License to kill non-combatants

When killing women and children was unpopularOn this anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, March 16, 1968, let’s remember a time when the American public was not rallying behind its soldiers as they murdered women and children in the conduct of modern warfare. We did not support the troops who shot civilians under orders, or wiped out entire communities. We did not sanction it as collateral damage, the killing we knew about.

Above is a poster from the First World War, where the Huns were demonized for their brutality. They didn’t have the current US license aparently. This was part of an enormous propaganda campaign to urge the American public to enter the war on the side of the British instead of the German. Much of the attrocities attributed to the Huns were actually contrived. The Rape of Belgium was much like the Rape of Kuwait. Talk of newborns pulled from incubators, tearfully recounted by the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s young daughter who had been stateside the whole time.

The new US attrocities in Iraq are documented, when there have been survivors. In a military town such as Colorado Springs, you can walk among the fatigue-wearing murderers. They’re not painted as red demons. You’re admonished to support them.

The UN covers for US sponsored Philippine death squads

The UN has been supposedly investigating Philippine death squad activity, but astoundingly came up with the ridiculous conclusion that the government of the Philippines was not behind this constant terrorism against its own people. Not only is Philippine president, Gloria Arroyo behind the organization of these terrorist squads, so is our very own US government, too. See Grieving mother fights to expose army death squads and see who trained these army death squads?

Hussein’s headless half brother

After all the crocodile tears from the imperialist bandwagon about how wrong it was to insult and degrade Saddam Hussein while murdering him post trial by kangaroo court, apparently that was not enough show to demonstrate US government capacity for brutality against those they choose to eliminate.

So they decapitated the half brother of Hussein and filmed it yesterday, for broader distribution later. Real Bush Death Metal live, and surely such sweet music to Cheney’s and Rice’s ears. They feast on blood do these vampires.

OOps! It was an accident they say…. Yes, but we know that films the neocons watch. Some ‘accidents’ are made to happen.

Charter school infection

War criminal given immunity from prosecutionDo you wonder how this nation’s infection of immorality keeps spreading? For one, the Colorado Springs charter school Classical Academy is employing former Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman to coach its students. The Gazette front page today tells of Sassaman, the Army commander, disgraced but given immunity, who tried to cover up his men’s attempted and probable murder of two Iraqi captives on the banks of the Tigris River in 2004, is now shaping young minds and bodies of fragile charter school students. I say fragile because remember what kind of parents are sending their children to these “charter” schools.

Scorched journalist policy

Shall we speculate as to who is killing journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan? (141 to date in Iraq.) Well, the who is documented, much of it labeled “friendly fire.” Shall we speculate about the why? Forgive me if it feels like I am connecting the dots with a crayon.
 
A recent documentary interviewed some Iraqi journalists about their inconsistent use of flack jackets. The journalists said they choose not to wear protection around fellow Iraqis because they don’t want to be mistaken for working for the occupiers. But walking beside American soldiers the journalists do wear flack jackets because they are fearful of being shot …by the Americans.

Witness to a crime
We’ve all seen it in the movies: the protagonist is accidental witness to a crime and becomes targeted by the perpetrator lest he live to testify. Or the victim begging for life, vowing in exchange not to go to the police. Both victim and criminal know it’s an offer the villain cannot risk.

Massacres usually intend to leave no survivors because the dead tell no tales. Countless war movies have depicted the war correspondent happening upon a war crime in progress, recognizing immediately that a “stray bullet” will be eminent.

Kill Boxes
We’ve learned over the course of two Gulf Wars that our military employs such tactics as “Kill Boxes” and “Free Fire Zones.” Both describe a similar US M.O.. The first is Air Force lingo for an area bounded by given coordinates inside of which everything is considered a target. The airmen are tasked with killing everybody in that box. They have the discretion not to shoot something, but they will be held responsible for whatever they leave, authorized as they were to annihilate all.

Photo shown across the world except in the USA renowned Kill Box in 1990 was the Highway of Death, where thousands of Iraqi soldiers fleeing from Kuwait were incinerated in their vehicles. (American viewers were spared the graphic images.)

The Hague Conventions forbid firing upon soldiers who are no longer attacking you. Even cowboys know you don’t shoot somebody in the back. Both the Hague and Geneva Conventions outlaw the indiscriminate killing of civilians and other non-combatants.

Free Fire Zones
Kill Boxes violate all international conventions. They are as illegal as the US Army’s Free Fire Zone in which soldiers are ordered to fire freely at “anything that moves.” Civilians are expected to know beforehand to get out of the way. They figure it out when our snipers begin popping their family members’ heads off in their gardens. IED detonations now trigger automatic Free Fire Zones around the radius of the blast. An American reputation for ruthless overkill now precedes us. As a result, when IEDs explode, Iraqis have learned to run for their lives. Our soldiers lie to themselves that the escaping figures must be responsible for the IED, and are thus combatants. American Humvees carry extra shovels to plant on the bodies of the slain civilians to paint them as bomb laying insurgents.

The US has deliberately shot civilians since the Korean War, though this has only recently been revealed. In No Gun Ri, entire masses of refuges were machine-gunned to prevent fighters from passing amongst them. This policy continued in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre being unique only for having been uncovered. In war, Collateral Damage has always been a tragic unintended consequence, but by no stretch of a JAG’s imagination can it be a sanctioned consequence.

Secret and Confidential
Let’s speculate here… If military manuals exist with instructions for Kill Boxes and Free Fire Zones which explicitly require the killing of civilians and non-combatants, how do you suppose the instructions read for dealing with uninvited members of the press? The US military seems quite preoccupied with how its actions appear in news broadcasts. How might US soldiers be instructed to deal with journalists who stumble upon the bodies and capture the unbecoming bloodshed with their cameras? We’ll find out someday when a witness survives.

These colors do run

Save our soldiers from prosecutionWell looky here…These colors do run… straight to their mommies when they unload their weapons into civilians and for once get caught.
 
