This week’s readings, particularly Asmat Khan’s series, had me deeply thinking about what it means to be an American citizen. About ‘we’s and ‘they’s – how we think about Americas greatest feats as a operation by us, we, and how when the government is killing countless Afghans and continuing to pretend if its attacks are precise, calculated or vaguely meaningful, it is something ‘they’ are doing. Khan mentions confirmation bias as he describes how senseless violence is enacted by the American armed forces, “‘Men on motorcycles moving “in formation,” displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles,” Khan writes. People see what they want to see. They act on what they decide they’ve seen. The blood spilled is, however unfortunate, unavoidable collateral damage. We fall victim to this confirmation bias time and again – HW Bush in Iraq, the armed forces in Afghanistan, and the American public looking at it all. History belongs to the victors, but reality belongs to what you decide you want to see. In real time, the aggressions enacted by America against innocent Afghan civilians is not only brutal, but careless. A detail that particularly struck me was that American armed forces are so ignorant to local cultural practices, such as families sleeping in during the month of Ramadan or staying in to avoid the heat, that they would declare areas free of civilians and ready to attack without checking if anyone was inside the homes. What is the explanation for this carelessness, after years of being stationed in this country? Because they are in the name of “protecting America” and because the slain children are not “ours,” the public buys that these civilian death couldn’t be helped.
Another example – they bombed bakeries, schools, civilan hospitals because they allege that ISIS uses these sites actively since they are traditionally protected by the laws of war. When surveillence drones miss children in the hospital at nights, miss neighbors huddling together to protect themselves from the bombs, when the bombs go off – we can shrug and look away. “It was necessary” – we buy into the confirmation bias that this is warranted. We can look at the numbers of the innocent dead and not find it evil because we decided we are fighting evil, not being it. In an age in which we are bombarded by tragedy and death and deeply desensitized, we are hardly bothered by deaths of those who aren’t our own. And if we are bothered, we do not want to think of our country – the great leader of the free world – as capable of inflicting such harm. This was the great war on “terror” – who is to say that what Khan captures here isn’t terror? Is it a journalists place to say? If a journalist says it, will they be believed? In an age where people get to self curate their news and dismiss what they don’t want to see as fake news, the ultimate breeding ground for confirmation bias amongst the masses, how can journalists contribute to real accountability?
