Month: April 2011

Chris Hondros, the award-winning photojournalist from Getty Images who was killed yesterday from brain injuries he sustained in a mortar attack in Libya, left his Iraq embed with a unit in the 25th Infantry Division in 2005 after publishing this photo. The image, of a little blood-spattered girl whose parents were killed by U.S forces at a security checkpoint, was taken while Hondros was traveling with the unit in Tel Afar. According to a New York Times retrospective of  war photography, he was booted from the embed shortly afterwards, but in an interview with Editor & Publisher, he said he left on his own accord, after Getty had tangled with the military over the pictures.

“Even if I had not sent those photos, I would have left that embed,” he says. “The incident had been a high stress one, and it didn’t start me out on a good footing with these particular soldiers. It’s impossible to be operating under hostility in an embedded situation.”

I was roundly mocked a couple weeks ago for my personal take on the power of images in war and the military’s post-Vietnam determination to suppress it. The detachment of today’s society from the war and the easy, breezy way we’ve waved goodbye (prematurely) to Iraq in our collective rear-view, has as much to do with the sterile way we have perceived the war (thanks to censorship and message management) as it has with willful ignorance or the fact that less than 1 percent of the population has been doing the fighting and now believes they “own” the war and our conception of it. More images like these might have at least jolted the rest of us out of our Soma holidays long enough to question the policies that led to this girl and her five brothers and sisters being orphaned in a brutal instant, which we now know, thanks to “rogues” like WikiLeaks, happened more than the U.S military was ever willing to admit.

 

Reason TV features an interview with Brian Doherty about the forgotten history of the antiwar right. The interview is conducted by Zach Weissmueller.

Tracing its roots back to the American Anti-Imperialist League of the late 1890s, Doherty discusses the evolution of right-wing non-interventionism through the 1930s and into the Cold War of the 1950s, which ultimately led to a lasting rift between conservatives and libertarians. He also addresses the possibility of a resurgent conservative antiwar sentiment in the Obama era.

Check it out (7.5 minutes):

Spencer Ackerman of Wired has an excellent piece today on the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command’s secret jails in Afghanistan. Ackerman notes:

Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about these detention centers since 2009. Detainees who claim to have gone through the sites have told them about abuses inside the so-called “Black Jails” ranging from sleep deprivation to punching. Human Rights First’s Daphne Eviatar (disclosure: a former colleague of mine at the Washington Independent) tells Dozier that inmates at the JSOC sites are “forced to strip naked, then kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day.” All of that is supposed to be banned under Obama’s January 2009 executive order on interrogations.

Ackerman notes that “JSOC units have run torture chambers before. In Iraq, JSOC ran the infamous Camp Nama, whose motto was ‘No Blood, No Foul.’” Unfortunately, the Democratic controlled Senate has a “see-no-evil approach to torture now that a Democratic president runs the show,” according to Ackerman. His article draws for a penetrating expose by the Associated Press’s Kimberly Dozier.

I assume that these articles will get little attention in Washington. Obama supporters are too busy hyping the president’s idealism to stoop to notice a few technicalities about interrogation methods.

The Washington Post has an editorial today fretting that the Obama administration has not killed enough Libyans. The Post warns that U.S. killing of more Libyans is the best way to assure a bright future for Libya. OK, that’s not verbatim – but this is: “The dangers of the military stalemate for the United States increase with each day it lasts. The greater the disorder in Libya, the greater the chance that extremist forces, including al-Qaeda, will push aside the pro-Western figures who now lead the opposition.”

Thus, the U.S. needs to kill more Libyan troops to assure the triumph of moderates in Libya.

For the Post, the bottom line is: “The longer the fighting continues, the more harm will come to civilians.”

So the best way to protect civilians is to blow hell out of the country in the next few hours.

This is the same editorial page that continues insisting that George W. Bush did not deceive Americans regarding the Iraq war.

Senator Rand Paul’s resolution opposing President Obama’s use of force in Libya gained the support of 10 Republican senators — and not a single Democrat.

The resolution was the same as a quote from President Obama when he was a Senator and presidential candidate:

“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

The resolution was defeated by a motion to table. The vote was 90-10.

Republican Senators voting to oppose US intervention in Libya were:
Collins (R-ME), DeMint (R-SC), Ensign (R-NV), Johnson (R-WI), Lee (R-UT), Moran (R-KS), Paul (R-KY), Sessions (R-AL), Sowe (R-ME), Toomey (R-PA)

Where are the antiwar Democrats?