In
early 2010, Pfc. Bradley Manning methodically uploaded a digital mother lode of
classified United States military and diplomatic documents to the Internet
insurgents of WikiLeaks. As everyone knows, WikiLeaks made these secret
archives available to a few major news outlets, including this one. Many
illuminating and troubling stories were published, and Washington has been
gnashing its teeth ever since.
The
founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is, as far as we know, still hiding out
in Ecuador's embassy in London, afraid that he might be extradited for his part
in this hemorrhage of secrets, though the only allegations outstanding against
him involve accusations of sex crimes in Sweden. Meanwhile, Manning, a
25-year-old low-level intelligence geek, is in pretrial hearings at Fort Meade,
Md. He has pleaded guilty to crimes carrying up to 20 years of prison time, and
the government is piling on more charges, including Article 104 of the military
code, ''aiding the enemy,'' which could get him life without parole.
In
his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with
the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of
stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he
was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything
she'd have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left
a message on voice mail but never got a call back. It's puzzling to me that a
skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever
couldn't figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a
reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.
But
what if he had? What if he had succeeded in delivering his pilfered documents
to The Times? What would be different, for Manning and the rest of us?
First
of all, I can say with some confidence that The Times would have done exactly
what it did with the archive when it was supplied to us via WikiLeaks: assigned
journalists to search for material of genuine public interest, taken pains to
omit information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants
killed, and published our reports with a flourish. The documents would have
made news -- big news.
But
somewhat less of it. While in reality The Times and the public benefited from a
collegial partnership with London's Guardian and other papers that took part in
the WikiLeaks fiesta, I'm pretty sure that if we had been the sole recipient we
would not have shared Manning's gift with other news organizations. That is
partly for competitive reasons, but also because sharing a treasury of raw
intelligence, especially with foreign news media, might have increased the
legal jeopardy for The Times and for our source. So our exclusive would have
been a coup for The Times, but something would have been lost. By sharing the
database widely -- including with a range of local news outlets that mined the
material for stories of little interest to a global news operation -- WikiLeaks
got much more mileage out of the secret cables than we would have done.
If
Manning had connected with The Times, we would have found ourselves in a
relationship with a nervous, troubled, angry young Army private who was
offering not so much documentation of a particular government outrage as a
chance to fish in a sea of secrets. Having never met Manning (he was in custody
by the time we got the WikiLeaks documents), I can only guess what that
relationship would have been like. Complicated. Probably tense. We would, of
course, have honored any agreement to protect his identity, though Manning was
not so good at covering his own tracks. (He spilled the story of his leaking in
long instant-messenger chats with an ex-hacker, who turned him in.) Once he was
arrested, we'd surely have editorialized against the brutality of his solitary
confinement -- as The Times has already done -- and perhaps protested the
disturbing overkill of the ''aiding the enemy'' charge. (If Manning's leak
provided comfort to the enemy, then so does every news story about cuts in
defense spending, or opposition to drone strikes, or setbacks in Afghanistan.)
Beyond that, we'd have made sure Manning knew upfront that he was on his own,
as we did with the last leaker of this magnitude, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon
Papers fame.
''When
the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist
him,'' Max Frankel, who was The Times's Washington bureau chief at the time,
recalled the other day. ''He was committing an act of civil disobedience and
presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately
pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider
ourselves his partner in any way.''
The
most important thing that would not be much different if The Times had been his
outlet would be Manning's legal liability. The law provides First Amendment
protection for a free press, but not for those who take an oath to protect
government secrets. This administration has a particular, chilling intolerance
for leakers -- and digital footprints make them easier to catch these days --
but I can't imagine that any administration would have hesitated to prosecute
Manning.
But
if Manning had been our direct source, the consequences might have been
slightly mitigated. Although as a matter of law I believe WikiLeaks and The New
York Times are equally protected by the First Amendment, it's possible the
court's judgment of the leaker might be colored by the fact that he delivered
the goods to a group of former hackers with an outlaw sensibility and an
antipathy toward American interests. Will that cost Manning at sentencing time?
I wonder. And it might explain the piling on of maximum charges. During
pretrial, the judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked whether the prosecution would be
pressing the same charges if Manning had leaked to The Times. ''Yes, Ma'am,''
was the reply. Maybe so. But I suspect the fact that Manning chose the
anti-establishment WikiLeaks as his collaborator made the government more eager
to add on that dubious charge of ''aiding the enemy.''
If
Manning had delivered his material to The Times, WikiLeaks would not have been
able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to
human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein. In fact, you
might not have heard of WikiLeaks. The group has had other middling scoops, but
Manning put it on the map.
