“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
— Albert Einstein
On Saturday August 6, 2011, a U.S. military Chinook transport helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing 30 American soldiers, including 17 elite Navy SEALs, and eight Afghans. The mainstream news media was awash with somber reports about this being the “deadliest day” for U.S. forces in the ten years since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan began.
Notably, many news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and The Washington Post claimed the helicopter crash and its 30 American casualties marked the “deadliest day of the war”, without adding the vital qualification, “for United States military personnel.” Even the progressive website Truthout provided its daily email blast that day with the headline: “Deadliest Day in Decade-Long Afghanistan War: 31 Troops Killed in Shootdown.”
The obvious implication of these reports was that on no single day since October 7, 2001, when the U.S.-led invasion and bombing campaign began, had as many people been killed in Afghanistan as on August 6, 2011.
Perhaps most brazen and sanctimonious regarding this claim was MSNBC‘s primetime anchor Lawrence O’Donnell. Introducing the “Rewrite” segment of his Monday August 8 broadcast of “The Last Word”, O’Donnell looked directly into the camera and, in his measured and most heartfelt serious voice, told his viewers, “This weekend saw the worst single loss of life in the ten years of the Afghan War.”
He was lying. Unless, of course, like so many Americans, O’Donnell doesn’t count Afghan civilians as human beings worthy of being allowed to stay alive. In fact, the invisibility of the native population of Afghanistan is so ubiquitous in the American media, O’Donnell and his writers probably didn’t even think they needed to acknowledge civilian death tolls at the hands of foreign armies. As General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, told reporters at Bagram Air Base in March 2002 when asked about how many people the U.S. military has killed, “You know we don’t do body counts.”
After showing a video clip of CIA Directer-cum-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s statement that the helicopter crash served as “a reminder to the American people that we remain a nation still at war,” O’Donnell took seven minutes of airtime to lecture his viewers about a country that has forgotten the hardships of warfare, due to the absence of a draft or rationing or war taxation. Clearly passionate and frustrated, he rhetorically wondered, “What kind of nation would need to be reminded that it is still at war?”
He continued: “There will be other nights for us to discuss the way forward or the way out of Afghanistan. Tonight is not that night. Tonight is for reminding this nation that it is indeed at war. And tonight is for reminding the nation of the price of war. The ultimate sacrifice.”
At this point, O’Donnell displayed photographs of some of the soldiers killed in the crash while delivering brief biographies, a sort of “Last Word” eulogy for the dead.
In his effort to tug at his viewers heartstrings, O’Donnell told us of one young soldier who had only “been in Afghanistan for less than two weeks.” Another was described by his mother as “a gentle giant.” A SEAL Team 6 member also killed in the crash, we were told, had a wife, a two-year-old son and a two-month old baby girl while another solider was survived by his pregnant wife and three children. O’Donnell eulogized one of the deceased servicemen by telling us of his personal history as a high school wrestler and his lifelong dream of becoming a Navy SEAL.
O’Donnell concluded the segment with the assurance that none of the family members of those soldiers who had died – as opposed to the million of Americans whose lives are totally unaffected by the ongoing occupation – needed any “reminding” that “we are a nation at war.”
Never once during this paean to the military did O’Donnell make even a passing reference to the thousands upon thousands of Afghan men, women, and children killed by U.S. and NATO forces in their own homeland, their own country, their own towns, their own communities, their own homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools, and at their own weddings.
The Afghan village of Karam was completely destroyed on October 12, 2001 when American forces dropped a one-ton bomb on it and killed over 100 people. On October 21, 2001, “At least twenty-three civilians, the majority of them young children, were killed when U.S. bombs hit a remote Afghan village,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
Not a solitary syllable was uttered to honor the seven children blown apart “as they ate breakfast with their father” when “a US bomb flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul” on Sunday October 29, 2001. The Times of India, citing a Reuters report, revealed that “the blast shattered a neighbour’s house killing another two children.”
A few weeks later, on November 17, 2001, U.S. bombs fired at the village of Chorikori murdered “two entire families, one of 16 members and the other of 14, who lived, and perished, together in the same house,” reported The Los Angeles Times. Shortly thereafter, heavy American bombing in Khanabad near Kunduz was said to have killed 100 people. The same day, a religious school in Khost was bombed, killing 62 people.
Around the same time, James S. Robbins, a professor of International Relations at the National Defense University, published an article in The National Review entitled, “Humanity of the Air War: Look how far we’ve come.” The piece began this way: “Think airpower can’t bring victory in Afghanistan? Think again.”