The website is called save the soldiers, sign their petition if you’re inclined. They want people who “support our troops no matter where they are or what their mission is…”

Their poster depicts GI Sebastian being pierced with arrows from the Left, from Murtha, and from the Mainstream [sic] Media. And look at the bull’s eye: “Haditha Propaganda.”

But looky in the news: more evidence of the atrocities committed in Haditha, even worse than had yet been reported, revealed by photos found traded among the soldiers themselves. Of women executed while cowering for mercy. Some of the pictures even set to music on somebody’s Playstation.

All along the soldiers were telling a different tale, crying that they were being falsely accused. The Iraqis meanwhile tried to get their story out, including the testimony of a young girl who survived by playing dead among her dying brothers and sisters. In Haditha twenty four civilians were shot at point-blank in retaliation for a nearby IED.

We’ve learned from returning soldiers that standard US practice after and IED detonation is to shoot every Iraqi within sight. In Haditha there were not enough to kill in the street so the Marines went house to house to execute local families.

We may hope these Marines were just bad apples. But as much as the military is defending these bad apples, it makes me think bad apples are the norm. And as we’ve learned from other episodes, bad-apple-hood is systemic and sanctioned by Rumsfeld himself.

Take a look at the pictures from the Marine training at Parris Island. There’s a mural depicting our enemies against which the soldiers discard their empty beer bottles. The Marine apple basket is likely rotten to the corps. Who’s gonna tell the mommies?

El Paso Co. to respect the Sanctity of Life

County resolved to uphold the sanctity of life in Haditha
We got a heads-up from our friends at Newspeak about an impending anti-abortion proclamation by the El Paso County Board of Commissioners. I accidentally read the 2nd page first. If you strike out half the WHEREASes, the resolution is about all human life. And their concluding paragraph dots the i. Those crazy pro-war Republicans are finally speaking out against Bush’s atrocities. It’s about time. We can be proud that El Paso County proclaims an end to war.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the undersigned members of the Board of County Commissioners of El Paso County, Colorado hereby proclaim January 21-28, 2007, as Sanctity of Human Life Week in El Paso County. As we reflect upon the sanctity of human life, we call upon our residents to recognize this week with appropriate ceremonies in our homes and places of worship, to rededicate ourselves to compassionate service, and to reaffirm our commitment to respecting the life and dignity of every human being.
DONE THIS 11th day of January 2007 at Colorado Springs, Colorado

THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS
OF EL PASO COUNTY, COLORADO

Dennis Hisey, Chair
Jim Bensberg, Vice Chair
Wayne W. Williams, Member
Sallie Clark, Member

US aggression against Somalia shows that America’s rulers are truly sick

How much of this continual US military aggression is going to be tolerated by the American people? Both the Democrats and Republicans are criminally responsible for continually breaking international law. They seem to think that they have carte blanche to make war, assassinate, torture, and invade other people’s countries at will! And worse, they have our government continually pushing other countries to do the dirty work for them.

The American people are not for this. We do not have a democratic system in place that gives us recourse to stop these continuous atrocities our government is continually making in our name. God spare us the revenge that will eventually be extracted on us for sitting by passively while these atrocities continue. We may not have a real democracy in place where thesse criminals that call themselves politicians can be removed at the voting booths, but we do have the ability to get out into the streets, make noise, and stay there until we can cause a popular rebellion to change our corporate dictatorship to something more humane.

Get involved! Make sure your local antiwar groups protest this latest military aggression against yet another downtrodden third World country, and get out into the streets with signs, banners, and your physical and personal presence!

Ethiopia Out of Somalia! Get the US out of Somalia! Stop the US government murder and mayhem everywhere! And throw these top Democratic Party and Republican Party politicians into jail where they truly belong.

Bush’s latest collateral damage- kid hangings

Can you believe this? At least 3 young kids have died by hanging themselves while imitating the hanging of Saddam Hussein during their ‘play’, and the US media has been hiding this news away from us? The corporate press owners are truly a bunch of whores.

Suck, suck suck for Bush and Dick all the time. See this Houston Chronicle article about the 10 year old boy that died by hanging on New Years Day there while playing ‘Saddam Hussein’. Only now is the news of these tragedies leaking out to us. The article mentions the other 2 children that also died while playing this ‘game’.

The Semite’s anti-Semite

Would it be anti-Semitism to make note that the US entertainment industry is predominated by Jews? Studio heads, producers, financiers are disproportionately Jewish, fair to say? Television, newspapers, publishing houses, quite a number headed by Jews. We could throw in the fashion industry, department stores, talent agencies, advertising agencies, financial institutions, it seems so stereotypical, but it is oddly true. The head start which Jews got during Christianity’s Dark Ages when no one but a Jew could a lender be, has set people of Jewish lineage well ahead in the world of commerce. Businesses can have an air of waspness, as the Bourgeoisie always did, but behind them, financing them, were Jews. It is not defamatory to make this observation, is it? No disrespect intended toward Jews.

It’s like pointing out that due in no small part to the African-American heritage having involved the selective breeding of slaves, Black athletes now dominate every professional sport in their hood. Of late, even golf. This is not racist talk, it’s straight talk.

So let’s address the Jewish lock on the US communications industry. It looks waspish, all the talking heads, the fat men, are wasps, but the money men are Jews. On the TV, rarely is any fun made of Jews, or Israel. The Israeli lobby can dominate our congress but the media is not going to tell us about it. Our TVs can make fun of Evangelicals, lampoon all priests as pedophiles, browbeat black welfare mothers, but Jews are inviolate. Is it because Jews have editorial control? Who knows.

When something like the Mel Gibson outburst happens, I can’t help but wonder how complex this gets. Gibson’s drunken tantrum didn’t have to make the news, in fact the police tried to downplay it. Instead the media ran with it, making Mel Gibson a household joke. Why? He would seem to be a valuable media property, why tarnish it? Later when I saw the release of Apocalypto, with Mel Gibson’s name getting top billing, I had to wonder whether the anti-Semitic rant was tarnish at all. Maybe in some ways it made Gibson more popular. Maybe it enhanced the box office for Apocalypto.