And,
finally, if he had dealt with The Times, maybe we would better understand
Bradley Manning. Lionized by WikiLeaks and his fan base as a whistle-blower and
martyr, cast by his prosecutors as a villainous traitor, he has become dueling
caricatures. Until the court proceedings, the only window into Manning's psyche
was the voluminous transcript of his online chats with the ex-hacker, Adrian
Lamo, published by Wired magazine. It portrays a young man, in his own words,
''emotionally fractured'' -- a gay man in an institution not hospitable to
gays, fragile, lonely, a little pleased with his own cleverness, a little vague
about his motives. His political views come across as inchoate. When asked, he
has trouble recalling any specific outrages that needed exposing. His cause was
''open diplomacy'' or -- perhaps in jest -- ''worldwide anarchy.''
At
Fort Meade, Manning delivered a more coherent explanation of what drove him.
Appalled by the human collateral damage of counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency, he says, he set out to ''document the true cost of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.'' Intrigued by his reading of State Department cables, he
felt a need to let taxpayers in on the ''backdoor deals and seemingly criminal
activity'' that are the dark underside of diplomacy. Was this sense of mission
there from the start, or was it shaped afterward by the expectations of the
Free Bradley Manning enthusiasts? The answer would probably make no difference
to the court. But it might help determine history's verdict.
Newtown
kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?
Numerous
commentators have rightly lamented the difference in how these childrens'
deaths are perceived. What explains it?
(Tariq
Aziz (centre, second row) attending a meeting about drones strikes in
Waziristan, held in Islamabad, Pakistan oin 28 October 2011. Three days later,
the 16 year old was reported killed by a drone-launched missile. Photograph:
Pratap Chatterjee/BIJ)
Over
the last several days, numerous commentators have lamented the vastly different
reactions in the US to the heinous shooting of children in Newtown, Connecticut
as compared to the continuous killing of (far more) children and innocent
adults by the US government in Pakistan andYemen, among
other places. The blogger Atrios this week succinctly observed:
"I do
wish more people who manage to fully comprehend the broad trauma a mass
shooting can have on our country would consider the consequences of a
decade of war."
My
Guardian colleague George Monbiot has a
powerful and eloquent column this week provocatively entitled: "In the US, mass child killings are
tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats". He points out all the ways
that Obama has made lethal US attacks in these predominantly Muslim countries
not only more frequent but also more indiscriminate - "signature
strikes" and "double-tap"
attacks on rescuers and funerals - and then argues:
"Most of
the world's media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown,
either ignores Obama's murders or accepts the official version that all those
killed are 'militants'. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not
like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and
flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of
bugs and grass and tissue.
"'Are
we,' Obama asked on Sunday, 'prepared to say that such violence visited on our
children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?' It's
a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the
children of Pakistan."
Political
philosophy professor Falguni Sheth similarly
writes that "the shooting in Newtown, CT is but part and parcel
of a culture of shooting children,
shooting civilians, shooting innocent adults, that has been waged by the US
government since September 12, 2001." She adds:
"And let
there be no mistake: many of 'us' have directly felt the impact of that
culture: Which 'us'? Yemeni parents, Pakistani uncles and aunts, Afghan
grandparents and cousins, Somali brothers and sisters, Filipino cousins have
experienced the impact of the culture of killing children. Families of
children who live in countries that are routinely droned by the US [government].
Families of children whose villages are raided nightly in Afghanistan and
Iraq."
Meanwhile,
University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, at the peak of mourning over
Newtown, simply
urged: "Let's also Remember the 178 children Killed by US Drones". He detailed the
various ways that children and other innocents have had their lives
extinguished by President Obama's policies, and then posted this powerful (and
warning: graphic) one-and-a-half-minute video from a new documentary on drones
by filmmaker Robert Greenwald (no relation):
.
.
Finally,
the Yemeni blogger Noon Arabia posted
a moving plea on Monday: "Our children's blood is not cheaper
than American blood and the pain of loosing [sic] them is just as
devastating. Our children matter too, Mr. President! These tragedies 'also'
must end and to end them 'YOU' must change!"
There's
just no denying that many of the same people understandably expressing such
grief and horror over the children who were killed in Newtown steadfastly
overlook, if not
outright support, the equally violent killing of Yemeni and Pakistani
children. Consider this irony: Monday was the three-year anniversary of
President Obama's cruise missile and cluster-bomb attack on al-Majala in
Southern Yemen that ended
the lives of 14 women and 21 children: one more child than was killed by
the Newtown gunman. In the US, that mass slaughter received not even a small
fraction of the attention commanded by Newtown, and prompted almost no
objections (in predominantly Muslim nations, by contrast, it received ample
attention and anger).
