Winter Soldier testimonies coming to DC

Winter Soldier film features confessions and documentation of American atrocities in VietnamThe IVAW are really pulling it together this year. And they’ve set upon an ambitious strategy that has precedent with Vietnam antiwar vets. Winter Soldier Redux, Washington DC, March 13-16, 2008.
 
In 1970 veterans of the Vietnam war convened in Detroit to share personal confessions of their part in atrocities perpetrated against the Vietnamese. The documentary made of these transcripts was kept from the US public and has only recently become available. Click here for some clips on YouTube.

The face of legally blind patriotism

Prosthetic eye with Marines emblemGunnery Sergeant Nick Popaditch lost his eye in the assault on Fallujah. His new glass prosthetic features a holographic emblem of the US Marine Corps.
 
This Veterans Day, Sergeant Popaditch was awarded a medal for pioneering an innovative combat technique. Presuming an ambush, Popaditch called in an airstrike, then drove his tank forward under cover of the C-130 gunship before its firestorm had subsided. As a result Popaditch was injured, but in his words: “(We were) just inflicting a devastating number of casualties on the enemy, and we did it in a way that no one had ever done before.”

This is the same tank commander immortalized on magazine covers in 2003 smoking his cigar as he assisted in toppling Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square. Articles told later of Popaditch’s tank named “Carnivore” storming Fallujah in retaliation for the contractors killed by jubilant Iraqis. Now he’s grabbing attention with his Few-The-Proud cornea. When we recoil at WWII accounts of the Death’s Head Regiment and other unthinkably morose nomenclature and regalia of the enthusiastic Nazis, can we fathom the imaginative horrors of our own X-Box-born killers?

Popaditch acted courageously by venturing into an ordnance maelstrom to certain injury. But whose kind of hero?

Silencers

Did Blackwater sneak silencers into Iraq? That’s a good question, because silencers are used mainly by snipers. Is this the true face of bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq?

Is sniping using silencers done by a private Pentagon- contracted corporation of death squad personnel what Iraq is all about for the US government at this point? Yes, it is certainly so. What else can one expect from a government that loves ‘water-boarding’ its captives so?

That and rendering. Dictionary meaning of ‘to render’ is ‘to try out oil from fat, blubber, etc., by melting.’ ‘Rendering’, a favorite phrase for US government death squad work. Yes, the US government, Pentagon, and Blackwater would be using silencers, too. America’s face to the world.

Generals among the cherry trees

Military brass speaking truthfully
The Washington Post, uncredited for being a chief jingoist newspaper behind Bush’s war making, weighed in on the General Petraeus Westmoreland testimony, indignant that of all things, the general’s credibility should be questioned.

General Petraeus had an exemplary record apparently, commanding the 101st Airborne. That division may still have cache in recollections of D-Day, but I remember those guys in the news in Iraq. In Fallujah, before we leveled it, the 101st initiated a gunfight with unarmed schoolboys who were protesting the requisition of their school for an American encampment. That was back in the days when individual atrocities, if they got past the media censors, seemed to draw outrage. Before Iraq became one single atrocity too dangerous for reporters to visit, a hand-basket already delivered which General Petraeus will testify, beyond reproach, is still well in hand.

‘The Peace and Stability Industry’ goes to work ‘for’ Darfur

Yes, there is such a creature that calls itself ‘The Peace and Stability Industry‘. The ‘International Peace Operations Association’ considers themselves to be just that. And they’re for ‘Saving Darfur’.