Then I heard a pundit criticizing the excessive media coverage of Gibson’s tirade compared to the lesser media coverage of Hezb’Allah’s simultaneous rampage against Israel. That false comparison hit a note for me. The media hadn’t failed to report Israel’s travails facing rocket attacks, what they failed to cover was Israel’s assault on Lebanon and Israel’s pledge to bomb ten buildings in Beirut for every Hezb’Allah rocket that struck an Israeli. The media failed to report the Lebanese civilians being massacred out of all proportion to the Israeli soldiers killed. It failed to report the secret raids in Palestine under cover of the assault on Lebanon. The media continues to underreport the targeted assassinations of Lebanese and Palestinian politicians, duly elected, with whom Israel does not want to deal.

But in the midst of all the non-reporting on Lebanon, word was still filtering out about Israel’s atrocities. It was coming mostly over the internet, via international news sources, but the truth was reaching many Americans. By the time Mel Gibson made his drunken anti-Semitic rant, a good number of Americans were coming to see that an Israeli-driven blood-bath was being perpetrated in the Middle East and American Jews were providing cover, even defending it. In a sense, as Israeli atrocities escalated, someone was bound to decry it. And it came in the form of a drunken Mel Gibson. And the media seized on it.

Kinda like the emperor parading naked, his handlers looking nervously around hoping that no one breaks decorum. But a young boy is bound to speak up unless you can preempt it with a moment you can manage. Instead of a boy, a stooge, speaking what everyone dares think, but a stooge easily discredited. Archie Bunker drunk, instead of Michael Wallace stone sober. Thus the media can address the issue of the anti-Israel backlash as anti-Semitism and not the issue of Israeli genocide in Lebanon and Palestine.

Karl Rove did this with George Bush’s cocaine rap in college. Rove knew the police records would come up, so he leaked them to a reporter whom Rove knew could be discredited. St Martin’s Press published the facts in Favorite Son, Rove stepped out to reveal the JB Hatfield’s dubious past. Immediately St Martin’s Press voluntarily withdrew all copies and burned them. Bush’s arrest for cocaine possession, very likely drug dealing, and the community service he received at a time when possession of marijuana would land prison time, simply went away.

Oh, Favorite Son was republished, and the facts circulate online, but the media didn’t and doesn’t cover it. You’d think they’d like a great story. I’m always reminded of why most of TV shows are so dumb, because they make the commercials look brilliant. That is, after all, the business of televison

I am not suggesting that Mel Gibson is part of a media conspiracy. Not in the least. I am suggesting that how the media choses to shape a story, whether to tell it or not, how to tell it, is certainly conspiratorial. Conspiracy is a loaded term because it’s become a discredited term. A handful of media entities colluding to shape a story is not a conspiracy anymore than you deciding to organize a surprise birthday party for a coworker would be a conspiracy. In your case, there’s a clear common interest in keeping the party a secret and you do it. In the case of a media conglomerate owners who decide what news may or may not hurt their common friend Israel, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to agree on a common cause. Show only Israelis worrying about rocket attacks, don’t show the half million cluster bombs left in Lebanon to snare curiosity-killed toddlers.

And when there’s a undercurrent brewing up in America, bursting to decry the Israeli murderers and their apologist Jews at home, point the camera at one who’s famous, maybe mildly sympathetic, drunk of course so it’ll be forgivable and let him rant. Next in front of everyone slap his wrists to teach how unseemly it is to be brnaded anti-Semitic. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt Gibson much, remember the adage, no such thing as bad publicity. When Apocalypto comes around, Gibson’s name will still draw. And Apocalypto’s message will work even better on the dumb white supremacists who thought his rant was serious.

It’s not anti-Semitic to condemn Israel for its campaign of genocide and apartheid in Palestine and Lebanon. It’s not anti-Semitic to point at the Israeli influence over our government’s actions. It’s not anti-Semitic or defamatory to accuse American Jews of uncritical support of colonial Zionism. It is not a case for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League to ask the American Jews underwriting our media to stop lying to themselves and us.

Mengistu found guilty of genocide

Ethiopia’s ex-ruler and Leonid Brezhnev’s African superstar, Mengistu, was found guilty in absentia for genocide today. He fled Ethiopia for Zimbabwe after the capital, Addis Ababa, was taken by rebel forces in 1991. He has been tried in absentia by a regime that itself is now having real problems with keeping its repression from running totally out of control. Still, Mengistu was definitely a bloody tyrant despite his original revolutionary drive. Under his Dergue regime, somewhere beetween 1 and 2 million died during his time in power, either from famine, through war, or directly through assassinations ordered by Mengistu’s people. He deserves his conviction, though he alone was not responsible for all those who died.

The problem one has though in assigning responsibility for crimes such as genocide, is that often there is so much blame to share all around. All of Africa became an arena for proxy fights in the ‘Great’ Cold War between the US plus its allies Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Britain, and the White Apartheid regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, all combined in struggle to keep the former Soviet Union from influencing the region in alliance with various indegenous rebel groups. This combined European-US interventionism caused the deaths of millions upon millions of Africans. And yet no genocide trial for the Whites.

Much has been made of Brezhnev’s miserable decision to have Russians fight it out on foreign soil in Afghanistan against the Islamic proxy troops of the US. This was actually a reasonable fight though, since what went on in that country certainly effected the Soviet Union, too. But why on earth Brezhnev continued to side and fund Mengistu in the Horn of Africa wars is hard for many to understand. He truly was a totally incompetent and corrupt leader, and his decisions he took in regard to the African tribal conflicts, certainly had a major effect on what ultimately led later on to Gorbachev’s own reaccionry and embecilic policies. That in turn led to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union back into a group of many barbaric and often warring, Fourth World capitalist states.

