CNN vs. Al Jazeera landing page. 17:20 GMT Monday April 4, 2010

Collateral Murder

Collateral Murder
Overview

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released 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.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.



The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.
- Collateral Murder

"All these batons might form, together, another human raft."

Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland

all the Buddhas died,

and never heard what killed them.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, died on January 6th, aged 93

a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way...

    "The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way..."      
- The New York Times, October 1862
[via Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others]

I didn't know our cows too could be so inhuman.

"Beckett’s poetic war fictions fuse a curious literalism with the Mallarmean principle that to name is to destroy. To use words like war, Vichy, Resistance, Auschwitz, and atom bomb would inevitably be to short-circuit the complexity of the experiences in question. Not for a moment does Beckett engage in the usual clichés about the horrors of war; not for a moment does he assume moral superiority or the knowingness (“I” or “we” versus “them”) that makes so much war writing problematic. To analyze how such a war could ever have occurred is not, in any case, the poet’s purpose. In actual life, Beckett went to work for the Resistance on ethical instinct rather than dogma, so in his fictions he takes his responsibility to be that of showing rather than the making of ideological points. Hence the extreme ellipsis, indirection and indeterminacy of the tales—an indeterminacy that allows the reader a good deal of space."

Essential criticism is the kind that opens up new worlds in a work, that shows you things you didn't see before. Marjorie Perloff's "In Love with Hiding": Samuel Beckett's War situates an ostensibly abstract series of works -- Waiting for Godot, "The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End" -- in a web of direct political contexts and meanings that opens up the significances of Beckett's ellipses and silences. "Essential" is not high enough praise for this essay. For anyone who's read, or heard of, Samuel Beckett or Waiting for Godot.

Transformers, or a Brief History of 21st Century Combat

Jane Dark on Transformers, the visual recreation of September 11, and the mechanization of warfare as it intersects with history: transformers

The Real Problem with Transformers

"Our enemy can take any shape... they could be anywhere..."
- dialogue from the forthcoming Transformers movie




Andy at Kino Slang posted some (preemptive) objections to Michael Bay's Transformers based on its complicity with the American military enterprise. While I also find this problematic, my real concerns with the film are the way in which it engages with the paradigm of contemporary warfare.

The film starts out as an allegory for 4th Generation Warfare (4GW), or perhaps even 5GW: enemies are hidden among us, yet to reveal themselves; they pose an existential threat to our society due to their capability to inflict huge damage instantaneously; these enemies emerge from the crowd of our everyday life, and have the ability to then slip back among us unnoticed, tainting all of our everyday routines and interactions with suspicion and fear. The film then renegs on this promised exploration of the enemy in our midst, in favor of a traditional (read: 3GW) military fantasy, where expertise with the tools of war provides hard-fought but ultimately inevitable victory. This military wish-fulfillment fantasy is on par with the power fantasies provided by comic-book superheros. It perpetuates the myth that the US Army can win a conflict -- any conflict -- due to its technological superiority and the grit of the soldier on the ground. The root of this power fantasy is a visible, stable 3GW enemy who need only be outthought and outmaneuvered to be defeated. This is the most ideologically dangerous component of the film: the perpetuation of an outmoded strategy -- and perhaps more importantly, an outmoded myth of warfare. I'm reminded of the experience of English soldiers in World War I (as relayed via Paul Fussell's excellent book The Great War and Modern Memory). Those men went off to war expecting the heroism of The Iliad, carrying with them ideals of personal heroism and sacrifice and expecting to return home "by Christmas." What they found was the mess and slaughter of a pointless and chaotic war, quite the opposite of the notions of heroism they had been fed. Fussell's book is predominantly about the development of a particular strand of literary irony in this generation of writers who experienced life in the trenches firsthand. If Transformers can be taken as representative of our present response to myth-disillusionment as much as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden were of the WWI generation, then the present response is instead one of nostalgia for the definable enemies of past days. It seems that few if any First World War veteran writers returned to the concepts of heroism expressed in Homer or the Romantic lyric. Those British soldiers experienced the disillusioning truth of war, but in 4GW [and 5GW] it is the citizenry who is made victim (with fear a main weapon of war). Thus a nostalgia arises from our desire for a defendable and secure social order, and no engagement with the realities of conflict in the modern age will do. Hollywood's machine pretends to do what no modern military apparatus can -- restore (the facade of) security to our everyday lives.

But, will the inevitable sequel-tease undercut this establishment of imagined safety?

For more on 4GW / 5GW, see:
John Robb at Global Guerrillas
Wikipedia on 4GW
5GW at ComingAnarchy
Truly Formless 5GW at ComingAnarchy
tdaxp on 5GW (in-depth)
Kung Fu Monkey on 4th Generation Media