Tag Archives: American Sniper

American drone pilots eat massacres like the Boston Marathon for breakfast. Let all bombers share Tsarnaev’s fate.

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Wikileaks Collateral MurderShould Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get the death penalty? Should Aurora’s James Holmes or Charleston’s Dylann Roof? How about American sniper Chris Kyle or the Apache gunship assholes exposed by Wikileaks in “Collateral Murder”? Videos abound of US airstrikes and drone strikes far more deadly and indiscriminate than the Boston Marathon Bombing. I don’t agree with capital punishment, as deterrent or justice, but if cultural arbiters want to cry for the blood of terrorists there are a lot of offenders in line before 21-year-old Tsarnaev. I say let he who has bombed fewer innocent people cast the first stone.

Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas?

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Dzhokhar TsarnaevDoes the “Boston Marathon Bomber” look like he deserves the death penalty? Funny, you don’t even know what he looks like. US authorities have been meticulous about controlling images of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev since the manhunt for the teen and his older brother ended in extrajudicial firing squads which teen Dzhokhar survived. He’s been in custody since then and the only more recent image his captors released was of Dzhokhar giving the finger to a jail cell surveillance camera. This to influence the jury to give the death penalty. Why the embargo on images? Are authorities afraid the public will feel sympathy for the disfigurement Dzhokhar suffered from his fusillade? Where defense attorneys not permitted to submit images of Dzhokhar smiling? Is the image ban in effect a media blackout? Remember how Saddam Hussein’s trial was broadcast without sound? Now US dumb justice has become literally blind, all Star Chambers and spectral evidence.
 
Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas? If an American sniper turned in the Tsarnaev brothers headcount, he’d be handed a potato peeler and punished with kitchen duty. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a small fry. US drone pilots eat massacres like the Boston Marathon for breakfast.

When Michael Moore said snipers are cowards, he gave Americans a pass

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Michael Moore criticized AMERICAN SNIPER for glamorizing snipers, because they are in essence cowards who shoot victims in the back. It hit home, no doubt because exploiting the unfair advantage, shooting people unseen, doesn’t just apply to soldiers who carry sniper rifles. The act of targeting people who can’t fight back is carried out by many more specialists than snipers. It applies to helicopter gunners, soldiers who shoot civilians, soldiers who use night vision goggles, drone operators, bomber pilots, and of course the entire Chair-Force and Navy, whose every shot is taken from afar. America’s war machine is designed to target the lesser-abled. In the title AMERICAN SNIPER, I’m not sure the second word describes cowards more than the first.

Coming soon to an airbase near you

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Time to revisit this leaked C-130 targeting video of a US Afghan turkey shoot. With the Creech AFB remote Reapers, American snipers working electronically can now sit stateside, with YOU AS THEIR HUMAN SHIELD.

(The control room chatter remind me of an auction house, where spotters call out the hits in case the auctioneer is too busy to see them.)

What am I thinking, we could outsource this function to the lowest unprincipled bidder. If telecommunications can permit Pakistanis to sort US mail or take our fast food drive-through orders, why not let them do the killing on our video game consoles?

Child-proof Iraq

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US sniper perched on highAn American sniper at work.
 
Fallujah is often declared a Free-Fire Zone, which means soldiers are to shoot anything that moves.

I just watched a newly released documentary about OPERATION PHANTOM FURY, our military’s swoop into Fallujah. The documentary was called Caught in the Crossfire: The Untold Story of Fallujah.

I was already aware of the atrocities such as our use of chemical weapons, but I hadn’t considered the no-less-sensational: the plight of those who survived.

They were evacuated from Fallujah, a city the size of Cincinnati, without anywhere to go, step this way please, to the desert. There they subsisted without refugee camps mostly at the outskirts of their city.

After the fighting, they were asked to return to their homes, to find that there was little to which to return. Almost all the businesses were destroyed or damaged.

The footage gathered for this documentary was amazing, there were the mass graves into which the survivors were obliged to bury the bodies of their relations and friends. These were enormous trenches the size of boxcars into which everyone shoveled dirt after each layer of bodies. We’ve seen footage like that before. It was black and white and those forced to do the shoveling were German citizens held responsible for the piles of concentration camp dead.

There was footage of the checkpoints, where lines of people waited out in the cold for days, the men were separated from the women and in any part of this zone, brutal force was permitted and often used.

The most poignant image for me however was a simple domestic scene of a family returned to its home. In one shot a small boy was guiding his younger sibling down the stairs, navigating hand in hand around the rubble on the steps.

I thought about how American parents worry that their child might encounter an unprotected wall socket.

Putting aside the fears that Iraqi parents have that their child will venture outside and into view of American snipers, or into the path of an oncoming American convoy which has orders not to stop under any circumstance, or that their child might be attracted to a brightly colored unexploded cluster bomblet and pick it up; I hadn’t thought of the not child-proof rubble on the step.