Anyone who saw last night's Channel 4 news could not have been anything other than disturbed by the long report on the US Army's operations in the 'Sunni Triangle'.
If you take the report at face value, then one incident in particular was upsetting to watch. The treatment of the man in brown who "was found loitering near what was believed to be the mortar launch site". It's never pleasant to watch someone getting beaten or humiliated. It's even worse when that person is not guilty of anything, which was definitely implied by the reporter (Martin Sadler is his name, I think).
The words and manner of Captain Pfuetze also bothered me. He came across as arrogant, unconcerned about the Iraqi people and determined to seem macho.
But, there was something else about his manner that got under my skin. It was the fact that I couldn't shake the feeling that he was hamming it up for the camera. It was as if he knew the media were not on his side and he was determined to give them the caricature he figured they wanted.
After the report, Jon Snow was speaking with British Major General Cordingly. Snow pointed out that the soldiers knew that a camera was running and that they were willing to be filmed behaving like this. Yet, Snow didn't seem to consider that the camera might change the way soldiers behave? Do they want to be filmed and seen as 'tough guys'?
Obviously, the editing is also open to questioning. The reporter said he spent 10 days in the company of Charlie Company. Yet, we've only seen a 12 minute clip of those 10 days (the video report is available). Was what we saw representative of the Army's mission during those 10 days? We saw a lot of terrified people in homes the Army was raiding, but we never found out if the subjects of the raids were terrifying the local population.
So I ended up feeling disturbed by the image of the US Army and disturbed by the questions I had that the report didn't answer.
On a related note, General Cordingly did offer the view that the US soldiers were not trained to do peace-keeping, something that I referred to here. Again, I don't know how true or not this is, but it does worry me.
