Hunting Scenes From Baghdad

Kai Müller comments on a video showing the horrifying brutalization of people in war.

When Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, were killed in the streets of Baghdad on July 12, 2007, the U.S. military claimed they were “insurgents” and said that they didn’t deliberately target innocent civilians. An exhaustive investigation of the shooting undertaken by Reuters ended with no results. Until eyewitnesses who were aboard the American attack helicopter went public, there was no proof supporting a deliberate killing.

That has now changed. Since WikiLeaks released the original video shot from the helicopter, the Pentagon’s strategy of denial has collapsed like a house of cards. The 30-minute video doesn’t show pictures of a firefight, but rather an execution. The helicopter crew mistook Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon and its telephoto lens for a rocket propelled grenade. Besides, two other men in the group were holding Kalashnikov assault rifles. But their actions, rather than indicating aggressive intent, merely showed them milling around in the dusty square apparently thinking the helicopter hovering overhead was there for some other reason. There were actually battles going on nearby that Noor-Eldeen probably intended to photograph.

“Light ‘em all up!”

“Come on, fire!”

The salvos strike the asphalt out of the blue; a hail of bullets hits the walls of houses and blows the group of men off their feet. Noor-Eldeen runs away looking for cover and falls.

“Keep shootin’!”

The black and white video plus the accompanying radio traffic combine to produce a shocking depiction of man’s brutality to his fellow man in war. It’s also proof of the U.S. Army’s absolute technological superiority with its “eye in the sky” able to see every minute detail and accurately hit its targets. It is these precision weapons, the so-called “smart weapons,” that enable the United States to wage war. They minimize U.S. losses and concentrate destructive power to confined spaces like that crossroads in Baghdad where 12 men were killed and two children severely wounded.

Computerized warfare has become a visual event for soldiers; a first-person game with real victims that soldiers make impersonal with juvenile braggadocio: “Oh yeah, look at that,” one crew member marveled about the accuracy of their weapons, “Right through the windshield!” His buddy giggles. Nobody knows these people. The dumb thing about “smart weapons” is that they’re incapable of keeping their knowledge to themselves.

What remains a mystery is what prompted someone in the Pentagon to anonymously forward this classified material on to the WikiLeaks internet site. In the past, anonymous sources passed such things perhaps to a trusted media reporter and thereby set them on a path of investigative journalism. That’s how the My Lai massacre came to light and first showed Americans how they had turned Vietnam into a slaughterhouse.

It’s probable that frustration in the Pentagon is again reaching the boiling point over this leak. But this time, the public is getting access to the material in relatively unfiltered form. The burden of that is enormous, but even more important is the emotional gravity of the pictures that turns everyone who wants information about the event into voyeurs and hostages to the all-powerful war machinery. They are drawn into the crew’s disgusting cynicism as if it were reality soap opera, real-life shock included. But war is more than just the pictures it creates.