That all being said, one positive effect of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is that it pulled the rug out from under Mengistu’s foreign funding for war in the Horn of Africa. When he finally fell in 1991 from power, he was about as credible as Pol Pot had become in Kampuchea after beating back the US in SE Asia. Lesson learned once again? An intial revolutionary movement that comes to power with war being waged continuously by imperialist powers against it, can lead to a meltdown of the revolution and a total disintegration into slaughter and famine.

Is Iraq in ‘Civil War’?

Our national debates often enter into surreal territories, and I got to say that I find the liberal sites to be almost as bad as the conservative ones when it comes to their examination of US militarism. Today finds the liberal sites, like Alternet and CommonDreams celebrating what a supposed advance forward it is that NBC started calling the situation in Iraq a civil war. The White House duly responded with, “Is not! Is not!”. So there, we now have lined up the two sides of the usual American idiocy, The Democrats versus the Republicans. Yawn…. But is the Iraq conflict in reality a ‘civil war’ like the liberals are now declaring it to be? I think not.

See, the liberal Democratic Party types don’t dare call the Iraq conflict what it really is, which is an imperialist war and colonial occupation Made in America. So they do the next best thing they can come up with, and that is to say that the US has troops centered in a country with a ‘civil war’ flaring up. Oh my! Despite ‘our’ good intentions, we’re in danger! Let’s cut and run!
This way of stupidly arguing this issue of war and peace with the Right, allows pro-warmongers to say, Look, the Iraqis need us to keep themselves from killing each other. Oh how humane we shall always be!

Liberals, this is no civil war at all. Can you imagine in our real American Civil War, would we have ever called it a Civil War if all the American cities, both South and North, had been occupied by a bunch of murderous imperial troops, from say Mongolia or Japan? And that these troops were causing the chaos between different sections of our own country’s population? See the simple difference between a real civil war, and an imperialist war? Apparently, the liberals have big trouble on that! Our American Civil War was a civil war, whereas the Iraqi chaos is not.

If one remembers this, the Vietnam War was once described by the American press as a civil war, too. The supposed good guys in South Vietnam were our friends, and the bad guys there were the commies. It was taught that South Vietnam was in a civil war where another country would not leave the South Vietnamese alone to solve their internal difficuties. That bad country was called North Vietnam. Just like then, the argument went that we had to occupy the country, simply because without us, the ‘civil war’ there would go much for the worse. Plus, another country, Iran… uh I mean North Vietnam, was wrongly entering into another country’s civil strife. and trying to turn it into a ‘civil war’! We had to save the South Vietnamese from foreign intervention into their civil war! Oh such tortured logic the warmongers must use.

Liberals refuse to tell the truth to people, back then and right now. They don’t go out and say that we have torn apart another society because we are an imperialist country that invaded and occupied their land. God forbid it if the liberals , who are such great flag waving patriots, would ever speak bad of the troops! Instead, the liberals have a tendency to revert to just moaning and groaning about, Why be over there in such a bad neighborhood? Look, there’s a civil war going on. Gotta go now! We’re getting hurt. Today, some liberal nuns were actually here in Colorado delivering food to our US soldiers! Poor soldier boys and girls. Get them out of harm’s way. They’re innocently in the midst of a ‘civil war’, and need some canned goods delivered to them! They’re starving! Bring them home and feed them better. Such nonsense makes me want to cry, but that’s what the liberal nuns were pushing today in Colorado.

What to say when the US spent all that time previous to the invasion, arming and training Kurds in the North of Iraq? When they take orders from DC, Iraqi Kurds are not fighting a ‘civil war’ then? But if they free lance like the Shia and the Sunni are currently doing, well that’s ‘civil war’? No? That’s nonsense. Iraq is still a conflict where ethnic tensions are being provoked by foreign powers. There is a simple name for doing that, too. It is called IMPERIALISM, not ‘civil war. The US is an imperialist country as is Britain. Imperialism often times picking on weaker countries, not countries that can better fight back. So the first cousin of American imperialism is COLONIALISM. Iraq is in the center of a colonial war, not civil war, Olbermann. I center on this liberal, because he is the point man of the Democrats within the media at this time. It is he that is pushing this use of ‘civil war’ to describe the battlefield that his government has made in the Middle East. LOL. Well he would say, at least, that Bush is not ‘his’ government. But then again, both Iraqi Shia and Sunni agree on one thing. This is not a ‘civil war’, but a warfare forced on them by colonial occupiers. My Fellow Americans, this is an imperialist war and a colonial war. It’s kind of shameful for us continually putting the guilt on the Iraqis on this matter.

The sheer nature of imperialism, is that the imperial power always uses one sector of the colony against another. It only gets called civil war, when the imperial country doesn’t klike the way things are spinning out of its control. Then they can withdraw, and say, “Oh those primitive people. They hate each other. They are always in a civil war”. I’m waiting for the day when NBC and Olbermann start calling the Middle East wars of the US for what they are. What they really are. That’s right. I’m waiting to hear the righteous Olbermann to start calling the foreign policy of the US, IMPERIALISM. But Democratic Party motivated liberals and their liberalism can’t be depended on too much.

Comparing the death tolls

In the aftermath of bombings and indiscriminate attacks in Iraq which reached record numbers on Thanksgiving, I read that the combined Iraqi civilian casualties raised the Baghdad death toll to 202. For the day. For Baghdad. The count starts anew each day.
 
Meanwhile the US soldier death toll is 50 and climbing, for the month. For all of Iraq. Why the differing units of measure? Why not consider weekly totals for both Americans and Iraqis, to facillitate comparison?

I know something’s wrong on the grocery shelf when the price of some items is given per ounce, while a similar commodity is described per pound. Somebody doesn’t want the price comparison weighed, and I haven’t yet taken a calculator with me to discover who.

Why this discrepancy of value for human lives? I’m thankful at least we are new counting the Iraqi lives lost, although the numbers are themselves distorted. US forces are conducting more air attacks where it’s more difficult to measure the casualties. Won’t somebody come out and say it, we care quite a bit less about Iraqi lives compared to American lives? Even though the Iraqis were likely innocents, often children and children.

