We Won't Get Fooled Again... except this time

That the US Senate would pass a bill I consider an abomination is not really that shocking. But that my allies would be the likes of Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn, or that my opposition would include Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, and Patrick Leahy… that is seriously weird. Of course, I’m also on the same side as Al Franken, Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, and opposed by Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell… and now everything makes sense again. Sort of.

I’m talking, of course, about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, with its controversial provision which allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. When this frankly scandalous piece of legislation got the White House imprimatur yesterday—President Obama had been threatening to veto it, but now says he’ll sign it tomorrow—I linked to this article and wrote on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “WHAT??? Is there really a difference between being actively evil and merely capitulating to evil at every opportunity?”

That was unfair. I apologize to the legitimately craven, those who would like to stand up to the Dark Side, but just can’t muster the gumption to do so. On this issue, at least, they have nothing in common with Barack Obama, who is indeed actively evil… or, at the very least, whose vaunted knowledge of constitutional law seems to have a blind spot on that whole habeus corpus thing that has only been the hallmark of English and subsequently American jurisprudence since the 13th century. (I mean, really, you can’t expect the poor lad to keep up with all the new developments, right?)

Okay, before we go any further, it’s time to reiterate that I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, and to concede that we’re not really talking about habeus corpus, per se, but rather a first cousin of it. Habeus corpus, after all, is a means of securing the release of those illegally detained. This bill provides a means by which an obviously unethical and unconstitutional practice that runs counter to centuries’ worth of legal precedent is rendered “legal.”

My mistake was in believing, perhaps more on faith than on evidence, that the President’s early objections to this legislation were based on civil libertarian concerns. They weren’t. They were, apparently, all about turf wars, making sure that it was the President and not (gasp!) Congress who had the prerogative to violate the civil rights of American citizens. Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Salon.com is more comprehensive than I could be, and includes valuable links to statements by the likes of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. Here’s a little of HRW executive director Kenneth Roth’s commentary:

By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side….

It is a sad moment when a president who has prided himself on his knowledge of and belief in constitutional principles succumbs to the politics of the moment to sign a bill that poses so great a threat to basic constitutional rights….

President Obama cannot even justify this serious threat to basic rights on the basis of security. The law replaces an effective system of civilian-court prosecutions with a system that has generated the kind of global outrage that would delight recruiters of terrorists.

It’s not often that I quote Rand Paul with approbation, but I can’t find anything to argue with here:

… detaining citizens without a court trial is not American… [if the law passes] the terrorists have won.

We're talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk. Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.

Of course, there’s also Mark Kirk:

We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention. We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights. You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention. I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you.

And yes, having essentially articulated the manifold reasons this legislation is unconstitutional, misrepresented and downright scary, Senator Kirk proceeded to vote for it, anyway.

Kirk wasn’t alone. Here’s Dianne Feinstein: “Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.” Then she voted for the bill, too.

OK, could we have one big chorus of “W.T.F.”?

Supporters of this bill claim that it merely codifies existing practice (in which case, why do we need it?), and doesn’t extend the tentacles of governmental power. There may, unfortunately, be some truth to this allegation (if so, I assure you that it’s purely coincidental). The notion of constitutional rights became distorted beyond recognition in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the desperate passage of the PATRIOT Act, which managed somehow to be frighteningly repressive and downright silly at the same time. Similar, and further, invasions of personal privacy became central to the legacy of a power-hungry President named Dick Cheney George W. Bush.

Those of us who voted for Mr. Obama in part because of Mr. Bush’s cynical and indeed Machiavellian assertions of executive power to do essentially whatever the hell the President wants have been, are, to say the least, bitterly disappointed. The Obama administration has extended chronologically and in some cases substantively about every Bush-Cheney over-reach. Rep. Jerry Nadler sums this up nicely in his response to the assertion that this bill doesn’t really make substantive changes to civil liberties:

It doesn't codify existing law. It codifies claims of power by the last two administrations that have not been confirmed by [the Supreme Court]—rather terrifying claims of power, claims of the right to put Americans in jail indefinitely without a trial, even in the United States.

Nadler makes an important distinction: what is existing law and what a pair of megalomanical administrations claim it to be are hardly interchangeable concepts.

Tellingly, if Obama had any real principles, he could have asserted them on this issue. In political terms, there was an opportunity here: some 40 Republicans in the House voted against this bill, and another half-dozen in the Senate joined them. On one of the few occasions GOP legislators haven’t been in lock-step, the Obama administration characteristically fumbled the ball. But, as noted above (and with striking clarity by Greenwald), no one in the executive branch seems to have had the slightest inclination to follow the path of civil liberties… not when there is power to be consolidated, at any rate.

