Tweet
While I think it’s unfortunate that my friend Matt Armstrong doesn’t really deal with the first-order thing-itself* when discussing the Wikileaks video — surely the “true fiasco” is what the video displays — his analysis of the Pentagon’s days’ worth of silence and pretend-it’ll-go-away-ness is really worth reading. I hope it won’t be violative of any ground rules to say that after I wrote a Washington Independent post that noted the video’s existence on Monday, a military contact emailed me to alert me to Central Command’s page displaying the investigations. (Maybe it’s me, but the formatting for the actual investigations did not play well with my Mac; and I asked a poor unfortunate colleague to help me out with displaying and we just failed.) But that was it. Matt is astonished:
The Wikileaks release apparently caught the Defense Department flatfooted. Even today, three days after its release, there is largely silence from DOD, save a brief public comment and a link to documents and photos at www.Centcom.mil (sensibly available when clicking “Link to FOIA documents on July 2007 New Baghdad Combat Action”). Don’t bother going to www.Defense.milas that site, and hence the Pentagon, has nothing readily available either. The April 6 briefing pack did not include the explanatory imagery and there is no news release explanation the Department’s position. It’s as if nothing happened. When asked about the situation, senior official at DOD pointed me to the “great piece” in The New York Times explaining how trained soldiers see the events is different than civilians. This, however, misses the point.
Despite the vigorous discussion online and over the air whether there was a violation of the laws of war, the old belief that if you ignore a problem it will go away continues to dominate.
As a journalist, I don’t know how far I want to wade in here, lest I give off an air of asking, “Hey! Why haven’t you tried to manipulate me?” and that’s not my intent. Matt is a public-diplomacy/strategic communication specialist and so his analysis of the second-order question of DOD’s response is right up his alley.
*Actually, that’s not really fair to Matt, since he points to Central Command’s annotated photographs to contextualize the Reuters reporters’ proximity to (embed within?) Iraqi insurgents, and attempts to embed a no-longer-available YouTube’d rebuttal. While that is valuable context for the first shooting incident — the van incident is something else entirely — I fail to see how a reporter “crouched with a camera” is “demonstrating hostile action toward coalition forces.” If Matt wanted to avoid weighing in on the subject, I fully sympathize, because I’m personally conflicted about everything on display; don’t feel I have remotely sufficient information to reach any judgments; and have deleted three-and-change posts out of a subsequent discomfort engaging on this. Yet I’ll be on al-Jazeera’s ‘Listening Post’ this Sunday to talk about the meta-point concerning DOD’s response and I intend to crib liberally from Matt’s post.
6 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
The disturbing video obtained by Wikileaks is almost certainly just one of many, perhaps thousands, as bad or worse. The DOD has no way of knowing how many might have already found their way out of it’s control and are now circulating like loose nukes.
Spin things the wrong way and the next video in the pipeline could go off in their faces like an IED. For now a fetal crouch may be the best option.
One thing that I can assume from the video and also from Vice Adm. William McRaven’s sour pickle faced apology, (most likely ordered by Gen McChrystal), to that Afghan family is that the military brass are still a very long way from being all on board with the whole COIN thingy. McRaven’s special forces in particular still seem to be in full kill people and break things mode
I went back and re-read Mountain Runners piece more carefully and took a good look at the documents and photographs he linked to. The main problem for the DOD is not that they can’t come up with explanations. During the Vietnam War I’m sure that a logical military argument could have be made by DOD for why “you have to destroy a village in order to save it”. Unfortunately outside the military community can they find a willing buyer for their explanations? It would certainly be a very hard sell to the Vietnamese, Iraqis or Afghans.
This is really very simple. There are only two possibilities about what to say about this, and neither can be said. this was either a legitimate application of force under the existing ROEs and therefore almost defitiely routine, which is not acceptable b/c the afghan surge is understood by the public to be based on the Iraq surge, McCh. himself has recently said we’ve killed a lot of innocents, and this is what that looks like (all of which is of course the God’s truth). This would be a propaganda setback of the tallest order and be totally adverse in terms of support for the war and so it can’t be willingly taken on. On the other hand, they could try to say this was a violation and further claim it was a rare aberration, but this would require at the very least another investigation and ultimately punishment to make stick, and there isn’t any reason they could give to set aside the investigation already done, and neither do they have any intention to discipline any of these individuals who they know were doing exactly what they were brought there and trained to do. The result is silence.
I have watched the 39 min video as carefully as I can. Many people are claiming that one man in the crowd is carrying an AK47 which seems very possible from what I can see. If as some say a second man is carrying an RPG launcher, that I am far less sure about. It would have to be minus the grenade and it looks like a piece of shit rifle of the type I think you might find all over Iraq. It was also very lucky that the troops who called in the air strike found, according to the military report, an RPG launcher under one of the bodies as that made the difference between a textbook use of legitimate force vs an atrocity, perhaps TOO lucky I think.
At any rate the military description of events seems shaky even given that they had the video to review. Iraqi witnesses on the ground interviewed the next day gave a story far more consistent with the video even though they had presumably not seen it.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/8/exclusive_witnesses_describe_deadly_2007_us
DOD tried to go the second route in the Haditha case and it all blew up in their face. Rank and file Marines sitting on court marshals, rightly in my opinion, would have none of it.
The fact that there were courts-martial for Haditha I think means at least some investigators found likely wrongdoing, because in absence of a video there wasn’t this pressing public need to portray the incident as an aberration/violation. The point with the Wikileaks video is that, even though this by all accounts looks at least like a routine use of force, if not also an entirely legitimate one, they can’t come out and say so because it looks so bad on the tape. ‘If this is what legitimate looks like, then what does excessive entail?’, etc. There weren’t any graphic depictions of what happened at Haditha (at least that were released), which meant that competing verbal accounts (even of physical evidence) are all that could be internalized by the public. If the military had wanted to sweep Haditha under the rug, they would have been able to do so much more than they can here. The fact that they didn’t suggests it really looked like there was cause for discipline (even to seasoned Marines), whatever results of the courts-martial eventually were.