It
is well worth asking what accounts for
this radically different reaction to the killing of children and other
innocents. Relatedly, why is the US media so devoted to covering in depth every
last detail of the children killed in the Newtown attack, but so indifferent to
the children killed by its own government?
To
ask this question is not - repeat: is not - to equate the Newtown attack with
US government attacks. There are, one should grant, obvious and important
differences.
To
begin with, it is a natural and probably universal human inclination to care
more about violence that seems to threaten us personally than violence that
does not. Every American parent sends their children to schools of the type
attacked in Newtown and empathy with the victims is thus automatic. Few
American parents fear having their children attacked by US drones, cruise
missiles and cluster bombs in remote regions in Pakistan and Yemen, and empathy
with those victims is thus easier to avoid, more difficult to establish.
One
should strive to
see the world and prioritize injusticesfree of pure self-interest
- caring about grave abuses that are unlikely to affect us personally is a
hallmark of a civilized person - but we are all constructed to regard
imminent dangers to ourselves and our loved ones with greater urgency than
those that appear more remote. Ignoble though it is, that's just part of being
human - though our capacity to liberate ourselves from pure self-interest means
that it does not excuse this indifference.
Then
there's the issue of perceived
justification. Nobody can offer, let alone embrace, any rationale for the
Newtown assault: it was random, indiscriminate, senseless and deliberate
slaughter of innocents. Those who support Obama's continuous attacks, or
flamboyantly display their tortured "ambivalence" as a means of
avoiding criticizing him, can at least invoke a
Cheneyite slogan along with a
McVeigh-taught-military-term to pretend that there's some purpose to
these killings: We Have To Kill The Terrorists, and these dead kids are just
Collateral Damage. This rationale is deeply dishonest, ignorant,
jingoistic, propagandistic,
and sociopathic, but
its existence means one cannot equate it to the Newtown killing.
But
there are nonetheless two key issues highlighted by the intense grief for the
Newtown victims compared to the utter indifference to the victims of Obama's
militarism. The first is that it underscores how potent and effective the last
decade's anti-Muslimdehumanizationcampaign has been.
Every
war - particularly protracted ones like the "War on Terror" - demands
sustained dehumanization campaigns against the targets of the violence. Few populations will tolerate continuous
killings if they have to confront the humanity of those who are being killed. The
humanity of the victims must be hidden and denied. That's the only way this
constant extinguishing of life by their government can be justified or at least
ignored. That was the key point made in the extraordinarily
brave speech given by then-MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield in 2003 after
she returned from Iraq, before she was demoted and then fired: that US media coverage of US violence is
designed to conceal the identity and fate of its victims.
The
violence and rights abridgments of the Bush and Obama administrations have been
applied almost exclusively to Muslims. It is, therefore, Muslims who
have been systematically dehumanized. Americans virtually never hear
about the Muslims killed by their government's violence. They're never profiled.
The New York Times doesn't put powerful
graphics showing their names and ages on its front page. Their
funerals are never covered. President Obama never delivers teary
sermons about how these Muslim children "had their entire lives
ahead of them - birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own."
That's what dehumanization is: their humanity is disappeared so that we don't
have to face it.
But
this dehumanization is about more than simply hiding and thus denying the
personhood of Muslim victims of US violence. It is worse than that: it is based
on the implicit, and sometimes overtly stated, premise that Muslims
generally, even those guilty of nothing, deserve what the US does to them,
or are at least presumed to carry blame.
Just
a few months ago, the New York Times reported that
the Obama administration has re-defined the term "militant" to mean:
"all military-age males in a strike zone" - the ultimate expression
of the rancid dehumanizing view that Muslims are inherently guilty of being
Terrorists unless proven otherwise. When Obama's campaign surrogate and former
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the US killing by drone strike of
16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki two weeks after his father was
killed, Gibbs unleashed one
of the most repulsive statements heard in some time: that Abdulrahman
should have "had a more responsible father". Even when innocent
Muslim teenagers are killed by US violence, it is their fault, and not the fault
of the US and its leaders.
All
of this has led to rhetoric and behavior that is nothing short of deranged when
it comes to discussing the Muslim children and other innocents killed by US
violence. I literally have never
witnessed mockery over dead children like that which is spewed from some of Obama's
hard-core progressive supporters whenever I mention the child-victims of
Obama's drone attacks. Jokes like that
are automatic. In this case at least, the fish rots from the head: recall
President Obama's jovial
jokes at a glamorous media dinner about his use of drones to kill
teeangers (sanctioned by the very same political faction that found Bush's
jokes about his militarism - delivered at the same media banquet several years
earlier - so offensive). Just as is true of Gibbs' deranged and callous
rationale, jokes like that are possible only when you have denied the humanity
of those who are killed. Would Newtown jokes be tolerated by anyone?