Ultimately, it all boils down to the lyrics of the great Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Three years ago, we were all thinking, “Change it had to come. We knew it all along.” Trouble is, the more salient part of the song comes later: “Meet the New Boss. Same as the old boss.” Don’t you hate it when Pete Townshend is right?

"I'm Erick, and I'm a Pseudo-Christian Moron." "Hi, Erick."

There’s a wonderfully instructive post by the reliably stupid Erick Erickson over on RedState.com.

Erickson was certainly not alone in buying into the easy narrative coming out of Norway that the terroristic attacks there were perpetrated by Islamic radicals. The New York Times, the BBC, and other allegedly reputable outlets all signed on without bothering to do any… you know… fact-checking or real reporting. (There’s a good chronicle of how what is now pretty clearly a false report spread here.) The sloth of the mainstream media is, of course, a running theme on this blog: a couple of the more recent examples are here, here, and—perhaps most relevantly—here.

But Erickson is a special case: he’s stupid enough to try to be clever: he tweeted “Terrorist bombing in Oslo. I bet you it was not Lutherans who did it.” Well, Erick, ol’ boy, I bet you lost that bet.

Still, most of us have confidently, even smugly, made a prediction that didn’t turn out to be accurate. The difference between you and me on the one hand, Gentle Reader, and wastes of potentially useful protoplasm like Erick Erickson on the other is precisely this: when we screw up, we admit it, apologize, and move on. He, on the other hand, while admitting he has a fair amount of egg on his face, wants to blame everyone else for his lapse. In this, of course, he is not unlike a lot of self-styled pundits, mostly but by no means exclusively on the right, who simply cannot admit that they got one wrong.

You see, it’s not that his prejudice blinded him to the possibility that an act of terrorism might be perpetrated by the quintessential Aryan (after all, Europe has never had any trouble with that lot, right?). It’s those wild-eyed leftie pinkos in the media who are always making excuses for Muslims. After all,

In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.

Really, because all I heard for days was about how Nidal Hassan was Islamic, and the New York Times article, for example, (I just picked one at random from the list of allegedly left-leaning media sources) on the Arkansas shootings includes this: “In a lengthy interview with the police, Mr. Muhammad said he was angry about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Thomas said. Previously known as Carlos Bledsoe, Mr. Muhammad told investigators that he had converted to Islam as a teenager, Chief Thomas said.” By the way, that was in paragraph 6 (see below). Sounds to me like there’s no cover-up there.

Ah, but Erick the Oblivious isn’t done yet: “Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a ‘conservative Christian.’” Might that be because he’s a conservative Christian? Oh, and confessed culprit Anders Behring Brevik isn’t identified as “right-wing” in the first Times article to identify him until paragraph 11 or as a Christian until paragraph 16 (see above). He was in fact described as a “right-wing fundamentalist Christian” in a follow-up report, only after what the Times describes as “a detailed manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination” came to light. (OK, that one was in paragraph 5: you got me, there.)

In fact, if a perspicacious reader were to be troubled by the Times’s reporting, the distress would more likely be founded on sentences like the following, taken from a since-removed article: “Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday's assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida's signature brutality and multiple attacks.” You catch that? The clear implication is two-fold: 1). it isn’t terrorism unless it’s Islamic terrorism, and 2). it’s still al-Qaida’s fault. This is the allegedly pro-Islamic, anti-Christian coverage that has Erickson’s skivvies in a twist.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald has a point when he argues:

Thus: if it turns out that the perpetrators weren’t Muslim (but rather “someone with more political motivations”—whatever that means: it presumably rests on the inane notion that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be “ruled out” (one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the more deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is Muslim violence). The final version of the NYT article inserted the word “Islamic” before “terrorism” (“even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause”), but—as demonstrated above—still preserved the necessary inference that only Muslims can be Terrorists. Meanwhile, in the world of reality, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one—1 out of 294—was perpetrated by “Islamists.”

