A: The ones doing the killing never seem to care if the intelligence it’s based on is actually true.
Q: Why not?
Brad Hicks: (emphasis mine)
If you studied American history prior to about 2000, even if you studied it at the college level, you were almost certainly taught something wrong, because the truth was one of America’s last, best-kept secrets. And it has to do with lynching. You see, if you studied before then, one of the things you were told about lynching was that lynching was usually motivated by anger, by hatred, by exaggerated fear of “impurity,” by anger over Reconstruction, by irrational over-reaction to minor black crimes. But then a historian made a lucky find, one that unlocked a whole field of study. A set of records, more or less accidentally compiled, gave us a longer and more comprehensive list of lynchings than we had. A very macabre set of records.
…That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, historians were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.
I want you to get this through your head, and never forget it. Lynching was not a hate crime. Lynching was an economic crime.
On August 22, the US Military targeted civilian homes in Azizabad, Afghanistan. Depending on which accounts you choose to believe, they either killed 92 innocent civilians, including as many as 60 children; or 30-35 Taliban militants plus “only” 5-7 innocent civilians. (So I guess that would make it okay then.) Ludicrously, US Military sources have been claiming that the discrepancy is due to Taliban convincing the villagers to fake the evidence, even suggesting that they built fake mass graves to fool UN inspectors and international reporters.
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.
…right. Well then it must be true, because it’s not like Ollie North ever lied on behalf of the US government or anything.
But that’s not where I’m going with this.
Carlotta Gall reporting for the New York Times: (emphasis mine)
Two families in the village have lost men serving in the police during recent Taliban attacks. Reza Khan, whose house was the main target of the Special Operations Forces operation, and who was shot dead in the episode, was a wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport, and with a cellphone business in the town of Herat. A recent photo of him shows a clean-shaven, slightly portly man in a suit and tie — far from the typical look of a Taliban militant.
His brother, Haji Rashid, said the American forces “should question the people who gave them the wrong information.”
“We want them brought to trial and punished for what they have done,” he added.
His claim was supported by the district chief, Mr. Umarzai, who said, “The victims did not fire on the Americans.” He said he suspected that an informer falsely told the American forces that Taliban fighters were in the village and also staged the firefight.
…
The villagers and the relatives of some of the people killed in the raid insisted that none of them were Taliban and that there were no Taliban present in the village. Eight of the men killed were security guards supplied by Reza Khan to a private American security company and did possess weapons, said Gul Ahmed Khan, Reza Khan’s brother…
The Khan brothers are from the most prominent family in the village and were hosting the memorial ceremony for their brother, Taimoor Shah, who was killed in a business dispute a year ago. They had cards issued by an American Special Forces officer that designated each of them as a “coordinator for the U.S.S.F.” Another brother, Haji Abdul Rashid, blamed a business rival for falsely telling the Americans that their family supported the Taliban.
The American forces didn’t actually manage to kill their reconstruction bigwig target with the initial bombing:
A policeman, Abdul Hakim, whose four children were killed and whose wife was paralyzed, said she had told him how an Afghan informer accompanying the American Special Operations forces had entered the compound after the bombardment and shot dead her brother, Reza Khan; her father; and an uncle as they were trying to help her. She said she had heard her father plead for help and ask the Afghan: “Are you a Muslim? Why are you doing this to us?” Then she heard shots, and her father did not speak after that, he said.
Wait, the informer shot them dead? Well, it’s a second-hand account, so it’s tough to say for sure. But even if not, the informer who got this lynching party started was there to the bloodthirsty end.
So the main target of this combined air and ground attack was a contractor for the local American base. Did someone else, with better connections perhaps, want a slice of that contractor pie? Did they put the finger on Khan and use the American military as a hit squad to get him out of the way? Does anyone believe that the new Pentagon “investigation” of the atrocity will address such questions?
As the US is clearly not going to give up the identity of the Afghan informer, these questions are not likely to have answers soon. But, they are the right questions.
Still, it’s good to be reminded that violence is not just about hating the other. That’s the excuse; that’s what fans the flames and provides cover. But when it comes to actually taking that extra step to start killing people, all too often it’s just simple greed that gets the ball rolling. And this applies all the way along the spectrum, from global wars down to small town lynchings.