(rabble.ca, April, 2013)
By Matthew Behrens
One
day last week, I was in a Shawarma shop as the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the
Boston manhunt provided the soundscape for lunch. The gentleman behind the
counter and I exchanged words of sadness about the sickness infecting those who
would commit the kind of violence we saw at the end of the world-famous
marathon.
“This
reminds me of growing up in Lebanon,” he told me. “Every day, during the war,
bombs like this would go off all the time.” Hundreds were indiscriminately
killed, like those killed this past week in Iraq by car bombs, and in Afghanistan
and Pakistan and Yemen by U.S. air strikes. As the lunch hour went on and the
stenographers to power struggled to fill the airwaves with commentary, the
inevitable questions arose. Was anywhere safe, given something bad could happen
on a moment’s notice? What drives a
person to do this?
“Why did these young men who grew up and
studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such
violence?” asked Barack Obama on Friday night. It is a testament to the
self-censorship of global media that Obama can ask such a question without a
hint of irony, nor without a single voice asking the same question of the
Harvard-trained, constitutional lawyer Obama himself, who two days earlier
signed off on the latest of his daily kill lists, resulting in the
extrajudicial murder of two individuals in the town of Wessab, Yemen.
Writer Farea Al-Muslimi, in an Al Monitor editorial, “My Village Was Attacked By
US Drones in Yemen,” describes a sense of bewilderment that his village could
be attacked, one that must have mirrored the sense of outrage felt by
Bostonians when their trademark marathon was bombed. “If you live in Yemen, the
golden rule is to expect anything any time,” al-Muslimi wrote. “That, however,
does not include expecting your hometown village — one of the most peaceful and
beautiful places in Yemen — to be bombed. The peacefulness of such a place
makes you believe that no one has ever heard of it, let alone that it is bombed
by a US drone strike at night…. The ominous
buzz of the drones terrorizes communities. Where will they strike? Will I be
next? These are the questions youngsters now grow up asking...The ‘collateral
damage’ of drones cannot just be measured in corpses. Drones are traumatizing a
generation.”
Based on the
daily trauma of drone strikes, the editorial concludes, “It is
tempting to conclude that the US has no interest in a measured response to
terrorism. It is difficult not to think it doesn't matter to them whether they
terrorize (and radicalize) entire populations as they check another name off
their ‘kill list.’”
That
nagging question about who would do such things arose again during a White
House press briefing, where the pack mentality was briefly broken by a very
brave correspondent, Amina Ismael, who put it plainly: “I send my deepest
condolence to the victims and families in Boston. But President Obama said that
what happened in Boston was an act of terrorism. I would like to ask, Do you
consider the U.S. bombing on civilians in Afghanistan earlier this month that left
11 children and a woman killed a form of terrorism? Why or why not?”
White House spokesflak Jay
Carney’s answer was typical bafflegab, and the rest of the reporters fell in
with softball questions more befitting the narrative of the day. Meanwhile, editorial
pages lit up with the not unexpected think pieces about “radicalization,” with
Canadian national security industry spokesman Wesley Wark struggling to
understand how “seemingly well-integrated young men can come to take up the
cause of mass casualty violence and terrorism.” It is a testament either to his
poor scholarship or his willful blindness that Wark concludes that, despite a
decade of counter-terrorism efforts, “we are no closer to possessing a
definitive answer.”
Wark wonders about the motives
of individuals who would seek to “kill and maim,” but rather misses a key
point. The suspects were acting no differently than a general in the Pentagon
when they detonated a crude version of weapons that are a regular part of many
a military arsenal: cluster bombs, anti-personnel weapons that are no different
in their intended use than the Boston bomb, designed to rip apart human flesh
and inflict maximum suffering. These things have been dropped millions of times
on civilian targets by air forces whose pilots have received medals of bravery.
