Glenn Greenwald 04 February
2015. Posted in News
Denunciations
of ISIS are worse than worthless, says Glenn Greenwald, when they are used to
make us forget or further obscure our own governments’ brutality.
The
latest ISIS atrocity – releasing a video of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot
being burned alive – prompted substantial discussion yesterday about this
particular form of savagery. It is thus worth noting that deliberately burning
people to death is achievable – and deliberately achieved – in all sorts of
other ways:
Burnt
alive by US drones in Pakistan
The
most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to
those targeted or near a strike. The missiles fired from drones kill or injure
in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of
powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive
drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb
amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss. . . .
In
addition, because the Hellfire missiles fired from drones often incinerate the
victims’ bodies, and leave them in pieces and unidentifiable, traditional
burial processes are rendered impossible. As Firoz Ali Khan, a shopkeeper whose
father-in-law’s home was struck, graphically described, “These missiles are
very powerful. They destroy human beings . . .There is nobody left and small
pieces left behind. Pieces. Whatever is left is just little pieces of bodies
and cloth.” A doctor who has treated drone victims described how “[s]kin is
burned so that you can’t tell cattle from human.”
Burnt
alive by US drones in Yemen
Mousid
al-Taysi was travelling in a wedding convoy celebrating a cousin’s marriage
when a missile slammed down from the sky. All he remembers are bright
red-and-orange colours, then the grisly sight of a dozen burned bodies and the
cries of others wounded around him.
Mousid
survived the December 12 attack in Yemen’s central al-Baydah province,
apparently launched by an American drone, but his physical and psychological
recovery process is just beginning. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest
drone attack in the country in more than a year. . . .
After
talking with victims and family members in the area, it was clear a majority of
civilians were among the carnage of the targeted wedding convoy. . . .
Civilians
living under drones said they live in constant fear of being hit again. “Many
people in our village have expressed terror at the thought of another strike,”
Sulaimani said. “When the kids hear a plane they no longer climb the trees
searching for where that noise came from. They each immediately run to their
houses.”
Burnt
alive by US phosphorus shells in Iraq
Ever
since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents,
there have been repeated claims that troops used “unusual” weapons in the
assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has
focussed on white phosphorus shells (WP) – an incendiary weapon usually used to
obscure troop movements but which can equally be deployed as an offensive
weapon against an enemy. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian
targets is banned by international treaty. . . .
The
debate was reignited last week when an Italian documentary claimed Iraqi
civilians – including women and children – had been killed by terrible burns
caused by WP. The documentary, Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, by the state
broadcaster RAI, cited one Fallujah human-rights campaigner who reported how
residents told how “a rain of fire fell on the city”. . . . The claims
contained in the RAI documentary have met with a strident official response
from the US . . . .
While
military experts have supported some of these criticisms, an examination by The
Independent of the available evidence suggests the following: that WP shells
were fired at insurgents, that reports from the battleground suggest troops
firing these WP shells did not always know who they were hitting and that there
remain widespread reports of civilians suffering extensive burn injuries. While
US commanders insist they always strive to avoid civilian casualties, the story
of the battle of Fallujah highlights the intrinsic difficulty of such an
endeavour.
It
is also clear that elements within the US government have been putting out
incorrect information about the battle of Fallujah, making it harder to
assesses the truth. Some within the US government have previously issued
disingenuous statements about the use in Iraq of another controversial
incendiary weapon – napalm. . . .
Another
report, published in the Washington Post, gave an idea of the sorts of injuries
that WP causes. It said insurgents “reported being attacked with a substance
that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns”. A
physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents “were burned, and
some corpses were melted”. . . .
Yet
there are other, independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn
injuries. For instance, Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the
testimony of refugees from the city spoke to a doctor who had remained in the
city to help people, encountered numerous reports of civilians suffering
unusual burns.
One
resident told him the US used “weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud”
and that he watched “pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that
continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns.” The
doctor said he “treated people who had their skin melted.”
Jeff
Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle,
said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be
dropped. In the RAI film, Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war,
says: “I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white
phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it’s known as Willy Pete …
Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the
bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children” . . . .
Napalm
was used in several instances during the initial invasion. Colonel Randolph
Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11, remarked during the initial invasion
of Iraq in 2003: “The generals love napalm – it has a big psychological
effect.”
