WikiLeaks Follow-Up: The View From The Ground
The furor over the WikiLeaks video of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad (which killed two Reuters employees and wounded children) has receded a bit, but there are still many loose ends and questions.
Some of them are addressed by the “The Danger Room” blog, which has an absolutely fascinating account of the incident from the point of view of the Army specialist who carried the children wounded by the helicopter to safety. And his account is not so good for the Army. Here’s one key piece:
Wired.com: Wikileaks presented the incident as though there was no engagement from insurgents. But you guys did have a firefight a couple of blocks away. Was it reasonable for the Apache soldiers to think that maybe the people they attacked were part of that insurgent firefight?
McCord: I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. However, when I did come up on the scene, there was an RPG as well as AK-47s there…. You just don’t walk around with an RPG in Iraq, especially three blocks away from a firefight…. Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement. They did have weapons there. However, I don’t feel that the attack on the [rescue] van was necessary.
Now, as far as rules of engagement, [Iraqis] are not supposed to pick up the wounded. But they could have been easily deterred from doing what they were doing by just firing simply a few warning shots in the direction…. Instead, the Apaches decided to completely obliterate everybody in the van. That’s the hard part to swallow.
And here is how McCord’s feelings over the incident were received back at his unit:
McCord: After the incident, we went back to the FOB [forward operating base] and that’s when I was in my room. I had blood all down the front of me from the children. I was trying to wash it off in my room. I was pretty distraught over the whole situation with the children. So I went to a sergeant and asked to see [the mental health person], because I was having a hard time dealing with it. I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a lot of other horrible things. I was also told that there would be repercussions if I was to go to mental health.
Wired.com: What did you understand that to mean?
McCord: I would be smoked. Smoked is basically like you’re doing pushups a lot, you’re doing sit-ups … crunches and flutter kicks. They’re smoking you, they’re making you tired. I was told that I needed to get the sand out of my vagina…. So I just sucked it up and tried to move on with everything.
Yesterday, Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger published an op-ed titled “What I Want From the Pentagon.” The essence of his demand is simple:
What I want from the Pentagon – and from all militaries – is simple: Acknowledgment, transparency, accountability.
Reuters tried to get the video for two and a half years. And now it wants the Pentagon the take responsibility:
Let’s dig behind the video. Let’s fully understand the rules the military were operating under. Let’s have a complete picture of what was going through the fliers’ minds. Let’s hear the Pentagon explain its interpretation of the rules of engagement and the Geneva Convention and how the actions either did or did not accord with them in its view. And importantly, let’s keep in mind that while we focus on this particular tragedy, it is the rare circumstance that when a journalist is injured or killed in a conflict area, there is a video of the death, and even more rare as this case demonstrates, for the public to see such a video.
This is exactly what should happen, because it will help save some lives in the future.
But there is a deeper issue here, as well. The truth is that this is exactly the sort of mistake that often gets made in wars. Lots and lots of the wrong people get injured and killed. Procedures and rules of engagement can always be improved. But innocent deaths have been part of war since the beginning.
The US military probably does try harder than most to avoid killing civilians and journalists, but war–emotion, testosterone, fear–has its own cruel logic. The difference is that so much of our modern age is recorded on video we just happen to see the brutal reality much more often.
This is a good thing. It helps us understand what wars really are, and what they really mean for the populations which get caught up in them. That in turn helps us evaluate if wars are just or justifiable with greater clarity and wisdom. And to the extent that the public is seeing much more of the shocking death and destruction of war, it will help make war just that much less viable as an option.
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[...] and brutality of war, forcing us all to answer hard questions of morality and efficacy. First it was a devastating helicopter attack in Iraq, which killed two Reuters employees and wounded child…. And now it is a special forces attack in Afghanistan which wiped out a family, including three [...]