The money for the Justice and Peace Darfur benefit tomorrow is going to a group called CARE. Here is an article that mentions in passing their general level of awareness of issues regarding US based military contractors and Darfur.
……………………………..
The Privatization Agenda: Hired Guns and Darfur

The U.S. under the Bush administration has served up more money for Darfur than any other country has to date. But when President Bush announces that he’s giving an impressive $10 million a month to AMIS, as he did in one of his innumerable Darfur press releases last year, where do all those greenbacks actually go? The answer may surprise readers who are unfamiliar with the modern cash cow of private security contracting. Much of it is channeled to Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE)—an L.A.-based subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. Another significant portion goes to the L.A.-based DynCorp International, a name you may recognize from the child sex trafficking scandal in Bosnia, or the alleged beatings of journalists in Haiti, or the toxic crop-spraying in Colombia. No individual DynCorp employee has been prosecuted in any of these cases. To the contrary, DynCorp went on to win more lucrative contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan … and, yes, Darfur.

Whereas the lack of accountability for hired guns in America’s current wars has proved to be one of the major stories of the past few years (think Blackwater in Fallujah, or Titan at Abu Ghraib), there’s been hardly a peep about U.S. defense contractors on the ground in Darfur. When I asked a senior official from CARE—a major humanitarian group working throughout Sudan—about the phenomenon, she replied: “Our people are not aware of private contractors in Darfur. Some in Khartoum, but not Darfur.” This oversight is difficult to comprehend, given that the vast majority of AMIS projects in Darfur are managed by PAE and DynCorp employees, from the building of barracks to the provision of strategic transport…..
…….
This is just an excerpt from the whole article Can Drag Queens and Hired Guns Save Darfur? at Truthdig. One might also mention that Lockheed is the largest military-industrial employer in Colorado Springs.

Oops! We missed the target…

So sorry. We missed the target… but there was nefarious activity there. The title to this reportage on MSN is… ‘Attack that killed kids likely missed target- Officials: Military knew children were present but considered risk worth it’

That even sounds like Madelyn Albright is still on the job? Of course, this is Afghanistan we’re talking about now, and not Iraq. That must be different?

The General’s Report- General Taguba, American hero

The General’s Report really shows how the top Pentagon command and leaders of the Bush Administration fully authorized and supported the continued use of torture on American held Prisoners of War held at Abu Ghraib. They should all be in jail.

General Antonio Taguba deserves a Purple Heart for his valor in not going along with them. Now let’s get Guantanamo closed down and the base given back to the Cuban people.

Sand Creek No Gun Ri

This morning will be the dedication of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. The headline of today’s Gazette? “One man’s battle” about whether the 1864 slaughter was a massacre or a battle, and reporting the re-release of a 1925 first hand account written by Irving Howbert who, 61 years after the fact, did not recall the atrocities ascribed to his unit. Whatever kind of near sesquicentenial slap in the face is this? Do you think the prominent placement of this insult could have something to do with blurring America’s vision about current military massacres?

Normally respected Old Colorado City historian Dave Hughes is republishing the book, and wants to repaint the Sand Creek Massacre as, well, not a massacre at all. A quick recap: One early morning in 1864, 700 cavalry volunteers swooped into a village of 500 Arapaho and Cheyenne refugees, killing nearly 200 (the Gazette says 150) committing unmentionable atrocities, following the command “Kill or scalp all, big and little; nits become lice!

I first heard Dave Hughes talk about the glories of war at, of all places, the traveling Vietnam War Memorial. It reflected a myopic immoral tide change I would never have been cynical enough to foresee, and it presaged our national sanction of the US war of aggression against Iraq and acceptable collateral damage. In the shadow of the traveling wall, remembering the 58,000 American dead, where not often enough did someone mention the millions of Vietnamese dead, Dave spoke of his immense pride of commanding his men, suffering the terrible casualties they did in Korea. The heavier the toll, the deeper his pride, the blustery commander was volunteering, if it weren’t for old-age, to do it again. I kid you not. Though he lost half his men to the battle, he would bravely venture more.

Downplaying massacres seems to be Hughes’ game. If you Google No Gun Ri, the now admitted deliberate massacre of hundreds of Korean refugees in 1950, here’s what do you’ll get: Dave Hughes on record standing up for the actions of American machine gunners. Here too, he wasn’t there, and relies on the recollection of soldiers who might have reasons to be blanking out on those parts. For shame. I know and like Dave Hughes, but he’s got a moral screw loose. And as we’ve seen in this town, that’s catching.