Robbins continued his claim that “the air campaign over Afghanistan has been effective by most reports” and that “critics of the air campaign at home and abroad make as much of civilian casualties as suits their purposes, but arguments over whether a few, a dozen, or hundreds of people have died only show how civilized warfare has become.” He averred that “[a]ny civilian deaths caused by allied bombs are unintended deaths” (emphasis in original), declared that the U.S. was using the “tools and means of the humane” to bomb Afghan civilians to death on a regular basis, and concluded, “The allied air campaign is demonstrating how moral a war can be.”
On December 31, 2001, U.S. ground forces confirmed an enemy target in the village of Qalaye Niazi and “three bombers, a B-52 and two B-1Bs, did the rest, zapping Taliban and al-Qaida leaders in their sleep as well as an ammunition dump.” A military spokesman, Matthew Klee, proudly told reporters that the strike was an unmitigated success, saying, “Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage.” However, The Guardian reported:
Some of the things his follow-on reporters missed: bloodied children’s shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.
The charred meat sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden’s henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.
They said more than 100 civilians died at this village in eastern Afghanistan.
In the first three months of the Afghanistan assault, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives found that upwards of 4,200-4,500 Afghan civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S.-led bombing campaign and the “starvation, exposure, associated illnesses, or injury sustained while in flight from war zones” that followed the invasion and airstrikes. In May 2002, Jonathan Steele of The Guardian reported that, up to that point, “As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention.”
For O’Donnell, it appears the “price of war” doesn’t include the 48 civilians killed and 117 wounded, many of them women and children, when U.S. jets bombed a wedding party in Oruzgan in July 2002, the 17 civilians, mostly women and children, killed by coalition bombs in Helmand in February 2003, the eight civilians killed by a U.S. gunship and bomber in Bagram Valley the same month, the eleven civilians killed, including seven women, by a U.S. laser-guided bomb that hit a house outside the village of Shkin in April 2003, the six family members killed by U.S. bombs that hit the village of Aranj in October 2003, or the nine children (seven boys and two girls aged 9 to 12) murdered by two U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt II planes which attacked the village of Hutala while the children were playing ball.
Asians believe that the evil karma accumulated by the US will come back to haunt the US. If and when disaster strikes the US in a wide swath of the country, Asians will nod in acknowledgement of the karma that US has accumulated. Asians do not want the US on Asian soil again. Korea and Vietnam are the last countries in Asia that have suffered millions of innocent lives. Japan and S.Korea must realise that their citizens do not want to die so that the Americans can sleepin peace.
very good to note that war results in the death of innocents.
much better to note that the people that NATO is fighting in Afghanistan DELIBERATELY kill innocents and kill far, far, far more of them than NATO troops kill.
are far , far better not to twist O’Donnell’s words about the greatest number of American soldiers killed to attempt to say that he doesn’t notice that innocent dead Afghans.
that sort of juvenile crap only shows that Shirazi’s not developed enough tp comment negatively on other people’s humanity as well as shows that he doesn’t know much about O’Donnell.
learn not to sh1t on yourself before you start saying other people stink, Nima.
So can we gather from your comment, fuster, that you agree that we should only count American deaths, that Afghani civilian deaths don’t count? Because the logical corollary of your remarks does seem to be that you are a moral and intellectual coward.
No Jeremy don’t go down the same path that Nima did and try to gather up a big bunch of “not in evidence”.
We keep count of Afghan civilian deaths and we note how many of those innocents are killed by NATO/Afghan govt forces and how many die by the insurgents actions.
Last I checked the number of innocents killed was rising while the percentage killed by NATO/Afghan troops was around 20% and dropping.
Since jeremy you haven’t evinced any real understanding of my earlier remark your attempt at drawing “logical corollaries” from it, is just as void.
I think that you’re not without potential despite all my argumentation with the current content of this site and encourage you to keep trying. I think that you might make something of this.
(but in the name of reason really, really re-think publishing the stuff from Thomas Mountain. That’s some worthless sh!t that just lays there and stinks.)
Dude, when somebody says that August 6, 2011 was “the worst single loss of life in the ten years of the Afghan War”, they are ipso facto saying that Afghan lives don’t count, so spare us the sophistry.
Thanks for the constructive comment, fuster.
In what way have O’Donnell’s words been twisted? He said exactly what he is quoted as saying. If you believe that any time anyone mentions “loss of life” in Afghanistan on U.S. television, one must expect and assume that those killed were American soldiers, then this alone proves the myopia of which I wrote about.
If you have footage of or something written by O’Donnell suggesting he does “notice…innocent dead Afghans”, I’d love to see it and eagerly await whatever you find.
Please note that, after Osama bin Laden was reported killed by Navy SEALs this past May, O’Donnell took to the airwaves in his “Rewrite” segment to condemn the Bush/Cheney approach to fighting terrorism across the globe. He spoke of how John Kerry got it right when he suggested terrorism must be dealt with as a law enforcement issue, rather than a military one. As usual, O’Donnell was confident in his commentary and he made a number of very strong, trenchant points regarding the incompetent rush to war and its subsequent handling.