How can news outlets simply set the standards of measure as if the most important factor was to have the result fall within manageable ranges, figures we can wrap our head around? Or more accurately, figures they can wrap around our head.

What’s going to happen when the daily toll of civilian deaths reaches higher? Will they break the day into parts, a morning Iraqi death toll for example? To compare not too insanely with the US deaths per month? What a ruse.

UK Channel 4 -Iraq the Hidden War

British TV documentary, 49 minutes. For mature viewers only.

EXCERPTS:
Iraqi journalists don’t wear flak-jackets for fear of being mistaken for working for the Americans. But they wear flak-jackets when they’re around Americans because they’re afraid of being shot by them.

Father asking little Iraqi boy: “Do you like the Americans?”
Reply, dismissively: “Do you think there is anyone who likes the Americans?”

Phosphorous Bombs- US/Israeli Weapon of Torture

The BBC has a news item today saying that Israel has just admitted for the first time today that it used Phosphorous bombs on Lebanon. The evidence kept piling up that they in fact had, and evidently Israel came to the conclusion that their lie, that they had not used this type of chemical weapon, was no longer defensible.
 
A similar process had ocurred earliet where the US originally denied using this chemical weapon on Falluja, but then later admitted that it had. Both countries have argued that phosporous bombs are legitimate military weaponry, though previously they had attacked Saddam Hussein’s use of this chemical weapon against his Kurdish population.

The US/ Israeli defense of their use of this weapon is similar to Bush’s defense of using torture against POWs. They have merely changed the label on what they say constitutes torture, as they have now changed the label of what the phosphorus bombs actually are. They call them incendiary bombs now, instead of chemical weapons, which is what they called them when Hussein was using this weapon.

The use of chemical weapons against civilian populations by the US military is ancient news, as is their juggling of labels for them. Chemical weapons are often called ‘pesticides’, ‘defoliants’, or described as ‘smoke bombs’, as Israel did with phosphorous, which gives off plumes of camoflaging smoke, which just happens to be poisonous. Israel claimed to be merely marking targets with phosphorus bombs’ smoke, rather than using this weapon to burn the insides out of its targets. That’s what phosphorous does as it burns downward and into the blood stream, where it is later carried to organs inside the body while still burning.

The US/ Israeli use of these weapons explains their political policies in the Arab world quite well. These are the weapons of terrorist countries, rogue staters that defy international law that has tried repeatedly to limit weapons of torture like this, not to mention trying to outlaw the cluster bombs also dropped everywhere by the same two states. These are the weapons of terrorist states, and not merely legitimate countries just trying to fight the terrorism of a few rogue individuals. Rogues, one might add, that originally fought on behalf of the US in other terrorist conflicts directed from Washington DC. These are the weapons of imperial governments that illegally occupy territory of other peoples, peoples they consider inferior to their own. These are the weapons of racists.

3 Fort Carson snipers die, no reason to cry

Probably one of the most disgusting lines of work the Pentagon arranges for ‘our troops’ to do, is the role of sniper. And three of these Fort Carson trained assassins just got blown up yesterday in Iraq, according to The Gazette headline today. The article had sort of a tearful quality to it, and this is part of the neo-con rehab for the reputation of snipers, torturers, and thugs of all stripes and varieities.
 
Cybersniper.com will give you even a musical rendition of this sniper rehab propaganda, and another sniper.com site had a collection going to help out US military snipers to get better equipment to shoot down Arabs with. Kind of a Toy for Tots thing, Bless their damned souls. But when most Americans think of snipers, they generally still think of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Whitman, who shot down close to 50 people from the University Tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Let’s hope that people also remember that both got their training in the US Marine Corp, but they might not, I guess?

These three soldiers who just died in Iraq all trained as snipers at Fort Carson, but their dead bodies will head back to their hometowns, where no doubt the local press will talk about how proud their families are of them, how proud their local communities are of them, and how proud America is that they gave their lives in service to Bush and Cheney and the oil companies they represent. Hahaha, that last part is just untrue. The local press won’t mention that part of their ‘sevice’ for sure. My bad. They will be called hereoes, ‘sniper heroes’ even! Tears will wash ashore in remembrance of what fine men they were to choose this fine line of endeavour.

But the time to cry was when they joined the military and began to have the aspiration to train as long distance killers. They threw their lives away THEN, plain and simple. No reason to cry now. RIP, you three made the wrong turn in life. I’m crying for the orphan children of Iraq instead.

A proposed local anti-torture resolution

We, concerned American citizens and residents of the city of Colorado Springs, call upon our city council to issue a proclamation to both the state of Colorado and the federal government, that as citizens of this city, state, and country, we categorically reject the application of any deliberate mental or physical abuse upon any and all prisoners held by our local, state, and national governments. And further that we call upon our national leaders to have all prisoners held by the US military, be treated according to the regulations of the Geneva Conventions regarding the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

We urge the passing of the following resolution by the City Council of Colorado Springs:
……………………………………………………………………………..

We, the citizens of Colorado Springs, categorically reject the current policy of our national government of transferring US held prisoners to other countries, or to US allied armed groups, to have them tortured during interrogation or as punishment. We also reject any policy of deliberate governmental assassination of foreign opponents, whether it be carried out by our own military, or outsourced to US allies.

We, the citizens of Colorado Springs, categorically reject the indefinite holding of any prisoners without trial and without charges filed against them, whether foreign or domestic. We reject the systematic denial of timely access to lawyers of the choosing of the prisoners needing legal representation. We reject harassment of the legal councils of all prisoners. All prisoners should immediately have access to the press, so that any mistreatment can be made public. Not to do so, is not in keeping with the processes of a democratic society, whether these prisoners be domestic or foreign.

We, the citizens of Colorado Springs, call upon the US government to immediately prosecute any officials who have abused prisoners, or denied them their due rights. This includes not just the immediate abusers of prisoners, but those in supervisory positions over those lower level employees, who directed the actions of their subordinates. We call upon our federal government to immediately initiate a grand federal investigator commission into these multiple abuses that have already been documented as having occurred, and to have them stopped at once.