Of course, minor details like facts never get in the way of Erickson’s narrative. Ultimately, however, this part of Erickson’s baseless screed isn’t really the troublesome part. Idiot conservative commentators’ lying about the facts is hardly news. Then we get this: “The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam.” Once again, of course, the accusation is unmitigated bullshit (see Greenwald’s numbers, for example, which come not from some random guy with a Twitter account, but from the European Union’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report for 2010). Ultimately, Erickson’s argument boils down to an allegation that wacko Christians aren’t really Christian, but wacko Muslims are really Muslims. Just because Erickson says so. The really outrage is yet to come, however:

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

In fact, Mr. Erickson, you bigoted asshat, Christ tells us to love one another. That’s why “secular left[ists]” like me can embrace homosexuals and Muslims: because they are God’s creatures, made in His image. Because we, not pseudo-Christian pietists like yourself, who read only the parts of the Bible that conform to your manifold prejudices, actually try to emulate the compassion embodied in Jesus. We might not do it for that reason, but that’s what a belief in social programs, in Welfare and Social Security, in health care for all is—that’s what we believe in. And I’m here to tell you, you mendacious Mammon-worshipper, that Jesus is a lot more likely to be on our side than on yours.

I will grant you one thing, though: you are “most definitely not of this world.” We don’t mind your visiting our planet, and we hope you enjoy your stay. Just don’t try to pretend you live here.

Bradley Manning: The Questions Far Outnumber the Answers

In this iteration of my blogging life, I have posted 25 essays; over on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, I’ve posted 70 links (17 of them to this blog). In that time, no one really disagreed (publicly) with me except around the edges. I take this as more of a bad thing than a good one. My purpose in writing these pieces isn’t to be affirmed (although that’s nice, and I thank those of you who have offered your approbation): it’s to engage in a conversation about what I perceive to be significant issues of our day.

So I was actually pleased when one reader, a friend and former student, took issue with me yesterday over a post to the Facebook page. I had linked this article on the website of an organization called Courage to Resist. The piece concerns Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is apparently now being held more or less in isolation, charged with having turned over to WikiLeaks the now-notorious video subsequently titled “Collateral Murder.” My commentary on the video itself can be found here.

Anyway, this particular reader wrote, reasonably enough, that “When you sign with the military; you agree to the uniform code. When you sign to that, you have to align with all military actions. Justified or not…. that kind of behavior will infect the code.” He also took issue (as do I) with Courage to Resist’s slogan, “Support the troops who refuse to fight.” It is a little disingenuous to voluntarily join the armed forces and then come to a crisis of conscience over the fact that armies kill people. On the other hand, to suggest that many enlistees are provided with misleading if not outright fabricated information about what their military lives and duties will be (nothing in writing, of course) is merely to acknowledge reality. We could go around and around on this for days, and it’s really just a side issue. So let’s move on.

Be it noted, then, that all I did was post the link and note Pvt. Manning’s arrest, his apparent inability to access civilian counsel, and the (as far as I’m concerned) indisputable fact that the center-piece crime with which he is charged is an act of whistle-blowing. I made then, and make now, no determination of whether Pvt. Manning’s alleged actions were—or ought to be—legal or even ethical. Importantly, however, I do insist that “legal” and “ethical” are separate categories; in cases like this one, especially, it is possible to be the latter without being the former.

Many readers of this blog will know that this spring I taught a topics course on the American theatre and the Vietnam War. One of the texts we used was The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Daniel Berrigan’s adaptation of actual court transcripts in one of the most seminal anti-war protests of the Vietnam era. The eponymous nine protesters destroyed several boxes of draft records with homemade napalm, then stood in a circle, singing, calmly waiting for the police to arrive. They offered nothing like a traditional defense in court, merely pointing out the potential conflicts of interest of an obviously stacked jury and seizing every opportunity to make the case about the war instead of about their own actions. They were convicted, of course—there could be no doubt about their guilt in legal terms—but they became heroes to millions of people in the process.

Does Pvt. Manning belong in that same category? Frankly, it’s very hard to say. There are far more questions than answers. If the reporting of the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima is to be believed, Pvt. Manning was, and probably still is, a very messed-up young man. Nakashima's lead paragraph describes a 22-year-old soldier who “had just gone through a breakup. He had been demoted a rank in the Army after striking a fellow soldier. He felt he had no future, and yet he thought that by sharing classified information about his government's foreign policy, he might ‘actually change something.’” If that’s an accurate description, his actions were more desperate than heroic, more Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame than Daniel Ellsberg (to whom some have compared Manning) releasing the Pentagon Papers.

But there is much in this story that just doesn’t make sense, at least yet. The best reporting I’ve seen on the issue is the lengthy and detailed essay by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Greenwald’s analysis is filtered through a reliably progressive lens, to be sure, but he’s clearly done the work: his documentation is, by contemporary journalistic standards, a thing to behold.

