The U.S. Media and the
13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last
Month by a U.S. Drone
By Glenn Greenwald
February 12, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Intercept" - On
January 26, the New York Times
claimed that “a CIA drone strike in
Yemen. . . . killed three suspected Qaeda
fighters on Monday.” How did they know the
identity of the dead? As usual, it was in
part because “American officials said.”
There was not a whiff of skepticism about
this claim despite the fact that “a senior
American official, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, declined to confirm the names
of the victims” and “a C.I.A. spokesman
declined to comment.”
That NYT article did
cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), who provided
the names of the three victims, one of whom
was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni
teenager whose father and brother were
previously killed in American drone
strikes.” The article added that “the Qaeda
member did not know Mr. Jahmi’s age but said
he was a member of the terrorist group.”
In fact, as the
Guardian reported
today, “Mr. Jahmi’s age” was 13 on the
day the American drone ended his life. Just
months earlier, the Yemeni teenager told
that paper that “he lived in constant fear
of the ‘death machines’ in the sky that had
already killed his father and brother.” It
was 2011 when “an unmanned combat drone
killed his father and teenage brother as
they were out herding the family’s camels.”
In the strike two weeks ago, Mohammed was
killed along with his brother-in-law and a
third man.
Mohammed’s older brother
Maqded said he “saw all the bodies
completely burned, like charcoal” –
undoubtedly quite similar to the way the
Jordanian combat pilot looked after he was
burned alive last month by ISIS. That’s not
an accident: the weapons the U.S. military
uses are
deliberately designed to incinerate people
to death. The missiles shot by their
drones are named “Hellfire.” Of his younger,
now-deceased 13-year-old brother, Maqded
told the Guardian: “He wasn’t a
member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.”
There are a few
observations worth making about this
repugnant episode:
(1)
The U.S. media just
got done deluging the American public with
mournful stories about the Jordanian
soldier, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, making him a
household name. As is often the case for
victims of America’s adversaries, the victim
is intensely humanized. The public learns
all sorts of details about their lives,
hears from their grieving family members,
wallows in the tragedy of their death.
By stark contrast, I’d be
willing to bet that the name “Mohammed
Tuaiman al-Jahmi” is never uttered on
mainstream American television. Most
Americans, by design, will have no idea that
their government just burned a 13-year-old
boy to death and then claimed he was a
Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be
kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without
the aspirations or dreams or grieving
parents on display for victims of America’s
adversaries (just as Americans were
swamped with stories about an
Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran
for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having
no idea that their own government imprisoned
an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj,
in Guantanamo for seven years without
charges).
When I was in Canada last
October during two violent attacks –
one in southern Quebec and the
other in Parliament in Ottawa – both of
the soldiers killed were (understandably)
the subject of endless, intense media
coverage featuring their lives, their dreams
and their grieving parents. But I’d bet that
the Canadian public was incapable of naming
even a single foreign individual killed by
their own government over the last decade.
It’s worth considering the
extreme propaganda impact that disparity
has, the way in which the U.S. media is so
eagerly complicit in sustaining ongoing
American militarism and violence by
disappearing victims of U.S. violence while
endlessly heralding the victims of its
adversaries.
(2)
I have no idea
whether this 13-year-old boy was “a member
of al-Qaeda,” whatever that might mean for a
boy that young. But neither does the New
York Times, which is why it’s
incredibly irresponsible for media outlets
reflexively to claim that those killed by
U.S. drone strikes are terrorists.
That’s especially true
since the NYT itself
previously reported that the Obama
administration has re-defined “militant” to
mean “all military-age males in a strike
zone as combatants.” In this case, Mohammed
did not even qualify for that Orwellian
re-definition, yet still got called a
terrorist (by both the Obama administration
as well as a “member of AQAP,” both of whom
are, for different reasons, motivated to
make that claim). Whatever else is true,
extreme skepticism is required before
claiming that the victims of the latest
American drone strike are terrorists, but
that skepticism is
virtually never included.
(3)
The next time
there’s a violent attack on the west by a
Muslim, and journalists immediately declare
that Islam is the culprit and set out to
demonize those who suggest it might be
“blowback,” perhaps this incident can be
remembered. Does one really need to blame a
radical version of religious dogma to
understand why people get really angry when
they hear – yet again – that the children of
their nation have been extinguished –
incinerated – by another American drone?
If it were American
teenagers rather than Yemeni ones regularly
being burned to death – on American soil
rather than Yemeni soil – does it take any
effort to understand why there’d be
widespread calls for violence against the
perpetrators in response? Consider how much
American rage and violence was unleashed by
a single-day attack on American soil 13
years ago.
In fact, if it were the
case that this 13-year-old boy were a
“member of AQAP,” is it hard to understand
why? Do we need to resort to claims that
some primitive, inscrutable religion is to
blame, or does this, from the Guardian
article, make more sense:
When the Guardian
interviewed Mohammed last September,
he spoke of his anger towards
the US government for killing his
father. “They tell us that
these drones come from bases in Saudi
Arabia and also from bases in the Yemeni
seas and America sends them to kill
terrorists, but they always kill
innocent people. But we don’t know why
they are killing us.
“In their
eyes, we don’t deserve to live like
people in the rest of the world and we
don’t have feelings or emotions or cry
or feel pain like all the other humans
around the world.”
In 2009, the U.S.
got caught using cluster bombs in Yemen
in an attack that slaughtered 35 women and
children. Obama then
successfully demanded that the Yemeni
journalist who proved that the attack was
from the U.S., Abdulelah Haider Shaye, be
imprisoned for years. In December, 2013, a
U.S. drone strike
killed 12 people as they traveled to a
wedding.
What’s confounding and
irrational and inscrutable isn’t that people
react by turning to “radicalism” and
violence. It’s that many journalists and
officials in western nations seem to think
that they can go around for decades
invading, occupying, imprisoning without
charges and dropping bombs on multiple other
countries around the world, regularly
killing innocents, including children, and
then act shocked and surprised when people
in those countries, or who identify with
them, want to bring violence back in
return. That is a sentiment
grounded in deep irrationality, blind
nationalism, and primitive tribalism.
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