that day.”
It all sounds reasonable. Yet, it is a fallacy. It accepts the premise of the mission is a legitimate and lawful one. Like with the case of Saddam, from this wrong premise everything else stems.
Righteousness is the opium of the soldier.
And we are the rehab program.
The first step is to accept that you are powerless over the killing — that your lives are but pawns in a game for a ruling class that doesn’t even care about their own officers, as their treatment of the profetic, if mediocre otherwise, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki shows.
Once that step is overcome, the world will open up. I know dozens of ex-soldiers like Stan who have accepted that. My own grandfather on my mother’s side became a pacifist after being a POW of the Nazis. I mean, that is widely accepted to have been a just war. But seeing a school full of children burn down next to his camp due to an Allied bombing run was enough trauma to make him a pacifist, and commie fllow traveller, a victim of McCartyism and an alchoholic out of a previously abstemious man. If a “good” war can make contradictory wreck out of someone with a PhD, no wonder “going postal” applies to so many vietnam vets who were 18 year olds when they first had to rape a woman and 50 when they killed their co-workers…
Which reminds me of Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, who became a light shade of Red after a career that made him the most decorated US Marine until the time of his death. He got the Medal of Honor *twice*.
This was his summation of his career:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
Even so, in what has to be the reason why there are uncorroborated reports of shaking at Butler’s tomb, a Marine base in Okinawa is called “Camp Smedley Butler”. Somewhere, a Marine officer was having a laugh at the irony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
So you see, Ed, its not that we don’t like you, or don’t like the troops, or a rooting for the bad guys. It just we want much less people to die that necessary, and we want kids to have an opportunity to live lives that don’t amount to having to take medication for PTSD the rest of their lives, or having them end up killing some of their co-workers when they are fifty all the while the people they killed and died for enjoy expensive and luxurious condos, late model exotic cars, court-side basketball tickets and pop viagra like candy.
As an officier, in particular a West-Pointer and Ivy Leaguer, I must assume talk about class sounds foreign to you. But it shouldn’t. At least if you care about your men and women, as you seem to do.
In the end war is people who don’t know each other killing on behalf of people who do know each other, but don’t kill each other…
27 June 2005, 6:20 amastras:
the lame excuse is: “The initial picutures were taken without weapons because we had consolidated the RPGs away from the individuals and were guarding them while we set up security and treated the wounded.”
he took the weapons away. that’s normal, i guess. then he took them back and took pictures?? why? who is supposed to believe this story?
27 June 2005, 8:54 amLEE:
Stan, it appears to be wholesale slaughter of the Iraqi people. Using the Marine credo, “Kill them all, let God sort them out” and take their oil.
27 June 2005, 12:10 pmrsklnkv:
I just wanted to express my agreement with the first post (Peggy) in that we are, unfortunately living in a culture where folks just don’t want to know. The idea that we are all somehow responsible for the tragedies of this world is a cold, hard fact most people don’t want to deal with. It’s much easier to be apathetic, ignorant, etc. than to face the music. The truth is that until EVERYONE is free, there can be no freedom at all (Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.–Fannie Lou Hamer). Not even in the ‘God Blessed’ Good Ole US of A.
27 June 2005, 2:08 pmThanks for the info Stan.
Ed:
To everyone: It is not about me. Stop hiding behind my bio.
I will do my best to abide by Stan’s Rules and Suggestions. I will gladly engage in discussion of issues with those who do likewise. Others I will ignore.
27 June 2005, 6:15 pmEd:
To Astras:
1) As you suspect, soldiers are trained to separate weapons from the dead and wounded on an objective. Ask Stan to confirm this.
2) Some captured insurgents are now turned over to the Iraqis for prosecution by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI). http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2004/08/iraq-040802-centcom02.htm Evidence is presented at their trials. Photos with captured weapons would seem a plausible method to document the circumstances of arrest.
None of this proves that is actually what happened, only that Grider’s self-described actions were consistent with his training and orders.
