196: Rashomon

Larry Keeley

So he's asking me if I knew any of the details. And I said, no. And he started to tell me the gory details about the analysis of that bombing. And of course, what they use are people who go in afterwards and do forensic analysis of a calamity.

And what was fascinating about the forensic analysis is that the forensic teams didn't quite agree. Some said the bombs were placed 12 centimeters away from where they would have needed to be to destroy the major support column in the North Tower. Others said, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. The bombs were four centimeters away from where they needed to be to destroy that column.

Larry Keeley

And it turns out that one of the guys I'm lunching with is a major general, George Close, a brilliant guy. And he turns out to be hand-picked by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to think through something called the revolution in military affairs.

When I got a little bit of explanation about this revolution in military affairs, they said, we're in the middle of one. And I said, OK. And they said, they don't happen very often, we think there's been maybe 12 of them in history. What that means is that everything that is normal and the way we engage, fight a conflict, and win it will go through a change.

So one of the early historic examples was the invention of gunpowder. And you think about the world of gladiator, and you see the kind of conflict that gun powder transformed forever. People that are rushing up to the enemy with their horses, wearing 300 pounds of armor and rushing up to the enemy and whacking him with something sharp. That was the nature of battle in those days.

Well gun powder comes along, cannons get cheap, they put them on wheels, they can haul them to the enemy's fortress. That's a revolution in military affairs.

And I'm sitting there listening to this and they've happened so seldom in the history of the world. Every time a revolution in military affairs has occurred in history, the party in power at the beginning has not been in power at the end. And they got a lot of historians at the Pentagon. And those historians had convinced the senior generals that we were in the midst of a revolution in military affairs with these basic principles.

Larry Keeley

One of the things we have is money, material in spades. To challenge elite forces to be able to overcome a vastly superior enemy, with next to nothing. That is just completely the opposite of the way we think. And it's logical that we wouldn't think that way. Because we start with the presumption that we're the mightiest, and the biggest, with the greatest technologies.

Larry Keeley

I don't know if they have to become them, but they have to be able to think like them.

Rawah

This is the 12 o'clock news.

Rawah

This report is saying that Israel is taking advantage of all the media turning to America and reporting what's happening. And they are bombing more homes and killing more Palestinians in Palestine.

Rawah

The only channel I don't see these things on is the American channels. I have the Syrian, the Lebanese, the Dubai channels, the Kuwait, the Saudi Arabia, the Iraq. So if all of these channels are bringing it, I'm sure it's not a lie. It's been confirmed on many channels.

Rawah

This is a Powerpoint slideshow. I have gotten the email, first in September, where the Israelis would start attacking the Palestinians. This is a picture of a boy in a hospital. This is a boy who was shot in the head.

Ali Abunimah

I think there's an issue of power here. When you have an overwhelmingly powerful force like Israel and people who have lived under occupation-- people whose entire life is controlled by the whim of this power, whether you can get up in the morning, go to work, is up to the mood of the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint. Whether your house will be demolished is up to the Israelis. Whether you're allowed in or out of the country is up to the Israelis. Whether you're allowed to go from this village to that village is up to the Israelis. Everything is up to the Israelis.

So people experience the Israelis as a powerful, overwhelmingly powerful, force. And in fact, the Israelis have always tried to inculcate that in people, the myth of invincibility, the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, that it has this omnipotence. Which a lot of people believe, especially when they're in a much weaker position. You know, you might believe a lot of things.

Ali Abunimah

It's so different from the experience of Palestinians, who are often brutally and forcibly expelled. And people say, look how Israel got away with doing this to us and getting the world to believe something different. And if they can do that in that most fundamental instance, then what can't they do?

Ali Abunimah

Consider the fact that no foreign journalists covering Israel, Palestine, live in the occupied territories. I think there's one, I think the Economist's correspondent lives in Gaza, or at least used to.

So what happens, is that when a reporter goes there, they become, functionally speaking, an Israeli. You know, they live amongst Israelis. The children go to Israeli schools. They wake up in the morning, they go and get their cup of coffee, they're surrounded by Israelis. And so their fears become those of Israelis.

I remember an NPR reporter being interviewed about how she copes with the fear of suicide bombings.

And she said, well I and my friends, you know, we go out a bit less. She was speaking in the first person. So there's no reporter who can speak in the first person as to what it's like to be a Palestinian.

So there's an issue of perspective. It's not that there's conscious bias. But if you're living in one place that's totally different, that's like a first world environment, as West Jerusalem is, you're going to have a very different perspective.

