The Crime of Silence

If
such an incident took place in
America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?

Has anything better expressed the current
disconnect between America and its foreign wars than the above words
from Noor
Eldeen? Eldeen is the father of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen,

one of those whose 2007 death at the hands of U.S. forces in Baghdad was

captured in the video released by WikiLeaks.org. What would we
do? It's hard to believe it wouldn't be substantially more than we are
now
doing to prevent this sort of thing from happening again in Iraq and
Afghanistan -- and to humans.

The official soothers are, of course,
busily at work in the news media cleaning up the damage this previously
secret
footage has caused: This is sad, but it is what war is. Mistakes
happen. Soldiers obviously are trained to kill. It has to be that
way. These defenses are not in themselves wrong. This is,
indeed, what war is all about. But while such arguments may explain
away
the actions of the soldiers in the video, they do not justify the
actions of
those who send them there -- nor the silence of those who let it happen.

Yes, war is certainly a terrible thing and it is precisely because it is
such a
terrible thing that it should be strictly reserved for situations where
it is
absolutely necessary and has a chance of accomplishing something --
conditions
not remotely met in either of America's ongoing wars.

Ah, but some may say, the leaked footage
of the laughing gunners is from Iraq! That's just George Bush's old
war. Let's shove it into the closet with the other memories of those
bad
old days. Unfortunately, the Iraq War is far from over, and more
importantly we know that atrocities such as this are happening in
Afghanistan
right now. How do we know this? Why the U.S. commander told us so
himself. Speaking of reckless shooting incidents that NATO forces
engage
in, General Stanley A. McChrystal acknowledged "We have shot an amazing
number
of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."
As
Noor Eldeen asks, what would be our reaction if a statement like this
applied to
events in America? Would a "We'll try to do better in the future"
suffice -- even if it were animals we were talking about?

In 1967, organizers submitted a petition
entitled "Individuals Against the Crime of Silence" to UN Secretary
General U.
Thant with the names of thousands of Americans who signed "as both a
permanent
witness to our opposition to the war in Vietnam and as a demonstration
that the
conscience of America is not dead." At that point, the Nuremberg Trials

were twice as close in time as the Vietnam War is to us and the idea of
collective responsibility was perhaps therefore higher in public
consciousness. It was, after all, just a little over twenty years
earlier
that "Good Germans" had followed orders and kept quiet as the Nazis led
them to
World War II. The petition signers were determined not to be those kind
of
"Good Americans" in the Vietnam War era.

It's a fair bet that the lion's share of
those who signed that petition were supporters of many of President
Lyndon
Johnson's other initiatives, the "Great Society" legislation he had
pushed
through Congress. So this was not an easy choice for them -- as it might

have been a couple of years later when Johnson's war became Richard
Nixon's
war. Yet the signers didn't think that things like the passage of
Medicare, or having progressive Cabinet members, or a President who
talked a
more peaceful line than the man he defeated could justify their silence
in the
face of the Vietnam War, for the simple reason that it did not meet the
criteria
for a just war and no amount of good at home could justify atrocities
abroad.

The story of the latest Afghanistan cover-up
is in its own way every bit as grotesque as the events shown in the Iraq
video,
although thus far not so graphically depicted: NATO now acknowledges
that two
pregnant women "were accidentally killed as a result of the [NATO] joint
force
firing" in a February 12 raid in the village of Khataba, although
General
McChrystal's headquarters initially claimed that the women had been
"tied up,
gagged and killed" before the raid. And this is happening in the war
that
is obviously not yesterday's, but the one that President Obama has
embraced as
the war of the future.

The questions these wars raise for Americans
today are not terribly different from those facing the early
anti-Vietnam War
petition-signers:

Do things like the signing of
a health care bill justify silence in the face of the mobilization of
100,000
troops in a war against a hundred men at arms (the number of Al Qaeda --
the
presumed primary enemy -- estimated to actually be in
Afghanistan)?

Do positive steps like a nuclear
arms reduction treaty justify silence when the head of the state that
our war
effort ostensibly supports says he himself might join the opposition
because our
invading armies are turning it into something that looks like a
legitimate
"national resistance," as Hamid Karzai said of the Taliban (the
secondary
enemy)?

Does having an
administration more committed to the rights of American workers justify
silence
as the President escalates a war where, in the words of famed Vietnam
War
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, "There is no prospect of any kind of
success ...
any more than the Soviets achieved in their ten years there, just as in
Vietnam
we really had no realistic prospect of more success than the French?"

If our answer to these questions is no, it's
never too late to make up for past silence. Later this month or early
next, the Administration, although struggling to fund its priorities at
home,
will be back to Congress looking for another $33 billion to expand its
Afghanistan War. Regardless of how our Representatives and Senators
have
voted in the past, any of us who think silence is a crime when it abets
an
unjust war need to pick up the phone and tell them to vote down the
appropriation. (The number's 202-224-3121).

Nothing we can do will bring back Namir
Noor-Eldeen or any of the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who
have died
needlessly in these wars, but perhaps we can one day hope to give his
father an
answer we can live with.