Elsewhere in the news, a play opens in London which retells the tragedy of Fallujah, in the actual words of participants on both sides. Authorities note 70 breaches of international conventions by the US forces. Soldiers like Dave Hughes can explain to themselves the necessity of sniping, gassing and obliterating hundreds of civilians in the regular conduct of war. Luckily wiser soldiers and statesmen before them have already addressed man’s bloodlust and agreed there are crimes that must never be rationalized.

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.

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.

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.

Tal Afar out of the bag

President thinks he has glommed unto an Iraq War success story, the American suppression of Tal Afar. Americans had hardly heard the name Tal Afar before Bush mentioned it in his recent address. Ergo must be a quiet town, at peace. Think so?
 
Tal Afar has been off the radar because there are no unembedded journalists there. There has been no one to report back about the usual American practices against the Iraqi population, no one but the usual military liasons. Now 60 Minutes is adding their voice to Bush’s refrain.
 
Well Tal Afar is in our neck of the woods actually. The last of Colorado Springs’ own Third Armored Cavalry has returned from duty at Tal Afar, and the stories circulating already will make your hair stand on end. Over the next weeks, I’ll document a number of 3rd AC eyewitness reports.

Tal Afar is the story of a Fallujah-like siege and bombardment, outside of the view of western TV cameras. Soldiers tell of levelling the Saria District, inhabitants and all. In the meantime, you can read an excellent account here.

2.
Not wishing to be surpased by Bush’s war is peace, violence equals progress logic, the media is criticising itself for not reporting more good news from Iraq. Right wing shills are arguing that network reporters should step out from the protection of the Green Zone and report on more than IEDs and bedlam. What a perversion of the hotel journalism argument! Reporters cannot step out into the real Iraq without getting killed. Some success story.

Gunship diplomacy

C-130s laying suppression fire before landing.
The C-130 gunships are coming! C-130s are flying platforms for hi-tech observation and weaponry. U. S. Military leaders have announced that they are deploying C-130s to Iraq in greater numbers, one of them called “Spooky.” You wonder -why now? What’s happened in Iraq that we now want to rain death upon the Iraqi population without needing to differentiate between men and women, adults and children, between friendly and unfriendly Iraqis?

Have you seen the video footage smuggled to the press which documented a now infamous C-130 raid upon an aledged Taliban compound in Afghanistan? From a safe height, gunners on the plane destroyed cars and buldings and picked off every single person running for cover. Infrared imagery illuminated every person’s body against the dark ground.

There were some valiant dashes for cover in the Afghan example, even a run that resembled a miraculous field-length touchdown where the runner was able to zig-zag between each shot from the C-130 cannons. You couldn’t help but want to cheer the little figure on. In the end the C-130 got everbody and redirected its fire to obliterate the entrance to a nearby cave.

One advantage to using the C-130 gunships in Iraq now will be that we will know how many Iraqis we are killing. The C-130s will have video records of the Iraqi casualties. We’ll have tiny white images of every body we destroy. We’ll know the children in the videos because although the little white figures emit a similar heat footprint, the children will have been taking smaller final steps.

Gunship diplomacy denotes the practice of bringing colonies to heel by the mere show of force, usually a technologically advanced ship sent to patrol the coast of a subjugated people who have known otherwise only houses made of natural materials.

War criminals at large

Serbian war criminal Mladic.Serbian General Ratko Mladic, seen here with NATO commander General Wesley Clark, wearing each other’s caps, is accused of the infamous massacre of 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica. Separated from the women, all the men and boys from Srebrenica were gathered into a soccer stadium and killed.
 
Mladic is also sought as a war criminal for the bombardment of Sarajevo. Wesley Clark may still face war crimes charges based on the bombardment of the civilian population of Kosovo.