Rawah

OK. Right now it's 8:05. And as soon as I got home, my mom told me that on the Arabic satellite they brought that about 4,000 Israeli people that are employed in the World Trade Center did not go to work on Tuesday. And Ariel Sharon was supposed to be in a meeting in New York on Tuesday, but he canceled it.

Also, there were Jews, photographers, on top of the building, a few buildings. They were getting ready to take pictures. So the assumption now is that the Jews are the ones who did it.

Rawah

Till now, no Israeli name has been mentioned of one of the victims. No Jews, nobody has been reported that they were hurt.

Rawah

There aren't?

Rawah

There are? That were killed in that building?

Rawah

Well, how about the employees that did not go to work that day?

Rawah

I see what you're saying. And I don't know who did it, exactly, and no one knows yet. Because no one in the world, yet, have any real evidence of who attacked the World Trade Center.

Ali Abunimah

You know, one of the first feelings I had, and many others, is please God don't let this be someone from the Middle East. We don't want it to be, we disown, we renounce this act. This is a horrific atrocity, a crime against humanity was committed in New York.

So saying it's a Zionist conspiracy is a way to dissociate yourself from it completely. You know, if people supported it, they'd be saying, yay, you know, strike one for the Muslims. No one is saying that. They're all looking for a way out.

Rawah

Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this Halloween you have kids and people dressed as Osama bin Laden. Strongly believe so.

I went to Dominick's the other day and I was shopping and I see all these Pumpkins and costumes. And there's the first thing that came into my mind. Because Americans now are afraid of something called Osama bin Laden. Or something that is called Mohammed or Islam or Arabs.

Issam Shukri

Me and my wife used to work in two different rooms in the same sort of building. And she always listened to Kuwaiti station, the national Kuwaiti station, because it has some more fun songs and mixture of songs, and stuff like that.

But anyway, so she was trying to find that station, but she couldn't. She said, Issam, it seems there's something wrong with the radio, I can't find that station.

So I start to flip through the stations. And I put it on our Baghdad station, and, boy, I started to hear the marches and the military music.

Issam Shukri

Yes. That was the government's sort of announcement, in music, to times of trouble. We sense it when we, for instance, hear emotional love songs, we think that the regime is taking a break a little bit.

So at the time, we heard that and instantly we knew that there was a military or some kind of problem.

I heard about the invasion by dashing out into the street, and saying, what happened? And people, in a lower voice, well Saddam invaded Kuwait. And he's calling people to go and fight over there in the front.

And I said, I sort of struck my head and I said, not again.

Issam Shukri

Yes, I served three years, actually.

Issam Shukri

Well, I don't know. Ira, it's the most individualist, as well as a collective, miserable experience that you will ever have. Because you are facing, actually, not one enemy. You are facing two enemies-- one in your back, and one in your face. And when you turn to run away, you see the back enemy trying to shoot you. That is the government of Iraq, right.

I couldn't picture myself putting on the same uniform and fighting for a regime, a bloody regime, again. So that was my feeling.

And the next day I had to go to that military center and join the forces. But as I was an architect, I was actually allocated to the back of the front, and inside the city of Baghdad.

Issam Shukri

I was, actually. But some of my classmates, they were sent out to the front. And some of them faced their deaths there, they were killed.

Issam Shukri

Ira, 100%, 100%, I will tell you.

Issam Shukri

Right. Actually, Ira, at the time we were waiting because James Baker, at the time, warned Iraq that, we are going to put you back in the Middle Ages. And everybody knew about that, but nobody believed it.

Issam Shukri

Yes. Yes, we didn't believe that it's going to happen. It's over 100 countries are gathering their forces with an unprecedented show of force in the human history, against 22 million people. We couldn't believe that this could be something true. I couldn't believe that the representative of the most so-called civilized country would utter such nonsense. Forgive me for that.

Issam Shukri

Yeah, I was in my home with my wife and my three-year-old son. And I was renovating my house. I was like two years, three years married to my wife.

And I was sort of dividing my family home into two little homes. One is for my sister and one is for my family. And as a show of, you know, emotional support, we all slept-- we had mattresses on the floor in my living room, which had doors open because I was renovating at the time. You know, I've brought a lot of paint to paint my living room.

So anyway, we slept, and that night, the night of the 17th of January, in my living room, and we sort of kissed each other and we fell asleep. And exactly at 2 A.M. we all woke up and the ground was shaking violently. And it was like a deep, deep, sort of echo happening, coming down from the ground. And the streetlights were on at the time, and in five minutes, all the lights were out.

And we, at that minute, we were certain that this is the war and we're back again. We're facing death all over again.

