"Kill Team" on PBS

If you've seen American Sniper, you owe it to yourself (and maybe others) to watch the acclaimed doc The Kill Team on PBS's "Independent Lens" tonight--at 10 pm in New York area, for example.   Far from a rah-rah, black and white portrayal, it probes the infamous episode in Afghanistan when a group of American soldiers set out to kill one or more civilians just for the hell of it (one said he was simply "bored").   One of the soldiers bravely tried to turn whistleblower, was shut out, then went along with one murder and served three years in prison.   So, as you can see--a complex story that will not leave audiences cheering all the white hats and jeering the "savages."

In spite of the subject matter, Krauss’s film does not have an explicit anti-war sentiment—and in fact, he says, he left footage on the cutting room floor in order to keep the movie from coming across as overtly political. But he acknowledged it will be hard for some to watch without coming away with a sense of alarm about the horrors of war, especially as one soldier says that killings like this happen all the time, “We’re just the ones that got caught.”

My piece on U.S.-caused civilian casualties in Iraq.