April 11, 2010
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat” ~ General Stanley A. McChrystal
In Afghanistan and Iraq the American and NATO troops have committed numerous atrocities: shooting unarmed locals at check points, on the street, even while they're tilling fields. They've bombed wedding parties, raided homes at midnight and murdered occupants of all ages. They've stormed hospitals, used chemical weapons, left a trail of depleted uranium... They've flattened the offices of international news organizations, hid suspects from the International Red Cross and tortured prisoners to death... and it’s still happening, day after day, with Drones wiping out remote villages, shredding their families, assassinating anyone they choose.
The contents of a previously suppressed Pentagon video has come as a nasty shock to so many, from day one of the War on Terror, the slaughter of civilians depicted in the video released by WikiLeaks, Collateral Damage, has been a key feature of the conflict.
The video shows trigger-happy U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilots and U.S. Special Forces slaughtering Iraqi civilians in Baghdad at a street corner in July of 2007, then seeking to cover up their crimes, planted weapons LAPD style. Twelve civilians died, including a Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
The visual and audio record reveal the two Apache helicopter pilots and the US Army intelligence personnel monitoring the real-time footage that the civilians roughly a thousand feet below are armed insurgents and that one of them, peeking round a corner, was carrying an RPG.
The dialogue is chilling, gleeful pilots gloating over the effect of their initial machine-gun salvoes. “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” answers the other. Then, as a wounded man struggles in pain toward the curb, the pilots can't wait to finish him off. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says yearningly.
Then a civilian van, seeing the carnage, pulls up. A man jumps out, and starts dragging the wounded man around to load him in. A few moments later, another salvo finishes off the wounded man and his would-be rescuer, kills other civilians in the van and wounds two children in the front seat.
US ground troops arrive on the scene, report the presence of wounded children. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot tells the other. There are further sniggers as a US armored vehicle rolls up. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots cackles.
According to the US military’s statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine [sic] insurgents were killed. This version of events was cited by the New York Times under the headline “2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias”.
Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lens could be mistaken for an RPG. “A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded , is 3 feet long and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.”
Sprey’s second point is that an Apache helicopter makes a very loud “whomp, whomp” noise. “ Twelve guys are unconcerned, with loud helicopters right overhead. Imagine if they were planning an assault on American troops. They’d be crouched down and skulking along walls, spread out. They would not be walking casually down the middle of the street, totally ignoring the helicopters.”
A retired U.S. Marine in an email exchange:
“Not a good show at all. The group on the ground were banishing nothing that ‘looked’ or appeared as weapons, especially the voiced ‘RPG’ which is so obvious when loaded. And then again – they were told in advance by intelligence (I am sure by the tone in the flight) that these people were bad guys. The Apache crews were just stupid and the intelligence clowns pointing them and egging them on are guilty of murder – ‘you are clear to engage’. GMAFB.”
Another retired U.S. Army man, answering the email from the retired U.S. Marine quoted above:
“The damage this incident and its video evidence will do is immense… it will irrefutably confirm for many that large chunk of anti-American propaganda which insists the American flyers are just playing computer shoot-em-up games using real flesh and blood as a proxy for the digital figures they usually slaughter only in the arcades."
“How much is simulator training responsible for the disconnection from reality demonstrated in this incident? The crew was detached from reality… How [is] the Army… producing crews that, having the potential for such incompetence, cannot detect it among themselves. If anyone in that crew had paused and asked if the action being taken was correct, surely it would have been aborted… The Army has to find out why.”
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the US military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed. the US military’s cover-up story that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid.
The American Special Forces troops not only killed the women but had also gouged out their bollets from their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath before lying to their superiors about what happened.
In this first decade of the 21st Century, it is time to ask what kind of war machine the West has created? From the little we are able to know, it appears to be lawless, tech obsessed and sadistic. It is an army of Draculas sucking the blood from the throats of the dispossessed, the impoverished, fuelled by an annual US budget of over $600 billion on weapons of death.
Yes, an army marches on its stomach, and that may still be true, but these days you get the sense that the burgers are washed down with tumblers of blood. Often the blood of innocents. It becomes an addiction, perhaps, an insatiable desire that's part Gothic and part Surrealist, like a videogame played on a helicopter hovering over Transylvania.
