The media has focused our attention on the murder of civilians in Kandahar Province of Afghanistan by an American soldier. Today I’d like to ask a few questions about this event and what it means.
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| Sheepscot Rainbow Courtesy of Jan |
Forty-four years ago today, American soldiers on the Batangan Peninsula in Viet Nam killed about 500 civilians and dumped most of them in irrigation ditches.
The Viet Nam event went down into history as the My Lai Massacre, and in some historical accounts is seen as a pivotal factor in turning the US public against the Viet Nam war.
The survivors of the slaughter were placed in a camp called My Lai 2. Four years after the event, the media reported that the camp had been over-run by the communist insurgency and totally destroyed. I happened to be in Quang Ngai Province at around that time. The Quaker Rehabilitation Center had patients out on the peninsula, including in the My Lai 2 concentration camp.
Based on reports from our patients, the US and UK staff were skeptical of media stories that a second My Lai massacre had been perpetrated by the other side. So we drove out to see for ourselves. The camp was entirely destroyed. We searched for one of our patients, an above-knee amputee who was over-due for his appointment. There was no sign of him except for the artificial leg we had made, lying partly burned in the rubble. The US staff, who spoke Vietnamese, interviewed all the people in the area we could find. They told a different story.
Wikipedia says this:
In the spring of 1972, the camp (at Mỹ Lai 2) where the survivors of the Mỹ Lai Massacre had been relocated was largely destroyed by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) artillery and aerial bombardment. The destruction was officially attributed to "Viet Cong terrorists". However, the truth was revealed by Quaker service workers in the area through testimony (in May 1972) by Martin Teitel at hearings before the Congressional Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees. In June 1972, Teitel's account of the events was published in the New York Times.
The Times op ed is from June 6, 1972. It was called, “Again, The Suffering of Mylai.” When I was invited before Ted Kennedy’s committee, I brought along the partially burned prosthetic leg to illustrate my testimony.
I'd like to use the My Lai anniversary and its juxtaposition with the murders in Kandahar to mention three issues.
1. Are these civilian massacres unique or rare?
One of the problems with the media frenzy about the Kandahar killings is the impression that what happened is an abnormality. I can’t agree. Massacres of innocent people by all sides are routine in wars, and I’ve not known or been in one without them. Certainly there has been reporting on such massacres perpetrated by both sides in Afghanistan.
In Viet Nam and other wars I've been in, I heard many stories of these sorts of atrocities, and they were usually not disputed, except by diplomats in the presence of cameras. When we allow our country into a war, we have to assume that civilian horrors will ensue. A variation on the uniqueness story is the incessant hinting from our media that the perpetrator must be insane. This point sounds good, but it’s somewhat without significance, and it runs the risk of letting the politicians and military brass off the hook.
You can’t send tens of thousands of women and men anywhere without knowing that a predictable percentage of them will be nuts, and another knowable fraction will become so. So if you’re honest, and responsible, you’ll have mechanisms in place to lessen armed individuals doing terrible things. I’m pretty sure our military does try to decrease these slaughters. They are not doing it well enough; the proof is in the pudding. This mass murdering second lieutenant will no doubt be punished. Those who created the circumstances that made this and other outrages possible and inevitable, will likely escape accountability, as happened with My Lai.
2. What about the drones?
The Kandahar mass murder is being portrayed as different from drone-caused slaughters. We have a huge fleet of drones in Afghanistan, and the rate of civilian deaths – those that have been admitted to – seems to far exceed the number of people shot dead in their beds.
I’m not making morality from body count statistics: killing a civilian is individually and uniquely wrong. Yet there’s not doubt that deliberate shooting is creating more revulsion.
This distinction may come from the idea that the soldier went out and just killed people, they were not “collateral damage” in any way. He came very close to them and pulled his trigger, and then set them on fire. It was up close and personal.
But the military collects detailed statistics about the “effectiveness” of their weapons. They know how many collateral people they’ve killed, and they can predict how many more will die in this way. If I know someone is going to die because of something I want to do, and I do it anyway, I’m responsible. Any watcher of TV cop shows knows that.
I have two purposes in raising this point. One is to diminish the false distinction between allegedly purposeful murder and fabricated accidents. The other is to mention that the military is keenly aware of the American public's much smaller amount of revulsion about drone strikes. The US public is probably more tolerant of blowing things up without our own people being in harm’s way, and I suspect many people buy into the ethical fabrication of collateral damage.
If you follow the development of military hardware, you can learn a whole lot about what’s in store for us. These days the military is positively tripping over itself, along with universities and aerospace companies, to develop a wide array of drones to keep an eye on us, and in some instances mete out punishment.
Boeing is doing runway testing of the Phantom Eye, pictured here, a hydrogen powered drone that will stay up for four days at a time (no humans means no food or bathroom breaks are needed), flying up to 65,000 feet – in some respects, acting as a replacement for satellites, should they get disabled in a war with China. And these planes provide high altitude surveillance that is beyond our awareness - literally.
More down to earth, the Guardian has been covering the run up to the London Olympics, showing us how it will be illegal to hang posters critical of the Olympics in your own home, how certain roads in London will be closed to everyone but corporate sponsors – and – how the skies over London will be buzzing with an armada of drones. Police use of drones to control civilians sounds like science fiction TV. In actuality, it's more of a reality show.
The Kandahar killings are being sold as more of an unique aberration than is supported by the facts. Further, this event will be made wide use of in the selling of a more drone-centric military. And police departments all over the US are buying drones. Right now.
I grew up hearing about the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and how in retrospect, that conflict was a testing ground of new weapons for WWII. In the future, I suspect we’re going look back to Afghanistan the same way.
3. What about jurisdiction?
When I first went to Viet Nam, I was astonished to discover I didn’t need a visa, all I had to do was show a US passport to Vietnamese officials as I entered their country, and they had to let me in. This is standard US exceptionalism – we defended their sovereignty by ignoring it. You might recall that a major sticking point in our final withdrawal from Iraq was over jurisdiction, the zeal of the US to shield our soldiers and our civilian contractors from accountability in the legal system of the country where they were running around armed, drunk, and scared.
I don’t support turning over the murdering lieutenant to the Taliban for their interpretation of Koran-based punishment. But any one of several respectable human rights tribunals could well take up such a case. The problem is, the US tends not to join or participate in most of the appropriate fora – precisely because our country and military insist that only we can hold our own people accountable, and that we do it very well.
So well in fact that one soldier served three and a half years for the killing of more than 500 people at My Lai. Everyone else got off – except the three soldiers who had attempted to blow the whistle on what happened. They were denounced in Congress and persecuted and threatened for 30 years.
When I visited My Lai 40 years ago, there was a haze of tension in the air on that peninsula. Even with our big Quaker star on the side of the vehicle, we were stared at with a loathing I had never experienced from normally outgoing Vietnamese country people, even in North Viet Nam. The shattered trees and acres of bulldozed moonscape, the concertina wire confining entire villages to stinking, crowded camps, and the constant pressure of frowning Saigon soldiers behind mirrored sunglasses, all gave me a lightheaded, sick feeling.
I was torn between wanting to bolt out of that toxic place as fast as I could, and wanting to remain to show a few more moments of sympathy and solidarity. When we finally did drive away, I promised myself that I’d never forget those traumatized people crouched in the mud in the blazing sun, and that’s one promise I’ve kept, for all these years.