Burnt
alive by Israeli phosphorus bombs in Lebanon
Israel
has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah targets during
the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White phosphorus causes very
painful and often lethal chemical burns to those hit by it, and until recently
Israel maintained that it only uses such bombs to mark targets or territory. .
. .
During
the war several foreign media outlets reported that Lebanese civilians carried
injuries characteristic of attacks with phosphorus, a substance that burns when
it comes to contact with air. In one CNN report, a casualty with serious burns
was seen lying in a South Lebanon hospital.
In
another case, Dr. Hussein Hamud al-Shel, who works at Dar al-Amal hospital in
Ba’albek, said that he had received three corpses “entirely shriveled with
black-green skin,” a phenomenon characteristic of phosphorus injuries.
Lebanon’s
President Emile Lahoud also claimed that the IDF made use of phosphorus
munitions against civilians in Lebanon.
Burnt
alive by US napalm in Vietnam
The
girl in the photo — naked, crying, burned, running, with other children, away
from the smoke — became emblematic of human suffering during the Vietnam War.
Kim Phuc was 9 then, a child who would spend the next 14 months in the hospital
and the rest of her life in skin blistered from the napalm that hit her body
and burned off her clothes. She ran until she no longer could, and then she
fainted. . . .
Phuc
went outside and saw the plane getting closer, and then heard the sound of four
bombs hitting the ground. She couldn’t run. She didn’t know until later, but
the bombs carried napalm, a gel-like incendiary that clings to its victims as
it burns.
“Suddenly
I saw the fire everywhere around me,” she remembers. “At that moment, I didn’t
see anyone, just the fire. Suddenly, I saw my left arm burning. I used my right
hand to try to take it off.”
Her
left hand was damaged, too. Her clothes burned off. Later, she would be
thankful that her feet weren’t damaged because she could run away, run until
she was outside the fire. She saw her brothers, her cousins, and some soldiers
running, too. She ran until she couldn’t run any more. . . . Two of her
cousins, ages 9 months and 3 years, died in the bombing. Phuc had burns over
two-thirds of her body and was not expected to live.
Unlike
ISIS, the US usually (though not always) tries to suppress (rather than
gleefully publish) evidence showing the victims of its violence.
Indeed,
concealing stories about the victims of American militarism is a critical part
of the US government’s strategy for maintaining support for its sustained
aggression. That is why, in general, the U.S. media has a policy of
systematically excluding and ignoring such victims (although disappearing them
this way does not actually render them nonexistent).
One
could plausibly maintain that there is a different moral calculus involved in
(a) burning a helpless captive to death as opposed to (b) recklessly or even
deliberately burning civilians to death in areas that one is bombing with
weapons purposely designed to incinerate human beings, often with the maximum
possible pain.
That’s
the moral principle that makes torture specially heinous: sadistically inflicting
pain and suffering on a helpless detainee is a unique form of barbarity.
But
there is nonetheless something quite obfuscating about this beloved ritual of
denouncing the unique barbarism of ISIS. It is true that ISIS seems to have
embraced a goal – a strategy – of being incomparably savage, inhumane and
morally repugnant. That the group is indescribably nihilistic and morally
grotesque is beyond debate.
That’s
exactly what makes the intensity of these repeated denunciation rituals
somewhat confounding. Everyone decent, by definition, fully understands that
ISIS is repellent and savage.
While
it’s understandable that being forced to watch the savagery on video prompts
strong emotions (although, again, hiding savagery does not in fact make it less
savage), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the ritualistic expressed
revulsion has a definitive utility.
The
constant orgy of condemnation aimed at this group seems to have little purpose
other than tribal self-affirmation: no matter how many awful acts our
government engages in, at least we don’t do something like that, at least we’re
not as bad as them.
In
some instances, that may be true, but even when it is, the differences are
usually much more a matter of degree than category (much the way that angry
denunciations over the Taliban for suicide-bombing a funeral of one of its
victims hides the fact that the U.S. engages in its own “double tap” practice
of bombing rescuers and funeral mourners for its drone victims).
To
the extent that these denunciation rituals make us forget or further obscure
our own governments’ brutality – and that seems to be the overriding effect if
not the purpose of these rituals – they are worse than worthless; they are
actively harmful.
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