One drop in a sea of blood
The statement below
was authored by Michael Prysner, an Iraq war veteran and co-founder of
March Forward!, an affiliate of the ANSWER Coalition.
Dear Ben,
The harrowing Apache
footage released by WikiLeaks gives us a stomach-turning glimpse of
war. Seventeen minutes of cold-blooded massacre in a war of more than
seven years. A brief clip of one Apache video; a quick look at one part
of one mission. Hundreds of those missions take place every day.
The video came to light
thanks to military whistleblowers who provided it to WikiLeaks together
with supporting documents. Imagine if we had access to all such
videos, the things we would see. Imagine all the Iraqis killed who have
no one to uncover the truth about their deaths. Had the death of two
Reuters news staffers not generated interest in this video, then the
destruction of three families by hellfire missiles fired into an
apartment building with no provocation, in a separate engagement also
featured in the video, would have never been made public.
This massacre is a drop in a sea of blood. Many other such “incidents” will never be known.
Officers claimed there
was “no question” that the pilots were responding to enemy fire; the
video shows there is no question that they were not responding to enemy fire. They said that they had “no idea” how the journalists were killed; the video shows that they know very well how those journalists were killed. They were gunned down standing in a crowd of unarmed people.
After the slaughter of
that group, the pilots beg for permission to kill the innocent
passers-by who had come to the aid of one of the wounded, like any of
us would have done if we saw our neighbor dying on the ground as we
drove down the street. They kill everyone trying to help the dying
journalist, and critically wound two children seen sitting in the front
seat.
We see a group of
unarmed men mowed down by a machine gun designed to destroy armored
vehicles. We see a vanload of good Samaritans obliterated for trying to
help a dying victim. We see all this with the soundtrack of the pilots
mocking the dead, congratulating each other and laughing about the
massacre.
No wonder the U.S.
military goes to such great lengths to keep such videos from us. They
want us to see Iraq and Afghanistan through their lens, through their
embedded reporters, filtered by censorship and restrictions. They know
that, once the people of this country see the extreme racism and
brutality behind these occupations, they will be repulsed by what their
tax dollars are paying for.
The military brass and
the White House politicians have tried to justify this senseless
atrocity. “Cut the pilots some slack. This was in Baghdad. This was a
battle zone”—that’s been their line. The pilots had been indoctrinated
with the same colonial mentality. “That’s what they get for bringing
their kids into battle,” one pilot says.
The father driving that
van was not “bringing his kids into battle.” He was bringing them to
school, driving down the street where they live. But the U.S.
occupation has made all of Iraq a battle zone. To those pilots, to
their commanders over the radio and to the generals in the Pentagon,
every single person in Baghdad and in Iraq is “fair game.”
The pilots joked about
the people they killed, laughed about U.S. military vehicles running
over dead bodies, knowing that their commanders were listening and that
they were being recorded. They were not acting out of character. This
is the culture of the occupation. This is how these wars are being
conducted.
Having seen this, one
cannot honestly believe that these atrocities are committed day in and
day out for the liberation of the Iraqi people.
The Pentagon’s talking
heads and media lackeys are hard at work putting their spin on this
story. It’s time to tell the truth. For more than seven years, the U.S.
has unleashed criminal, unprovoked aggression against the people of
Iraq, and they have been doing the same thing in Afghanistan for more
than eight years.
The U.S. military
presence in Iraq is a colonial occupation force. The only way forward
is a complete, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S.
forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. This government will not do that
unless all of us who are outraged by these criminal acts stand up and
demand it.
Michael Prysner
Iraq war veteran and co-founder of March Forward!
