THE KILL TEAM EXPLAINS HOW SOME AMERICAN WAR CRIMES HAVE OCCURRED
Patriotic Americans volunteer to serve in the army of the United States only to learn that the they are sometimes at the mercy of their commanding officers more than in jeopardy because of an enemy. In The Kill Team, a documentary directed by cinematographer Dan Krauss, recruits in Afghanistan are told that their mission is to kill people. Rather than having a script, the film mostly pulls together assorted interviews with the apparent aim of showing the stresses of combat, parental grief, and the absurdity of American military justice. Never interviewed, a Sergeant Gibbs is identified as someone who understands the mission to be to order his subordinates to shoot unarmed Afghan civilians, drop weapons on them, and then take photographs of the scene, so that their deaths can be justified as self-defense in combat. If a young Private objects to such a war crime, then he is charged with the crime and must confess to a lesser sentence in order to avoid life in prison. The film interviews some of those caught in the trap, while their army buddies side with Gibbs to avoid the same fate. Unfortunately, the focus is not on the fact that the military indeed is engaging in war crimes (a term not used) and not on the fact that such practices have delegitimized the role of the United States in the eyes of Afghans, thereby serving to bolster the prestige of the Taliban as the only local force fighting for ordinary people. The message of the documentary is thereby politically castrated (as was Frank Lafferty, who was forced to retract his charge on CNN that Donald Rumsfeld was a “war criminal”) despite a puzzling credit at the end stating that Gibbs serves a lifetime sentence for his role in ending the lives of innocent Afghans and another credit indicating that one of the whistleblowers was inexplicably released early from prison after being bullied into pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter. MH