Endgame Vol.1 (10 page)

The United States military uses another type of bomb, this one “a terrific
weapon” with “tremendous destructive power,” according to U.S. General Wesley Clark.
⁵⁵
It is the BLU-82, also known as the “Daisy Cutter.” This fifteen-thousand-pound bomb, filled with an aqueous mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap, is so large it can only be launched by rolling it out the rear door of a cargo aircraft, the MC-130 Hercules. The slowness of the cargo plane means Daisy Cutters can only be dropped when there are no defenses, in other words, only on those who are defenseless. (It must be stated that prior to the U.S. attack, the Afghans were not
precisely
defenseless: their Air Force did have two old planes, which might even have been jets.
⁵⁶
It must also be stated that in the first days of the attack the Afghan military killed precisely one American soldier, and Afghan prisoners did manage to kill one CIA operative—who was probably “playing smacky face” with them, as the CIA has been known to put it—before they themselves were ultimately blown to bits. Far more U.S. military casualties were caused by so-called friendly fire and a plane wreck.) A parachute opens, then the Daisy Cutter floats toward the Earth. The parachute slows the descent enough to give the transport plane time to get away before the bomb explodes. The bomb detonates just above ground, producing what are called overpressures of one thousand pounds per square inch (overpressure is air pressure over and above normal air pressure: overpressures of just a few pounds are enough to kill people) disintegrating everything and everyone within hundreds of yards, and killing people (and nonhumans) at a range of up to three miles.
⁵⁷
General Peter Pace, vice-chair of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, put the purpose clearly: “As you would expect, they make a heck of a bang when they go off and the intent is to kill people.” Marine Corps General Trainor was even more specific about the effect of Daisy Cutters on people in Afghanistan: “Besides the physical degradation, these—along with the regular ordinance dropped from B-52s—provide great psychological punishment, as victims begin to bleed from the eyes, nose, and ears, if they aren’t killed outright, of course. It’s a frightening, awesome assault they’re suffering, and there’s no doubt they’re feeling our wrath.”
⁵⁸

Even if the primary target of these bombs were members of the Afghan military (or terrorists, whatever or whomever they may be) those who were killed were mainly just people trying to survive. “We were farmers,” said Kamal Huddin, after American planes made four passes over Kama Ado, his home village, killing more than half of the three hundred people who lived there. “We were poor people. And we didn’t have any contact with any organizations.”
⁵⁹
It’s no surprise that people like these—people living in mud huts with straw roofs, using wooden plows to till the soil exactly as their ancestors did—were killed. Colonel
John Warden, who planned the air campaign in Iraq, said that dropping any of these bombs I’ve mentioned “is like shooting skeet. Four hundred and ninety-nine out of five hundred pellets may miss the target, but that’s irrelevant.”
⁶⁰

So, who dies? I have seen pictures of the dead, dark-haired children laid out on mattresses, hands folded neatly above the last clothes they will ever wear by parents now standing looking downward, eyes red, in the background. The children’s faces are bloated, and red, too, though not from tears but instead from blood which never seems to finally wash away. The parents’ hands, too, are red where faint traces of their children’s blood remains.

It is not acceptable in the United States to talk about these dead children. The official United States and capitalist media have declared it so. The Chair of CNN, Walter Isaacson, ordered journalists who work for CNN not to focus on the killing of Afghan citizens by the U.S. military, because it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” He went on to admonish his reporters who cover civilian deaths that they should never forget that it is “that country’s leaders who are responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in,” perhaps forgetting that the same argument could just as easily be used to ignore the dead in this country. The head of standards [
sic
] for CNN, Rick Davis, followed up his boss’s memo with some suggested language for newscasters to repeat, for example, “We must keep in mind, after seeing reports like this from Taliban-controlled areas, that these U.S. military actions are in response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the U.S.,” or “We must keep in mind, after seeing reports like this, that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan continues to harbor terrorists who have praised the September 11 attacks that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the U.S.,” or “The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the September 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the U.S.”
⁶¹
Each of these statements could of course be inverted: “We must keep in mind that the capitalist regime in Washington continues to harbor journalists, military leaders, politicians, and CEOs who have put in place and praised U.S. military and economic policies that kill millions of people annually.”

