With the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, the Islamic State has gone beyond turning slasher movies into reality shows with its beheadings to pushing the envelope of torture porn. But as, at Glenn Greenwald reminds us at the Intercept, it’s not the only armed force in recent times to use immolation as a weapon. In fact, in the tradition of its use of napalm in the Vietnam War, the United States rains hellfire down on suspected terrorists, in the form of Hellfire missiles launched from drones, which gives new life to the cliché “burnt to a crisp.”
Greenwald quotes from a report that reveals the mercilessness of these missiles.
The new [AGM-114N Thermobaric Hellfire] warhead contains a fluorinated aluminum powder layered between the warhead casing and the PBXN-112 explosive fill. When the PBXN-112 detonates, the aluminum mixture is dispersed and rapidly burns.
Furthermore, during the Iraq War, the United States employed white phosphorus. Greenwald quotes from another report.
… published in the Washington Post, gave an idea of the sorts of injuries that WP causes. It said insurgents “reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns”. A physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents “were burned, and some corpses were melted.”
Why doesn’t U.S. use of burning generate as much outrage as the Islamic State’s? Besides that it’s us, that is. Greenwald writes:
One could plausibly maintain that there is a different moral calculus involved in (a) burning a helpless captive to death as opposed to (b) recklessly or even deliberately burning civilians to death in areas that one is bombing with weapons purposely designed to incinerate human beings, often with the maximum possible pain. That’s the moral principle that makes torture specially heinous: sadistically inflicting pain and suffering on a helpless detainee is a unique form of barbarity.
Beyond that, though:
Unlike ISIS, the U.S. usually (though not always) tries to suppress (rather than gleefully publish) evidence showing the victims of its violence. Indeed, concealing stories about the victims of American militarism is a critical part of the U.S. government’s strategy for maintaining support for its sustained aggression. That is why, in general, the U.S. media has a policy of systematically excluding and ignoring such victims (although disappearing them this way does not actually render them nonexistent).
Apparently, if you crow about it, one incineration at a time is worse than several or dozens from a missile or chemical. After all, decorum must be obtained at all times.
Also, it behooves us to remember that the United States invented the greatest incendiary device in history ― the nuclear bomb.