Further, we the citizens of Colorado Springs, call upon our state and local authorities to renounce the use of abuse and torture of American prisoners held in local and state facilities. We are well aware that the deliberate use of sexual abuse, solitary confinement, and physical assault is rampant throughout the US in multiple correctional facilities, and that the multiple torture methods and abuse techniques and denial of rights used against our own citizens is now being incorporated into the systematic abuse of foreign POWs held by our military. Calling foreign POWs by any other name does not change their real status as POWs. If the US military has taken prisoner any foreign citizen during military engagements, then these troops we consider to be POWs, and their treatment is subject to the Geneva Conventions.

We, the citizens of Colorado Springs and our city council, especially condemn local military contracting agencies, with their many offices located inside our city limits, that have directed torture against POWs in other countries. Already US troops operating in conjunction with these private contractors have been found guilty of directing torture and abuse of prisoners in their custody. These private operatives have been documented as having shot at foreign nationals and having severely injured and murdered foreign civilians as a result. We do not consider these companies to be good citizens of our community, and urge that appropriate criminal charges be brought against companies that have violated prisoner rights per the Geneva Accords regarding humane treatment of POWs. We call upon the city, the state of Colorado, and the US federal government to cease contracting at once with these companies, and to end their immunity from having charges brought against them for their acts of criminality overseas.

Further, we the citizens of Colorado Springs, reject as dishonest and criminal any government denial at either the state, local, or national levels that these abuses are in fact occurring. The documentation is extensive and overwhelming that the US is mistreating POWs, and also prisoners within its own national criminal corrections facilities. The US government has a known and long history of using torture against POWs. Tens of thousands of US held Vietnamese POWs were tortured to death in the so-called ‘tiger cages’ and during the US “Phoenix Operations.” Similarly, the atrocities on prisoners captured by the US financed ‘Contras’ has been well documented. The US use of torture on POWs is not new. What is new is the open advocacy by federal leaders of what had been covert policy. We condemn, as citizens of Colorado Springs, this open advocacy of war crimes committed by US soldiers. We support our troops by demanding that they not be subject to orders to commit war crimes.

We the citizens of Colorado Springs and our city council, proclaim it time for the abuse to stop, and for humane treatment of all prisoners to begin. To allow our government to abuse foreign prisoners of war is to be complicit in the crime, just as continuing to allow abuse to be inflicted on our own incarcerated citizens. We reject both, and call upon our government, at all levels, to most urgently begin to humanely treat those behind bars.

The passage of this proclamation by our city council to be sent to both the Governor of the state of Colorado and to the President of the United State.

Five thousand Iraqis

The EWO memorial displays 3000 civilian shoesJohns Hopkins has calculated that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion of their country. Six Hundred Fifty Five Thousand.
 
Quite a difference from the 30,000 by Bush’s estimate, “give or take a thousand.” Or the 45,000 by the official media counts. Or Lancet’s original 100,000 and later 250,000. Both those numbers were contested too, even as they were now probably conservative.

Most people who know that civilian casualties have been understated are still refuting the 655,000. ” I’m not sure the count is that high, but it’s high I’m sure.” Critical thinking without the why. Johns Hopkins methods, like the Lancet’s are peer reviewed for all to see. Our government and its supporters are the only ones to refute the number. When have they yet proven to speak any truth at all?

I’ll tell you I believe the new figure. I read about how it was calculated, based on surveys and statistical studies, with the same means as are used elsewhere in other populations and other catastrophes. I cannot believe, cannot fathom, cannot mourn 650,000 Iraqi lives destroyed by American aggression. What I can conceptualize is the 5,000 more. Tell me you caught a fish one foot and one half inch long, and I’m inclined to believe you measured it.

For those who want to compare the 655,000 to how many Iraqis would have died under Sadam’s continued reign, the number is already taken into account. Let me quote the latest study:

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions

Time Magazine banality of puff

Dead presidentBagNewsNotes drew my attention to the cover of a recent Time Magazine, a posterized image of Iranian President Mahmmud Ahmadinejad. The photo was manipulated reminiscent of OJ’s mug being darkened for sinister effect.
 
Readers commented on Ahmadinejad being made a cartoon, or a throwback to student movement political posters. I’d put it back further. I think the photo editors at Time are after a tin-type look, suggesting the Islamic Revolution is profoundly backward, belonging to the century before last perhaps.

The composition of the picture, particularly the woodgrainish, oddly insufficient backdrop behind Ahmadinejad’s head, reminds me of the post-mortem photographs of dead outlaws in the American West. Pictures of the outlaws brought to justice, laid out semi-vertically against their wood-box coffins, were circulated in the old west to publicize their successful apprehension. This provided proof for everyone to see with their own eyes that a feared outlaw was dead.

Add to Ahmadinejad’s resemblance the dark hair and beard and I think this Time cover emulates a photograph made iconic in Latin America at least, spread around by our government as a warning to others: the Dead Che Guevara.

How do you suppose the Time editors excuse themselves for their art direction whim? Do they think readers will accept it as fair that one personage be accorded an intimate portrait on the cover of Time, and yet another receives a editorialized visage?

The editors at Time can’t expect their readers to remain naive for much longer. I’m encouraged by the trend in children’s TV cartoons to mock the manipulation toolbag of media artists. The cliche of Bambi Eyes for example is mocked from Spongebob to Jimmy Neutron. They make obvious the deliberate use of caricatured expressions when they are being manipulative. Our children’s media literacy will be greatly enhanced and Time’s techniques will have to become more sophisticated.

Haditha
I had a chance to peruse a copy of this issue at the dentist’s. Further inside is a profile of one of the marines, The Face of Haditha, on trial for a possible war crime in Haditha. Shooting 24 Iraqi civilians, some of them at point blank range. Sargeant Frank Wuterich speaks out, the headline reads, “for the very first time.” The layout features a large picture of Wuterich on the left and a brief bio and interview on the right. Let me cut to the meat of the article, Wuterich is not permitted by his lawyer to say anything about what happened at Haditha except that he believes with incredulity that the actions of he and his comrades were within their legal rules of engagement. Wuterich also ponders innocently why he has not been asked more by the military investigators about what happened at Haditha. Thus, Time Inc has slipped us two items: the suggestion of innocence, and the suggestion that the prosecutors are not after the truth.