I, personally, Ira, I'm not ashamed of this-- I started to shake. My hands couldn't hold anything. I grabbed my--

Issam Shukri

I grabbed my little kid. And he was crying, he didn't know what was happening. I remember my son, when he heard the B-52 over his head. I put my hand on his heart and I felt his heart bumping like crazy.

And ironically, I went to the wash the next five, six times in five minutes. You know, when you have this kind of stress, I needed go to the wash room. As mundane as this is, but I need to tell the Americans about it.

The fear is very, very frightening when you're expecting your death. It's much more frightening that when it happens suddenly, if you're asleep, or if you're embarking on your work, or whatever. But when you're expected minute by minute, second by second sometimes, it gets like a torture. So we were literally tortured.

And we started to wander with the streets. I looked around in my neighborhood. And, by the way, our neighborhood looks pretty much like any American or Canadian neighborhood. You know, row houses or individual homes, with the front yards very nicely done. You know, people that has the same qualities of life. The difference is that they live in constant fear.

Issam Shukri

Right. Well actually, I was very worried about this guy, because he was very young. And you know when fear, when you start your life by experiencing fear and bombing, it would leave scars in your soul for the rest of your life. And I think he's fine now.

But he kept asking me, why are they doing this to us? What have we done?

And I couldn't find the right answer because he was very young at the time. I couldn't go into deep political analysis of what's going on. But I told him, there is a bad guy who did something wrong. And there are some judges of the world who wanted to take the law by their hand, and then they come and punish him. And then I stop for one second, and say, but they are punishing us. But we are scared, he's not scared.

Issam Shukri

Well, Ira, I didn't try to justify what the American forces were doing. To tell you the truth, I'm not going to polish my words. I told him that, you know, after days and days of bombing I at first told him that, well there are some judges who are going to catch this man. And, you know, he's an outlaw, they're going to put him in jail. I try to make things like a story to his age.

And then after that I start to feel frustrated, myself, because I see people slaughtered in front of my eyes. And Saddam comes out in the screens, laughing with his ugly face. So I started to tell him, well, those judges are sometimes more severe and sometimes they hit hard that the people themselves will suffer some injuries. But, again, that's OK. Probably in the end, they will catch him.

But it never happened. And now he knows that it's not going to happen, neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan, nor in anywhere in the world.

Issam Shukri

To tell you the truth, I hoped for that. But I felt deep, deep in heart that they're not going to catch this person. I've always doubted that. And not only me, all the people in Iraq doubted that. Because there is always history that tells you lessons.

And there is the fresh memory when Saddam used the chemical weapons against Halabja-- which is a northern, very, very peaceful city-- in 1988, and killed 5,000 people in two hours. Nobody in the West raised a finger. Nobody called him a terrorist, nobody called him a tyrant.

But when he touched a state that is a strong ally to the West, a state that is very rich in oil. So we didn't have really trust to the West. It's a feeling that those people do not care about other nations. They can bomb any city, any minute, any time, without warning.

Issam Shukri

I didn't like the United States. As a government, as a military force-- not the people. I saw cruise missiles falling on buildings that are exactly-- unfortunately, I would say that it looked exactly to me like the World Trade Center. I mean, when I saw the World Trade Center, those airplanes crashing into it, the first thing jumped into my head was when I saw one of the buildings-- I was driving from one part of the city to the other-- and I saw one of these building hit by a cruise missile. But some of these buildings where inhabited by civilians.

So, I do not hate, I don't like to use this word, but I was mad, I was angry at the United States government. Because it uses a lot of force, inhuman force, to punish very poor people.

Issam Shukri

Oh, in that respect, we hated Saddam. I would definitely use that word.

Mark Bowden

And they had been spotted speaking at a rally in Mogadishu earlier that morning, and had been observed by spies on the ground and in the air traveling to a house in the center of Mogadishu, in an area called the Bakara Market.

And so General William F. Garrison, who was the leader of Task Force Ranger, authorized a raid which was to swoop in very quickly on this house and arrest these two guys and anyone who was with them, and bring them back to the base.

Mark Bowden

No. The mission was envisioned as taking about 30 minutes-- or basically 30 minutes on the ground and maybe another 30 minutes to convoy the prisoners out of the city.

Mark Bowden

In the end, the battle lasted about 15 hours, through a long night and into early the next day. Eighteen American soldiers were killed. It was the most significant firefight that American soldiers have been involved with since the war in Vietnam.

The way the raid was set up, the Delta Force operators would hit the ground first. They ride on benches on the outside of these little helicopters-- AH-6s, they call them Little Birds-- and are literally put right down in front of the house. They land right on the street. So the Delta Force operators were inserted in that way.

