Two grim stories making news today, both previously shrouded in secrecy, show the inevitability and necessity of transparency and "looking backward" in the conduct of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The NYT reported yesterday that the American-led military command in Kabul admitted to the killing of three Afghan women in a "badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February," after previously denying responsibility.
The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths.
A NATO official also said Sunday in an interview that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. A senior NATO official later denied on Monday that any evidence tampering occurred....
NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians — a district prosecutor and local police chief — during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.
Three women also died that night at the same home: One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death — or had died by some other means — hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.
The women, as Glenn discusses in his comprehensive post on this story, were found bound and gagged (Update: the media reports suggested--from military reports--that the women were bound, but that has not been confirmed.)
The second story is in some ways even more disturbing. The small, non-profit organization WikiLeaks released a graphic and disturbing video of "collateral murder," a "classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff." The video and supporting documentation were obtained by WikiLeads from military whistleblowers.
Dan Froomkin writes about the video
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
"Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards," says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.
A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: "Come on, let us shoot!"
Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.
And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."
The helicopter crew, which was patrolling an area that had been the scene of fierce fighting that morning, said they spotted weapons on members of the first group -- although the video shows one gun, at most. The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade.
The shooting, which killed Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, took place on July 12, 2007, in a southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad.
The official story, as reported by the NYT at the time, was that those killed were "insurgents and two civilians." The Pentagon hasn't responded yet to the release of this video, but has maintained until now that the killlings were justified by the army's rules of engagement.
At issue in both of these stories is the length to which the military will go, and has gone before, to cover up the brutality of of these military interventions. The scale isn't equal to, say, Abu Ghraib, but the ultimate effect is the same, particulalry in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Winning hearts and minds in the rest of the world, but particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, is all but impossible when these atrocities--and the subsequent cover up of them--are inevitably revealed. Keeping the hearts and minds of Americans will prove to be just as difficult when these stories come to light.
There's ongoing discussion in scimitar's recommended diary.