Dehumanization
of Muslims is often overt, by necessity, in US military culture. The Guardian
headline to Monbiot's column refers to the term which Rolling Stones' Michael
Hastings reported is
used for drone victims: "bug splat". And consider this passage from an
amazing story this week in Der Spiegel (but not, notably, in US media) on a
US drone pilot, Brandon Bryant, who had to quit because he could no longer cope
with the huge amount of civilian deaths he was witnessing and helping to cause:
"Bryant
and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When
Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the
world. . . .
"[H]e
remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a
figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers
(6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used
to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order
to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a
laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing
the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until
impact. . . .
"With
seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant
could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three
seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the
monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
"Second
zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one
in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
"Bryant
saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The
child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
"'Did we
just kill a kid?' he asked the man sitting next to him.
"'Yeah, I
guess that was a kid,' the pilot replied.
"'Was
that a kid?' they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
"Then,
someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center
somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. 'No. That was a dog,' the
person wrote.
"They
reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?"
Seeing
Muslim children literally as dogs: few images more perfectly express
the sustained dehumanization at the heart of US militarism and aggression over
the last decade.
Citizens
of a militaristic empire are inexorably trained to adopt the mentality of their
armies: just listen to Good Progressive Obama defenders swagger around like
they're decorated, cigar-chomping combat veterans spouting phrases like
"war is hell" and "collateral damage" to justify all of
this. That is the anti-Muslim dehumanization campaign rearing its toxic head.
There's
one other issue highlighted by this disparate reaction: the question of
agency and culpability. It's easy to express rage over the Newtown shooting because
so few of us bear any responsibility for it and - although we can take steps to
minimize the impact and make similar attacks less likely - there is ultimately
little we can do to stop psychotic individuals from snapping. Fury is easy because it's easy to tell
ourselves that the perpetrator - the shooter - has so little to do with us
and our actions.
Exactly
the opposite is true for the violence that continuously kills children and
other innocent people in the Muslim world. Many of us empowered and cheer for
the person responsible for that. US
citizens pay for it, enable it, and now under Obama, most at the very least acquiesce
to it if not support it. It's always
much more difficult to acknowledge the deaths that we play a role in causing
than it is to protest those to which we believe we have no connection. That,
too, is a vital factor explaining these differing reactions.
Please
spare me the objection that the Newtown shooting should not be used to make a
point about the ongoing killing of Muslim children and other innocents by the
US. Over the last week, long-time gun
control advocates have seized on this school shooting in an attempt to generate
support for their political agenda, and they're perfectly right to do so: when
an event commands widespread political attention and engages human emotion,
that is exactly when one should attempt to persuade one's fellow citizens to
recognize injustices they typically ignore. That is no more true for gun
control than it is the piles of corpses the Obama administration continues to
pile up for no good reason - leaving in their wake, all over the Muslim world,
one Newtown-like grieving ritual after the next.
As
Monbiot observed: "there can scarcely be a person on earth with access to
the media who is untouched by the grief of the people" in Newtown. The exact opposite is true for the children
and their families continuously killed in the Muslim world by the US
government: huge numbers of people, particularly in the countries responsible,
remain completely untouched by the grief that is caused in those places. That
is by design - to ensure that opposition is muted - and it is brutally effective.
Since the Moyers show, I have been thinking of many things that happened during
that intense period in 2002 and 2003 when the political and media establishment
seemed to lose its collective mind (again) and took this country into an
inexplicable and unnecessary war. As tristero notes below, the story is long
and complicated and it will take years to put it all together, if it ever
happens.
I was reminded of one episode, after the invasion, that came as big surprise to
me because it came from an unexpected source. And it was one of those stories
that was clearly a cautionary tale for any up and coming members of the media
who valued their jobs.
On 9/11 those of us who were lucky enough not to be in Manhattan sat glued to
our television sets and watched a star being born. Here's how the
Wikipedia described it:
On
September 11, 2001, Ashleigh Banfield was reporting from the streets of
Manhattan, where she was nearly suffocated from the debris cloud from the
collapsing World Trade Center. Banfield continued reporting, even as she
rescued a NYPD officer, and with him, fled to safety into a streetside shop.
After the initial reporting of the tragedy had ended, Banfield received a
promotion, as MSNBC sent her around the world as the producer of a new program, A
Region in Conflict.
A Region in Conflict was broadcast mainly from Pakistan and
Afghanistan, generally considered locations unfriendly to Westerners. To report
day-to-day local stories in that area of the world, she sometimes used her
Canadian citizenship to provide access where Americans might not be welcome.