27 June 2005, 7:21 pmEd:
To Sks:
1) I don’t expect perfection. I do expect due diligence with facts from a blog that aims to be an alternative media outlet. Given Stan’s experience and knowledge, I have to wonder how carefully he read the article he cited. I’d like to see Stan be successful. I think I’m doing him a favor by calling him on it when he gets sloppy, helping him to hone his game.
2) I believe the Iraq mission is both morally and legally right. Therefore, any argument starting with the presumption that the war is wrong carries no weight with me. I do however accept the premise that even within a just war there can be injust and criminal actions.
3) Please provide evidence of your statement that Saddam was trained, paid for, and installed by the US. It is common knowledge that we allied ourselves with him in the early 80’s against Iran, but that does not constitute culpability for creating his regime.
4) Even if we were responsible for Saddam, that would not render us ineligible to depose him. In my view, it would increase our moral responsibility to correct the situation.
5) Class, economics, pet political theories, and 100 year old biographies are attempts to divert attention from the story that Stan posted. He repeats specific allegations of war crimes. Why do you avoid looking more closely at them?
27 June 2005, 7:52 pmStan:
Ed, I did not repeat the allegations. You need to stop that. I said that this is what a story said. My main point was just what is in the subtitle line, that the press gives the Pentagon the presumption of honesty when outrageous claims are made. And you are avoiding that issue.
I will repeate it here, so there is no confusion:
“…bystanders always get beat up in urban combat actions worse than anyone, and are often attacked wihtout provocation because ot the trigger-happy paranoia and rage of the troops who are dropped into their cities – troops who are not unlike hornets screwed inside a Mason jar. What I am saying is that it is simply not possible that when 50 people are killed in one of these actions, that all 50 are “insurgents.†That’s an outrageous claim – on par with telling people that a piss-ant just ate a bale of hay – and the outrage is magnified by the fact that the press repeats these figures WITH THE UNQUESTIONED CLAIM that the dead (no wounded, mind you) were all “insurgents.—
This is not about whether they were Marines or army, or even about the supposed accuracy or inaccuracy of the report. You are on a red herring expedition, because you don’t want to deal with the real fish. I am saying that this story is as credible or more credible - based on my experience of military operations - than what gets repeated in the media.
As to so-called moral responsibilities, I’ll believe it when I see the fast movers launching toward Tel Aviv and Riyadh. Until then, its just apologetics. And you can’t cancel the discussion by striking limits on the premises - using only your own premises as a point of departure. It’s faulty premises that lead to bad conclusions, and there is no way to resolve the value of a position without critiquing the premises.
27 June 2005, 8:23 pmEd:
Stan:
1) I am not trying to avoid the issues. I readily concede your basic premise. Combat actions in the vicinity of populations frequently result in civilian deaths. The notion that everyone killed in any large engagement is a combatant IS ridiculous, especially in urban combat. The press SHOULD be skeptical of such claims when the Pentagon makes them.
2) STAN: “I did not repeat the allegations. You need to stop that. I said that this is what a story said”. ED: That’s a cheap dodge. You link to the story, summarize it on your blog front page, and strongly imply that the story is credible “evidence”. Some of your words:
“… these stories that provide graphic evidence serve to overcome the more stubborn forms of denial and to open up the unwelcome discussion.”
“…the one I am highlighting here with the able assistance of the linked story from Cryptome …”
(NOTE: for the reader’s benefit, the annotation “…” indicates text has been omitted before and after the selection. You are invited to refer to the top of the page, where the original document resides, to read the statements in their full context and draw your own interpretations. This is standard practice in the English language.)
3) STAN: “This is not about whether they were Marines or army, or even about the supposed accuracy or inaccuracy of the report.” ED: Are you interested in facts at all, or only in furthering your point of view? If the former, how can you possibly argue that the underlying accuracy of the report is unimportant and not worthy of discussion?
4) STAN: “You are on a red herring expedition, because you don’t want to deal with the real fish.” ED: Who’s trying to “cancel the discussion by striking limits on the premises” now?
5) STAN (from the original article): “That’s why building these bypass media networks are so important. And they work… not as fast as we’d like, but they work.” ED: Only if you hold yourselves to higher standards of accuracy than them. Accept sloppy reporting and you are no better.