Wark and others might
also benefit from a brilliant piece of 1970s research by Dane Archer and
Rosemary Gartner called “Peacetime Casualties: The Effects of War on the
Violent Behaviour of Noncombatants.” This analysis, which documents substantive
increases in domestic homicide rates following a war, begins by stating the
problem that is largely dismissed as part of the “root causes” argument:
“Violence by the State is strangely absent from discussions of violence. Books
about aggression, for example, often treat topics ranging from hormones to
homicidal criminals without mentioning capital punishment, the shooting of
looters, the beating of protesters, or even that most impressive form of
‘official’ violence: war.”
The legitimation of official violence, they
argue, becomes so embedded in the culture that the core message – “the unmistakable
moral lesson that homicide is an acceptable, or even praiseworthy, means to
certain ends” – becomes mirrored in the population at large. A majority of
nations involved in wars experienced homicide rates that increased
significantly compared to nations not involved, revealing a “linkage between
the violence of governments and the violence of individuals. This linkage is
mediated, we believe, by a process of legitimation in which wartime homicide
becomes a high-status, rewarded model for subsequent homicides by
individuals….The wartime reversal of the customary peacetime prohibition
against killing may somehow influence the threshold for using homicidal force
as a means of settling conflict in everyday life.” Put more succinctly, U.S.
Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1928: “Crime is contagious. If the
government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.”
Another answer can be found in our recent
history. A media obsessed with anniversaries (the one week anniversary of
Boston, the 100th commemoration of the First World War, the latest
day count of Lindsay Lohan’s sobriety) failed to miss the 45th
anniversary of a story that was originally reported as an American military
victory.
On March 15,
1968, young American soldiers went into a Vietnamese village and when asked by
a soldier, “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” were told by their
commanding officer, “Kill anything that moves.” As Nick Turse further recounts
in his excellent history of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, “Over four hours, members of Charlie
Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims…They even
took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way,
they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systemically burned
homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.” Such atrocities were the norm,
not the exception, and Turse notes that massacres were so common that the
Pentagon formed a secret Vietnam War Crimes Working Group.
While
ordinary soldiers committed these heinous acts, they were, like the tortures,
renditions, and mass slaughters from the skies of today, part of the official
command structure. War criminal Henry Kissinger relayed the murderous orders of
President Nixon on the bombing of Cambodia, instructing the Air Force: “Anything that flies on
anything that moves.”
That genocidal mentality (rooted very much in
the slaughter of indigenous populations and the ethnic cleansing symbolized by
“residential” schools) was also reflected in the deliberate targeting of Iraq’s
electricity grid and water treatment systems during the 1991 Gulf War, with the
U.S. Air Force noting in a 1998 report that “The loss of electricity shut down
the capital's water treatment plants and led to a public health crisis from raw
sewage dumped in the Tigris River." A US Defense Intelligence Agency
analysis entitled "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," noted that
sanctions (which killed 1.5 million people, and were “worth it”, according to
former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) would prevent the importation
of the necessary equipment to purify water, leading to "a shortage of pure
drinking water for much of the population" and "increased incidences,
if not epidemics, of disease.”
Perhaps the real question is: What
radicalized U.S. officials to so hate civilian populations around the globe
that such atrocities could be planned and carried out? Another opportunity to
understand the “radicalization” of American officials (and their Canadian counterparts)
was lost with the media’s failure to provide an equal amount of coverage to two
well-documented reports on complicity in torture. One report (Globalizing
Torture http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition) found 54 nations
(including Canada) provided assistance to the U.S. program of rendition to
torture, while another (The Report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on
Detainee Treatment), a bipartisan effort undertaken by some very conservative
elements, including members of the military, found it “indisputable” that the
U.S. has been complicit in torture, and expressed its concern at “the kind
of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11,
directly involving a president and his top advisors on the wisdom, propriety,
and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.
Despite this extraordinary aspect, the Obama administration declined, as a
matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what
happened, saying it was ‘unproductive’ to ‘look backwards’ rather than
forward.”
As people around the globe, from Boston
Massachusetts to Wessab, Yemen and the Kunar province of Afghanistan remember
the dead and care for the wounded in their communities, all victimized by acts
of terrorism, it remains our collective to task to not only seek
accountability, but also a consistent recognition of – and action responding to
the fact – that terrorism is committed with our tax dollars, by our
governments, in our name.
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