She would read viewer e-mails on-air, sometimes without reviewing them
beforehand, to avoid bias.
During the conflict in Afghanistan, Banfield interviewed Taliban prisoners, and
visited a hospital in Kabul. Later entries covered her travels from Jalalabad
to Kabul, as well as other experiences in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, she
interviewed Father Gregory Rice, a Catholic priest in Pakistan, and an Iraqi
woman aiding refugees. While in Afghanistan, Banfield darkened her blonde hair
in order to be less obviously a foreigner.
I made terrible fun of Banfield. She seemed to me to be the personification of
the infotainment industrial complex, a reporter better known for her stylish
spectacles and blond highlights than her journalistic skills. She was their
girl hero, a Jessica Lynch of TV news, constructed out of whole cloth in the
marketing department of MSNBC. But I was wrong about her. It's true that she
was a cable news star who was created out of the rubble of 9/11, but her
reporting that day really was pretty riveting. Her stories from Afghanistan
were often shallow, but no more than any of the other blow dried hunks they
dispatched over there, and they were sometimes better. Still, she symbolized
for me the media exploitation of 9/11 and the War on Terror Show and I was
unforgiving.
But very shortly after the invasion of Iraq --- even before Codpiece Day ---
Banfield delivered a speech that destroyed her career. She was instantly
demoted by MSNBC and fired less than a year later.
...I
suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and
that the war is now over essentially -- the major combat operations are over
anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials -- but there is so much
that is left behind. And I'm not just talking about the most important thing,
which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could
possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But
also what Americans find themselves deciding uponwhen it comes to
news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and
when it comes to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate any longer.
I
think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms
of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process,
which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that
we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds
of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a
video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd
never seen before and were witness to for the first time.
And
there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts
of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This
is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it's fought
and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it
really looks like when they're firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or
across a bridge, or into a building.
[...]
So
for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists
got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like
at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us
in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.
That
said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed.
You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is
not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors
that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this
coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage,
and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means
you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it
was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot
of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm
not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another
war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful
terrific endeavor, and we got rid of horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator,
we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.
I
can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of
pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there,
but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides.
You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both
front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which
is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were
all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled,
they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from
the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should
never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this
war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her
husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be.
Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's
unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.
That
just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection
of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. This was a
success, it was a charge it took only three weeks. We did wonderful things and
we freed the Iraqi people, many of them by the way, who are quite thankless
about this. There's got to be a reason for that. And the reason for it is
because we don't have a very good image right now overseas, and a lot of Americans
aren't quite sure why, given the fact that we sacrificed over a hundred
soldiers to give them freedom.
[...]
All
they know is that we're crusaders. All they know is that we're imperialists.
All they know is that we want their oil. They don't know otherwise. And I'll
tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of
the Twin Towers and most of them couldn't recognize a picture of George Bush.
[...]
That
will be a very interesting story to follow in the coming weeks and months, as
to how this vacuum is filled and how we go about presenting a democracy to
these people when -- if we give them democracy they probably will ask us to get
out, which is exactly what many of them want.
[...]
As
a journalist I'm often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for
going on television and saying, "Here's what the leaders of Hezbullah are
telling me and here's what the Lebanese are telling me and here's what the
Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here's what they have to say about the Golan
Heights." Like it or lump it, don't shoot the messenger, but invariably
the messenger gets shot.
We
hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his
name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak
with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they're
prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call
terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the
air. And that's not all, as a porn star. And that's not all, as an accomplice
to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply
being the messenger in the Arab world.
How
can you discuss, how can you solve anything when attacks from a mere radio flak
is what America hears on a regular basis, let alone at the government level? I
mean, if this kind of attitude is prevailing, forget discussion, forget
diplomacy, diplomacy is becoming a bad word.
[..]
When
I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being
pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they're sort of
falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating
chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the
last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in
the course of a couple of days.
Did
our broadcasting change? Did we get boring? Did we all a sudden lose our flair?
Did we start using language that people didn't want to hear? No, I think you've
just had enough. I think you've seen the story, you've' seen how it ended, it
ended pretty well in most American's view; it's time to move on.
What's
the next big story? Is it Laci Peterson? Because Laci Peterson got a whole lot
more minutes' worth of coverage on the cable news channels in the last week
than we'd have ever expected just a few days after a regime fell, like Saddam
Hussein.
I
don't want to suggest for a minute that we are shallow people, we Americans. At
times we are, but I do think that the phenomenon of our attention deficit
disorder when it comes to watching television news and watching stories and
then just being finished with them, I think it might come from the saturation
that you have nowadays. You cannot walk by an airport monitor, you can't walk
by most televisions in offices these days, in the public, without it being on a
cable news channel. And if you're not in front of a TV you're probably in front
of your monitor, where there is Internet news available as well.
