http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad.html?ref=global-home
WASHINGTON — The Web site WikiLeaks.org released a graphic video on Monday showing an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad.
Reuters had long pressed for the release of the video, which consists of 17 minutes of black-and-white aerial video and conversations between pilots in two Apache helicopters as they open fire on people on a street in Baghdad. The attack killed 12,among them the Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and the driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
At a news conference at the National Press Club, WikiLeaks said it had acquired the video from whistle-blowers in the military and was able to view it after breaking the encryption code.
David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters news, said in a statement that the video was “graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result.”
On the day of the attack, United States military officials in Baghdad said that the helicopters had been called in to help American troops who had been exposed to small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades during a raid. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad, said at the time.
But the video does not show hostile action. Instead, it begins with a group of people milling around on a street, among them, according to WikiLeaks, Mr. Noor-Eldeen and Mr. Chmagh. The pilots believe them to be insurgents, and mistake Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon. They aim and fire at the group, then revel in their kills.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” the other responds.
A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will try to fire at them so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says.
A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside. “Well, it’s their fault for bring their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.
At another point, an American armored vehicle arrives and appears to roll over one of the dead. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots says, chuckling a little.
Reuters said at the time that the two men had been working on a report about weightlifting when they heard about a military raid in the neighborhood, and decided to drive there to check it out.
“There had been reports of clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area but there was no fighting on the streets in which Namir was moving about with a group of men,” Reuters wrote in 2008. “It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture at the time.”
The American military in Baghdad investigated the episode and concluded that the forces involved had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group. No disciplinary action was taken.
Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.
The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.”
The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made ... And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”
And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.
I’d argue that Mr. Gingrich is wrong about that: proposals to guarantee health insurance are often controversial before they go into effect — Ronald Reagan famously argued that Medicare would mean the end of American freedom — but always popular once enacted.
But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead, I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)
And that cynicism has been the hallmark of the whole campaign against reform.
Yes, a few conservative policy intellectuals, after making a show of thinking hard about the issues, claimed to be disturbed by reform’s fiscal implications (but were strangely unmoved by the clean bill of fiscal health from the Congressional Budget Office) or to want stronger action on costs (even though this reform does more to tackle health care costs than any previous legislation). For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan — very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts — that Democrats were proposing.
Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.
It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.
And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”
Without question, the campaign of fear was effective: health reform went from being highly popular to wide disapproval, although the numbers have been improving lately. But the question was, would it actually be enough to block reform?
And the answer is no. The Democrats have done it. The House has passed the Senate version of health reform, and an improved version will be achieved through reconciliation.
This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.
The United States, a nation of 300 million, won nine gold medals this year in the Winter Olympics. Norway, a nation of 4.7 million, also won nine. This was no anomaly. Over the years, Norwegians have won more gold medals in Winter Games, and more Winter Olympics medals over all, than people from any other nation.
There must be many reasons for Norway’s excellence, but some of them are probably embedded in the story of Jan Baalsrud.
In 1943, Baalsrud was a young instrument maker who was asked to sneak back into Norway to help the anti-Nazi resistance.
His mission, described in the book “We Die Alone” by David Howarth, was betrayed. His boat was shelled by German troops. Baalsrud dove into the ice-covered waters and swam, with bullets flying around him, toward an island off the Norwegian coast. The rest of his party was killed on the spot, or captured and eventually executed, but Baalsrud made it to the beach and started climbing an icy mountain. He was chased by Nazis, and he killed one officer.
He was hunted by about 50 Germans and left a trail in the deep snow. He’d lost one boot and sock, and he was bleeding from where his big toe had been shot off. He scrambled across the island and swam successively across the icy sound to two other islands. On the second, he lay dying of cold and exhaustion on the beach.
Two girls found and led him to their home. And this is the core of the story. During the next months, dozens of Norwegians helped Baalsrud get across to Sweden. Flouting any sense of rational cost-benefit analysis, families and whole villages risked their lives to help one gravely ill man, who happened to drop into their midst.
Baalsrud was clothed and fed and rowed to another island. He showed up at other houses and was taken in. He began walking across the mountain ranges on that island in the general direction of the mainland, hikes of 24, 13 and 28 hours without break.
A 72-year-old man rowed him the final 10 miles to the mainland, past German positions, and gave him skis. Up in the mountains, he skied through severe winter storms. One night, he started an avalanche. He fell at least 300 feet, smashed his skis and suffered a severe concussion. His body was buried in snow, but his head was sticking out. He lost sense of time and self-possession. He was blind, the snow having scorched the retinas of his eyes.
He wandered aimlessly for four days, plagued by hallucinations. At one point he thought he had found a trail, but he was only following his own footsteps in a small circle.
