Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Wikileaks Video "Collateral Murder," the Problem of Frames, and "Gunner's Pantoum"

Warning: not suitable for children or people with heart conditions.

In my talk on documentary poetry at the Split This Rock conference, I made it a point to encourage everyone to sign up to Wikileaks for their updates. Just a few weeks later, Wikileaks has made the news with its provocative release of a video that they've entitled "Collateral Murder" (see above). There was an unfairly framed segment on "Talk of the Nation," one of my least favorite shows on npr, which framed the video in a "what we (civilians) don't know about what war is like" sort of discourse. No one, at least during my listening, called in to ask the larger questions that this sort of narrowed frame refuses to allow (such as, why are they in this situation in the first place, not just what other dangerous situation calls for such air support). (Again, today, it should have been called, "Talk of the Empire").

In fact, those who called in to decry the video occasionally proved the opposite of their argument--one particular caller said that he would kill everyone in a village (which village, and which war, he didn't say) rather than let any American even be threatened. Of course, Neal Conan didn't engage the blatant criminality of this point of view; I wish he had called a crime a crime. Perhaps he thought that restraint would allow this point of view to reveal its limited truthfulness.

Perhaps I am being too harsh about it; clearly, our soldiers are being placed in an ethically compromised and deeply confusing situation--that of an insurgency, where paradoxically the occupying power is both responsible to maintain the security of the populace while they fight an insurgency that uses the populace as a shield and sometimes as collaborators for their fight. The real criminals, of course, are reaping the benefits of their privilege far from the war zones.

I don't know all the details, but one place to begin is with what Wikileaks posted on their site:
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.


I don't know the whole truth, and maybe such a "whole truth" is impossible. But we owe it to ourselves to engage in a truthful discussion about the implications of this video, which the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange compared hauntingly to a video game. And that is the scary part of the video--the way in which the video looks like a game, and the game prepares for war, and those little humanoid figures--from such distance of sky and screen--remain targets and nothing else.

And all this would be enough to talk about (and I've been remiss in not getting into the fray), but then Ian Demsky, a fellow poet and investigative journalist, got right down to the job and transcribed and transformed the language of the video into the form of a pantoum--a form of repetitions, as this video itself will be repeated over the internet, and mulled over, and rejected or hailed depending on one's point of view.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010
GUNNER'S PANTOUM

by Ian Demsky


Last conversation Hotel Two-Six?
Do you want Hotel Two-Two element—
Request permission to engage.
Roger, received.

Do you want Hotel Two-Two element?
See all those people standing down there?
Roger, received.
I can’t get them now because they’re behind that building.

See all those people standing down there?
You are free to engage.
I can’t get them now because they’re behind that building.
Hotel Two-Six: Crazy Horse One-Eight.

Repeat: You are free to engage.
We’ll be engaging.
Hotel Two-Six: Crazy Horse One-Eight.
Light ‘em all up.

We are engaging.
God damn it.
Light ‘em up.
Come on fire.

God damn!
Just fuckin’, once you get on him, just—
Fire. Fire.
Keep shooting.

—once you get on him, just open ‘em up.
We need to move. Time now.
Keep shooting. Keep shooting.
We’re still firing.

We need to move.
Roger, I’ve got ‘em.
We’re still firing.
Oops, I’m sorry. What was going on?

Roger. I got them.
God damn it, Kyle.
What’s going on?
All right, you’re clear.

God damn it.
Got bunch of bodies laying there.
All right, you’re clear.
We’ve got one guy crawling around down there.

—bunch of bodies laying there.
Hey, you shoot, I’ll talk.
We’ve still got one guy crawling around.
Crazy Horse One-Eight, this is Hotel Two-Six. Over.

You shoot, I’ll talk.
Oh yeah. Look at those dead bastards.
Crazy Horse One-Eight: Hotel Two-Six.
Good shootin’.

Look at those dead bastards.
Location of bodies: Mike Bravo five-four-five-eight.
Yup. Good shootin’.
There’s one guy moving down there, but he’s wounded.

Location of bodies: Mike Bravo five-four-five-eight.
We’ll let them know so they can hurry up and get over here.
There’s one guy still moving around down there.
We have a van that’s approaching and picking up the bodies.

—so they can hurry up and get over here.
Possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
We have a van that’s approaching and picking up the bodies.
Right down there by the bodies.

They’re possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
Let me engage.
Right down there by the bodies.
Can I shoot?

Can we engage?
Roger.
Can I shoot?
We’re trying to get permission to engage.

Roger.
Are they picking up the wounded?
We’re trying to get permission to engage.
Come on let us shoot.

Are they picking up the wounded?
They’re taking him.
Come on let us shoot.
Bushmaster Seven: Crazy Horse One-Eight.

They’re taking him.
Fuck.
Bushmaster Seven: Crazy Horse One-Eight.
Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.

Fuck.
Clear.
Bushmaster Seven: Roger.
No more shooting.

Clear.
Clear.
No more shooting.
Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield.

Clear.
The vehicle appears to be disabled.
—right through the windshield.
Bradley element turning south down the road where the engagement was.

