Category: Current Affairs

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In Fallujah

I struggle every day with my feelings about what’s happening in Iraq. Not a subject I can write about casually. But occasionally, I read something that sort of cuts through all the anger and depression and turns the casualty statistics into wrenching flesh-and-blood reality. A great example today: A long dispatch from Dexter Filkins of The New York Times relating the Fallujah fighting as he saw it while accompanying a Marine company through the thick of the combat. One vignette:

“More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company and quietly slipped away. Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski, nicknamed Ski, was a Bravo Company sniper. For hours at a stretch, Corporal Ziolkowski would sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40 rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big and wide, and Corporal Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a better look.

“Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Corporal Ziolkowski was one of Bravo Company’s most popular soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who learned to shoot growing up in the countryside, Corporal Ziolkowski grew up near Baltimore, unfamiliar with guns. Though Baltimore boasts no beach front, Corporal Ziolkowski’s passion was surfing; at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Bravo Company’s base, he would often organize his entire day around the tides.

‘” All I need now is a beach with some waves,’ Corporal Ziolkowski said, during a break from his sniper duties at Falluja’s Grand Mosque, where he killed three men in a single day.

“During that same break, Corporal Ziolkowski foretold his own death. The snipers, he said, were now among the most hunted of American soldiers.

“In the first battle for Falluja, in April, American snipers had been especially lethal, Corporal Ziolkowski said, and intelligence officers had warned him that this time, the snipers would be targets.

” ‘They are trying to take us out,’ Corporal Ziolkowski said.

“The bullet knocked Corporal Ziolkowski backward and onto the roof. He had been sitting there on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had taken his helmet off to get a better view. The bullet hit him in the head.”

[Update on June 6, 2006: While doing a little reading and surfing for a post on Iraq War photography, I came across an unpublished picture of Corporal Ziolkowski shot by photographer (and sometimes New York Times stringer) Ashley Gilbertson. The picture depicts Ziolkowski and a spotter in a setting that well could be the Grand Mosque mentioned in Filkins’s report; that’s the the position from which the corporal killed is said to have killed three enemy fighters. The link to the picture, on the Aurora Photos site: http://www.auroraphotos.com/bin/Detail?ln=8158700002.]

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The Bile Variations

Irwin Graulich — the guy who says journalist Kevin Sites is an ally of al Qaida and Saddam for reporting on the Marine shooting in Falliujah — responded to my earlier letter. Graulich, who elsewhere describes himself as “a well known motivational speaker on morality, ethics, Judaism and politics,” promises to “kick the crap out of” Sites if he ever runs into him on the street. But compared to other online missives he’s credited with sending, he’s positively civil here:

Dear Dan

Thank you for your comments. I have seen the videotape and I stand by my article. I tried to place myself in the soldiers shoes, and knowing what had occurred with these so-called insurgents (who are actually terrorists and do not give a damn about their own lives), I would have probably shot them as well. It is frightening to go into that situation knowing these evildoers could set off a bomb hidden under their bodies or whip out an AK-47.

It is very easy for a journalist like Sites to take the situation out of context, which is what he did. I would always give the benefit of the doubt to our heroic, extremely moral military, whereas you and Sites apparently will not jump to that conclusion. That is where we differ. This is not a street fight in Brooklyn. This is an ugly war against some really bad monsters. Of course the marine was facing a life or death situation. If a branch to a tree moved, he should shoot it and ask questions later.

I know of Sites past reporting and some of it is commendable. However, this action was a very tragic and despicable error on his part and I do not want any other journalists to try to become heroes at our military’s expense. Frankly, if I ever run into Sites on the streets of Manhattan, I will personally kick the crap out of him for what he did to that marine. That is the justice I learned growing up on the streets of Brooklyn.

