What You Expect To See . . .

or what you want to see?

One of Sullivan's readers left a comment that brought home the latest atrocity to hit the news:

Soldiers are trained to kill and sometimes in the heat of combat they will engage in killings that are not strictly justified, for example, at Haditha. But this -- all of it -- was simply gratuitous and the killing of the wounded journalist and the shooting up of the minivan trying to pick him up to save his life went beyond gratuitous and was just plain sadistic murder.

Forty years ago, when Charlie Company went into My Lai to inflict some collective punishment, a helicopter pilot watching from above saw the carnage and did something to stop it. Nowadays, helicopter pilots make movies of their killings and beg a wounded man to make a suspect move so they can pump more 1 1/4" rounds into him. How completely depraved.

The incident he's referring to, of course, is this one:



Wikileaks claims it has verified the authenticity of the video, although Charli Carpenter at Lawyers, Guns & Monney was not convinced. It appears, however, from a comment left in that thread, that the Pentagon has confirmed the authenticity of the video. (Read the comments to Carpenter's thread, by the way -- very rational and interesting, except for the obligatory jerk who seems to think the people who caused 9/11 were journalists and children -- Reuters is the real enemy, apparently.)

There are a lot of possible explanations here, most of which are advanced in the comments to Carpenter's post. I'm not sure I buy the "see what you expect to see" thing, though, although there's a lot of support for that one. What I'm seeing here is a shoot first, look later approach, which is not good at all.

But let me add my own thought to Sullivan's reader's first comment above, which seems particularly apt considering that DADT repeal is on the front burner again (well, for everyone except the White House): because of shortfalls in recruiting, the Pentagon has been issuing record numbers of moral waivers -- to white supremacists, gang members, and convicted felons, some of whom were convicted of violent crimes. But gays are not fit to serve. I'm not claiming that gays are necessarily going to do better in a situation like this, but considering that we're more likely to be starting off with a different mindset, it seems likely.

Footnote: take this also in the context of some of the reports we've had of "hazing" of a distinctly sexual -- and sadistic -- nature, the investigations of contractors such as Blackwater for their behavior in the field (where they're not supposed to be to begin with), and you start to get a pretty ugly picture. Particularly since the military, true to form, is finding nothing wrong with this. From the Collateral Murder site, which also has the original 38-minute video:

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Frankenstein's monster was a pussycat compared to what we've created.