How are their crimes any different from what the U.S. did in Fallujah? We besieged the city, bombed and sniped at its civilian population, then we told the residents of Fallujah to evacuate or meet their maker. From the lines of refugees leaving Fallujah, we turned back all fighting-age men and boys, on the pretext that we didn’t want “insurgents” to escape our dragnet. We forced them back into the city where we then treated everyone as a combatant and we exterminated them.

Child-proof Iraq

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.

The 911 Reichtag Fire

In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

2001 brought the American People their 9-11, with similar doubt as to how it came to happen. Americans were also given their Dachau at Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp absent every American notion of civil right. Americans soon became responsible as well for waging a preemptive war on Iraq based on trumped up charges of WMDs, and American atrocities at Mazar-i-Sharif and Fallujah, which beg comparison to the Nazi taking of Czechoslovakia, and Nazi acts at Babi Yar and Lidice.

To compare American to Nazis may seem like a profound trivialization of the horror of the Holocaust. There is no evil greater than that which perpetrated the Holocaust. But the Final Solution didn’t start until 1940. The U.S. Neocons are comparatively early in their game.

History has now confirmed that it was the Nazis themselves who started the Reichstag fire. They set the fire at night, while no one was in the building. Not a single life was lost. Not very Nazi-like. Someday history will reveal the truth about who perpetrated the events of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center. Time will eventually have to overcome this administration’s persistent efforts to thwart investigation and accountability.

IF the Neocons in the U. S. administration, either by negligence or malice, did allow or facilitate or instigate or perpetrate this ugly tragedy, if they did this, what can they have yet in store for the American people?

(Reprinted ArmchairCommando.)

Vets Day part 2: the 3rd Armored Cav

Black gloved marchers
Before the Guernica that became Fallujah,
 
before our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah,

before there were civilians immolated in their beds by white phosphor in Fallujah,

before Napalm under the disguise of Mark-77 was used in Fallujah,

before our tanks were running over the injured Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah,

before our helicopters were killing every last family trying to wade across the Euphrates River to escape the blood bath that was Fallujah,

before we were turning back all able-bodied men from the age of 11 to 65 from the lines of refugees trying to leave Fallujah because we didn’t want insurgents to escape our pincer movement, forcing them back into the city to make a stand,

before we declared that anyone not evacuated from Fallujah would be treated as a combatant,

before we declared our determination to make an example of Fallujah.

2.
Before we tried to make an example of Fallujah the first time because the world saw what they did to the four contractor mercenaries,

but had to pull out because we hadn’t yet thought to cut off access to the hospitals from which were escaping horror stories of the atrocities we were committing against the civilians of Fallujah.

Before we had thought to ban Al-Jazeera from Iraq for reporting on Fallujah despite our restrictions,

before we killed the Al-Arabia reporter who dared to venture into Fallujah.

3.
Before the famous desecration of the bodies of the contractor-mercenaries by enraged Fallujah youth who’d often seen contractor-cowboys ride through their streets shooting indiscriminately out the window;

before our military tried to cordon off Fallujah with encampments.

4.
Before the killing of three unarmed Iraqi marchers, and the wounding of dozens more, who’d assembled to protest a massacre the day before, both times by nervous 82nd Airborne soldiers who thought they had been fired upon first.

3.
Before the massacre of schoolboys protesting the occupation of their school by American soldiers. The soldiers claimed to have been fired upon and yet the only bullet holes to be found after the killing of 17 unarmed Iraqi men and boys were from the American guns.

5.
Before that time Fallujah had not been occupied. Fallujah remained restful throughout America’s invasion of Iraq. It was not until the actions of the 82nd Airborne and the Marine Expeditionary Force that Fallujah erupted into a hotbed for the insurgency and, as a result of American anger, into American war crimes recalling Lidice and Guernica.

Throughout this period, and in between the disastrous actions by the 82nd and the Marines, Fallujah and the Anbar Provence were the responsibility of the 3rd Armored Cavalry of Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. To their credit, they were not party to the unfortunate American actions.