You
have had more minutes of news on the Iraq war in just the three-week campaign
than you likely ever got in the years and years of network news coverage of
Vietnam. You were forced to wait for it till six o'clock every night and the
likelihood that you got more than about eight minutes of coverage in that half
hour show, you probably didn't get a whole lot more than that, and it was about
two weeks old, some of that footage, having been shipped back. Now it's real
time and it is blanketed to the extent that we could see this one arm of the
advance, but not where the bullets landed.
But
I think the saturation point is reached faster because you just get so much so
fast, so absolutely in real time that it is time to move on. And that makes our
job very difficult, because we tend to leave behind these vacuums that are left
uncovered. When was the last time you saw a story about Afghanistan? It's only
been a year, you know. Only since the major combat ended, you were still in
Operation Anaconda in not much more than 11 or 12 months ago, and here we are
not touching Afghanistan at all on cable news.
There
was just a memorandum that came through saying we're closing the Kabul bureau.
The Kabul bureau has only been staffed by one person for the last several
months, Maria Fasal, she's Afghan and she wanted to be there, otherwise I don't
think anyone would have taken that assignment. There's just been no allotment
of TV minutes for Afghanistan.
And
I am very concerned that the same thing is about to happen with Iraq, because
we're going to have another Gary Condit, and we're going to have another
Chandra Levy and we're going to have another Jon Benet, and we're going to have
another Elizabeth Smart, and here we are in Laci Peterson, and these stories
will dominate. They're easy to cover, they're cheap, they're fast, you don't
have to send somebody overseas, you don't have to put them up in a hotel that's
expensive overseas, and you don't have to set up satellite time overseas. Very
cheap to cover domestic news. Domestic news is music news to directors' ears.
But
is that what you need to know? Don't you need to know what our personality is
overseas and what the ramifications of these campaigns are? Because we went to
Iraq, according to the President, to make sure that we were going to be safe
from weapons of mass destruction, that no one would attack us. Well, did
everything all of a sudden change? The terror alert went down. All of a sudden
everything seems to be better, but I can tell you from living over there, it's
not.
[...]
There
was a reporter in the New York Times a couple days ago at the Pentagon. It was
a report on the ground in Iraq that the Americans were going to have four bases
that they would continue to use possibly on a permanent basis inside Iraq, kind
of in a star formation, the north, the south, Baghdad and out west. Nobody was
able to actually say what these bases would be used for, whether it was forward
operations, whether it was simple access, but it did speak volumes to the Arab
world who said, "You see, we told you the Americans were coming for their
imperialistic need. They needed a foothold, they needed to control something in
central and west Asia to make sure that we all next door come into line."
And
these reports about Syria, well, they may have been breezed over fairly quickly
here, but they are ringing loud still over there. Syria's next. And then
Lebanon. And look out lran.
So
whether we think it's plausible or whether the government even has any designs
like that, the Arabs all think it's happening and they think it's for religious
purposes for the most part.
[...]
I
think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors
of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may
have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.
It
had a very brief respite from the sanitation when Terry Lloyd was killed, the
ITN, and when David Bloom was killed and when Michael Kelley was killed. We all
sort of sat back for a moment and realized, "God, this is ugly. This is
hitting us at home now. This is hitting the noncombatants." But that went
away quickly too.
This
TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really
hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as
glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks
this is a glorious thing to do.
War
is ugly and it's dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the
Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill
themselves to take out Americans. It's a dangerous thing to propagate.
[...]
There
is another whole phenomenon that's come about from this war. Many talk about it
as the Fox effect, the Fox news effect. I know everyone of you has watched it.
It's not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe Fox as having
streamers and banners coming out of the television as you're watching it cover
a war. But the Fox effect is very concerning to me.
I'm
a journalist and I like to be able to tell the story as I see it, and I hate it
when someone tells me I'm one-sided. It's the worst I can hear. Fox has taken
so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of
their targeting the market of cable news viewership, that I'm afraid there's
not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it's
turning out, but not news.
I'm
hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable
news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after
a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the
effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires
to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the
corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to
go along with their war coverage.
Well,
all of this has to do with what you've seen on Fox and its successes. So I do
urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of
cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it
behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to
choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.
That's
it. I know that there's probably a couple questions. No one's allowed to ask
about my hair color, okay? I'm kidding, if you want to ask you can. It's a
pretty boring story. But I just wanted to say thank you, and let's all pray and
hope in any way that you pray or hope for peace and for democracy around the
world, and for more rain this summer in Manhattan. Thank you all.