Remember, reporting a war in real time is in a completely different category than reporting on a political rally or factory opening. So lease do not give me this baloney about Sites honorable attempt to convey the truth. I know a ex-marine who captured a Nazi officer in the Dachau concentration camp at the end of WWII, and when the Nazi spit in his face, the soldier pulled out a revolver and shot him in the head. This was featured in a well known Steven Spielberg documentary called “The Final Days.”

Would you want to give this heroic African-American soldier who eventually became the Secretary of Education of the state of Massachusetts a trial and a prison term? Frankly, I would give him a medal, a dinner in his honor, a brand new Cadillac and a cruise to the Bahamas.

Irwin N. Graulich

President

Bloch Graulich Whelan Inc.

333 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10010

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S&M, Meet MSM

A tardy discovery: There’s a new dirty word for people like me who have earned their living from the filthy advertising- and subscriber-derived dollars that support newspapers, magazine, television, radio, and online news sites. It used to be we were just lowlifes, practitioners of a sordid verbal form of sado-masochism. But now we’re MSM — mainstream media — as in MSM journalist. It’s not a complimentary term. Generally it denotes the dull, the slow-witted, the lazy, the dim defenders of the status quo (often to pursue secret liberal agendas; often just to lord it over and disrespect bloggers and anyone who’s not on the inside of the MSM world).

Go ahead, try Googling something like “MSM journalists.” Fascinating.

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Rage Against the News

So, a journalist videotapes something we’d rather not believe can happen — a Marine killing a wounded, unarmed enemy. The official response is that the incident is under investigation. And the unofficial response is: from people who feel the war is a misguided, ruinous dead end — people like me — that the incident somehow shows how senseless and tragic the whole adventure is. And from people who appear to feel that all the devastation of life and treasure in Iraq is just part of the cost of preserving our freedom and security — a view I find mind-bendingly out of touch with reality — there’s rage: that a reporter would dare do his job, that the actions of one of our soldiers would be questioned, that anyone could second-guess the need to blow away a wounded enemy, regardless of the circumstances.

Of course, the reactions on the other side (here and here for instance) go a lot farther than that. Kevin Sites, the journalist who shot the pool video, is now the enemy, “a turd,” “a slimy bastard,” and worse. Another blogger urges: “Note to all soldiers: If a prize-greedy journalist films something you don’t want aired because you know it could get your fellow soldiers killed, take the camera and destoy [sic] the film. You have the permission of the people who support you and NOT the savages you are so rightly killing.” Some posts even advocate violence against the journalist.

What’s stunning is the desire, on one hand, to deny what the pictures show, and on the other to punish or even shut down the source of the information. The right-wing site MichNews (“Most In-Depth, Conservative Honest News & Commentary) ran a column today that made the modest, unhysterical charge that Sites is an accomplice to al Qaida and Saddam Hussein and decrying how the video besmirched the “heroic warrior.” The column, by someone named Irwin Graulich, calls for a boycott of NBC and its owner, General Electric for “their despicable practices.”

OK, I was moved enough by that last piece of writing to send a letter in response:

Dear Mr. Graulich:

Regarding your piece “Fahrenheit Fallujah,” two points:

First, have you seen the videotape? If so, you would seem to be intentionally mischaracterizing it. The individual or individuals involved did not face any kind of “split second decision [sic]” in this case. Indeed, one voice can be heard identifying the wounded enemy as casualties from the previous day, then other voices discuss whether one of the wounded men is feigning death; then comes the shooting. If it’s improper to jump to the conclusion that the videotape

shows a Marine committing what amounts to murder, it’s also improper to characterize the tape as showing a Marine facing a life-and-death situation with no time to assess the situation.

Second, your comments about Kevin Sites amount to slander of a journalist who has a long and very accessible record of sympathetic coverage of our troops in Iraq. Far from portraying them as heartless killers, he’s done as much as any U.S. journalist I’m aware of to put a human face on a group of people who’ve been called upon to do an inhuman job in inhuman circumstances. Don’t take my word for it — check out his independent writings on the war at kevinsites.net.

