Amicus Dei

I was listening to NPR on the way back from a meeting this afternoon.  The guest on Fresh Air was Marc Garlasco, military analyst for Human Rights Watch, and former Pentagon targeting expert.  Garlasco explained his work at the Pentagon in identifying “high value” — human — targets, and devising a bombing plan to take out those targets.  While it was strange to hear a former Pentagon employee describe his work for Human Rights Watch, more disturbing was the jargon he used to describe his days at the DOD.

Garlasco was one of the chief “targeteers” for the Pentagon, joined by other “targeteers” from CIA and NSA.  He spoke of the “targeteers” gathering to sort high profile targets in priority order, and then turning those lists over for “weaponeering” to the ordinance experts.

I was struck by the Disneyesque quality of those words — targeteers, weaponeering — which sounded jauntily like “mouseketeers” and “imagineering.”  But the clincher was this — Garlasco said they watched their bombs fall from the comfort of their Pentagon offices via military satellite imagery — the ultimate video game experience, where real bombs kill real people in real places.

Garlasco now serves a military adviser to Human Rights Watch.  His responsibilities include seeing first-hand the effects of bombs, particularly on civilians.  And, in a “professional” manner he discusses with military commanders how they might reduce the collateral damage (read: stop killing innocent people) by changing their bombing techniques and ordinance selection.

This all smacks of trying to clean up war, which of course, is an impossibility.  War is war, but if we can have a cleaned up version, much like a sanitized fantasyland, then war becomes an acceptable past-time for nations of our world.  This is a world which has lost its way and confuses inhumane strategy for ethics.  I suppose fewer civilian deaths are better than more civilian deaths, but trying to clean up war seems to me like trying to live in a graveyard.  While everything might look neat and tidy, death permeates it all.  — Amicus Dei