Keep It Secret — Or We Shall Kill You

***Warning: the video is extremely shocking to watch.

This documentary video is from one of the classes I took in my sophomore year.

The video is about a Japanese journalist, Mika Yamamoto, who died in Aleppo, Syria in 2012. She was shot to death in a random shooting by the pro-government troops.

What I want to talk about here today is not about her, but about what the nations really want.

Around 25:00 of the video, the documentary moves to the scene of the moment an airstrike has started in Iraq War while she and her colleague were staying in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. 20 days after the war has started, one of the hotel rooms, where two American journalists from Reuters were staying, was shot by an American tank. One was seriously wounded, and the other one who was standing by the window died. (* The scene is very shocking and bloody to see)

The Americans in the tank who shot them obviously knew that there were many journalists staying in the hotel. I do not know what America wanted to do, or why they killed their own people, but there might have been something unpresentable, or something they wanted to hide. This video made me even more suspicious about the international community. Maybe no nations do not really want to fix any problem in the world, and nations’ interests may be their own benefit only. In order to pursue their own interests, they do not even hesitate to kill their own people.

2 Responses to "Keep It Secret — Or We Shall Kill You"

Ian Muir says:

February 23, 2016 at 4:07 pm

I think that this is a really interesting post and I think that it hits a lot of very important points. The US invasion of Iraq was one big mistake after another and an operation that probably got more people killed than it saved. But that isn’t what I want to talk about.

State interests always lie at the heart of any military involvement and US interests in Iraq around 2003 have been questioned countless times. Official US statements say that the invasion’s goal was to find and destroy WMDs and to remove Sadam Hussein from power. We all know how the hunt for WMDs and Sadam Hussein played out but of all the the US interests at play in the decision to invade Iraq, I don’t believe that there was anything the US was trying to hide from the public view other than the total failure to find the supposed WMDs.

On top of that, the US involvement in Iraq was plagued with events where foreign civilians were killed while doing one thing or another. In 2004 and 2007, a private security firm called Blackwater was involved in a series of firefights, the one in 2004 leaving four US civilians dead and their charred bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah. The 2007 event involved a firefight between Blackwater contractors and Iraqi insurgents that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. Since 2003, over 170 journalists have been killed in Iraq under various circumstances, the vast majority of whom were not imbedded with combat units, meaning they didn’t enjoy protection from trained soldiers. Collateral damage is unavoidable in warfare and when journalists enter war zones, no matter the circumstances, they risk their own deaths as well as those of their fellow journalists in that war zone.

I think to say that the soldiers in the American tank that supposedly shot the hotel knew that it housed journalists is a stretch and to say that the US wanted to hide something by killing journalists is even more of a stretch. Urban counter insurgency is messy by its very nature and the journalists in that hotel knew what they were getting into when they arrived in Baghdad on the eve of the invasion. Counter insurgency operations are incredibly information sensitive and no operation is perfect.The journalists fully understood the ramifications of their actions and knew what they were risking. The video has no english subtitles so perhaps I missed some crucial information, but I do not believe that the US knowingly killed the American journalists in the Palestine Hotel as you suggest. If the US wanted to hide its interests in Iraq, there are far more effective ways of hiding those interests than shelling hotels housing journalists.

As for a more current perspective on Syria, sifting through the horrific mess that is the Syrian civil war to try and understand state interests is a nightmare. The most basic of state interests that we see at play are those of state influence in the region. Russia wants to gain a foothold in the Middle East, a region that has been dominated by US presence for the last 15 years. The US does not want to see that happen and wants to show that it can actually successfully do something positive in the region for once. Shi’ia Iran wants to extend its own influence in its constant, and not altogether cold, “war” with the Sunni dominated Gulf states. Basher Al Assad wants to retain control of the Syrian government at whatever cost and with the help of whoever. Turkey wants to keep its southern border free from rebel crossing and wants to use the civil war as an excuse to eliminate Kurdish influence within its borders. The list goes on and on and is far more in depth than the simple list I spelled out. There are probably even some interests that no one knows about currently that will become evident in the weeks and months to come as Syria sinks even farther into civil war.
1. Karen Yamasaki says:
  
  February 23, 2016 at 11:07 pm
  
  Thank you very much for replying to my blog post. The scene captured in the video was one of the things that I have been questioning since I have watched it, so I am very glad that I got to hear a new perspective. However, it was not caused by an operational mistake.
  As I was searching for more information, I found out that the soldiers were ordered from the top commander to shoot within the hotel because there were insurgents inside who were trying to fire rocket-propelled grenades. Just like you, the Pentagon has defended the attack on the Palestine Hotel by saying that the killings were accidental. The soldiers involved claimed that they were targeting insurgents who had fired rocket-propelled grenades.
  This claim, however, is highly questionable. The Palestine Hotel was a well-known place for journalists covering the Iraq war. The US tanks were at too far a distance to be hit by rocket-propelled grenades from the hotel. Witnesses reported hearing almost no gunfire from the area around the hotel in the hours leading up to the US attack. And earlier that day, two other media outlets had also been hit by US strikes: the Abu Dhabi television network, and the satellite network Al Jazeera, killing correspondent Tareq Ayoub.
  Adrienne Kinne was working in military intelligence at Fort Gordon, Georgia at that time. Her mission was to intercept satellite phone communications in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then transmit the satellite phone conversations back to the United States.
  As she identified who the phone number belonged to, she realized that the numbers belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with Iraqi or Afghan militaries, but to humanitarian aid organizations: NGOs such as the Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations, and journalists. A few days later, she got the list of potential targets. It included the Palestine Hotel, which was well-known as “the hotel for journalists,” as one of their potential targets.
  
  Also, about the language you used to describe journalists:
  It is true that journalists certainly would not be able to expect a high degree of security, and people sometimes take their deaths for granted by forgetting that the lives of journalists are as valuable as ours.
  However, we know that extreme poverty is real because there is somebody who reported it.
  We know that war is terrible because there are people who reported it by risking their lives.
  We should all appreciate that our knowledge about the no-go-zone is based on their sacrifice.
  
  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer_reveals_us
  http://www.ifex.org/iraq/2004/01/15/rsf_investigates_us_military_strike/

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