What seems clear is that Pvt. Manning admitted to (“took credit for”? “claimed responsibility for”?) not only the release of the 2007 video, but of another similar video from Afghanistan and of some 260,000 diplomatic cables. The exact nature of the charges against him is not entirely clear, at least to me, but surely they’re linked to some broadly-construed concept of “national security,” a descriptor so flexible in application that it means anything from “the continued existence of the republic is legitimately at risk” to “this has the potential to be mildly embarrassing to someone with some clout.” See, for example, the brouhaha over the release of information regarding warrantless wiretaps in the Bush administration: to hear the Dick Cheneys of the world tell it, the threat to the American citizenry wasn’t that our government was eavesdropping on our private conversations without as much as probable cause, it was that we knew they were doing it.

Greenwald identifies a number of, shall we say, anomalies in the story as presented to us:

Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they “could do serious damage to national security?” Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to “quickly” confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat, given the obvious ease with which that could be preserved, intercepted or otherwise surveilled? These are the actions of someone either unbelievably reckless or actually eager to be caught.

In fact, the first question that comes to my mind isn’t why Manning did this, but if he did. Perhaps it is plausible that he had access to the materials he describes. Perhaps he really did find a somewhat less than reputable pseudo-journalist via Twitter and offer him his confession—in a fit of remorse? or of braggadocio? Perhaps Adrian Lamo, the “journalist” in question, really didn’t offer him confidentiality and really did fear for the safety of American citizens when he went scurrying off to nark on Pvt. Manning. But it strikes me as equally plausible that Manning had nothing to do with the release of the video(s), that the cables were never released at all, and that the claims of responsibility are more a cry for help than either a baring of the soul or an assertion of existential heroism. Voluntary false confessions are a fact of judicial life, and while I’m not a psychologist, it strikes me that Manning’s mental and emotional profile would bear considerable resemblance to those of people who do falsely confess.

Given the Army’s secrecy, we’re unlikely to find out much more about this case. All of which means that we don’t know if Pvt. Manning in fact did what he claims to have done, and, if he did, what his motives were either in the commission or in the confession. With so many facts unresolved, our own prejudices and predilections will inevitably fill the void. Pvt. Manning will therefore likely be, in different people’s eyes, a hero, a traitor, a victim, or just a pitiable young man, possibly forever. Who knows? Maybe one of those descriptions might even be accurate.

And now for what we DID see on a video

If my last post was about what wasn’t seen in a video, this one is about what is. This Monday, an organization called WikiLeaks released footage of an attack on July 12, 2007, by two US Army Apache helicopters on a group of Iraqi civilians, killing about a dozen people and wounding two children. The incident would no doubt have attracted little attention except for the single and utterly random fact that two of the dead were employees of Reuters News Service: driver/assistant Saeed Chmagh and photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen. Reuters, apparently, doesn’t take kindly to losing its people in unprovoked fits of arrogance by the US military. Moreover, they know how to negotiate the vagaries of the Freedom of Information Act, and both have and are willing to employ the resources to get to the truth. After nearly three years, the video shot from the lead helicopter has apparently come to light.

The footage shows the American helicopters opening fire on a group of Iraqis who have committed no apparent offense other than being in the vicinity of each other. One of the Americans talks about seeing a weapon… but there is no evidence of one: one suspects that he was misidentifying Noor-Eldeen’s camera equipment. I’m not trained in this stuff, so maybe there’s a weapon there somewhere that I don’t see. But I do earn my living, in part, by knowing what gestural patterns are plausible manifestations of what psychological impulses: in the terms of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the relationship between the action (psychological) and the activity (physical). And I’m here to tell you that there’s no way that those men in those pictures were engaged in any sort of belligerent activity. They are relaxed, paying no attention whatsoever to the attack helicopter a couple hundred yards away from them—they had to have both seen it and heard it—until, of course, it opened fire on them.

The report back to the base, that the pilots can see “five to six individuals with AK47s” is at best an obvious exaggeration—even counting the camera equipment, they have identified precisely two even possible weapons. But even if we take them at their word on that, they aren’t satisfied until they have slaughtered everyone in the area, well over half of whom, by their own numbers, are unarmed. They subsequently claim that “we had a guy shooting”; the tape doesn’t confirm that assertion, but, again, it might be true. Of course, it might be true that Rush Limbaugh will honor his pledge to leave the country since health care reform passed, but I’m not holding my breath.

Our Beloved Boys in Uniform then gloat about “those dead bastards.” A short while later a van approaches and some men emerge, obviously with the intent of coming to the aid of a wounded man (who turns out to be one of the Reuters men) who has managed to crawl up onto the sidewalk. The guys in the helicopter start sounding like three-year-olds in the candy store, impatiently demanding of the base, “C’mon, let us shoot.” Permission is granted: apparently such basic human decency as caring for the wounded—any wounded—is now a capital offense. Anyway, the helicopters proceed to blast the crap out of the van, killing most of those inside but—miraculously—only wounding the two children.