Take a look at the photograph. Sargeant Frank Wuterich stands with his arms crossed in frank honesty. He’s got big brown eyes and he’s addressing us squarely, looking like our paperboy come to collect our subscription. He’s young, attractive as American Pie, with big doe eyes. He’s got a partially concealed tattoo on his forearm and in the article we read he has several. One tattoo he was reluctant to show the photographer, we’re told, is of a dagger skewering severed fingers and eyeballs, his wife “doesn’t like that one so much.”

Bloggers
On the issue’s back page is a whimsical article by book reviewer Lev Grossman defending himself against blogger Edward Champion who has been picking on him. Grossman’s piece is an honest rebuttal to a difference of opinion, but he ends it with the usual dismissal columnists use to trump their blogger counterparts, “at least I’m getting paid to write this.”

Paid by whom Mr. Grossman? By a media conglomerate which is distorting the news to an audience of readers less culturally savvy than a common child? Good for you.

Senator McCain fake shining armor

Victim of Vietnamese 
Do we assume because John McCain suffered mistreatment at the hands of the Vietnamese, that he empathizes with victims of torture? By presenting a false alternative to Bush’s torture bill, McCain is showing he may just want payback.

 

I’m not so sure we should believe that McCain was grossly mistreated by the Vietnamese. When he was shot down he was assaulted by angry people that did physically attack him. He was already injured at that point from the fall of his aircraft though.

Why did they attack him when he came down? The answer seems rather obvious, but this assault hardly can be called torture. It was rage at the American criminal that had been napalming and bombing those ‘Gooks’ down below.

As to his later imprisonment? He claims he was beaten and kept in solitary at times. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have suffered these abuses and much worse within America’s own jails. Nobody talks about this even as it goes on massively today in US prisons. I think we all know that rape is an epidemic in US prisons, and is actively encouraged by authorities as a form of control and torture of prisoners. Has McCain ever opened his mouth about this? I think not. He certainly was never threatened with it at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’.

McCain’s debriefing by the US military was set to make it publicly appear as if the Vietnamese were torturing American POWs on a routine basis. The reason for this is that the US was systematically doing much worse to the Vietnamese they held, and a loud campaign of denunciation of supposed Vietnamese abuse of the few Americans they held was meant to take the spotlight off what the US military did in mass to its captives. Returning US GIs were encouraged to join into this campaign with their stories, many of which might well have been coached.

The Pentagon actively pushed US POWs to voice claims that they were grossly mistreated. It became a major industry on the propaganda front. To this day, it is an urban Right Wing myth that huge numbers of returning veterans were spit upon and assaulted by hippie protesters. And the campaign suoppsoedly to aid ‘America’s POw/MIA’ went on for decades, even when it became quite preposterous. No campaign for the victims of US atrocities in SE Asia was ever begun though.

Let’s face it, many people lie and then even begin to believe their own lies. During the first Gulf War, I can’t count the number of Right Wing Americans that claimed to know Kuwaitis. I think we need to take McCains’s claims of being tortured with a big grain… make that a big rock of salt. The verifiable evidence is slim that he was tortured, to say the least.

My father-in-law was tortured by police though. He later died from complications related to that torture. Remember the so-called ‘Operation Cooperation’? It launched the decades long so-called drug wars. My wife’s dad was caught up in the militarization of the US-Mexican Border, thrown in jail, and then tortured. Acid was dropped into his eyes.
As a result, he walked around half blind the rest of his life.

In contrast, McCain is running for president as a Right Wing Republican. I think he is just an asshole and not a torture victim at all. He looks just fine though a little heavy from fine dining.

McCain hardly seems like a torture victim. He’s just your typical Right Wing ex-US-soldier type that wants to be publicly hailed as a hero, even though his activities as an imperialist trooper were dispicable. I can think of a jillion other ‘victims’ of torture out there whose claims of abuse I would take much more seriously. His claims to be a ‘compassionate conservative’ aren’t much more believeable than Bush’s.

Dog and pony sex show

Little JonBenet Ramsey’s killer has been found. How many stories like JonBenet are on the back burner, waiting for a lull in the news or for the need for a distraction from the news?

How fortuitous that just as a ceasefire is achieved in Lebanon and journalists can finally go back into the country and document the devastation and atrocity and humanitarian disaster and unexploded cluster bombs, suddenly there’s a story on the TV that overtakes every other practically twenty-four-seven.

And this one has an icky factor beyond credulity. A pre-op transgendered pedophile 2nd grade teacher, whose own father thought him dead “I thought somebody would have killed him by now,” who’s been harboring a JonBenet fetish, AS HAS THE REST OF AMERICA OBVIOUSLY, a macabre fascination with imagining a dolled-up mini-tyke in her death throes.

This guy tells the authorities that he was present at JonBenet’s death so he’s yanked out of a Thai jail were he was awaiting charges on some other perverse impropriety.

Now his motives can be pretty muddy. Maybe he wanted to escape the sordid fate of a Thai jail cell. Or maybe he wants to see himself finally linked to the object of his fixation. He gets to be the protagonist in his fantasy of JonBenet’s last breaths. It’s the old high school ploy, isn’t it? If he couldn’t have JonBenet, he’ll settle for the world thinking he had her.

I’m not saying Karr-creep didn’t kill JonBenet. I’m only suggesting that this story’s ick factor should have kept it from soiling our television viewing until something of the voracity of his claims were shown to be valid. And the ick-factor increases as we realize that the media circus is only bringing this gentleman closer to orgasm.