The vehicle appears to be disabled.
I think I drove over a body.
Bradley element approaching engagement site.
Maybe it was a visual illusion.

I think I drove over a body.
Last conversation Hotel Two-Six?
Maybe it was a visual illusion.
—permission to engage.




Author’s Note: This poem is adapted from radio traffic heard on U.S. Military gun-camera video depicting a 2007 attack in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad that killed two Reuters news staff and wounded two children. The video, which Reuters had sought under the Freedom of Information Act, was made public by WikiLeaks.org.
_____________________________________________________


Ian Demsky, a longtime investigative newspaper journalist, often draws from public records to help make visible what J.G. Ballard called the "invisible literatures" of our society. He is enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Idaho.

4 comments:

Ian Demsky said...

Philip,

I really like how you draw explicit attention to the blurry lines regarding the video and the overall conversations' silent gaps.

Watching the video reminded me of the police "media day" I was invited to in Nashville. They gave us Glocks that shot paint pellets and threw us into various role-playing scenarios: clearing a burglarized home, effecting a felony traffic stop. Even knowing the situation was fake and 100% safe, I don't know that I've felt more powerful chemical manipulations of my emotions from the tension and the adrenaline. The point of the exercise was to show us what police go through when making those split-second decisions. There was another time the ATF (also in Nashville) invited journalists out to shoot some seized weapons, ostensibly to learn about what our intrepid lawmen were out there facing. They had AK-47s and various automatic pistols, but after one turn on the AK I sat out the rest of the demonstration completely discomfited that every weapon they had brought was made for the sole purpose of killing human beings.

One thing that still bothers me about the video -- and one reason I guess my poem took the direction it did, not stressing the journalist angle -- is that the only reason it's getting any press or attention is that journalists were killed. Where's the outcry, the leaks, the demands to see footage from the thousands of other sorties that have killed who knows how many bystanders and civilians? If anything, this video seems to point beyond itself. But, heck, the public isn't going to sit and audit every bombing run, ever gunship attack to verify that the rules were followed, only the "bad guys" were hurt.

Moreover, as you point out, more than the soldiers involved, the video implicates our elected officials and the companies profiting off the violence.

Philip Metres said...

To me, the question of who released the video and why is an important one. Clearly, someone inside the military/d.o.d. believes that this video was something that needed to be shown to the public, because that's where it came from. Someone believed that this sort of action needed to be examined by the public.

If you listen to this "Talk of the Nation" segment, you will certainly throw up. The two military-affiliated guests basically said it was their fault for being in a war zone.

It's their country.

Lyle Daggett said...

And I find it constantly wearying (allowing that I'm sitting here relative safety and comfort) listening to the same apologetics and excuses and android attempts (from government and military and news media people) at justifying and explaining away the actions of the military, in light of the fact that I've heard all of it before, during the years of the Vietnam war, and the endless examples from other times and places in history.

Years ago (ca. 1972) I once had a conversation with a guy I knew slightly, who had enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program at the local university, and was majoring in chemistry. He showed me his ROTC textbook, with its careful diagrams of the size of bomb craters various bombs were expected to make, and the degree of death and damage they were expected to cause, radiating outward in concentric circles -- blandly describing these as if he were explaining the engineering features of a bridge or radio antenna.

He insisted that any reported incidents of hospitals, schools, etc., in Vietnam being hit by bombs from U.S. aircraft were actually the result of "enemy" weapons missing their targets in the air and falling back down to the ground. Not, in any case, he assured me, the result of intentional bombing by the U.S. military.

Then he insisted that napalm was actually a somewhat "humane" weapon, because (according to him) it burned through a person's body quickly, whereas by comparison the chemical white phosphorus, for instance, could take up to a whole minute to burn through someone's body.

Aside from the obvious perverse psychosis of this last one -- the notion that napalm could under any circumstances be considered humane -- the kicker for me was that not only was his moral judgement totally warped, he was also wrong about the basic "technical" facts. Napalm, it turns out (big shocker here) doesn't in fact kill quickly (or "humanely"), it also takes a long time to burn. This I learned from another guy I knew who'd been in Vietnam in the Marine medical corps and had seen the real thing. Not that such elegant distinction make a particle of difference if some of the hellish stuff has fallen on you and you're being burned alive...

Anyway my point just being that I find myself in staggering disbelief that the same anti-truth, the same moral depravity, is still blaring out into the cables and airwaves after 30 or 40 years, that there are even debates in the highest levels of government about whether torture of prisoners is morally acceptable (torture which has occurred all along anyway but now has achieved the status of policy position), that there are still so many people in positions of influence who, apparently, have learned absolutely nothing from even the most recent living history.

Thanks very much for posting this.

Philip Metres said...

Lyle,

I agree with you; the more war changes, the more it seems to stay the same. Advances in technology have not led to greater ability to "target the enemy," nor have they led to a more moral warfare--as far as I can tell. Perhaps, given the level of possible "surveillance" of the battle scene, it is less possible to get away with mass murder. But that is little balm for the victims of war.