In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice—that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.”
Killing Fields, Then and Now
Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent when the WikiLeaks story broke in June 2010. Certainly, they were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media. If, for instance, you read the version of the WikiLeaks story produced—with the same several weeks of special access—by the New York Times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had accessed a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew.
While the Guardian led with the central significance of those unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the Times led with reports (mainly via Afghan intelligence) of a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort—of the ties, that is, between Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper’s major sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan. To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the Times coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through two full four-column WikiLeaks-themed pages and deep into a third.
With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of that initial document dump. The WikiLeaks story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the United States until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who oversaw the Afghan War since being confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood, specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands. Within a few days, that had become the WikiLeaks story, as headlines like CNN’s “Top Military Officiaclass="underline" WikiLeaks Founder May Have ‘Blood’ on His Hands” indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the secretary of defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability… that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks.”
Moral culpability. From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the previous three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes collateral damage.
Collateral Damage in America
Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in a decade of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than eight years of the same in Iraq, the United States has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and, in some cases, the direct act of murder. Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have tried).
Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street in July 2007 to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital. In repayment, he and his two children were gunned down by that same Apache crew. (The children survived; the event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; the case was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.) That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that Americans have known little or nothing about.
Now, Private Bradley Manning, a twenty-two-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to WikiLeaks and may have leaked those ninety-two thousand documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial, was branded a “traitor” by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism, and is almost certain to find himself behind bars for years or decades to come. As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones cloaked in the secrecy of “national security”), their fates are no less sure.
When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have his choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him. Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a multimillion-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.
Moral culpability? It doesn’t apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment. That’s a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.
The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive, talk shows to go on. They will be treated with great respect, while Americans—once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over—will undoubtedly feel little culpability either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society “collateral” damage.
So much blood. So many hands. So little culpability. No remorse.
One November’s Dead
Remember how, as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”
For those whose lives were formed in the crucible of the Vietnam years, including the civilian and military leadership of the Bush era, the dead, whether ours or the enemy’s, were seen as a potential minefield when it came to antiwar opposition or simply the loss of public support in the opinion polls. Admittedly, many of the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were based on half-truths or pure mythology, but they were no less powerful or influential for that.