{"id":448113,"date":"2021-12-26T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2021-12-26T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=381852"},"modified":"2021-12-26T12:00:50","modified_gmt":"2021-12-26T12:00:50","slug":"the-u-s-military-is-a-machine-of-impunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/12\/26\/the-u-s-military-is-a-machine-of-impunity\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"395926\n

An Air Force AC-130 gunship in this undated photo was used by the U.S. military to attack targets around Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2001.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: U.S. Air Force\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

My education\u00a0in<\/u> wartime savagery\u00a0started in Bosnia in the 1990s.\u00a0Reporting on\u00a0the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time<\/a> that my Balkan\u00a0lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.<\/p>\n

We tend to associate\u00a0barbarism\u00a0with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood\u00a0on their boots. That\u2019s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to\u00a0America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization\u00a0Airwars<\/a>, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

How does America react when it kills civilians? Just last week, we learned that the U.S. military decided that\u00a0nobody will be held responsible<\/a>\u00a0for the August 29 drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. After an internal review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chose to take no action, not even a wrist slap for\u00a0a single intelligence analyst, drone operator, mission commander, or general. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby bizarrely\u00a0said<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cWe acknowledge that there were procedural breakdowns\u201d but that \u201cit doesn\u2019t necessarily indicate that an individual or individuals have to be held to account.\u201d<\/p>\n

There has been quite a lot of savagery-adjacent news to absorb this month. The New York Times just published a two-part series by Azmat Khan, based on military documents, revealing that U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians but that the Pentagon has done\u00a0almost nothing to discern how many were harmed or what went wrong and might be corrected. As Khan noted<\/a>, \u201cIt was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Savagery consists of more than the act of killing. It\u00a0also involves a system of impunity that makes clear to the perpetrators that what they are doing is acceptable, necessary \u2014 maybe even heroic \u2014 and must not cease.\u00a0To this end, the\u00a0United States has developed a machinery of impunity that is arguably the most advanced in the world,\u00a0implicating not\u00a0only a broad swathe of military personnel but also the entirety of American society.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Elite Accountability<\/h2>\n

Impunity tends to begin at the top. No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress<\/a> about these disasters. The opposite has occurred \u2014 stars have usually been added to their shoulders, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march<\/a> into well-paid positions<\/a> as board members in the weapons industry or elsewhere (even though they are not strapped for resources, thanks to pensions that can reach $250,000 a year). The reputation-protection racket is so galling that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article<\/a>\u00a0in 2007 that noted: \u201cA private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

We should not be surprised. We are a society that excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero<\/a>), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin (also zero<\/a>), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them<\/a>). And let’s not forget the politicians<\/a> and pundits<\/a> who goaded America into an illegal invasion<\/a> of Iraq in 2003\u00a0and suffered no consequences. It\u2019s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of\u00a0these elites benefit from the con.<\/p>\n

Military impunity is somewhat unique because it stretches downward, too. If an intelligence analyst or drone operator or fighter pilot follows orders and procedures for an airstrike that kills dozens of civilians in a wedding party \u2014\u00a0which has happened<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 they need to be excused of wrongdoing. After all, who gave the orders, and who set the procedures? These questions would require looking up the chain of command, and for that reason, they are not asked with any intention of finding the answers. That\u2019s why it was with no sense of alarm that secret military documents published by The Intercept<\/a>\u00a0in 2015 noted that in a two-year campaign called Operation Haymaker,\u00a09 of\u00a010 Afghans killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. For the U.S., this was the acceptable cost of doing business.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous\u00a0pursuit of soldiers for other offenses.<\/blockquote>\n

The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous\u00a0pursuit of soldiers for other offenses.\u00a0Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the financial industry, or the IRS, which oversees taxpayers, or the Senate and House ethics committees, which keep an eye on members of Congress, the U.S. military has wide authority and deep resources to impose an array of penalties, from pay reductions to loss of rank\u00a0and\u00a0death sentences<\/a>. The military avidly uses these powers, too. In 2020 alone, there were more than\u00a037,000 cases of discipline<\/a>\u00a0in the armed forces, and since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases.<\/p>\n

Yet these powers have been used sparingly or not at all when it comes to airstrikes that kill civilians. One of the worst massacres in two decades of warfare occurred not long ago, on March 18, 2019, when U.S. warplanes dropped bombs that killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children, in an\u00a0Islamic State\u00a0enclave in Syria. The carnage was immediately apparent. As the Times\u00a0reported last month<\/a>, an analyst who watched the attack on a drone video typed into a secure chat system, \u201cWho dropped that?\u201d Another analyst wrote, \u201cWe just dropped on 50 women and children.\u201d A quick battle assessment settled on 70 people killed.<\/p>\n

