"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."
—U.S. historian Howard Zinn, 1993.

The apparently wounded, unarmed insurgent who was dispatched by a U.S. marine's bullet in a Falluja mosque last weekend was probably no innocent.

But he, like the unnamed American soldier who took him out, was caught in a nightmare that we, sitting far away in our living rooms, could never imagine, no matter how many times we watched that NBC embed video over and over and over again.

That soldier is also a victim — of the lie that invading Iraq would avenge the dead of 9/11, root out dangerous WMDs, wipe out terrorism and make the world a safer place.

Who among us — tired, terrified, hungry, homesick and heartily sick of the carnage — can honestly claim they wouldn't pull the trigger under the same circumstances?

Yet, ask the right-whingers, and they'll also shoot the messenger: award-winning NBC war correspondent, Kevin Sites.

"A quick Google lookup on Kevin Sites reveals quite a bit of admiration at lefty sites for his past work, which causes my antennae to tingle," wrote Charles Johnson, on his Little Green Footballs weblog where, he added, he was "extremely skeptical of this report."

Yes, well, there are none so blind ...

The question is, why this video? Why, of all the gruesome footage that leaked out of Iraq over the past 20 months, did this little horror show merit so much airtime and attention?

Consider all the pictures you never saw on CNN of Iraqi people being blown to bits by U.S. bombs. Think of the dead and wounded coalition troops, most of them American, whose pain and suffering were captured, but never shown, by embedded news crews.

What about the civilian lives in Falluja, where uncounted men, women and children have met grisly fates, and received no medical attention, because U.S. forces first took the main hospital where they handcuffed the doctors and evicted the patients.

The reason?

As the New York Times reported, quoting an anonymous senior government official, the hospital was judged "a centre of propaganda" on civilian casualties: "This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons."

But, in the information age, information has this nasty habit of seeping out from under the heaviest of lids.

Go to fallujapictures.blogspot.com and see the limbless Iraqi babies and empty American combat boots that account for a fraction of the toll in Falluja. These are the true images from "Operation Phantom Fury," not video of some scared and jumpy American kid who obviously thought he was doing the right thing or otherwise he wouldn't have done it with a camera on his tail.

Go elsewhere on the Internet — http://www.informationclearinghouse.info, to name one site — and see other video, from other battles, shot by other embeds or from cockpit cameras, of other wounded Iraqis being shot by U.S. troops ("That was awesome! Let's do it again!") and even unarmed civilians being blasted from the air ("Dude!")

But, aside from rare airings on non-U.S. broadcasters, none of these got the play given to Sites' tape which, ironically, rolled out of the Pentagon's well-oiled embed machine, engineered to manipulate the war coverage.

Interestingly, as suggested by the estimable Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, there are no in-beds at the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany where who knows how many wounded Americans are being treated for "burns, blasts and gunshots, with spinal and brain injuries and `traumatic amputations' among them."

If there were, perhaps we'd have an accurate count of, if not the Iraqi civilian or insurgent casualties, at least of the American numbers. But no. As journalist Greg Palast suggests, with reports varying so widely, you have to wonder if healthy soldiers aren't getting shot on the plane to Germany.

So why that Sites video?

Because it was equivocal, because it was open to interpretation, because the commentariat could excuse what happened, as Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, did on more than one network on Tuesday when he said, "all bets are off in this environment" and the insurgents are "not playing by any of the rules.''

In other words, the video allowed the media to set up the crime and then to shoot it down, as if it were no crime at all.

Meanwhile, they ignore how the insurgents have scuttled off like cockroaches and how the military is stretched too tautly to contain them.

Instead, they plant the flag in the rubble of a city that won't stay under that flag for long.

© 2004 Toronto Star

###