See No Evil

The heavily
armed, trained killer was "under stress" when he raped, then murdered a
14-year-old girl and tried to burn her body, after having murdered her
parents and 7-year-old sister.

"He's my Steve. You can't stop loving someone."

Here are
the two poles of our existence, the human condition stretched between
them, as taut as it can go, perhaps. How do we embrace a crime such as
this - we, as Americans, who underwrote it? We want to push the accused
into the deepest corner of our forgetting, but we can't quite do so.

The aunt,
who attended the recent trial of former Pfc. Steven Green, at a civil
court in Paducah, Ky., still loves this boy and told reporters, after
his sentence to life in prison without parole, "We did not send a
rapist and murderer to Iraq."

And I believe her.

I believe
her without minimizing the crime, without blocking my ears to the
wailing remorse of the surviving family members who traveled from Iraq
to witness the trial and testify at the "impact hearing" and who wanted
Green to get the death penalty. And I believe her in spite of the
media's stalled impasse of consensus expertise that explains and
dismisses the actions of Green and two fellow GIs, James P. Barker and
Paul Cortez, on March 12, 2006, in the village of Mahmoudiya, as
further examples of the stress our soldiers are under in Iraq and
Afghanistan. These are bad places. They lost it, y'know?

To my mind,
such locked-in know-nothingism, such refusal to make obvious
connections, makes the mainstream U.S. media fully complicit in the
conspiracy to evade, indeed, shatter the whole concept of,
responsibility for the consequences of our wars of conquest and
occupation.

These wars,
or the fomenting of the precondition that makes them possible - the
dehumanization of whole nationalities - are in and of themselves the
problem: They are the disease. Green's crimes, and all the other
propaganda embarrassments for which low-ranking scapegoats have been
publicly chastised, are the symptoms. How many symptoms do we need
before we dare address the underlying condition, which infects all of
us?

The crime
for which Green, Barker and Cortez have all been convicted - and the
only crime involving U.S. soldiers killing Iraqis that has resulted in
more than a slap on the wrist or outright dismissal of charges - is
unbearable in its details. The three drunkenly conspired one day to
rape and murder Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a young woman who passed
regularly through the checkpoint they guarded. They forced their way
into her house; Green killed her mother, father and sister, then
participated in the gang-rape of the 14-year-old, after which he shot
her in the head, then set fire to her body.

The plan
was to burn the house down and blame the insurgents, and it almost
succeeded. That scenario would have suited the Army just fine, but the
truth leaked out and trials and convictions - a.k.a., damage control -
became necessary. Yet I insist that this case is not closed.

We must
look at it in the context of all the other symptoms suddenly
manifesting. These include: 1. The shootings at the mental health
clinic in Baghdad, by an Army sergeant on his third tour of duty, in
which five people died. 2. The surfacing of more Abu Ghraib torture
photos, which military people have dissuaded President Obama from
releasing because of their alleged graphic depiction of rape and other
brutal activities that are likely to enflame anti-Americanism in the
Middle East. 3. The soaring military suicide rates and the recent
three-day suicide stand down at Fort Campbell, Ky., in response to 11
suicides at the base in 2009.

The larger
context, of course, includes the deaths of uncounted thousands - likely
hundreds of thousands - of Iraqi, Afghan and, now, Pakistani civilians
- by U.S. and allied bombs and missiles; the night raids and general
reign of terror in occupied Iraq, in which military-age males (MAMs, in
Army acronym-speak) were frequently rounded up en masse and shipped off
to detention centers; the toxic devastation that follows in the wake of
our bombings, and the soaring rates of cancer, birth defects and
neurological illnesses these toxins cause, affecting American troops as
well as local civilians.

The context
also includes the training that our troops, including Steven Green,
received before deployment: e.g., hours of bayonet training ("Kill!
Kill!") which has zero combat usefulness in the war on terror, but
serves to desensitize the troops and inculcate a monstrous contempt for
the people whose country they will occupy.

"We did not send a rapist and murderer to Iraq," said Patty Ruth, Steven Green's aunt.

And Green
himself, in the statement he released after his conviction, said: "I
see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is
intrinsically evil. And I am sorry I ever had anything to do with
either."

Then the door closes and the lock snaps shut on the killer and his newfound, too-late wisdom.