A legal officer flagged it as a possible war crime that warranted an investigation, the Times noted, \u201cbut at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.\u201d The Pentagon\u2019s inspector general looked into what happened, but even its report was \u201cstalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.\u201d An evaluator who worked on the\u00a0inspector general’s\u00a0report, Gene Tate, was forced out of his job after complaining about the lack of progress and honesty. Tate told the Times: \u201cLeadership just seemed so set on burying this.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could go on for thousands of words describing other airstrikes that killed civilians and resulted in no discipline or slight reprimands\u00a0that were issued\u00a0only after\u00a0embarrassing reports from news organizations and human rights groups. For instance, there was a 2015 airstrike on a\u00a0hospital in Kunduz<\/a>, Afghanistan,<\/a>\u00a0that killed 42 patients and staffers; the military\u2019s reluctant discipline included counseling and retraining for some of the personnel involved. The point is this: A military establishment that has\u00a0enthusiastically enforced requirements for things as petty as\u00a0wearing a reflector belt<\/a>\u00a0while jogging<\/a> has consistently failed to discipline\u00a0soldiers for wrongful bombings that its own battle assessments acknowledge have killed civilians.<\/p>\n

The machinery of impunity actually has two missions: The most obvious is to excuse people who should not be excused. The other is to punish those who try to expose the machine,\u00a0because it does not function well in daylight. That\u2019s why Daniel Hale,\u00a0an Air Force veteran whom the government accused of leaking those classified drone documents to The Intercept, was sentenced<\/a> under the Espionage Act to more than four years in prison. It is not the act of killing civilians that will result in definite and heavy punishment, but exposing<\/em> the act of killing.<\/p>\n

\n\"FILE\n

The charred remains of a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders is seen after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Oct. 16, 2015.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Najim Rahim\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

Undoing Impunity<\/h2>\n

In 1992, I interviewed a Muslim girl in Bosnia who had been raped. \u201cThe Vi\u0161egrad warlord took a fancy to her,\u201d I later wrote<\/a>, \u201cand one night dragged her and her younger sister away from their mother, who of course was crying hysterically and holding onto the legs of the warlord, who kicked her away and shouted, \u2018I am the law.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The warlord\u2019s name was Milan Lukić, and he was one of the most evil men in a war that had a surplus of them. He killed women and children with particular ruthlessness, one time setting fire to a house in which 59 civilians were sheltering; they all perished. But Lukić was saying one honest thing when he kidnapped the sisters:\u00a0He was<\/em> the law. His paramilitary thugs had a monopoly on violence in\u00a0Vi\u0161egrad and the full support of Serb political and military authorities. At the time, I\u00a0didn’t imagine that their crimes would catch up\u00a0with\u00a0any of them.<\/p>\n

My interest right now is in the durability of these machines of impunity, not the comparative depravity of the crimes they protect (what happened in Bosnia\u00a0was genocide). It seems ridiculous to think that the U.S. military\u2019s cover-ups will be undone. The Pentagon is now getting even more support from\u00a0the country\u00a0in\u00a0a form that is\u00a0easy to measure and crucial to sustaining its clout: funding. Congress has just passed a military budget of $768 billion<\/a>, which is more than was allocated in 2020, even though U.S. troops withdrew this year, in a humiliating fashion, from their forever war in Afghanistan. Despite what has happened,\u00a0America’s elected representatives are not\u00a0loosening their\u00a0protective embrace of the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0the impunity that seemed eternal in Bosnia turned out to be short-lived, at least for\u00a0the elites of criminality. Lukić is now in prison with a life sentence, thanks to his conviction<\/a>\u00a0at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. Key\u00a0wartime leaders\u00a0were extradited to the Hague too. Slobodan Milo\u0161ević, the president of Serbia, died of a heart attack before his trial concluded, but Radovan Karad\u017eić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of Bosnia’s Serbs, were convicted of genocide.<\/p>\n

America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to\u00a0pressure from larger nations.\u00a0But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies\u00a0\u2014 they are still at work. One thing I\u2019ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn\u2019t bet against them.<\/p>\n

The post The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable \u2014 maybe heroic \u2014 and must not cease. <\/p>\n

The post The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448113"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":449286,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448113\/revisions\/449286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}