And then the bigger Blackhawk helicopters come in. The Blackhawks are too big to land on the street. So they hover overhead, and the Rangers rope down to each of the four corners of the block where this operation was taking place.

Mark Bowden

Well as the Rangers roped into the four corners, one of the young rangers, a fellow named Todd Blackburn, actually missed the rope and fell 70 feet from the helicopter to the street. You know, this was the most serious injury that any of these units had sustained since they'd come a month before. And it caused certainly a great deal of alarm within his little Ranger unit there.

And it set in motion a chain of events that kind of just slowed the whole process down. Not a lot, but a little.

Mark Bowden

Well, initially, as the men descended the ropes to the street, they could see almost nothing. Because the helicopters, the Blackhawks are so powerful, they kicked up huge clouds of dust. So they're roping down in a dust storm, so they can't really even see much past their nose. And they're hearing, for the first time, pretty heavy fire. Learning the sound of bullets that pass very closely make a loud, cracking noise, like a piece of hickory being snapped.

Mark Bowden

That's what they tell me. I've never, fortunately, been in a situation where people have been shooting at me. But there's sort of a whooshing sound that you hear if the bullet passes somewhere in your vicinity. But if it's close enough to you, you hear what's essentially a little sonic boom as the round goes past you. And, of course, they say the one that hits you, you never hear.

Mark Bowden

That's right. These are very young soldiers, they're well-trained, and very cocky, and very capable. But they had never been exposed to fire like this. And they had never seen the guys next to them suddenly start to drop.

Matt Eversmann, who was put in charge of this mission for the first time, one by one the men in his unit scattered around the street where they'd just landed are beginning to sustain injuries.

Mark Bowden

They get shot, right. One of them gets his thumb shot off, another gets shot in the shoulder-- he just starts seeing his men go down. So this was a very, very dangerous place to go.

The rules of engagement were that the men, the American soldiers, were not allowed to shoot at someone unless they were pointing their weapons at them. And so the Somalis knew the rules of engagement. So they mingled in with the angry crowds, who were not armed, so that they could fire at the Rangers without the Rangers being able to shoot back at them.

There was literally a scene where one of the Rangers was confronted with a Somali gunman who was laying on the ground. And he had children sitting on top of him. And I think he had a woman standing right in front of him. He had basically surrounded himself with non-competents so that he could lay there and shoot at the Rangers without being shot at himself. And actually what the Rangers in the situation did, was lay down a line of fire right in front of this man-- the children and the women fled very quickly, and then they shot the gunman.

But eventually, they were under so much fire that the rules of engagement were just dropped. Because they realized that they had to shoot back. If they didn't, they weren't going to survive. So some of these young men were in the position of having to shoot at crowds of people in order to avoid being killed, themselves.

Mark Bowden

Well they proceeded to evacuate Todd Blackburn. The Rangers fanned out and formed the perimeter like they were supposed to. They began coming under more and more fire as the minutes went by. The Delta Operators arrested the people they were looking for. They found them and handcuffed them and were leading them out of the building, when one of the Blackhawk helicopters that was still circling overhead, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and crashed about four blocks away.

[RADIO]

Mark Bowden

All of the men involved in this mission are communicating with themselves by radio. All of these conversations were tape recorded. One of the things that I found remarkable about listening to the audio tape is that you can hear the intensity of that moment. When that Blackhawk helicopter crashes, you hear men shouting into the radio, we've got a Blackhawk down. And you can hear the panic, almost, in their voices.

[RADIO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN BLACKHAWK AND BASE]

Mark Bowden

To them, if you're on the ground in a city with literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of people surrounding you and shooting at you, your faith in getting out of there alive rests largely on those helicopters overhead. They are symbols for you of the fact that you're there representing the most powerful military force in the world.

When the Blackhawk was shot down, that was the defining moment of this episode. The idea was to insert the men, take the prisoners, load them on vehicles, and drive them out of the city, and everyone would come back and have a barbecue. But once that Blackhawk went down, everything changed. Because now they had men down on the ground, either dead, wounded or fighting for their lives, and they had to try to rescue those men who had just crashed.

[RADIO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN BLACKHAWK AND BASE]

Mark Bowden

Right. Well this became one of the major phases of the battle, and certainly the bloodiest phase. Once the Blackhawk was shot down, the orders were for the convoy to load up the prisoners and then drive to the neighborhood where the Blackhawk had crashed. And the idea was then to rescue the men who had been aboard the helicopter and then drive out of the city.

