Wikileaks is a website launched in December 2006 that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of its sources. A senior military official confirmed to the Associated Press that this video showing the murder of two Reuters journalists in 2007 is authentic. As the Huffington Posts’s Dan Froomkin reported yesterday, the video shows “a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.”
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald makes the important point that this is not an aberration in these dirty wars. “It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we’re seeing it on video not because it’s rare, but because it just so happened… to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed.”
By Julian E. Barnes
The Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2010
As part of an effort to extend the military’s “warrior culture” to unmanned planes, the Air Force is overhauling how it trains the crews that operate its rapidly growing fleet of Predators, Reapers and other remotely piloted aircraft.
The changes in training will affect hundreds of personnel who fly the unmanned aircraft remotely over war zones from distant bases and control their powerful cameras and targeting systems.
The effort is part of a move by the Air Force to put as much emphasis on drones as it does on traditional fighters and bombers, officials said.
. . .
The new training is a mix of the technical — details about the radar, camera and laser systems — and what Allen calls “infusing the Air Force warrior culture” into the job.
“They need to understand the battle space. They need to understand working with a crew,” Allen said. “This is absolutely flying a vehicle, and we want someone dedicated to this duty.”
. . .
“You do not want to feel you are not in the actual fight,” said Airman Paul South, 20, of East Smithfield, Pa., a member of the first class of new sensor trainees. “You are in the fight, and you need to realize what is on the line every time you are doing your job.”
Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an “arc of instability” caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just “small wars in the midst of a big one.”
Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that’s 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.
The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield “virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors,” according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today’s younger generation of resources for their future.
