Establishing and disestablishing authority

When charges of indiscriminate violence are hurled at Americans, they are given the voice of authority: either "officials say," "witnesses say," or else the charge is simply stated as fact -- vox populi vox Dei.

But whenever the reporters are forced by circumstances to admit the Marines (or American forces in general) may have their own side of the story, they make plain there is a "void" of authority: This is just what those buggers claim. (One can almost picture the reporter rolling his eyes as he types that.)

AP:

A coalition airstrike destroyed a mud-brick home after a rocket attack on a U.S. base, killing nine people from four generations of an Afghan family including a 6-month-old, officials and relatives said Monday - one of the latest in a string of civilian deaths that threaten to undermine the government.

It was the third report in two days of U.S. forces killing civilians. The airstrike took place late Sunday in Kapisa province north of the capital, some 12 hours after U.S. Marines opened fire on civilian cars and pedestrians following a suicide bombing in eastern Nangahar province....

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said coalition forces will always respond in self-defense when fired upon: "It is often the enemy that is putting innocent peoples' lives in danger by where they're conducting these attacks on our forces."

Does AP actually question the claim that "it is often the enemy that is putting innocent peoples' lives in danger?" Do they really deny that the Taliban thinks of civilians merely as human shields, convenient speed bumps to slow down Western forces -- who, unlike jihadis, actually have respect for innocent human life?

If not, then why put it entirely in the mouth of the estimable Mr. Whitman? AP could simply have noted that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have frequently launched terrorist attacks against innocent civilians out of the blue, not even in response to any attack upon the aggressors. (You know, that whole "September 11th" thingie.)

The Times:

Nine members of a family were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan, including five women and three children during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said today....

The incident came just 12 hours after American forces in eastern Afghanistan opened fire on civilians when a suicide car bomb exploded next to their convoy Sunday morning, leaving at least 10 people dead and 25 wounded, according to Afghan officials....

United States forces at a small base at Tape Ahmed Beg, in Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul, called in the airstrike after coming under rocket fire around 9 p.m. local time on Sunday, the American military said in a statement.

Now let's be realistic here: "Afghan officials" have no official knowledge of what happened; they have not yet conducted any investigation, the events just occurred. All they know is what local Afghans, who may have a dog in the fight, tell them.

The Times knows this, just as they know that "officials" trumps "the military," just as "medical researchers" trumps "the tobacco industry." Nevertheless, the Times allows the accusation to hide behind the amorphous and vaguely authoritative "officials say," while the Marines are reduced to a whiny, personal defense -- and we all know those sexual assaulters and baby killers will say anything to weasel out of their rightful condemnation!

Reuters is the worst, as par for the course -- they are British based, and they typically use local stringers to write their stories... as in this case, where the reporter is Sayed Salahuddin:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has condemned U.S. troops for shooting dead 10 civilians at the weekend as officials said nine more -- five women, four children and an old man -- had been killed in an air strike....

U.S. marines shot dead 10 civilians in the east on Sunday, in what the U.S. military said was a "complex" Taliban ambush involving a suicide bombing and gunfire in a populated area outside the city of Jalalabad, near Pakistan.

The military said the soldiers fired in self-defense and 16 civilians were killed in the suicide raid and subsequent firing.

Tit for tat is where it's at

Reuters' Mr. Salahuddin finds occasion to drag in the international community to supply the mandatory moral equivalence between U.S. Marines (not Europeans!) and the Taliban:

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop [or is that Hoop de Loop?] Scheffer said he understood both incidents involved U.S.-led coalition forces rather than NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), but told reporters in Brussels:

"Every civilian casualty is one too many ... I do not think it will influence the great support there is for NATO ISAF forces in Afghanistan...."

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, whose country has 1,900 soldiers in the ISAF force, told reporters in Brussels that no officer would order troops to fire on civilians.

Yes, those Americans can be such cowboys, can't they? I certainly hope the Afghan people understand that we Europeans would never return fire when fired upon!

(If anyone reading this detects a subtle bias in this post towards the Marines' version and against the version retailed by "local" Afghans of unknown provenance -- then by jiminy, I think you've hit upon my mean, little secret.)

AP concurs:

Human Rights Watch said neither side was taking enough precautions to prevent human casualties and accused the U.S. and international troops of using excessive force.

"International forces don't have carte blanche to shoot anything they want in response to insurgent attacks," said John Sifton, a New York-based researcher for the group.

And lest we forget, the Times:

But a local representative of the provincial council, Suraya Bahadur, who comes from Nejarab district where the bombing occurred, condemned it. “I condemned both the suicide attacks and the rocket attacks by the enemy of Afghanistan, and also I condemn these type of mistakes,” by American and NATO forces, she said. “We never want our civilian people to be killed.”

Ooooh, snap!