But the problem was that the streets of Mogadishu are like a maze. And at this point, there are Somalis setting up burning barricades, and organizing ambushes at intersections. So as the convoy began to try to make its way to the downed Blackhawk, it got lost.

[RADIO]

Mark Bowden

It became a tragic comedy of errors with the pilots in the helicopters overhead. And there was a Navy plane, a P-3 Orion, flying high overhead, all of them trying to give directions to this convoy. But because of the, in some cases, the relay system of communicating to them, the people in the vehicles would get the instructions too late to take advantage of them.

So for instance, someone high overhead would say take a left. And by the time that communicated to Danny McKnight in the lead vehicle, they'd already passed the point where they were supposed to take a left.

[RADIO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN BLACKHAWK AND BASE]

Mark Bowden

The men in the vehicles in the rear of the convoy didn't even know what was going on. A lot of them still thought they were driving out of the city because no one had communicated to everybody down the line exactly where it was they were going and what they were trying to do. So you have these men holed up in these vehicles, one by one getting injured or killed, and not knowing where they were going, why they were making the turns they were making.

Mark Bowden

Right. The convoy was made up of two five ton trucks, flatbed trucks, with the prisoners in the back, and, I believe, six Humvees. And they discovered that rounds could go right through the skin of the Humvee.

For instance, one of the Humvees took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade, which penetrated through the side and exploded in the back, blowing the men who were in the back of the Humvee out the rear of the vehicle, out onto the street. A couple of those men were killed, two or three others were severely injured.

Whenever anything like that would happen, the convoy would stop, the men would all have to pile out. They would try to rescue the men who were injured, get them back on the vehicles, start up again. Every time they would stop, they would come under heavy fire. Until finally, more than half of the men on that convoy were either dead or injured.

Mark Bowden

Yeah. And it just shows you how chaotic the situation was on the street. There was this feeling expressed by one of the Air Force combat controllers who was in one of the lead vehicles, his name is Dan Schilling-- he couldn't understand what was going on, and he just believed they were going to keep driving around until they were all dead.

Mark Bowden

No, it's exactly the right word.

Mark Bowden

I mean, the Rangers said that they felt like it was kill an American day in Mogadishu. There was so much anger and hostility toward these American troops, that it virtually was true. That they were trapped in a city where everyone in the city, it seemed, was trying to kill them. And this is not just a normal city, this is the most heavily-armed population, probably in the world. And so they were under intensive fire from 360 degrees.

Mark Bowden

I think that they probably were aware that there was hostility against them, but they couldn't have imagined the intensity of it.

You have to remember, these are the best-trained soldiers in the world. They have the best equipment, they have these helicopters, which are absolute marvels of military technology, to support them. So they had, I think, a really cocky attitude. The idea that they would find themselves so outnumbered, and outgunned, and at a disadvantage, in a place like Mogadishu where they viewed the people they were fighting against as just a ragtag bunch of irregulars who wouldn't know how to put together an assault if their life depended on it-- now, though, they found themselves in, really, a predicament from which a lot of them had no reason to expect that they were going to get out alive.

Mark Bowden

Well, in fact involving the same units and in some cases the same men.

Mark Bowden

You know, what I hope the book Blackhawk Down does is sober people up to the reality of combat. And I'm not arguing, and I don't think the book argues, makes a pacifist argument, that we shouldn't be using military force. I think we're clearly in a position right now where will the moral obligation is to use military force.

The problem with the Battle of Mogadishu was, that none of the civilian leadership in the United States, from the President to the Congress, had imagined that these raids could turn out with so many people killed and injured. So their response, when this happened, was one of horror, that this was a disaster.

And so immediately, President Clinton called off the military mission in Mogadishu. But from a military perspective, the military objective was to capture Hasan Awale and Omar Salad. They were both captured and evacuated from the city and were in custody at the end of the day. And I think it was galling to the military, particularly to the men who took part in this, to have this mission viewed as a debacle. Because they felt that they've been successful, and they felt that after so much sacrifice, their strong desire was to stay and finish the mission, if only to honor the memory of the men who had been killed accomplishing it.

Mark Bowden

Well, much to my amazement, I don't think that the Army seriously studied this episode at all, this battle at all. It just boggles my mind, when you consider that this is probably the only instance of serious, real world fighting that American soldiers have had to do, certainly since the Persian Gulf War. And there was nothing like this even in the Persian Gulf War.

And you would think, just from a standpoint of evaluating the effectiveness of weaponry, of armor, and tactics, that they would want to examine very carefully what happened here. You know, I found myself in the position when I began working on this book, of being the first person who had attempted to really examine exactly what happened in detail.

Issam Shukri

The marches, and the military music.