A few minutes later, ground forces arrive, and the helicopter guys get a good chuckle when their comrades appear to drive over one of the bodies. When the soldiers find the wounded children, there’s a brief moment when it almost seems like there’s someone human there, but then we get this exchange: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” “That’s right.” This has got to be one of the most disturbing moments of a very disturbing piece of video. The implication is that although we shot these kids, it wasn’t our fault… they were brought into a “battle.” No, actually, they were brought into a massacre. And apparently when attempting to rescue an unarmed man who has been seriously wounded, it's protocol to drop your kids off first: to do otherwise is reckless. No one in this sequence did anything even remotely deserving of being slaughtered by a gaggle of trigger-happy goons: not the wounded man, not those who tried to help him, certainly not the children themselves.

Ultimately, however, this isn’t about the soldiers. I was fortunate enough to have been just a little too young to have been drafted into the Vietnam War, but I’ve done enough reading on the subject and have known enough veterans to understand that it is a different world there. Protestations that “none of the soldiers I know are like that” are as hollow as the claims that all soldiers are monsters. The fact is, we don’t know how any individual will respond until he’s there. Indeed, we don’t know how behavior will change (or won’t) from minute to minute. If what it takes to cling to a shred of sanity in that environment is to dehumanize anyone who isn’t one of us, to reduce the human carnage below us to a sort of video game, I understand. I don’t like it, but it’s one of life’s little contradictions. I don’t want to hang out at the slaughterhouse, either, but I do like those steaks and chops.

So I am perfectly willing to believe that the men we saw and heard behave so callously and indeed ghoulishly on this footage are actually quite wonderful fellows when removed from this environment: they were before they got there, and they are/will be again. The Army brass, on the other hand, are, to coin a phrase, liars. Here’s the report in the New York Times the next day: “Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry…. The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”

Now, whether there were any Shiite militiamen in the area may be open for debate, but those two journalists sure as hell didn’t die in any “fight.” They were simply attacked. Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl is quoted as asserting that ''There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” This is, of course, an outright lie. There’s plenty to question about Bleichwehl's assertion—the military just wanted to sweep another “oops” moment under their very large rug. They’d have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling journalists. (Any resemblance to Scooby Doo dialogue in the previous sentence is entirely coincidental.)

On July 16, some four days after the attack, Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger, citing a preliminary police report of a “random American bombardment” and Reuters’s own preliminary investigation which “raise[d] real questions about whether there was fighting at the time the two men were killed,” demanded a “thorough and objective investigation” of the circumstances of the two Reuters employees’ deaths. (It would be nice if alleged news organizations cared about the truth all the time, not just when one of their people has been killed, but I guess we take what we can get.)

Gentle Reader, you may have noticed that I equivocated at the end of my first paragraph. You know, when I said “the video shot from the lead helicopter has apparently come to light”? That’s because the tape has not been confirmed as authentic because… wait for it… the military can’t find their copy. According to the Associated Press, “Military officials said they believed the video was authentic, but that they had to compare the images and audio with their own video before confirming it publicly. When pressed Tuesday on why the military had not released the video when other documents related to the investigation were made public, officials said they were still looking for it and weren't entirely sure where it was.” Yep, really. If nothing else, this makes me feel a little better about the stuff that disappears into the abyss I call my desk. Seriously, though, I suspect that copy will somehow never be found, thereby making that rather damning tape unconfirmed. Hate it when that happens. Wikileaks says they are scrupulous about authentication, but John McCain said he vetted his running mate. And Wikileaks, to the extent that they have a reputation at all, are known for protecting their sources. So I’m guessing that we’re just going to have to assume the footage is real.

If we do that, then, there’s only one question. Not whether the helicopter guys got a testosterone overdose and started shooting up the place just because they could: they did. Not whether the Army brass consciously, brazenly, lied about what had happened: they did. Not whether Reuters gave a damn about only two of the dozen or so dead: they did. The only question is whether Glenn Greenwald is accurate in his assertion that “what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety--as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital” [emphasis his]. Based on the testimony of the necessarily anonymous reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog who wrote “90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists,” I’d have to say yes. Based on what I’ve been reading (or re-reading) to prep for my course on the American Theatre and the Vietnam War, yes. Based on over a half-century of observing human nature, yes. But you’re free to disagree. As long as you share whatever you've got in that pipe…