I can tell you will not own up to the inaccuracies in your original statements, so I’ll drop the issue. The text and links remain for other readers to make up their own minds.
27 June 2005, 9:21 pmastras:
it is obvious that this incident requires a criminal investigation. the teens had those weapons already? let’s take the fingerprints. this is the first time ever i have heard of troops putting weapons back beside dead iraqis and taking pictures. how could they trial them? they are dead. and why did did they take their clothes off? no matter how you try to justify it, ed. the whole incident stinks to the high heavens.
28 June 2005, 5:26 amEd:
Some of them were wounded, not dead. One was captured uninjured. They were presumably turned over to the Iraqis for prosecution. The Iraqis routinely release those without evidence. In fact, in some areas they routinely release anyone who only attacked Americans. This is the “puppet” government some of you despise.
The clothes were removed to treat the wounds. That is obvious from the photos. Again, standard practice.
The whole evidence and trial thing is actually a positive development, though I don’t expect any of you to concede that. As Stan has claimed, roundups did occur, especially in the first year, and nobody documented the circumstances of detainment or capture. By November ‘03 we had ten thousand people in detention, and we didn’t have the slightest idea who had been arrested for what. Terrorists, insurgents, common criminals, and unlucky bystanders were mixed in together. Young soldiers just didn’t have the training or procedures to do “crime scene” style investigation.
The fact that US troops are now required to document the circumstances of capture for the Iraqi civil authorities is undeniably an improvement. Assuming of course that you actually care about the legal and ethical conduct of the war, and are not just using it as a propaganda tool.
28 June 2005, 6:48 amStan:
In fact, I have been on several missions where we were explicitly forbidden to treat anyone “indigenous,” including so-called allies and civilians. The dressing on the one stripped body’s knee seems both weird and superfluous, given that he obviously died of a massive chest wound… which is untreated. And again, why were the weapons, that as Ed points out are separated from downed combatants as part of every search, then put next to bodies for photographs? Photographs are not part of every after-action process, and in fact cameras are now off limits to troops to prevent another Abu Ghraib scandal. Why photos, if not to set up “evidence” to rebut the testimony of eyewitnesses in the town?
28 June 2005, 7:11 amray-davison:
not to change the subject, but what gets me is that the corpses are getting so skinny, you know I get that real sad urge to feed em up and then I see how dead they are, that Mama’s crying. The boys are so skinny but thier sisters skin & bones the boys constantly face the moral dilemma, whether to eat what they’ve caged on the streets or take it home, little men. another few months of this horror show, look for rickets, and then those faded henna hair patches - it’s what the military post-industrial complex does best, heaven help them.
28 June 2005, 1:59 pmEd:
This is why:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062701605.html
“In recent weeks, lawyers with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division — to which Irizarry was assigned — began providing counterinsurgency units with kits containing cameras, explosive detection devices and pens and paper for sketching diagrams of the events. A slide show prepared by judge advocates shows soldiers how to photograph crime scenes and place evidence in plastic bags without smearing fingerprints.”
28 June 2005, 5:26 pmpeggy:
Ed and Stan - You two are talking past each other. Each of you has some important points to make. Ed is right that Stan should be more careful in fact-checking. It hurts our credibility if we bombard the world with flawed reports. And Stan is right that Ed is not seeing the big picture, and the big picture is what is important. Guys, there is a difference between winning an argument and actually bringing your opponent round to your point of view. I would like to believe that bringing the other guy round to your side is what each of you would like to do. But with all due respect, it seems to me like yall’ve got into a pissing contest, and that is not edifying to us bystanders. Forgive me if I speak out of place.
28 June 2005, 6:48 pmEd:
A clarification: the “standard practice” I referred to was the removal of clothes during wound treatment.
I assume you are talking about the boy on the right in photo #13. In photos #3 and #7, you will see he is still alive. I cannot see a massive chest wound, but an entry wound would be rather small anyways. All I can see is a large blood stain on his shirt. Look at his arm wound in #7 for a possible source of the blood. Hard to tell from the photos, isn’t it?
