U.S. Forces Pay Homage to George Orwell, As It Were
As a rule, you describe the persons your forces have slaughtered as “militants,” “terrorists,” or “insurgents,” or you give them some other designation that renders them guilty by definition. No need to get into boring details, such as a man’s name, age, occupation, and how many surviving members of his family remain to mourn his death and suffer for want of his support. A militant is a militant is a militant; la la la. If these guys didn’t want to get killed, well, they just shouldn’t have been born in Afghanistan or Iraq or (fill in the blank).
The trouble with the standard reporting procedure is that very often your forces’ attacks leave behind the all-too-undeniable bodies and body parts of women, children, and old people. Of course, you can call them bad names, too: women are sometimes terrorists, kids can carry bombs, blah, blah, blah. But it’s a tough tale to sell. The sight of dead children, in particular, has a way of raising uncomfortable questions about what the hell you are doing in that God-forsaken hellhole and how you are going about doing it.
Recently, in one of the countless instances in which such questions had arisen, the U.S. military spokesman came up with a truly priceless turn of phrase. The military had already followed the usual procedure–first deny everything, then admit something might have happened and promise to conduct an investigation, then report the findings of your phony-baloney investigation, which almost invariably exculpates all your troops, then, when faced with incontrovertible evidence of your crimes, minimize their extent and spin the whole story so that you continue to evade responsibility for the innocent persons you’ve just slaughtered. At this late stage in the sequence, the media flack, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, explained that previous denials and minimizations were not actually wrong; rather, as the U.S. forces were compelled to face the facts more fully, their story had to change, too. As he put it, “sometimes the truth can change.”
Welcome to 1984, Mr. Whitman. You’re going to be very happy there.
It has often been opined that “military intelligence,” “military justice,” and “military music” are oxymorons. It is high time that we added to this list “military truth.”
UPDATE: Whatever one may think about the wisdom or justice of the War Crimes trials after World War II, one principle they upheld makes excellent sense: no one can escape responsibility for the commission of a crime simply by pleading"I was only following orders." Those engaged in unjust or immoral acts, from the Commander in Chief all the way down to the lowest grunt on the ground, are all culpable. One may not regard all of them as equally culpable, but they are all volunteers. What sort of person obligingly commits a wrong and seeks absolution on the ground that"I was only following orders"? Did that person not have an option to disobey the orders?
We are historians on this list, so we have familiarity with some of the persons in history who have stood up and said no to those who ordered them to commit evil acts. We rightly regard those persons as moral paragons. According to the Wikipedia entry,"Today, the members of the White Rose are honoured in Germany as some of its greatest heroes because they opposed the Third Reich in the face of almost certain death." Where is our White Rose in the United States today?