I’m saying that if you or I phoned the police or the media to say we knew where Jimmy Hoffa’s body was buried, we’d get a bite. But if we added that we kept Hoffa in our freezer between necrophilic bouts, or that we killed him because he did not address us by our proper name Napoleon Bonaparte, the cameras might have given pause to let mental health officials sort things out.

There’s plenty of ugliness out there, very little of it deserves front-page attention and for the most part it doesn’t surface. When Geraldo was standing in front of that basement brick wall in Chicago, the supposed site of Al Capone’s vault, ready to show the world what was behind it, he may not have known what he was going to find. But you can be certain his network had already made sure it wasn’t going to be a crack whore’s alley or heroin addict’s den.

Or a dog and pony sex act, unless there is a call for one.

Subterfuge8.28 UPDATE
Bill Mahr spelled it out last night. JonBenet was a diversion from Lebanon atrocities.

Now Jeffrey Dahmer Karr has been unmasked as but JonBenet’s aspiring rapist. But the public is still left slimed by having attended to his sadistic fantasy. People who read James Patterson or Thomas Harris ask to bathe their imaginations in dark pools of that ilk, the rest of us do not.

Don’t blame the Boulder D.A., blame the MSM pornographers.

Atrocity damage control

AbirThis is 14-year old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi’s ID.
From Al-Mahmudiya. She is the young girl who was gang raped by five American servicemen who killed her family, and incinerated her body once they were done.
 
The press reported that she was an Iraqi Woman. When pressed, Army spokesmen admitted that her age might fall anywhere between 26 and 14. Abeer’s ID was already confirming her true age for the International Press. Even a week after the military admitted the rape victim’s age had been 14, American papers were still reporting the story as the rape of an Iraqi young woman.

Inured to war crime.

US soldiers TOSS a bakery in Fallujah
In a recent harder-than-usual puff piece report, the Stars and Stripes described a day of hunting insurgents in Fallujah.
 
Nevermind that Fallujah was supposed to have been pacified, razed to the ground more precisely, and barricaded to such an extent that only residents with approved retina scans could get back in. Nevermind. Insurgents are planting IEDs again, they’re sniping at our soldiers again, and we’re conducting patrols to stop them again.

On this patrol, an Iraqi sniper keeps popping up in a particular neighborhood. Our intrepid soldiers have become upset with the shopkeepers on the block because not one of them will rat on who’s doing the sniping. One of the shops is a bakery.

Here’s what our GIs come up with their down-home plan. “Toss” the bakery.

They blast the business’s lock, or drive into the door with their Humvee, then “toss the place,” throwing everything to the floor including bread, flour and utensils. The strategy being that maybe the bakery will reconsider collaborating with our soldiers.

Here’s the deal. Are you interested? Expecting Iraqi civilians to take a side is not only bad form, it’s a war crime. The tactic which the Stars & Stripes article paints as affable American ingenuity, is in reality an action that comprises three distinct war crimes. Violations of a code to which the American public has become inured, perhaps because of our media’s repeated pandering.

1. Coercing civilians to be our military scouts is forced conscription, a war crime.

2. Meting out collective punishment is a war crime.

3. Destroying civilian food is a war crime.

Such actions have long been designated as war crimes by international consensus, based on centuries of abuse suffered by civilians at the hands of soldiers. Since forever war makers have improvised many cruelties to visit upon uncooperative peoples, two testaments later there are codes of conduct to stop each one.

B.
For the stubborn faint-of-mind: Yes, the Iraqis are supposed to adhere to the same laws and conventions. Yes, hiding behind non-combatants is a crime. But do you think their actions justify your commiting crimes?

Probably you remember a rule your mother taught you: Just because somebody else does it, doesn’t mean you have to.

Shit hits fan writ American War Crime

US servicemen are escaping charges of murder in court because they can claim they were following orders. Actually, their official Rules Of Engagement: “Kill all military age males.”
 
Kill all military age males?! That’s an actual ROE? That’s a war crime!
 
pictureWe’re still trying to bring Serbs to justice for that very crime in Srebrenica. That’s a criminal ROE and all soldiers have an obligation to question such a rule. The Nazis claimed they followed orders. Not good enough. Still a crime.

Say you were a teenage Iraqi, or say you were an innocent bystander, or say you were an insurgent with your hands up, or say even you were an insurgent holding a gun, if you decide to give up and raise your hands in surrender, for your opponent to kill you would be an injustice and a war crime. Don’t you agree?

It’s pretty simple, compassionate and humane. It may feel shitty to a bunch of American soldiers who would like a license to shoot every Hadji in sight, but war is not a license to kill, kill, kill. War is hell, it’s not Half-life.

If you’re an American who just shot up a houseful of children, and you raise your hands in surrender, to shoot you would be a crime too. These days American solders now unfortunate to become captured are facing the wrath of the beleagered Iraqis.
 
We reap what we sow. We must prosecute the bastards sowing war crime.

No Gun Ri

The killing of Korean women and children by Piccaso
A letter has come to light, written by the American ambassador to Korea in 1950, which details the American intention to shoot Korean refugees should they approach American troops. This letter not only led to the next day’s massacre of hundreds of civilian at No Gun Ri, but documents what can now be understood as a systemic policy of shooting civilians. The US Army shrugged off such accusations at the time. This letter was declassified thirty years later, and was overlooked in the department review fifty years later.

Shall we extrapolate about the US military’s actions these days?

Most recently we’re learning about the US massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha: family members being executed at point-blank range by a handful of enraged marines. First there was a coverup, then a denial. Now the atrocity is being described as isolated. The press is even playing along -backhandedly- by asking if Haditha will become Iraq’s My Lai.

Such a comparison would be correct if we remember that My Lai was actually one among many US atrocities in South East Asia. Such massacres of civilians were policy in Vietnam. The Wintersoldiers tried to tell us about it then, we now know about Tiger Troop and their death squad missions.

American Iraq War veterans are already telling us about the common military response to IEDs: shoot at everyone and everything in the vicinity. Unembedded reporters have been recording since the invasion began about American soldiers breaking into houses and shooting the men, women and children inside. As was done in Haditha.