War And Claptrap

by Alexander Cockburn

Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, now touted as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie "Black Hawk Down" hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993, Somalia had spent many years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil companies was sufficiently strong for the post-intervention U.S. embassy to be located in the Conoco compound.

Citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the Marines. (The desire to distract attention from his pardon of Caspar Weinberger was another motive imputed by cynics at the time.)

The "humanitarian" intervention was touted as one of the first bouts of nation building of the New World Order, supervised by various nonprofit aid groups and protected by the UN-sponsored military force.

Soon, ugly stories of murder and torture by Canadian "peacekeepers" appeared in the Canadian press. To efface such unpleasantness, the U.S. press whipped up a frenzy about a local warlord called Mohammed Aideed, a sort of mini-Osama, and he became public enemy No. 1, target of various bumbling efforts to kill or capture him.

On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" composed of the Delta Force and Rangers tried to nab Aideed again in central Mogadishu. Aideed was nowhere to be found, and soon the American troops became confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded by angry crowds.

There ensued a massacre in which somewhere between 500 and 1,000 Somalians were killed, along with 18 Americans. In 1999, Mark Bowden's book "Black Hawk Down" appeared. Bowden had worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and had filed pieces right after the 1993 massacre. As the movie director Alex Cox points out in a recent, excellent discussion of "Black Hawk Down" in The British Independent, "It's interesting to observe how the story was retold over that time. An article by the former Independent correspondent Richard Dowden (not to be confused with Mark Bowden) the previous year makes the clear point that U.S. troops killed unarmed men, women and children from the outset of their mission: 'In one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence. The killer is not identified.'"

Now Bowden's original articles were filled with these unpleasant details. They are not to be found in the book. I am reliably informed that the publisher, Grove Atlantic, thought it politic to remove them, preferring an unblemished epic of American heroism. The only blemish that disfigures the release of the movie is the fact that GI John "Stebby" Stebbins, renamed Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, is now serving a 30-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl.

Cox cites a subsequent U.S. Army investigation of organized racism in the U.S. Army, which concluded the problem was particularly serious in all-white, so-called "elite" and "Special Operations" units. Such racial separatism could lead to problems, the report warned, because it "foster(s) supremacist attitudes among white combat soldiers." (The Secretary of the Army's Task Force Report on Extremist Activities, Defending American Values, March 21, 1996, Washington D.C., page 15)

After the massacre, Canada, Italy and Belgium all held inquiries into the behavior of their troops. Canada placed some of its soldiers on trial for torture and murder. The U.S. never held any such public investigation nor reprimanded any of its commanders or troops for the Somalian debacle, now inflated by Hollywood into an heroic epic -- the ultimate disjuncture of truth from claptrap.