Iraq War | Kevin Doyle Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Iraq War’

The FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC)

According to legend the FBI always gets its man – leaving sexism aside for the moment. Whether true or not, a recent case undoubtedly highlighted the extremely long reach of the US’s famous law enforcement agency. The case involved Anis Abid Sardar, an Iraqi national, who was working in London as a taxi driver. Last month Sardar was convicted of killing a US soldier in Iraq in 2007 and for this heinous crime he has been sentenced to serve a minimum of 38 years in prison – in the UK.

It seems that Anis Sardar became involved in the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq and took up making improvised explosive devices or IEDs. One of the bombs that he made exploded under a troop carrier west of Bagdad in 2007 killing “34-year-old Sergeant First Class Randy Johnson, of 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment” . Some months after the attack Sardar was fingerprinted as he entered the UK having travelled via Syria. Seven long years passed and then he came into the sights of the FBI. The Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Centre (TEDAC) identified his fingerprints on a number of devices that were similar to those that killed Randy Johnson. They issued a warrant for Sardar’s arrest and just last month he was convicted in what Sue Hemming of the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service described as a “landmark prosecution”.

Now you might ask what is TEDAC? Well that’s part of what’s interesting . The FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Centre is located at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico in Virginia. In the FBI’s own words it is the “US Government’s single repository for IEDs that have been collected or are of interest to the United States government.” To put it another way ‘it’s the bomb library of America.’

The FBI are extremely proud of TEDAC. It comprises a huge warehouse to where are repatriated the remnants of any device used against US agencies or its armed forces. Right now there are thousands of boxes in the warehouse awaiting examination (see above). When a device explodes anywhere and the target is US troops, the fragments from the entire conflagration are gathered up, logged and transported all the way back to said TEDAC facility in the USA. Just imagine the logistics involved here for one moment. The gathering of everything from a bomb blast must take place; the attention to detail must be paramount; everything is then packed up and posted in over to Virginia.

Amazing right. Take a look at the photo above of the warehouse and those racks of crates and you get some indication of the huge effort that is taking place. Every single one of those crates is a crime waiting to be solved. This is cutting edge detective work alongside a cutting edge commitment to justice too. Am I not right?

Eventually these bits of metal are examined and checked, and sometimes, as with the case of Sardar a prosecution results. The FBI notes that ‘Since its creation in 2003, TEDAC has examined more than 100,000 IEDs from around the world and currently receives submissions at the rate of 800 per month. Two million items have been processed for latent prints—half of them this year alone.’ An FBI spokesperson added, ‘We have a lot of experience identifying IED components and blast damage. As a result we have identified over 1,000 individuals with potential ties to terrorism.’

So there you are. Shit hot, right? TEDAC and everything associated with it is a commitment to justice that is second to none, right ?Except… Wait a minutes… What about…?

The question is HOW do you square up this dedicated pursuit by the FBI of men like Sardar with its polar opposite: the mounting tally of deaths associated with the US’s drone bombing campaign?

Before I set down another letter on WordPress, let me hasten to point out here that I’m not intending FOR ONE MOMENT to get into the matter of whether or not the US is entitlement to wander about the globe killing what it terms ‘legitmate’ targets at will. That is not for now. Afterall, a lowly writer such as I, who am I to question the right of the United States to execute at will those it deems to be its enemies?

Instead I will confine myself here to what are termed collateral deaths associated with this drone campaign? In a recent interview regarding the Naming The Dead project, Jack Serle of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism said, ‘We don’t have an absolute figure on how many people have been killed, but our best estimate is about 2,318. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that we’ll be able to name every single one of them, partly because a lot of people have died anonymously.” To date in fact NTD have managed to name just over 700 individuals.

Site of a suspected U.S. drone strike on an Islamic seminary in Hangu district, bordering North Waziristan, November 21, 2013.

For me it beggars belief that in t his day and age this sort of murderous activity can go on with no one or no organisation able to stop it, but there you are it does. The point however is that with regard to the US’s drone bombing campaign, significant numbers of civilians are being killed each week. This is simply a war crime, but one that is happening week in and week out now. The drone bombing campaign contravenes all the usual standards of conduct in war – where reasonable effort must be made to avoid the targeting of civilians. And in almost all the cases I know of there isn’t even a war on in the first place. The US is targeting and killing at will in areas of the world where it sees fit. Which puts TEDAC and the FBI’s investigative prowess into a somewhat different light, no?

The Naming The Dead project got underway due to the fact that in many of the cases where drone bombings have been conducted, the extent of the destruction and the arbitrariness of the attacks is such that no one knows often how many or who has died. It is not unusual on any day to have on the newswires a brief report that a drone bomb attack has taken place. In such reports the general number of casualties is reported on. The names of the victims are rarely given… and the world moves on. [Rest assured that no stellar effort by FBI or anyone else for that matter is going to take place in regard to these murderous attacks; in fact the victims’ families will be doing well if they manage to recover the remains of their loved ones.]

As I composed this post, I noted that the following report appeared on the wires. It is entitled, Fresh US drone strikes have claimed the lives of at least 14 people in the troubled eastern part of Afghanistan. To summarize the information in this report. There were six casualties on Friday when a group of people were targeted by a US Drone flying over eastern Paktia Province. ‘Witnesses and local resident say the victims were civilians, but Afghan officials insist that they were all Taliban militants.’ Furthermore, it is noted that later on that same Friday, ‘eight people were killed in another US drone strike in the eastern Nangarhar Province.’ The following is also noted: ‘The US has stepped up its drone campaign across Afghanistan in recent weeks.’ And the following was also noted:

June 5^th at least 15 civilians lost their lives in a US drone strike in Alishir district of Khost province near the border with Pakistan. Local residents said the victims were attending the funeral of a local tribesman.
On June 4^th Separate drone attacks across Nangarhar had claimed at least 17 lives the day before.

If you wish to know more about the extent and nature of the US’s drone war, the following pdf is worth examining.

So there you have it. One the one hand people are beavering away in TEDAC day in and day out, scouring fragments of metal, powering up scanning electron microscopes, piecing together tiny fragments of prints – generally DOING THEIR DAMNEDEST to find those criminals out there in the world. While on the other hand, under the same grand canopy that is US Justice and Law Enforcement, people are being blown to smithereens at will, with such gay abandon that in many cases it isn’t even known who is being killed or who they even are.

I guess you’ll drawn your own conclusions from all of this but I know one thing for sure, the days of having one law for one set of people in the world and another for another set, is long over with.

Don’t Mention The War at Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival

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Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes the best way to get your hands on the cream of short story writing for the year is to get along to the Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival, held in Cork. This year the short list of six writer (see below) for what is regarded by many as the most prestigious prize for the short story in the world, included five writers from the United States.

There is no doubt that the short story is a valued form in the States. Publications such as the New Yorker have in particular promoted the discipline and must be credited for their support for the short story over the years. Frank O’Connor himself benefited enormously from US patronage when he struggled to make a living here in Ireland all those years ago. Furthermore we cannot easily dismiss writers of the caliber of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Jane Anne Philips and Annie Proulx – to name just a few of the accomplished writers who have penned stories from over in the States.

But – and here’s the thing – it stuck me forcefully this year, with the US having such a strong presence in the final shortlist, that there is something wrong. The United States after all is at war. Actually it is fighting not just one war but two – in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars, it must be underlined, are major conflicts.

In 2003 the United States led coalition invaded Iraq. It deposed the regime there and installed another one. Massive civilian casualties were suffered and many atrocities occurred. It was discovered that torture and the ill-treatment of prisoner by US forces was rife – recall the Abu Ghraib revelations. In sum Iraq has been bombed into a relic of what it was once by the US war machine for dubious and long discredited objectives. Then there is the war in Afghanistan. Attacked in 2001 it has been in a state of crisis for nearly 9 years. Again the casualties have been massive. Torture has been rife and there is the ongoing plague of drone bombings which have in fact escalated in intensity since the Barak Obama’s election. Significant numbers of civilians have been massacred. We are talking here of outrages as serious as what Guernica represents to modern warfare. Now however it seems as if atrocities of the scale of Guernica have become so commonplace that they are hardly commented on any more. But they are still outrages and they are still happening.

