“The Kill Team,” a Rolling Stone Special Report, traces the grim story of the U.S. soldiers who murdered innocent civilians in Afghanistan for sport—and how their officers failed to stop them.
Warning: This feature contains graphic, NSFW images.
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From the Rolling Stone report:
As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged… . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.”
During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.
From Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Torture Of Others” in the NYT Magazine, which I read tonight for the first time thanks to Andrew Greene:
The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures — less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers — recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities — and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.
… And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.
Below is part of a September 2004 memo I drafted and think I e-mailed to an advisor of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. This was more than three years before I wrote my first blog post. The memo’s inflated rhetoric, its occasional Agnewesque alliteration, and its “many of us learned in Vietnam” reference are because I fancied these words could end up in a Kerry speech (i.e. as would stay true for several more years, I was both despondent about my country’s sprint away from the sane center of American politics and bat-shit delusional about the role my words might play in fixing things.) Anyway, from the memo, which I quote here not because it was visionary but precisely because it wasn’t visionary, precisely because it shows that the truth was — and is — so obvious that it could be typed out by a sleepy stay-at-home dad after he put his infant and toddler to bed:
Anyone planning a war needs to know — either from personal combat experience or from military history — that the vast, vast, vast majority of soldiers will carry out their mission with awe-inspiring honor and valor. But a war-planner must also assume that any military force – of any nation, at any time, in any combat zone – will include some bad apples, some bullies, and even a few good people who will snap in the face of the ghastly stress of combat. And any responsible war-planner must ask himself whether the benefits of military action outweigh the sum of all the risks, including the risk that America’s good name may be soiled by the miniscule fraction of freaks who hide out in the ranks.
Don’t misunderstand. Factoring in the risk of bad publicity is no excuse for the paralysis of perpetual pacifism. Obviously, the fear that American guards might mistreat prisoners in some Tokyo prison some day would have been no excuse for simply turning the other cheek after Pearl Harbor. Nor would fear of wrongdoing by troops have justified letting Osama bin Laden continue to have the run of Afghanistan after 9/11.
But Iraq was not World War II-era Japan. Iraq was not even Al Qaeda’s Afghanistan. In Iraq, as never before, our national security has everything to do with our international reputation.
As we are learning, the shaky evidence of Saddam Hussein’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction was not a compelling enough reason to gamble America’s good name. Because of the president’s miscalculations, this war is looking more and more like a gift to the murderers who recruit new terrorists.
Anyone who ever served in combat should have been able to warn the president that our invasion and occupation would give America’s enemies fresh propaganda. The harsh truth is we are lucky to be dealing ONLY with this prison scandal. So many of us learned in Vietnam that one sudden ghastly experience in combat can cause a group of good, decent, professional soldiers to mutate momentarily into something ugly, scared, lethal, and indiscriminate.
President Bush was naïve if he imagined we could get in and out of Iraq without handing our enemies some shameful scandal they’ll be able to exploit for years. That risk should have been tallied in the administration’s list of reasons not to go to war in Iraq. But I get the sense they weren’t keeping a list like that.
Today, this same risk should be on Obama’s list of reasons not to escalate in Libya. He damn well better have a list like that.
- David Quigg, 3/31/2011