The truth of this war is ugly and savage. It’s also ugly and savage to so casually condemn those who honorably and professionally try to convey that truth.

Respectfully yours,

Dan Brekke

Trying to respond reasonably and respectfully in this situation may be absurd. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, comes back in response.

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TomDispatch.com

TomDispatch.com is a blog published by Tom Engelhardt, an editor and journalist who teaches at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It’s a challenging, thoughtful site. Especially worth reading as soon as you have the time are a couple long posts he put up a few weeks ago dealing with Iraq: “The Costs of War,” a piece from a Texas woman named Teri Wills Allison whose son has been sent to the war, and a followup with reader reaction to her account. Among the many passages from Allison’s essay that struck a chord:

“For the first time in my life, and with great amazement and sorrow, I feel what can only be described as hatred. It took me a long time to admit it, but there it is. I loathe the hubris, the callousness, and the lies of those in the Bush administration who led us into this war. Truth be told, I even loathe the fallible and very human purveyors of those lies. I feel no satisfaction in this admission, only sadness and recognition. And hope that –given time — I can do better. I never wanted to hate anyone.”

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Winning Iraq, One Iraqi at a Time

Sometimes soccer balls aren’t enough to win the battle for hearts and minds. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. As in Falluja, where it’s hard to avoid the echo of the legendary (and, naturally, disputed) Vietnam quote reported by Peter Arnett, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” But beyond the spectacle of blowing the town to bits in order to make it safe for democracy, our mission to destroy the most evil of the evildoers produced an incident that’s sure to make us even more beloved not just throughout Iraq, but everywhere in the world where people are just hoping we’ll show up to spread our special brand of liberty. Not to be too elliptical, NBC reporter Kevin Sites (check out his blog; it’s excellent) witnessed a Marine execute a wounded Iraqi insurgent in a mosque.

From MSNBC’s online account of the incident:

“Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.

“One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

“The Marine could be heard insisting: ‘He’s f—ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f—ing dead.’ Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

” ‘Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.

“When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: ‘I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.’ ”

One may object to this incident being singled out since, hell, we’re up against savages and after all, this kind of thing happens in every war. Maybe so. But part of the mission ought to be to cling to whatever separates us from the savages, and the fact this happens in every war is no endorsement for it; in fact, it’s the strongest argument for making war the absolute last resort.

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Progress in Iraq

According to the Iraq Coalition Casualties site, 65 U.S. troops died in the first 12 days of the Iraq war in March 2003. Between Monday and Saturday last week, six days, 59 63 64 U.S. troops were killed, about two-thirds of them in the Falluja fighting (and let’s not forget the 1,200 Iraqis the U.S. says it terminated during the last week and whatever civilian casualties were inflicted). So, in Month 20 of the Great Regime Change, we’re experiencing the most intense and deadly combat to date. Now, of course, things are bound to get better.

(Update: The Iraq casualties web site updated the number of killed earlier today, so that’s why I’ve changed it above).

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Der Österreicher Kommt

The dark cloud on America’s political horizon is growing a little more ominous. No, not the ultrafundamentalist, ultraright, the-Bible-is-law crowd (they’re not on the horizon; they’re directly overhead, raining all manner of hail and hell on the heads of the unbelievers). No, I’m talking about California’s favorite Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As noted previously, there’s a fairly serious though so far fairly quiet move afoot to amend the U.S. Constitution to remove the requirement that the president must be born a U.S. citizen; that way, Arnold could run and bring his brand of bombastic, hit-and-run populism to all the people of America.

Now the campaign is getting aggressive. A new organization somewhat disingenuously called “Amend for Arnold and Jen” — at amendforarnold.org — is launching a series of TV ads promoting a change in the Constitution. I say disingenuous because the site name attempts to make the effort look as if, gee, it benefits all qualifying immigrants, even Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who hails from British Columbia. But it’s clear looking at the site that this is purely an effort to try to get The Austrian into das Weißhaus.

