The Crime of Silence

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The Crime of Silence
by Tom Gallagher

If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?

Has anything better expressed the current disconnect between America and its foreign wars than the above words from Noor Eldeen? Eldeen is the father of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, one of those whose 2007 death at the hands of U.S. forces in Baghdad was captured in the video released by WikiLeaks.org. What would we do? It's hard to believe it wouldn't be substantially more than we are now doing to prevent this sort of thing from happening again in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and to humans.

The official soothers are, of course, busily at work in the news media cleaning up the damage this previously secret footage has caused: This is sad, but it is what war is. Mistakes happen. Soldiers obviously are trained to kill. It has to be that way. These defenses are not in themselves wrong. This is, indeed, what war is all about. But while such arguments may explain away the actions of the soldiers in the video, they do not justify the actions of those who send them there -- nor the silence of those who let it happen. Yes, war is certainly a terrible thing and it is precisely because it is such a terrible thing that it should be strictly reserved for situations where it is absolutely necessary and has a chance of accomplishing something -- conditions not remotely met in either of America's ongoing wars.

Ah, but some may say, the leaked footage of the laughing gunners is from Iraq! That's just George Bush's old war. Let's shove it into the closet with the other memories of those bad old days. Unfortunately, the Iraq War is far from over, and more importantly we know that atrocities such as this are happening in Afghanistan right now. How do we know this? Why the U.S. commander told us so himself. Speaking of reckless shooting incidents that NATO forces engage in, General Stanley A. McChrystal acknowledged "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." As Noor Eldeen asks, what would be our reaction if a statement like this applied to events in America? Would a "We'll try to do better in the future" suffice -- even if it were animals we were talking about?

In 1967, organizers submitted a petition entitled "Individuals Against the Crime of Silence" to UN Secretary General U. Thant with the names of thousands of Americans who signed "as both a permanent witness to our opposition to the war in Vietnam and as a demonstration that the conscience of America is not dead." At that point, the Nuremberg Trials were twice as close in time as the Vietnam War is to us and the idea of collective responsibility was perhaps therefore higher in public consciousness. It was, after all, just a little over twenty years earlier that "Good Germans" had followed orders and kept quiet as the Nazis led them to World War II. The petition signers were determined not to be those kind of "Good Americans" in the Vietnam War era.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/09-3

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