(CW: CSA bro wtf)

The book relied on a dramatization of participant accounts, which were the basis of the movie. SPC John Stebbins was renamed as fictional "John Grimes." Stebbins had been convicted by court martial in 1999 for the rape and forcible sodomy of his six-year-old daughter. Mark Bowden said the Pentagon, ever sensitive about public image, decided to alter factual history by requesting the change

Also depicts the Somalis as just these warlike orcs hellbent on killing for blood without explaining that maybe these people don't want the USA meddling in their affairs. Nah, they're just savages.

They have like a pretty decent section in the documentary Theaters of War, about Pentagon and CIA involvement in Hollywood film development specifically about Black Hawk Down and how it serves to fundamentally rewrite the narrative on Somalia.

(Available to stream for free on Kanopy if you have a library card)

Right, some cursory reading debunks a lot of that horseshit and gives significant context that was lacking (as is often the case with American war movies)

In the wake of Barre’s ouster, the U.S. conveniently donned the cloak of humanitarianism, citing the famine as justification for military intervention. Significantly, the most severe period of the famine had passed several monthsbefore the U.S. declared its commitment to ending hunger in Somalia. In 1992—on the eve of the invasion—the death rate had fallen by 90 percent, according to Africa Watch.

Fighting the warlords” became the new call to action. The victor over Barre, Gen. Mohamed Ali Farah Aidid, wasn’t willing to make deals with the U.S. Soon after the invasion, food distribution was undermined by U.S. determination to rout Aidid by boosting forces loyal to the West, such as the self-declared President Ali Mahdi Muhammad.

Soldiers were heard repeating the slogan “The only good Somali is a dead Somali.”

Three months earlier [Before the events of "Black Hawk Down"], a missile attack by U.S. helicopters had killed fifty to seventy clan elders and intellectuals, many of them moderates attempting to broker a settlement to the war. According to the New York Times, U.S. officials estimated casualties of 6,000 to 10,000 Somalis—two-thirds of them women and children—in the summer of 1993 alone.

In fact, unarmed men, women and children became open targets for American troops. A writer for Britain’s Independent described how “[i]n one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence.”

After the Battle of Mogadishu, Canada, Belgium, and Italy all investigated charges of torture and murder committed by their troops, but the U.S. never issued a reprimand or even an inquiry. The trials in Belgium uncovered horrific evidence of abuse—including a sergeant accused of force-feeding a Muslim Somali child with pork and salted water until he vomited, and a sergeant major photographed urinating on the apparently dead body of a young man.

Meanwhile, “humanitarian relief” aid agencies working in places like Somalia reaped a massive boon through government contracts. As Somalia expert Alex De Waal put it, “Somalia is a striking manifestation of a new doctrine in international affairs, which we might call ‘humanitarian impunity,’ where aid-givers and peacekeepers, not local civilians, are becoming the beneficiaries of international law.”

All told, of the $1.5 billion earmarked by the UN for “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia, only 10 percent was spent on lifesaving work. The bulk of the funds went to the more than 28,000 troops that occupied Somalia, including the deployment of over 100 tanks, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, airborne gunships, and an aircraft carrier. Clinton eventually withdrew all troops by March 1994, and remaining UN peacekeeping forces were pulled out the next year.

Also, somewhat unrelated...I just did some searching and saw a lot of headlines with "Somalia on the verge of famine" written in Sept 2022

:rust-darkness: