Mark Phillips: The American Question

3/13/03: A man named Mir Ahmad lived in Afghanistan, where he grew to be somewhat tall.

Enthusiastic Washington Post spook-hound Vernon Loeb has a scoop in his column of March 10: America's deadly Hellfire missiles just got worse.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Hellfire missile has become the CIA's counterterrorist weapon of choice, fired at fleeting SUVs by remote control from slow-flying Predator drones.

Last November, the CIA killed six suspected al Qaeda operatives in Yemen with a Predator-launched Hellfire. During the first month of the war in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, the agency launched 40 Hellfire missiles.

The new Hellfires, it seems, can see through sandstorms. Over the course of 17 more paragraphs, Loeb waxes positively gushy, concluding with purple passion,

"In terms of the Apache and the Hellfire," said Dan O'Boyle, a spokesman for the Army's Redstone Arsenal, "there's a saying, 'You can run, but you can't hide.'"

What's missing from this happy family picture? A farmer named Mir Ahmad.

Mr. Ahmad was around 35 years old on the day he died. In a country of small people, Afghanistan, he was 5'10", enough to make him stand out from his two friends, Daraz and Jahan Gir, who went with him one February day from their village of Garboz to gather scrap metal from the war. It was Monday, February 4, 2002, when the three of them were burned to death by an American Hellfire missile fired from a pilotless aircraft flown by the C.I.A. Farmer Ahmad was survived, at least temporarily, by two wives and five children.

A Washington Post reporter named Doug Struck got the story from The Pentagon, who said that "an unmanned Predator drone spotted a group of men at Zhawar, and that others seemed to be acting in a deferential manner toward one tall man." Osama bin Laden, it seems, is a tall man, around 6'5". This uncanny resemblance was enough for the C.I.A., who did their patriotic duty, with total impunity: they fried them all.

Afterwards it was up to the Army to prevent the news of this victory from reaching the American people. "A Washington Post reporter who reached the remote scene of the attack was held at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and prevented from entering the site," wrote reporter Struck. "The soldiers also barred access to the nearby village where Ahmad and the two other men had lived." Alas for the cause of freedom, they failed.

According to our President, we went to war seeking justice. Mr. Ahmad and his friends received no justice. Nor will they ever. No-one will be jailed for their deaths, no-one will be prosecuted, nor even reprimanded. Probably not even yelled at. People like Mr. Ahmad are invisible to people like our President.

And they're invisible to Vernon Loeb, who loves his missiles, and loves his spooks, and loves the way technology can make things explode from miles away with uncanny accuracy, but who has so little love of poor dead Mr. Ahmad and his poor dead friends that he doesn't manage to mention them even once in his gushy, happy, upbeat history of the Hellfire and the Predator and the things they do for me and you. They aren't what matters to him.

Mr. Loeb's myopia is one reason why we started the War on Islam. It's similar to the myopia which led us to start the War on Vietnam. We lost that war, as we'll lose this one, for similar reasons.

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