Not to be outdone, Brit Hume of Fox News Channel recently wondered on air why journalists should bother to cover civilian deaths at all: “The question I have,” Hume said, “is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. [This is true only under a strict definition of history: as I’ve shown elsewhere, even for many of the warlike indigenous peoples—that is, those who are ahistorical, uncivilized—to kill noncombatants was unthinkable, and even
killing combatants was a rarity, an event.] Should they be as big news as they’ve been?” One could, of course, ask the same question of civilian casualties in the United States. Mara Liasson of that bastion of liberal news National Public Radio answered Hume’s question, and went right to the point: “No. Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.” Perhaps following the standards set down by Rick Davis, Liasson made sure to add that what she thought was missing from television coverage was “a message from the U.S. government that says we are trying to minimize them, but the Taliban isn’t, and is putting their tanks in mosques, and themselves among women and children.”
U.S. News & World Report
columnist and Fox commentator Michael Barone responded to Hume and Liasson, revealing the wide variety of opinion represented in the corporate media: “I think the real problem here is that this is poor news judgment on the part of some of these news organizations. Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany wars.”
⁶²

As above, so below. The same avoidance of attention to those killed by the United States happens at smaller news outlets as well. A memo circulated at the Panama City, Florida,
News Herald
warned editors: “DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like. . . . DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the U.S. hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children.”
⁶³

After 9/11,
The New York Times
took to publishing profiles of people killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. These profiles were syndicated through the country, letting us in on details of the lives of the dead. Thus we learn that one of the dead was an “efficient executive” who “never forgot the attention to spit and polish, in his work or play. ‘It doesn’t shine itself,’ he’d reply when people admired his vintage car.” We learn that another was “mad for Mantle,” and “stubbornly stood by his Yankees, even when his two sons . . . turned out to be Mets fans.” A third, we learn, was a top stockbroker, and a “prankster with a heart” who “would pull up next to you in his Porsche—a 911—flip the bird, grin, and take off in the wind.”
⁶⁴
A friend from New York said of the profiles, “I smell a Pulitzer.”

Here’s my question: What is the premise (and purpose) of these profiles? The
most basic answer is clear, that the dead are individuals worthy of consideration. Or, as someone put it in a letter to the editor, “I appreciate the efforts to humanize the victims. . . . They deserve to be remembered. They deserve justice.”
⁶⁵

Here’s another question that interests me even more: What is the premise (and purpose) of the silence surrounding victims of our way of life? That answer is clear as well, although we do not talk or even think about it.

Of course.

Imagine how our discourse and actions would be different if people daily detailed for us the lives—the individuality, the small and large joys and fears and sorrows—of those whom this culture enslaves or kills. Imagine if we gave these victims that honor, that attention. Imagine if everyday newspapers carried an account of each child who starves to death because cities take the resources on which the child’s traditional community has forever depended.
She never ran
, the article might read,
because she never had the energy, but she loved to be tickled, and loved to watch her mother, no matter what her mother did. When her mother carried her in a sling on her back, her large eyes took in every detail of her surroundings. She loved to smile at her neighbors, and smile also at little birds that landed on the ground near her mother’s feet.
Imagine if we considered her life as valuable as that of the “efficient executive,” and if we considered violence against her to be as heinous as we consider violence against him.

Imagine, too, if our discourse included accounts of those nonhumans whose lives this culture makes unspeakably miserable: the billions of creatures bred for torture in feedlot, factory farm, or laboratory; the wild creatures worth money, who are pursued and destroyed no matter where they hide; the wild creatures unvalued by the economic system, who are eliminated because they are in the way of production. Imagine if we spoke of the threespine stickleback, the Miami blue butterfly, white abalone, spectacled eider, southwestern willow flycatcher, Holmgren’s milkvetch, Pacific pocket mouse, individually and collectively. Imagine, finally, if we considered their lives as valuable as our own, and their contribution to the world and to our neighborhoods to be as valuable as that of a stockbroker—or even moreso—even if the stockbroker
does
drive a Porsche, flip us the bird, and take off in the wind.