She
may have been hoping for a future in able news, but you can't help but feel she
knew she wouldn't after delivering those remarks. (Read the whole thing at the
link if you're interested in a further scathing critique of the government.)
Perhaps
someone with more stature than Banfield could have gotten away with that speech
and maybe it might have even been taken seriously, who knows? But the object
lesson could not have been missed by any of the ambitious up and comers in the
news business. If a TV journalist publicly spoke the truth anywhere about war,
the news, even their competitors --- and Banfield spoke the truth in that
speech --- their career was dead in the water. Even the girl hero of 9/11
(maybe especially the girl hero of 9/11) could not get away with breaking the
CW code of omerta and she had to pay.
Does Navy SEAL's New
Book Suggest Bin Laden Killing was a War Crime?
By Adam Serwer| Fri Aug. 31
The famously shifting Obama administration narrative of the special
forces raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden left some
understandable doubts about how the operation actually went down. The key
question, from a legal perspective, is whether or not the administration had
ordered Bin Laden killed no matter the circumstances, and whether or not he had
tried to surrender or was otherwise "hors de combat" or "out of
the fight" as defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Bissonnette says he
was directly behind a "point man" going up the stairs. "Less
than five steps" from top of the stairs, he heard "suppressed"
gunfire: "BOP. BOP." The point man had seen a "man peeking out
of the door" on the right side of the hallway[.]
Bissonnette writes
that bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to
find the terrorist crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible
on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.
Bissonnette says the
point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner and
he and the other SEALs trained their guns' laser sites on bin Laden's
still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless.
Kevin Jon Heller, a senior lecturer at Melbourne Law School
and a blogger for Opinio Juris, has quite a different take. Heller argues that
the shots fired at Bin Laden's body after he was already wounded make his
killing a war crime. "[Bissonette] and his fellow SEAL thus intentionally
killed bin Laden while he was 'otherwise incapacitated by wounds' and hors de
combat," Heller writes. "That was a war crime—the war crime of
wilful killing." Heller had previously defended the operation as legal.
Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University
Washington School of Law, disagrees. "Being wounded does not necessarily
render one hors de combat; hors de combat means they’re not actually posing a
threat to you," Anderson says, citing moments where wounded combatants
have used hidden guns or explosives to kill American servicemembers who thought
they were surrendering or incapacitated. "There have been far too many
incidents in the past, including in Afghanistan and Iraq...cases where American
soldiers get killed because they were mistaken about the other side, or parts
of the other side surrendering... There’s still no obligation to pause the
attack, you’re allowed to put your own safety first."
I based the conclusion
that bin Laden’s death was legal under IHL on Nicholas Schmidle’s account of the bin Laden operation in The
New Yorker.
As recounted by
Schmidle, the SEALs’ actions were consistent with IHL.
Art. 41(1) of the First Additional Protocol: “A
person who is recognized or who, in the circumstances, should be recognized to
be hors de combat shall not be made the object of
attack.“ A combatant is hors de combat in three
situations: (1) “he is in the power of an adverse Party” (ie., captured); (2)
“he clearly expresses an intention to surrender”; or (3) “he has been rendered
unconscious or is otherwise incapacitated by wounds or sickness, and therefore
is incapable of defending himself.”
In Schmidle’s account,
bin Laden was not in the power of the U.S. when he was killed; he was not
wounded or sick; and — most relevantly — he had not clearly expressed an
intention to surrender.
The author of the new book “No Easy Day,”
however, provides a very different account of bin Laden’s death — one that has
to be taken seriously, because the author is one of the two SEALs who fired the
fatal shots. Here is the Huffington Post’s summary of the author’s account(emphasis
mine):
He and his fellow SEAL
thus intentionally killed bin Laden while he was “otherwise incapacitated by
wounds” and hors de combat. That was a
war crime — the war crime of wilful killing.
I imagine some readers
will respond by pointing out that bin Laden was already fatally wounded when
the SEALs shot him. There are two
problems with that response. To begin
with, the author is not a doctor; bin Laden might not have actually been
fatally wounded. More importantly,
though, it makes no difference if he was dying — he was still alive when the
author and his fellow SEAL shot him, and that is all the war crime of
wilful killing requires. That is not a
controversial idea; no domestic criminal-law system would consider shooting
a person dying of a fatal heart attack to be anything but murder. If your actions deprive someone of even one
second of life, you are both the factual and legal cause of their death.
To be clear, though, I
am not claiming that being wounded necessarily makes a combatant hors
de combat. I chose my words carefully: UBL was hors de combat because
he was “otherwise incapacitated by wounds” — the language in Art. 41(2)(c) of
the First Additional Protocol.