But check out how he described the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan and Iraq and its connection to the killing of bin Laden:
O’Donnell continued, “The last decade did not have to be a decade of war,” and stated that, with a more experienced and intelligent man in the White House, the United States “could have been spared thousands of casualties and years of wasted time” in the Middle East (emphasis added).
Nowhere in his comments did O’Donnell mention that one of the tragedies of America’s “overreaction” to 9/11 were the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed as a consequence of our actions. If you want to try and argue that O’Donnell was implying as much or that these deaths were included in O’Donnell’s mentioned totals, go right ahead. It is more than clear this is not the case and was not his intention. Only American lives have been wasted and careless risked and destroyed, not anyone else’s, according to what O’Donnell chose to say that night.
He could have even dumbed it down in order not to offend to sensibilities of tender-eared viewers and said that a decade of endless and unnecessary war has cost thousands of American, Afghan, and Iraqi lives. But he didnt.
In O’Donnell’s analysis, the unhappy consequences of U.S. military actions are wasted time, money, machinery, and American soldiers. Nothing else.
What, pray tell, do you think I don’t know about Lawrence O’Donnell from watching his program every night? His hidden care and affection for Afghan children bombed to death by Predator drones and F-16s? Perhaps. But one would hope that if he felt that way, he might have to balls to say it on the air once in while.
To feel a certain way and not speak out about it is, to use a wise phrase I once read, “juvenile crap.”
Sorry Nima, but you got what you earned for your statements and attempting to divine O’Donnell’s feelings from his lack of public, on-air utterance is exactly “juvenile crap” and I hope that my bitching at you will serve a constructive purpose and you’ll learn to gather something solid before you try making a case for a man’s inhumanity out of nothing.
No evidence isn’t evidence.
Don’t ask me to prove that you’re wrong before you can demonstrate a reasonable claim that you’re right.
You come up with something that the guy DID say that demonstrates his lack of humanity. Then maybe I’ll let you know some of the things that I’ve heard from people who have met and spoken with him.
Till then, you simply remind me of a woman I used to correspond with who goes around saying that Rachel Maddow hates Palestinians because she doesn’t devote her tv time to defending them.
It’s like Nima said, fuster. O’Donnell said exactly what Nima quoted him as saying, and Nima merely observed the logical corollary, and that’s that. Look, fuster, you are welcome to comment at FPJ and engage others in reasoned and civil discussion. However, trolling will not be tolerated and persistent trolling behaviors will result in a ban.
Sorry, jeremy but O’Donnell talking about Americans deaths is just that.
Talking about American deaths.
Using the absence of public talk about Afghan casualties to say or imply that he doesn’t care about them is trolling far more than is rebutting Nima’s article.
Trolling isn’t my purpose and I don’t wish to have you think that it is. Refuting statements that are without evidentiary basis is.
If you wish to contact me via email to discuss “trolling”further, please do. I want to argue or agree but not pointlessly for the purpose of mere annoyance and I’ll be happy to discuss what makes you comfortable or not and what you think might advance your journal’s efforts to present truthful reporting from an unconventional slant.
It’s a good mission and not an easy one and I’m not looking to sink it.
Again, fuster (this is getting tedious), O’Donnell said the following:
He did not say “American life” or “of American soldiers” anywhere in his segment. He didn’t even say “we saw.” No, his statement was clear.
Your arguments here make no sense.
fuster, your commentary is so inane that I won’t spend much time answering your silliness.
I will say this:
I never said that Lawrence O’Donnell has no humanity (I did, however, call him “sanctimonious”). I did note that he willfully ignores civilian casualties at the hands of U.S. and NATO forces whenever he addresses the issue of Afghanistan (or Iraq or “The War on Terror” in general, for that matter). The conflation of my commentary on O’Donnell and some random woman’s statement about how Rachel Maddow “feels” about Palestinians is ridiculous.
There is an obvious lack of any mention of civilian casualties in the mainstream media. I seriously doubt you would argue this.
What you’ve “heard from people who have met and spoken with” O’Donnell is inconsequential. Perhaps, if my analysis offends him, O’Donnell can address his own statements and give airtime to the civilians he omitted during last week’s broadcast when he returns to MSNBC from his current personal leave. (Sadly, O’Donnell’s 93-year-old mother died this past Sunday.)
You still have yet to identify a single error in my own article.
One last thing, regarding your “no evidence isn’t evidence” statement: Do you think it would demonstrate any particular censorship, ignorance, or display any sort of bias or deliberate misrepresentation if, say, news reports or political commentators, whenever speaking of the 22-day Gaza massacre of 2008-9, only mentioned the 13 Israelis killed during the assault (4 by friendly fire) and left out the 1400 Palestinians altogether? Would this be evidence of willful omission on the part of the reporter?