I thought that Azmat Khan’s two-part series was a remarkable effort of reporting — I’d previously read it for an OSINT class, but I’d forgotten just how long she spent doing a combination of document analysis and on-the-ground reporting (and even obtaining the documents was extraordinarily difficult and something that would be completely out of reach of most people, even though FOIA is supposed to be a tool for citizens to hold the U.S. government accountable and transparent). I think Khan’s reporting on the chat logs accompanying military assessments of strikes in the air wars was particularly interesting, as it demonstrated how soldiers, many of whom are presumably young, could treat the taking of human lives as a video game. It reminded me of reports a couple years ago that the U.S. military was using video games to market the armed forces to teens — there’s a pattern here of the gamification of war, as well as interesting signs of the layers of detachment that technology facilitates. In a similar vein, I thought it was interesting how Khan framed the aerial approach (vs. a boots-on-the-ground approach) as a decision that resulted in less public opposition and less scrutiny from journalists. A country may only have incentives to be accountable for mistakes when the bodies of their own citizens are at stake. Finally on these pieces, I thought it was terrifying, though unsurprising, that the military seemed to have no plans for self-correction or review throughout the course of the campaign.
The Euronews article about German officials deporting people who they said had criminal records was also interesting. I think the difference in the treatment of migrants vs. native populations when it comes to crimes is worth examining further. The native population can be fined or imprisoned (and often the aim is, at least nominally, rehabilitation), whereas with migrant populations, there doesn’t even seem to be a pretense of trying to integrate people into that country’s society — instead, governments often would rather foist that problem onto another country, a displacement that creates brand new cycles of instability and violence.
I thought from the readings it was generally shocking how haphazard some of the government decisions are. There seems to be a really wide margin of error acceptable to immigration authorities, which is quite alarming considering the scope of the lives at stake, as evidenced in the Reuters piece about Afghan refugees in Pakistan. I was particularly struck by a quote in the piece from a legal advisor who characterized the decision-making process as “simply about luck, good or bad.” Still, when governments cannot be counted upon, unexpected private individuals step up, like Martens in the piece in The Times. That he was “nuanced but conservative” on migration did not stop him from offering sanctuary to refugees. Still, individual efforts to make change in some way are unlikely to supplement real governmental policy, I think, pointing to a significant lapse in governance.
