The disjuncture these days between reality and what one reads in
the press here is pretty much absolute. The other day I opened up the San
Francisco Chronicle and found a piece hailing what the writer described as
something most unusual for Afghanistan, a "peaceful" transfer of power. Now
granted, the mostly civilian casualties are probably in the low thousands,
and the most effective agent in that same transference of power was large
cash bribes to all the relevant warlords, but even so, the word "peaceful"
is scarcely the mot juste.
Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, now touted
as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie "Black
Hawk Down" hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the
Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall
that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993, Somalia had spent many
years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil
companies was sufficiently strong for the post-intervention U.S. embassy to
be located in the Conoco compound.
Citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the
country, and an urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the
Marines. (The desire to distract attention from his pardon of Caspar
Weinberger was another motive imputed by cynics at the time.)
The "humanitarian" intervention was touted as one of the first
bouts of nation building of the New World Order, supervised by various
nonprofit aid groups and protected by the UN-sponsored military force.
Soon, ugly stories of murder and torture by Canadian
"peacekeepers" appeared in the Canadian press. To efface such
unpleasantness, the U.S. press whipped up a frenzy about a local warlord
called Mohammed Aideed, a sort of mini-Osama, and he became public enemy No.
1, target of various bumbling efforts to kill or capture him.
On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" composed of
the Delta Force and Rangers tried to nab Aideed again in central Mogadishu.
Aideed was nowhere to be found, and soon the American troops became
confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded by angry crowds.
There ensued a massacre in which somewhere between 500 and 1,000
Somalians were killed, along with 18 Americans. In 1999, Mark Bowden's book
"Black Hawk Down" appeared. Bowden had worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer
and had filed pieces right after the 1993 massacre. As the movie director
Alex Cox points out in a recent, excellent discussion of "Black Hawk Down"
in The British Independent, "It's interesting to observe how the story was
retold over that time. An article by the former Independent correspondent
Richard Dowden (not to be confused with Mark Bowden) the previous year makes
the clear point that U.S. troops killed unarmed men, women and children from
the outset of their mission: 'In one incident, Rangers took a family
hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was
shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead
when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence.
The killer is not identified.'"
Now Bowden's original articles were filled with these unpleasant
details. They are not to be found in the book. I am reliably informed that
the publisher, Grove Atlantic, thought it politic to remove them, preferring
an unblemished epic of American heroism. The only blemish that disfigures
the release of the movie is the fact that GI John "Stebby" Stebbins, renamed
Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, is now serving a 30-year sentence in
Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl.
Cox cites a subsequent U.S. Army investigation of organized
racism in the U.S. Army, which concluded the problem was particularly
serious in all-white, so-called "elite" and "Special Operations" units. Such
racial separatism could lead to problems, the report warned, because it
"foster(s) supremacist attitudes among white combat soldiers." (The
Secretary of the Army's Task Force Report on Extremist Activities, Defending
American Values, March 21, 1996, Washington D.C., page 15)
After the massacre, Canada, Italy and Belgium all held inquiries
into the behavior of their troops. Canada placed some of its soldiers on
trial for torture and murder. The U.S. never held any such public
investigation nor reprimanded any of its commanders or troops for the
Somalian debacle, now inflated by Hollywood into an heroic epic -- the
ultimate disjuncture of truth from claptrap.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