I can’t find any reference to eyewitnesses. Grider describes the engagement as taking place deep in a palm grove away from the town, and having to carry the casualties 200 meters to a road. Did you see a mention of eyewitnesses that I missed?
There are some legit questions. Why no AK-47s captured, when they are so common there? Who would take on a US infantry platoon at close range armed solely with RPG-7s? And how is “heavy RPG fire” possible with one launcher? Maybe that casts doubt on Grider’s story .. or maybe those boys were just dumb and unlucky. Not to be heartless, but Darwin is a bitch in combat.
None of this proves or disproves anything. But it’s good to closely scrutinize the actual evidence and facts when forming our individual opinions. Agreed?
28 June 2005, 7:38 pmEd:
Peggy, you’re right about us talking past each other. Not surprising, given the huge philosophical and ideological divide between us.
But how to get beyond it? Neither of us has much chance of bringing the other around to our point of view. Perhaps a lesser goal of being mutually edifying to the readers?
28 June 2005, 10:10 pmpeggy:
Thanks Ed for pointing our that there are indeed some anomalies in the pictures and Lt Grider’s response. And yes I for one agree that we should scrutinize - really *look* at the evidence, every bit of it, before forming opinions. Some things are right in front of our eyes and yet we don’t really see them.
The pictures do raise many questions, the more so the more one studies them. For instance, how did it happen that the first boy in the pictures was shot right in the middle of the forehead, apparently at close range (?? I am admittedly no expert on weapons and wounds). And why was it necessary to photograph a live boy’s naked genitals? Couldn’t the medics have covered that area with a cloth or something, out of basic respect? They surely would have done this with for one of their own.
There is one thing about which the pictures leave no question, however, which is that these boys were ragged and skinny. Thanks to ray-davison for mentioning this fact. Did anyone else notice? Or was the fact too trivial to be worth mentioning? And one of the boys had a recent haircut. Is this important? It is, because somebody cared enough about this kid for at least his hair to look decent, even if his body was emaciated and his clothes were ragged.
I would guess that these kids were poorly nourished throughout their lives. And I put it to all of you that a lifetime of hunger is worse than death by gunshot. And this is exactly why these boys were willing to risk their lives to throw a few weapons at American troops, knowing full well that these troops were way stronger than them, and their chances of being killed were high. Lt Grider or one of the commentators on the pictures says that the boys worked for the insurgents because they had been promised food in exchange for service. This is quite plausible.
There is an excellent report on child combatants that Graca Michal did for the UN. It is on the web. You can easily find it. Michal says that kids join military organizations for food, or for ideological reasons, or both. My own field research (fwiw) confirms this observation.
FOOD! We who have never faced starvation cannot really understand the meaning of food, or the lack of it.
And why were these boys so desperately hungry in the first place? Everyone knows the answer to that, or they should.
A recent article in Counterpunch by Kathy Kelly features a letter from an Iraqi man to the author. It is at
http://www.counterpunch.org/kelly06272005.html
Here is the letter:
“What happened in US if any one from US army feels hungry? For sure you all now saying the US government will do all they can to do, even they will send in… many airplanes … bringing all the best types of good energy foods and best supplements to make them (the army) stronger to kill the life in poor people. BUT, what about if any one from Iraqi people feels hungry? Simply the answer is no one will care about us…
In every month when Iraqi families go to the shops to get the (oil for food rations) foods, we just get some of the things:
1. Tea.
2. Milk of adults.
3. Soap.
4. Oils.
5. Sugar (some months).
And other important types are not found:
1. Milk of babies.
2. Rice.
3. Flour.
4. beans.
So, why we are still suffering from hungry and may be some families rich or they have the ability of shopping but what about others sleeping without dinner and what about the crying of baby for milk and his mother dying to give it to him, crying … who give mercy to her and her baby? Where is Bush and his flag he carried to bring the democracy and freedom? Who is the hero in our government … and why all the world organizations still silent and where is the UN?â€
So maybe those pictures should be published widely throughout the Internet, together with this man’s letter, and maybe the caption:
“These are your terrorists: starving children.”
