It horrifies me that brilliant and courageous journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Jane Mayer and a few others, can make such airtight cases for their important and just causes, shine a clear light into unspeakably cruel darkness, and…. it changes nothing. The detailed and coherent telling of the actual facts, even if they stir the emotions terribly, do not have any effect on organized human action (politics) next to the raw emotions alone, stirred violently with a buzzword or two and chanted over and over on the mass media.
Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, lays out the many horrifyingly criminal illegalities involved in the torture program, with dates, names, details, memos, who authorized and ordered what, how the laws were violated, the exact techniques routinely used, the destroyed tapes of torture interrogations, etc. A few years later President Obama, either in an unfortunate ad lib or reading a dick fingered teleprompt, admits that “unfortunately… we tortured some folks.” Tortured some folks. Harry Shearer does a good Obama imitation and that week on Le Show he did a musical number (at 42:00) with the hook, in unison with the Obama sound bite, a nonchalantly harmonized “we tortured some folks.”
Scahill, as he details in his book Dirty Wars (a NY Times best seller it seems the NY Times never reviewed), travels to a village near Gardez, outside the Green Zone in Afgahnistan, to investigate a rumored massacre of civilians. There had been a party in a village called Khataba early into the morning of February 10, 2010 to celebrate the birth of a child. The locals all have videos of the party on their phones, smiling faces, men dancing. Suddenly a helicopter lands, guys in heavy boots jump out, walk on the roof.
One of the men who had been dancing at the party goes out to see what’s up and gets pumped full of lead by American commandos. Likewise the two pregnant women who run to him screaming, likewise a teenage girl and another man, also shot to death. Only a couple die immediately, the cop and one of the women linger, groaning, for five hours after the Americans dig their bullets out of the bleeding bodies with their tactical knives. It would have been embarrassing and incriminating if local authorities, or NATO investigators, found American bullets in the bodies of the deceased, after all. The commandos stop the others from taking the two mortally wounded family members to the nearby hospital. They handcuff the remaining men, march them to the helicopter and drop them somewhere miles from home to have a nice day.
Scahill sees the videos and still photos of the victims, talks to the eye witnesses. The brother of one of the murdered men, whose pregnant wife was also killed, tells Scahill that when he finally got back from where the Americans dropped him he was ready to put on a suicide vest and go kill Americans but his father wouldn’t let him.
Scahill follows other similar stories in various countries and eventually learns that these killings are all the work of JSOC (Joint Strategic Operations Command), the highly secretive, elite Special Forces killing units that work directly for the president. “Do what you’ve got to do, boys,” says the president, presumably, and they eventually track down and kill Osama bin Laden, to the cheers of American hockey and football crowds. Scahill, who had been slowly and painstakingly unearthing details about the secretive JSOC, was amazed to hear JSOC, a name that is rarely spoken and never seen in print, suddenly lauded on CNN, Fox and everywhere, embodied in heroic Seal Team Six.
Scahill discovers that the kill list, once a few dozen names, now includes thousands of names. The lists of those killed, and the civilians killed along with them are highly classified, naturally, although Scahill puts together a rough list of confirmed raids, drone strikes and confirmed kills that shows these happen multiple times daily, mostly by drone now, in literally 40 something countries the US is not at war with. Every dead male of military age is considered a dead terrorist, like in the old body counts in Viet Nam where every dead civilian was counted as neutralized Viet Cong. It is unknown how many of the undisclosed numbers of killed children, older men and females of all ages are also terrorists, though it is also, probably, if we are justified in killing them, a substantial number, eh?
Scahill, a guest on Bill Maher’s show, lays out some of the hellish details for the audience. Fellow guest Jay Leno asks Scahill “why haven’t they killed you yet?” and Scahill just gives him a grim look, says nothing.
Fair question. So much easier just to kill a troublesome motherfucker like that, you know? Not that he offers any real threat to the tireless killing machine, the only thing the American people have endless funds for… but still, there is a principle here, one would think.
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