Wounding is not enough; incapacitation is required.
Owens clearly states
that UBL was shot and fatally wounded by someone else;
after “[taking] their time entering the room,” Owens and his fellow SEAL found
UBL lying on the floor, “blood and brains” spilling out of his skull, being
attended to by his wives. Only at that point did they shoot him.
It is thus problematic to see UBL’s death as part of a continuous attack — or
to imply, as Ken does, that viewing UBL’s death as a war crime requires imposing
“an obligation to pause the attack” on Owens and his fellow SEAL. The
facts clearly indicate that their attack on UBL beganwhen
they first discovered his prone, dying body.
(DO- why did author
italicize “some else”? They are one
team. How could it make a difference?)
(the team only began
after Bin Laden had his brains spilling out of his skull --, Kevin argues,
falls within “otherwise incapacitated by wounds.”)
Finally, and most
importantly, we need to recognize the implication of the “danger” argument made
by Ken and a number of commenters on my previous post: if a combatant who is in
his death throes with his brains spilling out of his head does not qualify as
“incapacitated by wounds,” Art. 41(2)(c) is a complete nullity, because by that
standard no wounded combatant could ever be considered incapacitated.
If UBL’s wounds were not
incapacitating, what wounds could be?
Nor is it an adequate
response to say that the key is whether the wounded combatant had been captured
prior to his killing (and thus presumably neutralized); that response also
renders Art. 41(2)(c) a nullity, because Art. 41(2)(a) already deems a
combatant “in the power of an adverse Party” to be hors de combat.
Here is my question
for Ken or for anyone else who believes UBL’s killing was consistent with IHL:
can you please identify a situation in which a wounded but non-captured
combatant cannot be lawfully killed?
NOTE 1: Ken’s
response, like many of the comments, appears to assume that fear or suspicion
that a wounded soldier might continue to engage in combat justifies killing
him. That assumption is incorrect. As the ICRC’s authoritative commentary on
the First Additional Protocol makes clear, the wounded soldier loses his
presumptive hors de combat statusonly if he engages in
some kind of positive act that indicates he intends to continue fighting
(emphasis mine):
The wounded and sick
in the sense of Article 8 (Terminology), sub-paragraph (a), of the Protocol,
are those persons who need medical care as a result of a trauma, disease or
other physical or mental disorder or disability, and who refrain from
any act of hostility.… On the other hand, there is no obligation to
abstain from attacking a wounded or sick person who is preparing to fire, or
who is actually firing, regardless of the severity of his wounds or sickness.
In other words, a
soldier cannot simply assume — even based on past experience with different
wounded combatants — that a seemingly incapacitated combatant will continue to
fight if given the chance. That is an important limitation in the context
of UBL’s death; nothing in Owens’ account indicates that they believed UBL was capable of
harming them — much less that he actually tried to harm them.
NOTE 2: Don’t forget
that the First Additional Protocol was adopted in the immediate aftermath of
the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong relied heavily on nearly every perfidious
tactic imaginable, yet the drafters of AP I still adopted Art. 41(2)(c).
So it impossible to argue that al-Qaeda’s tactics somehow render the
“incapacitated by wounds” provision obsolete.
As for your first
comment, my point is that the critical question is whether the SEALs had
time to determine that UBL had been incapacitated by the wounds inflicted
by whomever shot him. Had the SEAL who shot UBL continued to fire at
him even as he fell to the ground with his brains spilling out, I would
accept that he would not have had time to recognize that his earlier shots had
rendered UBL hors de combat.
But that is not the
situation here.
The two SEALS saw UBL
shot (or at least shot at), “took their time entering the room,” saw UBL
on the ground with his brains spilling out and in his death throes, and then
killed him. That is not a continuous attack,
and I think it is very difficult to argue that the SEALS did not have time to
recognize that UBL had been rendered hors de combat by his
wounds (And that assumes, of course, that the SEALs honestly believed
that he was not hors de combat when they fired at him, which
is anything but clear from Owens’ account.)
9.01.2012 at 2:37 pm EST Kenneth Anderson
Quick note from Ken –
I realize you can’t tell from the article, but I hadn’t actually read Kevin’s
piece and didn’t know it was up when I gave the reporter a quick reaction.
Not reacting to Kevin here – I’ve been away from blogging for some family
reasons – plan to be back in a week – and haven’t read either Kevin’s post or
the Mother Jones piece. Adam Serwer mentioned Kevin’s blogging in our
conversation, and I thought he was referring to Kevin’s post from when UBL was
killed. I’m going to keep my promise to my wife and stay away from this
until I am genuinely back, though. Ken
