Half-listening to NPR this morning I was suddenly jolted to attention by talk of "mass graves" and "American war crimes." Terri Gross was interviewing a couple of doctors from the Physicians for Human Rights. Seems they had discovered hard evidence of a mass grave in Afghanistan in 2002. It was a pit in the desert 60 meters by 16 meters. The doctors found lots of bone shards and bits of clothing and black headscarfs. Subsequent investigation revealed that somewhere between 200 – 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war appear to have been suffocated to death and then bulldozed into the pit in the desert. How did this happen? The doctors began filing Freedom of Information Suits and pressing the Bush administration and the State Department for an investigation to find out. However, there was a catch. As one of the doctors pointed, at the time of the massacre the United States was engaged in joint operations with the Northern Front, under Dostom, the local warlord. The doctor said that Dostum was actually on the payroll of the CIA. These circumstances give the United States possible direct culpability for any war crimes which investigation of this mass grave might reveal.
When the doctors found the bones in the big pit, they reported it immediately to the Bush administration and asked for an investigation. What they heard was silence. And stonewall. What the Bush administration finally said was that an "oral debrief" of the American special forces in the area revealed that no massacre had occurred.
The doctors were afraid that once they started talking about what they had found, the evidence would be destroyed. And as they told Terri today, they now have proof that it was. Forensic and satellite imagery show that a few weeks after they filed their suit, heavy earth moving was done at the site. And the doctor also said that since the event, four witnesses including drivers of the bulldozers and trucks involved, were tortured, killed or disappeared.
When the doctors finally started getting their FOIA requests answered, after hiring a Washington law firm to press their case, they were shocked. They found there was early knowledge on the part of the U.S. government that some 1,500 to 2,000 people had been massacred, and that at least four witnesses had been tortured and killed. The doctors give credit to the FBI who in their interviews with at least 10 Guantanamo detainees obtained information about this massacre, and had the integrity to report it as a crime.
Toward the end of the piece, Terri asked the doctors whether in their experience they have ever been involved in an investigation of a massacre or a war crime that involved the United States in such a direct way. In answering the doctor mentioned numerous such events she had investigated and said she never had seen such direct involvement of the United States. Another doctor warned of the "horrific mosaic of what happens when the United States, a supposed human rights leader ... abandons that commitment." "Accountability" he said "is not some political witch hunt, it’s about being able to restore our reputation." He concluded with a question: "Our values—are they the values of our founders, or of an Afghan warlord?"
http://www.npr.org/...
Is there something even larger here, something systemic? In June of last year the Huffington Post reported on a disturbing new documentary by the American News Project. Numerous interviews with soldiers and legal scholars focused on the apparently common practice of American soldiers in Iraq carrying "drop weapons" – typically AK-47s that had been confiscated from Iraqis. Many American soldiers carried at least one of these weapons around in their vehicles in case an innocent civilian were killed. The idea was to have the weapon ready to plant on the civilian, typically preparatory to taking a photo as evidence to exonerate the soldier.
http://americannewsproject.com/...
Here we have not a single war crime but a war crime culture. It is a culture where soldiers expect to kill civilians inadvertently, and where they are coached by their sergeants and platoon commanders on how to cover their ass.
We lost far more than our citizen rights in 9/11. The executive branch of our government went beserk. In Virgil’s epic on the Trojan War, he has this couplet describing the 9/11 moment in that story when the Greek attackers have emerged from their Trojan Horse and let their fellow soldiers through the gates of Troy. In trying to capture the wild abandon of the city defenders when they saw what was happening, Virgil wrote:
Madly they snatched up their arms,
Not thinking how best to use them.
This surely is the epitaph of George Bush and Dick Cheney, who saw fit to abandon the very international standards and principles that America itself had pioneered and nurtured over many decades and even centuries.
Now that the Harvard doctors have presented seemingly irrefutable evidence of Bush administration complicity in the cover up of a
massive war crime in Afghanistan, now that we have seen the pictures of torture and read the Taguba report and seen the evidence for the widespread use of "drop weapons," what now? Will the exposure of these war crimes and atrocities trigger a peace movement in America? Not likely.
Time was, when Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai Massacre and its coverup in 1969, the outrage his report provoked help trigger a huge peace movement that helped change American policy. But that was then. Hersh himself didn’t change. He reported on torture at Abu Ghraib. He just recently scooped Vice President Dick Cheney’s assassination squads. He himself has been more than a little horrified at the overall trend he sees in the American military. Recently in a speech at McGill University (2006) talking about video he’d seen showing U.S. troops who, after being attacked, shot and killed a group of nearby soccer players, said,
"there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."
Did George Bush and Dick Cheney cover up a huge war crime in Afghanistan far bigger than Mylai? Did they orchestrate the torture at Abu Ghraib? Did they preside over the military culture of the "drop weapon," in which soldiers expect civilians to be killed, and for whom covering up such acts is part of soldierly precaution. But perhaps we should not bother ourselves about all that now. Shouldn’t we just put the past behind us and try to be forward-looking. Are such crimes still going on today? Of course that’s a matter of interpretation. I saw a newsman only today on TV expressing his befuddlement at how the public reacts to two different modes of assassination, one carried out in person by an American assassin, and the other, carried out from 30,000 feet by a drone operated like a video game by some guy in a trailer in Nevada. As in all videogames, the American military today often makes mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes kill whole families just like the Israelis do. Sometimes we kill whole wedding parties—bride, groom, kids, guests, the whole schmgeggy.
Why have we allowed our government to get so far out of bounds? Has investigative journalism failed us? Not quite. Seymour Hersh and NPR are still reporting the atrocities. Physicians for Human Rights is still hiring law firms, pressing FOIA suits and exposing the mass graves. But it seems to be we who have changed – we who have turned into robot ghouls. Looking back at how the Mylai massacre helped trigger the great peace movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, it seems quite remarkable how outraged we were back then at the deliberate mass killing of several dozen women and children—how quaint! Far greater atrocities occur today that barely cause the eyebrow to rise. The once-shocking stories don’t even make the front pages of the newspaper any more, much less the nightly news (thank god for Sy Hersh, the New Yorker, NPR, and the Huffington Post). Terrorism has brutalized us Americans just like it has the Israelis. Like them, we have abandoned the principles of humanity for the virulence of hatred. And the end is not yet in sight.