{"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":"
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 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 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>\nElite Accountability<\/h2>\n