29 June 2005, 3:09 amSks:
“I believe the Iraq mission is both morally and legally right. Therefore, any argument starting with the presumption that the war is wrong carries no weight with me.”
Well, you are indeed entitled to that opinion, however patently untrue it is. Of course, then again it is simply that we have different views as to what constitutes “legality” and “morality”. Might be interesting to elucidate that.
“I do however accept the premise that even within a just war there can be injust and criminal actions.”
That would be like denying water gets you wet.
“Please provide evidence of your statement that Saddam was trained, paid for, and installed by the US. It is common knowledge that we allied ourselves with him in the early 80’s against Iran, but that does not constitute culpability for creating his regime.”
I suggest you start with “Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq” by Alan Friedman, a Financial Times writer, and then follow the bibliography there, including primary source information.
Also, just google it!
http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Saddam%20Hussein+cia
“Even if we were responsible for Saddam, that would not render us ineligible to depose him. In my view, it would increase our moral responsibility to correct the situation.”
I cannot this accept this logic. This is like using a wolf to guard sheep against another wolf. The guarding wolf will eat the sheep, even if he might also keep the other wolves away. (No wonder an elite counter-insurgency unit of the Iraqi Quisling government is the “Wolves”.)
The problems of Iraq are related not to the internal problems of Iraq, but precisely to the external interventions. Left on their own, the Iraqis will be able to fix themselves up.
The problem is that they might just decide, like Venezuela, that the USA is not such a good friend. And of course, you can’t have that… What? Non-whites with money and not doing what the USA wants? Can’t have that! That oil is ours! God told us so!
“Class, economics, pet political theories, and 100 year old biographies are attempts to divert attention from the story that Stan posted. He repeats specific allegations of war crimes. Why do you avoid looking more closely at them?”
Actually, like with the alleged war crimes in the Former Yugoslavia, attempts to focus on the narrow behaiviour of troops in the ground are the actual diversion from what really matters.
In all wars, even “just wars” war crimes will be commited. There are widely known reports of mass executions of German POW in the first days of D-Day, for example (even Band of Brothers, who you can’t say is a critical view on WWII, describes one such incident, watered down in the film version). So specific war crimes bore me. I can understand liberals getting their underwear all in a bunch over this, but it is disingeneousness, as war is hell, man.
Civilian casualties are also inevitable parts of any war.
Which doesn’t mean that it is alright to commit war crimes or kill civilians, as implied by those who support the war effort. It just means that the *only* real way not to have war crimes and civilian casualties is to not have wars in the first place.
What you dismiss as “Class, economics, pet political theories, and 100 year old biographies” are actually what the discussion should be about.
After all this war is about class, about a ruling class who squeezes all but the very rich, including rich “middle class” people. A rulling class that doesn’t send their sons and daughters to kill and die in a war those who do the actual killing and dying would never benefit from.
It is about economics, about people who want to press on with an unsustainable, crisis ridden, unjust, economic model based on dependency on unrenewable natural resources and who resort to stealing when the market forces they otherwise decry make prices go up. Market Anarchists ruling a State…
It is about pet political theories, about neo-conservatives and “New American Century” imperialism, about a Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz trying to export a reactionary Objectivist philosophy on behalf of Alan Greenspan, all while cloacking themselves in the reactionary collectivism of religious fundamentalism. It is about the pet political theory of “War of Civilizations” and how this is as much as a myth as a “historic” hatred between Shias and Sunnis. It is about the pet political theory that says that the Iraqis cannot fix by themselves the governability crisis the USA created in Iraq, and hence need to be invaded and occupied. Etc, etc, etc.
And it is about 100 year old biographies, in so far as they are not 100 years old, and they are not biographies but histories, and histories written in blood for that matter. It is about a country whose government and ruling class cares nothing other than about shorterm profit, who uses military might to try to correct the short-sightness of their policies, and that wonders why 15 out of 19 WTC terorrists were Saudis.
To ignore history is to repeat it.
