With Friends Like These…

It’s come to something when a Murdoch paper does a public service , but for once The Sun’s has, by publiishing the sickening cockpit video of US forces casually opening fire on UK ground troops in Iraq resulting in the unnecessary death of 25-year-old Lance-Corporal Matty Hull. The US Defence department is refusing to disclose the recordings to the British coroner overseeing the enquiry into Hull’s death.

See the video for yourself:

Video
Transcript

Rumours abound that the US forces who did this were high on drugs, or over-fatigued and overstretched, or all three together. You can make ytour own mind up – US pilots certainly admitted they were off their heads on amphetamines when they killed Canadian troops in Afghanistan:

The pills, which are illegal in the US, are given to combat pilots who are involved in long eight or nine-hour sorties in small controlled doses, say the military.

The Air Force stopped prescribing the ‘Go’ pills, as they are known by the pilots, in 1993 after reports that crews using them during the Gulf War became addicted.

But the drug has been quietly reintroduced in recent years.

But no one knows for sure, because the evidence has been withheld by the Pentagon. For an inquest to get the full picture and reach a true verdict requires all the evidence and the inquest has heard all but the crucial recordings of the pilots responsible.

The US Defence department has dissembled, obfuscated and outright lied about the recordings: first there was no tape, then there was, then they couldn’t find it, then it suddenly it existed but had been classified… and Blair’s government, being the spineless poodles that they are, have done nothing to bring pressure on the Bush administration to disclose the evidence that’s so crucial to the determination of how this soldier died. The coroner is, understandably, outraged that the government refuses to uphold British law.

So well done the Sun for once. Normally I consider it a rag I wouldn’t wipe catsick up with, but today? A bang-up job. Nevertheless, this video is of absolutely no evidentiary use except in the court of public opinion. We can see it, but the inquest can’t: despite the video now being in the public domain, it’s provenance can’t be verified because the US refuses to release an official copy. That means that although it’s plain as day to the world that the American pilots were acting like cowboys, the Coroner and the inquest jury are forced to be absurdly, officially blind.

This whole shabby episode is emblematic of the hollowness of the ‘special relationship’. Our troops must blindly follow orders to impose US foreign policy abroad and die needlessly at their supposed allies’ hands for the privilege, but no reciprocal sacrifice is required, not even the common courtesy of disclosing to this soldier’s devastated parents just how their son died.

We’ve come to expect the US government to cover up, sweep under the rug and lie, it’s the modus operandi of most government departments under Bush. The Pentagon just takes it to extremes.

But you’d think a British government would protest, however weakly, when it’s partner-in-crime kills British soldiers and covers it up.

Too many of our soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan not by the hand of the amorphous ‘enemy’ but by the ineptitude and bull-headed aggression of the US military, and this government is too supine and too obsessed with its own internal political troubles to protest, even in the weakest, most milquetoast terms.

I’ve never thought British troops should be in Iraq to begin with: this is and always has been an illegal war. But conversely I don’t think that that circumstance merits their casual annihilation by a bunch of gung-ho pilots, off their heads on jingoism and who knows what else.

Downing St and the Pentagon’s casual treatment of friendly fire incidents shows their contempt for servicemembers and their families and demonstrates that just as the average worker is to the multinational corporation, to the warmongers servicemen and women aren’t real people but just so much fodder for the free-market meat-grinder.

UPDATE:

Just to clarify: the MOD has had possession of the recordings for 3 years. What they didn’t have was Pentagon permission to release it. But now the government and MOD have said that as it’s now in the public domain, it can be admitted.

Good.