Marc Thiessen Tries To Excuse The Machine-Gunning Of Innocent Civilians

Torture fetishist Marc Thiessen weighs in today on "Collateral Murder", the video released recently by Wikileaks.

Thiessen: Left-wing blogs have jumped on the video as proof of the callous brutality of American troops. 
Glenn Greenwald made a point of saying this:

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.
I agree with Greenwald, as long as he is not completely absolving the troops from blame. The real blame for tragedies like these lies with those who pushed for, supported, and enabled this tragic, unjust and unnecessary war. People like Marc Thiessen.

Thiessen: The Huffington Post ran a story describing how “crew members can be heard celebrating their kills. ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,’ says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street. A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: ‘Come on, let us shoot!’ Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses. And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: ‘Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.’”
This, of course, is all true.

Thiessen: These words sounds horrific with the 20/20 hindsight of knowing that the targets were not insurgents, but civilians and journalists.
No, this sounds horrific no matter what. At one point a crew member is heard begging one of the wounded to pick up a gun so he can legally shoot him again. He wants the man to pick up a weapon, which would make him dangerous, just so he can shoot him! These aren't brave warriors; they're bullies.

Thiessen: But watching the video, it is clear the troops did not know they were firing on civilians.
That is not clear at all. What is clear is that they a) had no idea who these people were, 2) had a vague suspicion that they were armed and c) couldn't wait to mow them down with machine gun fire.

Thiessen: They thought they were attacking terrorists and insurgents who kill innocent civilians on a daily basis. 
Everyone looks like that when you have an itchy trigger finger.

Thiessen: As even the Times points out, the “attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and … one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.” 
Does this mean that anytime you see someone with what you think is an RPG, you are entitled to shoot everyone in sight, whether they are armed or not? And that you can then murder the Good Samaritans who show up to help?

Thiessen: As the video unfolds, the troops mistake a telephoto lens for a weapon and repeatedly say things such as: “That’s a weapon,” “Have individuals with weapons,” “Yup, he’s got a weapon too,” “Have five to six individuals with AK-47s. Request permission to engage,” “He’s got an RPG,” “We’ve got a guy with an RPG,” “Have eyes on an individual with an RPG getting ready to fire,” and “we had a guy shooting and now he’s behind the building.” As the video unfolds, it’s clear the troops believe they have come across heavily armed enemy fighters.
No, that just means that they know that they are on radio, and that if they want to shoot someone, they are going to have to say those sorts of things to justify it. It doesn't mean that it's true, and it doesn't mean that they believe it.

Thiessen: In other words, what unfolds is not “collateral murder” but a tragedy of mistaken identity.
I guess if I convince myself that Marc Thiessen is packing heat and threatening me, I am justified in murdering him in cold blood. As long as I believe it, right? (I do not believe this, just to be clear.)

Thiessen: The Huffington Post reports that “unveiling the video at the National Press Club on Monday morning, [WikiLeaks editor Julian] Assange said the helicopter crew approached its job as if it were a video game, not something involving human lives. ‘Their desire was simply to kill,’ he said. ‘Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.’” That is unfair. Their desire was not to kill innocent people; their desire was protect the American and Iraqi people from a murderous enemy. 
They killed innocent people. They did it in a very enthusiastic way. There is absolutely nothing in that video that would lead you to believe that they cared one bit if those people were innocent or not. They showed an absolute lack of any concern whatsoever. For Thiessen to give these troops the benefit of the doubt is a huge leap of faith, one which a honest person would not be prepared to make.

Thiessen: The video is heart-wrenching to watch, but I suspect that those most horrified after they learned the truth were the troops aboard that Apache helicopter who discovered they had accidentally killed innocent civilians. 
You could tell how horrified they were by the way they casually said "Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle."

Thiessen: The incident deserves investigation, and it appears that the military was not fully forthcoming about what took place. 
Not fully forthcoming? The military lied about this from the beginning, and refused to release the videos. They were forced into this admission by Wikileaks, an organization which is dedicated to revealing the truth about the war, and which is being targeted by the US Government for its efforts.

Thiessen: If so, disciplinary action may be warranted. But using this tragedy to question the humanity of American troops, or to suggest they have a callous disregard for human life—as WikiLeaks and the HuffingtonPost do—is simply wrong.
Who is questioning their humanity? They are all too human, it appears. And when our troops mow down innocent civilians and children in cold blood as though they are characters in a video game, they deserve to be questioned. And people like Marc Thiessen, who have enabled these horrific wars in the first place, deserve far worse.

Maybe They Aren't All Crazy, After All

Peter Galbraith, a US advisor to the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars from an oilfield in the Kurdish region.

OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

These talks were very contentious, to say the least. The Kurds have never gotten along with the rest of Iraq, and were demanding that they had rights to the oil in their region, and that those rights superseded any claim the Iraqi government had.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.

So it came as a shock to many last month when a group of Norwegian investigative journalists at the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv began publishing documents linking Mr. Galbraith to a specific Norwegian oil company with major contracts in Iraq.

Here is one thing you can be sure of. Galbraith knew precisely what he was doing, and he knew it at every step of the way. You do not "accidentally" earn a hundred million dollars just for standing around. And if it's all above board, why didn't he say anything about it? Why did he claim to be an unpaid advisor? Even if it's technically true, in the sense that he wasn't on salary, his denial makes it pretty apparent that he did not want anyone knowing that he had interests in Iraqi oil.

When drillers struck oil in a rich new field called Tawke in December 2005, no one but a handful of government and business officials and members of Mr. Galbraith’s inner circle knew that the constitutional provisions he had pushed through only months earlier could enrich him so handsomely.

So he helped design the Iraqi constitution, and then, shockingly, it turns out that that same constitution is going to make him very rich. Somehow I don't think the Muslim world will find that to be coincidental.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil.

Of course, these conspiracy theories don't sound so far-fetched now, do they, as a former US Ambassador and the Kurds have conspired to help themselves to Iraqi oil, oil which Iraq desperately needs as it tries to rebuild. Oil which it will need to sell if the US taxpayer has any hope of ever freeing itself from the burden of supporting Iraq.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

DNO’s chief executive, Helge Eide, confirmed that Mr. Galbraith helped negotiate the Tawke deal and advised the company during 2005. But Mr. Eide said that Mr. Galbraith acted solely as a political adviser and that the company never discussed the Constitution negotiations with him. “We certainly never did give any input, language or suggestions on the Constitution,” Mr. Eide said.

Sure. They had a man in the room, helping to write a constitution which would have a major financial impact on the company, but they didn't really pay any attention to him, or give him any suggestions. If there was even the slightest possibility of this statement being true, then you would also be reading about the massive stock sell-off as investors realized the company was being run by morons.

Kurdish officials said that they were informed of Mr. Galbraith’s work for DNO and that they still considered him a friend and advocate. Mr. Galbraith said that during his work on the Constitution negotiations, the Kurds “did not pay me and they knew I was being paid by DNO.”

Yes, of course the Kurds knew. Galbraith was helping them get a bigger piece of the action, at the expense of the Iraqi people, and he got a cut of it in return. The real question is did the Iraqis know that he was working for an oil company when he was pretending to be a mediator as he worked on their constitution. And they clearly did not.

The reasons why the Muslim world hates the US are getting clearer and clearer every day. They aren't crazy at all.

And there can hardly be any doubt that actions of Peter Galbraith will cost American lives and money, and will go a long way towards making Americans less secure.

I hope it was worth it.