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By Root 2273 0

Cutters can only be dropped when there are no defenses, in other words, only on those who are defenseless. (It must be stated that prior to the U.S. attack, the Afghans were not precisely defenseless: their Air Force did have two old planes, which might even have been jets.56 It must also be stated that in the first days of the attack the Afghan military killed precisely one American soldier, and Afghan prisoners did manage to kill one CIA operative—who was probably “playing smacky face” with them, as the CIA has been known to put it—before they themselves were ultimately blown to bits. Far more U.S. military casualties were caused by so-called friendly fire and a plane wreck.) A parachute opens, then the Daisy Cutter floats toward the Earth. The parachute slows the descent enough to give the transport plane time to get away before the bomb explodes. The bomb detonates just above ground, producing what are called overpressures of one thousand pounds per square inch (overpressure is air pressure over and above normal air pressure: overpressures of just a few pounds are enough to kill people) disintegrating everything and everyone within hundreds of yards, and killing people (and nonhumans) at a range of up to three miles.57 General Peter Pace, vice-chair of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, put the purpose clearly: “As you would expect, they make a heck of a bang when they go off and the intent is to kill people.” Marine Corps General Trainor was even more specific about the effect of Daisy Cutters on people in Afghanistan: “Besides the physical degradation, these—along with the regular ordinance dropped from B-52s—provide great psychological punishment, as victims begin to bleed from the eyes, nose, and ears, if they aren’t killed outright, of course. It’s a frightening, awesome assault they’re suffering, and there’s no doubt they’re feeling our wrath.”58

Even if the primary target of these bombs were members of the Afghan military (or terrorists, whatever or whomever they may be) those who were killed were mainly just people trying to survive. “We were farmers,” said Kamal Huddin, after American planes made four passes over Kama Ado, his home village, killing more than half of the three hundred people who lived there. “We were poor people. And we didn’t have any contact with any organizations.”59 It’s no surprise that people like these—people living in mud huts with straw roofs, using wooden plows to till the soil exactly as their ancestors did—were killed. Colonel John Warden, who planned the air campaign in Iraq, said that dropping any of these bombs I’ve mentioned “is like shooting skeet. Four hundred and ninety-nine out of five hundred pellets may miss the target, but that’s irrelevant.”60

So, who dies? I have seen pictures of the dead, dark-haired children laid out on mattresses, hands folded neatly above the last clothes they will ever wear by parents now standing looking downward, eyes red, in the background. The children’s faces are bloated, and red, too, though not from tears but instead from blood which never seems to finally wash away. The parents’ hands, too, are red where faint traces of their children’s blood remains.

It is not acceptable in the United States to talk about these dead children. The official United States and capitalist media have declared it so. The Chair of CNN, Walter Isaacson, ordered journalists who work for CNN not to focus on the killing of Afghan citizens by the U.S. military, because it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” He went on to admonish his reporters who cover civilian deaths that they should never forget that it is “that country’s leaders who are responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in,” perhaps forgetting that the same argument could just as easily be used to ignore the dead in this country. The head of standards [sic] for CNN, Rick Davis, followed up his boss’s memo with some suggested language for newscasters to repeat, for example, “We must keep in mind, after seeing reports like this from Taliban-controlled areas,