Finally, he stumbled upon a cottage. A man named Marius Gronvold took him in. He treated Baalsrud’s frostbite and hid him in a remote shed across a lake to recover.
He was alone for a week (a storm made it impossible for anyone to reach him). Gangrene invaded his legs. He stabbed them to drain the pus and blood. His eyesight recovered, but the pain was excruciating and he was starving.
Baalsrud could no longer walk, so Gronvold and friends built a sled. They carried the sled and him up a 3,000-foot mountain in the middle of a winter storm and across a frozen plateau to where another party was supposed to meet them. The other men weren’t there, and Gronvold was compelled to leave Baalsrud in a hole in the ice under a boulder.
The other party missed the rendezvous because of a blizzard, and by the time they got there, days later, the tracks were covered and they could find no sign of him. A week later, Gronvold went up to retrieve Baalsrud’s body and was astonished to find him barely alive. Baalsrud spent the next 20 days in a sleeping bag immobilized in the snow, sporadically supplied by Gronvold and others.
Over the next weeks, groups of men tried to drag him to Sweden but were driven back, and they had to shelter him again in holes in the ice. Baalsrud cut off his remaining toes with a penknife to save his feet. Tired of risking more Norwegian lives, he also attempted suicide.
Finally, he was awoken by the sound of snorting reindeer. A group of Laps had arrived, and under German fire, they dragged him to Sweden.
This astonishing story could only take place in a country where people are skilled on skis and in winter conditions. But there also is an interesting form of social capital on display. It’s a mixture of softness and hardness. Baalsrud was kept alive thanks to a serial outpouring of love and nurturing. At the same time, he and his rescuers displayed an unbelievable level of hardheaded toughness and resilience. That’s a cultural cocktail bound to produce achievement in many spheres.
TOKYO — Over the past decades, Toyota has built a strong presence in the United States by serving its consumers well and doing what the U.S. government has wanted. Now, it has stumbled badly largely because its greatest strength — the Toyota Way of “accumulation of small improvements,” or “kaizen” philosophy — has turned out to be a weakness in the age of complex electronic engines.
There is every reason to believe Toyota will fix its technical and management problems. The question is whether it will dig a deeper hole by losing the air of trust and reputation for competence among customers it has spent so long building up. That would be bad for Toyota, and for America.
Most auto companies in the past, including Ford and G.M., have had recall problems like Toyota. They all seem to try to hide the early evidence of flaws, even if they affect safety. This goes back to the American consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s “unsafe at any speed” campaign in the U.S. in 1965 that involved the Chevrolet Corvair produced by G.M.
Today, however, with electronic programming of cars, many of the problems emerging — such as the braking system of the Prius — are of a new nature. They are judgmental engineering calls. If they can be corrected by readjusting the setting on recalled cars, then Toyota can handle that quickly.
But what we are seeing may be a more fundamental problem that has to do with the engine control unit as a whole. In an average Toyota, there are about 24,000 inputs and outputs, with as many as 70 computer chips processing information and sending it on to other chips to operate the engine control units. It is a very complex system.
Such complex systems are a problem these days for all auto manufacturers — Germans and Americans as well as Japanese — because about 60 percent of a modern automobile is electronics. Toyota is the canary in the cave, so to speak, since it is the world’s largest manufacturer of cars, with more than 50 plants across the globe outside of Japan. Toyota has been expanding so rapidly it has more models on the road than any other carmaker on earth.
What we see with Toyota in particular is that this new electronic complexity has overwhelmed its famous concept of kaizen — “the accumulation of small improvements” — that has made Toyota such a quality brand worldwide. The company has so perfected the practice of kaizen from the bottom up at the assembly line that it has lost the big picture of how the whole electronic engine — and thus overall safety — works.
This is a limitation of the kaizen philosophy, which has helped Japan become the headquarters of quality manufacturing. If Toyota does not recognize this and tries to chalk all its problems up to floor mats touching the accelerator, or resetting a computer, it will miss the real issue. Where Toyota has failed is that rather than review the overall safety of the engine operating unit, it has focused instead on diagnosing the function of many thousands of pieces of an electronic engine.
What the company is missing is the human factor — a single person who has a comprehensive understanding of the details of the engine and how the parts interact and work as a whole.
In the old days, one chief engineer used to design everything. This was true with ships and airplanes as well as nuclear reactors. Now, design and production is broken down into so many details that there is no one in the current generation of Toyota engineers who seems to have the whole picture. A 45-year-old engineer at Toyota today would have spent the last 25 years working on “the accumulation of small improvements.”
What this suggests is that Toyota has to come up with a new organizational ethos beyond kaizen that can oversee the crucial safety features that may have been compromised by so much incremental improvement over the years. This is a philosophical problem of management, not a technical issue. A new system of “man and machine interface” needs to supplement the kaizen philosophy — in other words, one that perfects the big picture of engine control safety instead of just the small picture of components.