You dismiss Smedley Butler as 100 year biography; what happened to due diligence with facts? To begin with, it is not 100 years, but 70 or so. Then there is the fact that Smedley is just representative of one period in history. Stanley Goff, of whom I think you have heard, has written extensively about his direct and indirect participation, at a much lower level than Smedley, in exactly the same type of interventions as what Smedley describes. And Mr. Goff describes things that happened 10 years ago, not 100.
Now, we might be disingenious and claim that in 10 years all of the sudden the USA has switched gears. Then again, Bush speaks directly with God, so anything goes…
29 June 2005, 9:44 amEd:
SKS: “I suggest you start with “Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq†by Alan Friedman, a Financial Times writer, and then follow the bibliography there, including primary source information.â€
Ed: As I stated, the alliance of the US with Iraq against Iran in the 80’s is common knowledge, and not evidence of complicity in his regime’s crimes. To the extent that we screwed up in the 80’s, we corrected it in the 90’s.
You also ignore the fact that the Soviet Union was by far the largest supplier of arms to Iraq from 1959 until 1990, as evidenced by all those T-62’s and T-72’s we destroyed in ODS or found abandoned in OIF.
SKS: “Also, just google it!â€
Ed: I did, and found one single article, by Richard Sale. Every single other similar site in the top 20 was either a reprint or a rehash of that one article.
Sale’s article is deeply flawed. For starters, he cites no primary sources or quotes for Saddam’s ties with the CIA, only paraphrases of statements attributed to “anonymous former officialsâ€. He also makes great leaps of logic. Saddam visiting the US Embassy in Cairo is not evidence that he was a CIA operative. The Agency will listen to virtually anyone who presents themselves at an Embassy with a desire to provide information, and agents don’t walk in the front gate.
Most important, Sale just jumps right over the period from 1964 to 1980. Doesn’t even mention it. Considering that is when Saddam came to power, it is rather a glaring omission for an article that purports to establish that we “installed†him (your words). Were he to look closer, he would see that Saddam’s relationships during that time were much closer with the KGB: http://www.ci-ce-ct.com/Feature%20articles/Primakov_Hassein.htm
SKS: “Left on their own, the Iraqis will be able to fix themselves up.â€
Ed: Do you have any evidence at all to back this assertion up? Because your assessment flies in the face of nearly everyone with in-depth knowledge of Iraq, including many of those opposed to the invasion. I’m inclined to believe Ibrahim Jaafari over you: http://www.cfr.org/pub8203/ibrahim_aljaafari/a_conversation_with_ibrahim_aljaafari.php
Further, do you really think the Iraqis will be “left alone†if we leave? Hardly. Al Qaeda in Iraq will continue their campaign of suicide bombings to set the Shiite and Sunni communities against each other.
SKS: “… the Iraqi Quisling government …â€
Ed: Funny thing to call a government elected by a solid majority of voters in the country, all of whom risked their lives to vote. In fact, I’ll give you the finger for that one: http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Photos/2005/01/iraqi_voter.jpg
SKS: “Actually, like with the alleged war crimes in the Former Yugoslavia, attempts to focus on the narrow behavior of troops in the ground are the actual diversion from what really matters.â€
Ed: You can’t have it both ways. Stan posts stories of alleged war crimes. Everyone condemns the evil, brutal US occupation. I raise questions about the evidence. Then you say it doesn’t matter because the whole war is evil.
Of course it matters. A just war can be rendered unjust by widespread unethical conduct. An unjust war can be made much worse by the application of unjust means.
If it doesn’t matter to you, then don’t waste your time reading it. But apparently it matters to other people in this blog, so I’ll continue to dialog with them in mutual pursuit of the truth, or at least better understanding.
29 June 2005, 8:41 pmTom in Sydney:
Thus sprach Ed: “we corrected it in the 90’s.”
And thus was the deaths of 1,000,000+ Iraqis dismissed as corrective action.
The banality of evil.
30 June 2005, 6:14 amStan:
Quick points on Srebrenica:
http://www.zmag.org/hermanserbdebate.htm
24 July 2005, 9:09 pm