A favorite tactic is what I call the rim shot: That's when you allow the bad guy -- that would be us -- to make a case, giving him plenty of rope... so that your conclusory, parting shot can hang him. Viz., from AP:

Two men with automatic rifles were seen leaving the site of the rocket attack and heading into a compound that was then hit by two 2,000-pound bombs, a military statement said. Rural homes in Afghanistan are built in a compound style with one large outer wall often encasing several small rooms; many families tend to share the same compound.

"These men knowingly endangered civilians by retreating into a populated area while conducting attacks against coalition forces," said Lt. Col. David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman. "We observed the men entering a compound and that compound was targeted and hit by an airstrike."

The bombs left a large crater of twisted lumber and chunks of mud and killed four women, four children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years, and an 80-year-old man, said Gulam Nabi, a relative of the victims.

Sayad Mohammad Dawood Hashimmi, Kapisa deputy governor, confirmed the nine deaths.

Among those killed were Gulam Nabi's parents, his sister, two female relatives by marriage and four of the extended family's youngest children.

Yeah, so a couple of guys -- who were merely retreating, for God's sake -- enter a "compound," which is just a rural home... and then the military spasms, and we have dead women, dead children, and a dead octogenarian. Ba-dum DUM.

And how do we know that was the death toll? Well, reading between the lines, we have the word of Gulam Nabi, "a relative of the victims." No possible bias there. Oh, but it was "confirmed" by the deputy governor; which means, reading between the lines, that we have the word of Gulam Nabi. (Did you imagine that by "confirmed," Reuters meant the deputy governor went to the site and made a detailed forensic investigation of the bodies? Or that, after talking with Nabi, the deputy governor said "Crusaders and Zionists are always doing this kind of thing! Long live Mullah Omar!")

This bloody vote's been rigged!

We have the obligatory sly inuendo from Reuters -- I warned you they were the worst, but you never listen -- that there's dirty work afoot... and we know who's footing it. The intended response by the reader is, "Can you believe this? What chutzpah!"

"Karzai strongly condemned the incident that took place," the presidential palace said in a statement on Sunday. Karzai has ordered an inquiry, but previous such investigations by NATO and the Afghan government have done nothing more than confirm witness accounts that those killed were civilians.

Despite hundreds of civilian deaths, no foreign soldier has ever been found guilty of any wrongdoing.

I suppose it would be jingoistic of us to suggest that perhaps that's because no foreign soldier has actually been guilty of wrongly killing civilians. I know, I know. Baby killers. Abu Ghraib. Attica. But shouldn't the elite media pause for even a moment to consider the possibility that sometimes, behind the smoke, we just find -- a big smokescreen machine?

Sympathy for the devil

I don't want the New York Times to feel neglected. One of their signature tactics is to redefine the terms of the situation so that we feel sympathy, or even solidarity, with the terrorists. Usually, they invoke the "disproportionality" argument, knowing that Americans -- unlike those we're supposed to feel sympathetic towards, by the way -- tend to champion the underdog when we perceive a mismatch:

John Sifton, senior researcher at the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, also expressed concern at the level of force used by coalition and NATO troops. “That is heavy firepower to respond to two men, even if they have Kalashnikovs,” he said in a telephone interview. “If that version of events bears up, it would strongly suggest that the attack was disproportionate.” Mr. Sifton said insurgents also regularly violate the rules of war by using force near civilian areas ["...but don't quote me on that!"].

Forgotten in all the excitement is that everybody agrees that the American military called in the strike not just because they men were carrying AK-47s, but because they had just launched a rocket attack on an American military base. Having observed the two men firing a rocket at a base that has been repeatedly bombarded with rocket fire, it's reasonable for us to conclude that they kept more than mere rifles in their safehouse. Like, perhaps, more rockets.

So we're actually talking about responding to rocket fire by dropping a bomb -- which no longer sounds all that "disproportionate," does it?

Can't we all just get along?

Finally, sticking with the Times, we close with the faux attempt to get everyone to sit down and talk things through... as if that's the real problem: the terrorists just don't understand what fine fellows we really are:

Civilian casualties have increased in the last year as the insurgency has seen a resurgence in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Mr. Sifton of Human Rights Watch called on the Afghan government and NATO and coalition forces to sit down and work out operating procedures for troops in these circumstances in order to prevent further civilian deaths.

I call this a "faux attempt" for a particular reason: Look who Mr. Sifton calls on -- presumably those he holds (a) responsible for all these civilian deaths, or (b) to be the adults on the scene: the Americans, the Europeans, and the democratic Afghan government. He doesn't even pretend that the Taliban and al-Qaeda may be at least a small part of the problem.

That's like saying in 1985 that the United States and West Germany should sit down and work out what to do about all those Pershing II missiles in Europe, in order to avoid the threat of nuclear war. The cowboys are on the warpath again!

I utter the words, "and in conclusion" -- and the crowd leaps to its feet in sustained applause

Even if the elite media never wearys of being on the wrong side of the United States, you'd think they would at least get tired of being on the wrong side of history. Evidently they're indefatigable.