I believe Toyota can meet this challenge. The challenge I fear it will fail to meet is the psychological one, enveloped as the company’s leaders seem to be in a sense of panic at being attacked politically and in the press in their most lucrative market, the United States. There is such a clash between aggressive American political and media culture and reserved Japanese ways.
As America brings Toyota to account on safety, it must also put the company in the right perspective. Toyota has also always done what the American market and politicians demanded without losing quality or productivity. The U.S. asked Toyota to come to the U.S. to produce cars instead of export them from Japan, and use up to 50 percent local content.
Today, 2.5 million cars are produced annually in the U.S. at several plants; this has created many jobs. Toyota’s annual spending on parts, goods and services from hundreds of U.S. suppliers totals more than $22 billion.
Ninety-five Japanese component companies were transplanted from Japan to supply Toyota through its “just in time” manufacturing process, building up a component supply network along the Mississippi Valley that didn’t exist before.
Toyota is in the hot seat. But everyone should understand that the issue at hand is the tradeoff between complexity and safety in an age in which electronics and computers dominate the vehicles we all use on a daily basis.
HONG KONG — It must count as one of the more bizarre bits of diplomacy in recent times. Last week, on the eve of a visit by Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia threatened to take Japan to the International Court of Justice if it did not stop whaling in the Southern Ocean, the part of the Indian Ocean south of Australia.
One may dismiss this as a politician’s gesture aimed at a domestic audience that has taken to emotional “save the whales” campaigns. Though whale oil and bone had once been Australia’s biggest export, the nation had no tradition of eating whale meat, and a shortage of whales caused the closure of its last whaling station in 1978.
But such outbursts in favor of one member of the mammal kingdom by a major exporter of red meat is likely to do more damage to Australia’s image than to Japan’s. Most of Australia’s Asian neighbors — other than Japan — may not care much one way or the other about whaling. But the tone of moral superiority adopted by Australia — its apparent belief that it is the guardian of the Southern Ocean from Asian depredation — grates on many Asians who also resent environment lessons from a top carbon polluter.
From an Australian perspective it may seem reasonable that the largest, most advanced country in the Southern Ocean should assume some responsibility for it. But such assumptions of its rights and duties in international waters can easily keep alive lingering Asian resentments of Western colonialism — European expansionism that gave a small new nation with a population only a little bigger than Shanghai control over a vast, mineral rich landmass. Does Australia want to control the ocean too, some ask?
There may be scientific arguments about whether Japan’s harvesting of several hundred whales per year is endangering the stock in the Southern Ocean. But Australia’s “crusade” seems more couched in emotional than scientific terms. We see this also in the heroic status accorded the Australian and New Zealand campaigners who have harassed Japan’s whaling vessels.
Japan may be pushing the limits of the “scientific research” allowed by the International Whaling Commission in the “whale sanctuary” it declared in the Southern Ocean. But at least Japan still belongs to that body. Norway always refused to accept I.W.C. restrictions. Iceland walked out of the I.W.C. in 1992 (it returned in 2002 but largely on its own terms). Canada left earlier and has not returned.
Meanwhile, other countries with whaling traditions turn a blind eye to the organization. For example, whale hunting is illegal in South Korea but the meat of whales caught in nets or killed accidentally is sold freely. There is pressure to make hunting legal again. Other countries, including Russia and Denmark, allow it for “traditional” communities, which take hundreds of whales a year.
Even making allowances for all the unofficial catch it is still small compared with the numbers killed by ship collisions and nets.
In short, though the world needs properly regulated management of the oceans, Mr. Rudd’s antics discourage whaling countries from cooperating with the I.W.C. and make others reluctant to accept controls on fishing in international waters to stabilize rapidly depleting fish stocks.
Harpooning whales may be cruel and does excite emotions even among those who regularly eat red meat. But Australia is in scant position to complain when it shoots upward of 3 million wild kangaroos a year to protect crops and grazing for sheep and cattle. It recently announced a mass shooting of troublesome wild camels.
The kangaroo and camel culls may be justified. But local emotions are confused. Shooting kangaroos by licensed hunters has long been common in Australia’s outback. But a plan for a culling of the national symbol near the national capital raised a storm of protest to “save Skippy” (the pet kangaroo in a famous children’s TV program).
There is of course nothing unusual in battles between the heart and the head when it comes to attitudes to animals. For example, there is emotion, not reason, behind those in the West who are horrified with the consumption of dog in the East. In fact, there is no reason to treat whales differently from horses, which are still a table meat in some European countries.
Australia’s elevation of its selective emotion into a diplomatic feud with its major Asian ally is nothing short of ridiculous.