What has all this got to do with the short story? Well, for me, it is this. Here, on this occasion in Cork, we have five US short story writers shortlisted for a prestigious international award. These are very good writers – some are new and have produced debut collections while others like TC Boyle and Ron Rash are established. But is there one significant story about the above wars in the collective output from these writers? Well, so far, if it is there, I haven’t been able to find it. And by the way if someone does find such a story, then do let me know.

The pat explanation of course is that stories or literature (and art), if you want, are above these base matters. Or another generous explanation might be that the material for stories about these wars has yet to filter down through the great sponge that is contemporary life and civilisation. In other words, with regard to US output these stories will come in time – as indeed they did when we look back at the invasion of Vietnam by the US.

The above points are indeed reasonable. Or are they? Do they explain the avoidance of these US wars – that’s the question? Or maybe avoidance is too strong a word – is it? ‘Omission’ perhaps? Lack of interest perhaps? Well what then? Why silence about such important and vital events?

I accept that this blog observation of mine is not a scientifically valid study of contemporary US fiction and it’s engagement with war. Fair enough. Nor is it intended to be of course! And perhaps there is an explanation, or part of one, in the process of selection for the Prize – from long list to short list even. There were, I think, over twenty US writers on the long list so, maybe, along the way the writers of war stories were weeded out. I don’t know if that is so. And so maybe I am getting the wrong end of the stick here?

But my main point has been taken up elsewhere too. The dearth of novels about the current US wars has already been previously noted. US writer and small press publisher, Tony Christini has pointed out in a number of articles that there is serious lack of material emerging in the States to do with the current wars. Tony Christini’s points to a number of reasons for the paucity of fiction relating to these wars. Publishers are business people (as we all know – don’t we?) and as such they are uncomfortable with any rocking of the boat. And on the writer side, a focus on these wars can lead to the stigmatization of the writer as ‘political’ or as ‘having an agenda’. Apparently such qualities are good for your career. So is the issue censorship or perhaps more worrying still: self censorship?

Returning to the collections at this years prize, something else struck me though. And this in some ways is the most disturbing thing. It is not just that the collections concerned here don’t touch on the various wars now being waged by the USA. Rather there is also the inverse problem: this indeed is even more damning of the state of writing in the US to my mind. What I mean is: the picture that emerges of the Untied States from the collective output of the shortlisted US writers for this years Prize is of a society NOT at war. Indeed the concerns of many of the characters is rather of a world not unlike our own. (Note that Ireland is not currently at war or in the process of invading any other countries – that I know of anyway.) What I mean is that the characters obsess about normal and everyday concerns (mean neighbours; bad parenting and so on and so forth). And perhaps this is the double injustice of the literary output from the States as exemplified by this shortlist. In these times the ugly truth of a nation at war and a society driven by a voracious military-industrial complex is not only not being examined, it could even be argued it is being airbrushed from the picture we are being offered to see of that same society.

As a short short writer myself and as someone who has always admired Frank O’Connor’s engagement with the political, I must say I am unsettled by what I’ve read, and by this short list. But lastly let me say a few words about the worthy winner, Ron Rash. His stories in this collection are a cut above the others IMHO – going by the US entries anyway. While I couldn’t find any stories in his collection, Burning Bright, about the current US wars, this in a way is not surprising since his work has a focus on the southern, US Civil War dynamic. Fair enough I suppose. Indeed Rash’s collection points out well the problems in what I am attempting to draw attention to here and I accept that. Burning Bright is very good in its own right and indeed all the collections are worthy. It’s just as I say: how can you, you know… (… THE WAR). It’s still on everyone, isn’t it? Right now.

The Short List:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Picador UK, 2010) by Robin Black
Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010) by Belle Boggs
Wild Child (Bloomsbury, 2010) by TC Boyle
The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009) by David Constantine
Burning Bright (HarperCollins, 2010) by Ron Rash
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009) by Laura van den Berg

Note: TC Boyle had to withdraw from the final contest due to an his inability to travel to Cork for the Festival.

The Long List is here. (Scroll to the end.)