The statement below was authored by Michael Prysner, an
Iraq war veteran and co-founder of March Forward!, an affiliate of the ANSWER
Coalition.
 Click here to see the video |
The harrowing Apache footage
released by WikiLeaks gives us a stomach-turning glimpse of war. Seventeen
minutes of cold-blooded massacre in a war of more than seven years. A brief
clip of one Apache video; a quick look at one part of one mission. Hundreds of those
missions take place every day.
The video came to light thanks to
military whistleblowers who provided it to WikiLeaks together with supporting
documents. Imagine if we had
access to all such videos, the things we would see. Imagine all the Iraqis killed
who have no one to uncover the truth about their deaths. Had the death of two
Reuters news staffers not generated interest in this video, then the
destruction of three families by hellfire missiles fired into an apartment
building with no provocation, in a separate engagement also featured in the
video, would have never been made public.
This massacre is a drop in a sea
of blood. Many other such “incidents” will never be known.
Officers claimed there was “no
question” that the pilots were responding to enemy fire; the video shows there
is no question that they were not responding to enemy fire. They said that they
had “no idea” how the journalists were killed; the video shows that they know
very well how those journalists were killed. They were gunned down standing in
a crowd of unarmed people.
After the slaughter of that group,
the pilots beg for permission to kill the innocent passers-by who had come to
the aid of one of the wounded, like any of us would have done if we saw our
neighbor dying on the ground as we drove down the street. They kill everyone
trying to help the dying journalist, and critically wound two children seen
sitting in the front seat.
We see a group of unarmed men
mowed down by a machine gun designed to destroy armored vehicles. We see a
vanload of good Samaritans obliterated for trying to help a dying victim. We
see all this with the soundtrack of the pilots mocking the dead, congratulating
each other and laughing about the massacre.
No wonder the U.S. military goes
to such great lengths to keep such videos from us. They want us to see Iraq and
Afghanistan through their lens, through their embedded reporters, filtered by
censorship and restrictions. They know that, once the people of this country
see the extreme racism and brutality behind these occupations, they will be
repulsed by what their tax dollars are paying for.
The military brass and the White
House politicians have tried to justify this senseless atrocity. “Cut the
pilots some slack. This was in Baghdad. This was a battle zone”—that’s been
their line. The pilots had been indoctrinated with the same colonial mentality.
“That’s what they get for bringing their kids into battle,” one pilot says.
The father driving that van was
not “bringing his kids into battle.” He was bringing them to school, driving
down the street where they live. But the U.S. occupation has made all of Iraq a
battle zone. To those pilots, to their commanders over the radio and to the
generals in the Pentagon, every single person in Baghdad and in Iraq is “fair
game.”
The pilots joked about the people
they killed, laughed about U.S. military vehicles running over dead bodies,
knowing that their commanders were listening and that they were being recorded.
They were not acting out of character. This is the culture of the occupation.
This is how these wars are being conducted.
Having seen this, one cannot
honestly believe that these atrocities are committed day in and day out for the
liberation of the Iraqi people.
The Pentagon’s talking heads and
media lackeys are hard at work putting their spin on this story. It’s time to
tell the truth. For more than seven years, the U.S. has unleashed criminal,
unprovoked aggression against the people of Iraq, and they have been doing the
same thing in Afghanistan for more than eight years.
The U.S. military presence in Iraq
is a colonial occupation force. The only way forward is a complete, immediate
and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. This
government will not do that unless all of us who are outraged by these criminal
acts stand up and demand it.