Some of Arnold’s rich Silicon Valley friends are behind the drive, The main mover appears to be Lissa Gaye Morgenthaler-Jones (she’s also known by various permutations of that collection of names). A Google search shows:

–She’s been a heavy contributor to and participant in Schwarzenegger’s various California campaigns.

–She’s an investment banker and analyst and daughter of David Morgenthaler, an early Silicon Valley venture capitalist; in campaign finance statements, she’s said to be head of something called Laeta Capital, though I haven’t found anything on the firm tonight.

–She’s a moderate, pro-choice Republican who’s contributed to the WISH List — a Republican knockoff of the Democratically-focused Emily’s List; the WISH List steers money to pro-choice Republican women candidates on the local, state, and federal level.

It’s really hard for me to look at this calmly, never mind objectively. It’s clear that the principal reasons that foreign-born Americans were barred from the presidency are no longer relevant and that’s it’s reasonable for long-ago naturalized citizens to stand for president. When it comes to talent and ability, there’s nothing magic about being born in the United States. Just look at the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the other hand, amending the Constitution to benefit one man just stinks of opportunism. Of course, that fits the Arnold mold perfectly: He’s the opportunist’s opportunist. He proposed a measure to create a rich statewide after-school program for all de children of Colly-fornia; but he forgot to include any way to pay for it. He’s governing a state in the midst of a profound fiscal crisis, and his solution is to foist the bill off on the next generation. Meantime, he proposes balancing the budget by slashing education spending. And to get his way, he blusters up and down the state and bullies anyone who tries to stand up to him (his current civics project involves getting rid of the Democratic majorities in the state Legislature and its congressional delegation by putting an amendment on the ballot that would create a new reapportionment commission). And as far as his moderation goes: The guy stood by Bush, a conservative radical, and helped him get re-elected. I think the Austrian would be a friggin’ menace in the White House.

So, my ambivalence aside, I’ll be counting on the narrow-minded knee-jerk xenophobia of my fellow Americans to win out over their slack-jawed drooling love of celebrities in general and The Terminator in particular to keep foreigners out of the White House. For a little while, anyway.

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Guilty Bastard

After my extensive experience as a journalist and legal observer (I’ve put in hundreds if not thousands of hours watching top-notch crime dramas such as “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” “Law and Order” in regular, special, and extra-crunchy criminal flavors, “CSI” episodes set in venues as varies as Las Vegas, Miami, and New York City; not to mention formative undergraduate stints as a watcher of “Dragnet,” “Adam 12,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders,” and even “Burke’s Law“), I was unconvinced that Scott Peterson was guilty of anything but being a lying, conniving bastard (with a dash of sociopath thrown in). But that’s why we have a legal system in this country: to tell when people like that are also murderers. In any case, he’s guilty. At least until the case goes into overtime.

The best part of catching the verdict coverage early this afternoon (this can be read as an admission that I failed to occupy my time with more meaningful business; no need for a trial on that one) was the proliferation of mugging nitwits who showed up in the courthouse shots of every channel covering the story (I checked CNN, Court TV, MSNBC, and Fox News; the two specimens pictured here were captured on MSNBC). I mean, of course it’s nothing new. But it is kind of extraordinary that we’re all so conditioned to the presence of cameras that this kind of behavior — now apparently accompanied by cellphones, so we can talk to our buddies while we’re on screen — has become sort of automatic.

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Arafat, Sponsored by Israel

A nice segue on one of Charles Osgood’s CBS Radio spots this morning: He did a news item on the strange drama surrounding Yasser Arafat’s decline, and ran a soundbite from one of Arafat’s aides that went something like this: “He will live or die based on his body’s strength and the will of God.” Then Osgood comes on and says, “More after this, from the American Jewish Committee.” The message turned out to be an ad for Israel. A lovely unplanned moment of irony.