"It really dawned on me"

The Washington Post has an article on Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch that's worth reading, for this if nothing else:

Sitting in a secure vault deep inside the Pentagon, Marc Garlasco cheered when the laser-guided bombs he had helped target slammed to Earth, striking Iraqi soil. As a body flew like a rag doll across the video screen, framed in a bright flash and a cloud of dust, Garlasco and his fellow intelligence analysts thought they had taken out one of the U.S. military's top targets during the early days of the Iraq war.

But even as he reveled in the April 2003 airstrike, Garlasco was thinking ahead to his next job, which would take him to the edges of the very crater he had just helped create. Just two weeks after the failed attack targeting Iraq's notorious Ali Hassan Majeed, known as Chemical Ali, Garlasco left the Defense Intelligence Agency and traveled worldwide as a human rights activist seeking to determine the civilian toll of his previous work.

"I found myself standing at that crater, talking to a man about how his family was destroyed, how children were killed, and there was this bunny-rabbit toy covered in dust nearby, and it tore me in two," Garlasco said. "I had been a part of it, so it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It really dawned on me that these aren't just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time."

It shouldn't take something like this for a person to understand that bombs are killing actual flesh and blood human beings, of course, but it's still good to see someone with Garlasco's background come to the realization.

BONUS: Here's another former agent of empire coming to a similarly unexpected realization, after reading through the complete internal record of decision making:

[Vietnam] was no more a "civil war" after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest.  A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power—which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest—was not a civil war.  To say that we had "interfered" in what is "really a civil war," as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of "aggression from the North."  In terms of the UN charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.

[This] judgment was not one I came to lightly or easily.  It was the kind of charge I associated with antiwar rallies.  I had never been to one of these (since the first one, with Patricia in 1965), but I had read references to such claims before and dismissed them, as my colleagues did, as overblown rhetoric.  It was what "extreme" critics, radicals, and most international lawyers, though I didn't know that, had been saying about the nature of our involvement for years.  I had not believed them.  Now I had to.

That's Daniel Ellsberg, writing in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Next: I discuss the concept of fair use.

Comments

[petey]

"it's still good to see someone with Garlasco's background come to the realization."

it is, but this sort of thing (viz the connection between HRW and the establishment) was part of the reason i dropped my HRW membership. they do excellent research, but they seems to be sympathetic to neoliberal ends. this and the fact that they're supported by multimillionaires and my few spare dollars are more useful elsewhere.

[John Caruso]

Yeah, I'm never been a big fan of HRW for just that reason. As Helsinki Watch they were essentially a tool of US foreign policy, and as HRW they've been slow to shed that role. During Clinton's Kosovo assault HRW acted as a veritable arm of the US government, issuing reports that seemed tailored to help justify the attack. I've noticed a marked improvement in their output over the past few years (to my surprise)—but that may just be because there's a Republican administration in office.