by John Kaminski / Rudemacedon –
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
Maybe I’m only deluding myself, but I seem to remember stories during the Vietnam war when American reporters at least pretended to be outraged when US troops were accused of sickening war crimes. The My Lai massacre was a big deal when it was revealed – accidentally, as I recall.
We noticed that recent exposé in the Toledo Blade newspaper in which it was revealed that many US units in Vietnam were given carte blanche by their superiors to butcher women and children in a pathetic attempt to frighten the Vietnamese natives into supporting the white-skinned invaders who were eviscerating their jungle paradise.
Wild as they were, the 1960s were a more innocent time in America. Doing the right thing and treating foreigners with respect had not yet been eliminated from the social repertoire of American behavior.
But that was then and this is now.
It isn’t bad enough that no one in a position of authority in either the American government or practically all of American public life bothers to mention that the US has absolutely no business being in Iraq, and that all these needless murders and corrupt business practices have created a 21st century America that makes Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union look humane by comparison. Just ask all those innocent people of Arab descent who remain in jail without access to their lawyers.
The stark fact is America has gone to war, demolished an entire nation, and squandered the lives of thousands of its own soldiers for reasons that are lies — proven, documented, and deliberate perversions of the truth — and nearly no one on the homefront in positions of authority has had the moxie to stand up and say America is now the most dangerous rogue nation in the world….
‘Just Today. One Single Day’
Those who aren’t paying attention to the continuing atrocities being committed in our names might say I’m exaggerating. Well, as a good example, I bid you consider a mere one day’s news from Iraq, as reported by our premier American daily e-newspaper, Information Clearing House.
Today (Friday, January 9, 2004) was as good a day as any — very typical of the past ten months’ daily news from Iraq. Here is what the American “liberators” did to its hapless victims in Iraq — just today, one single day.
• A 55-year-old Iraqi man had been removed from his house in August after a search by American soldiers found no weapons there. His family had been desperately searching for him for months, and they finally found him, brain dead in a Tikrit hospital.
After performing diagnostic tests, doctors told his family he had suffered massive head trauma, electrocution, and other beatings on his arms. The family was told he would be in a coma for the rest of his life from the obvious trauma suffered from torture.
It turns out that American soldiers had dropped him off at the hospital, saying he had had a heart attack.
• In a similar story, the Arab newspaper Al-Bawaba reported the presidential secretary of former leader Saddam Hussein died two days ago while in US custody. He had been taken into custody in June. Reports in the Arabic press noted he was tortured by US investigators to pressure him to provide information on weapons development programs.
• The New York Times reported the Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment. So much for the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. The Times said “some military officials” said the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
• The London Financial Times reported Bush administration officials “systematically misrepresented” the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to war, according to a new report to be published by a respected Washington think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. These distortions, combined with intelligence failures, exaggerated the risks posed by a country that presented no immediate threat to the US, Middle East or global security, the report says.
• The London Financial Times also reported US intelligence bowed to political pressures in assessing the threat posed by Iraq, undermining a critical element of the Bush administration’s national security doctrine. That same think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, concluded that US intelligence was clearly unable to provide accurate information necessary for reliably acting in the absence of an obvious imminent threat.
Thursday’s Information Clearing House (ICH) report also included stories on a new investigation into a secret Pentagon intelligence unit that led the nation to war by pushing disinformation and faulty intelligence to produce wildly exaggerated threats posed by Iraq.
ICH quotes from Richard Perle’s new book about how the US should make a preemptive strike on North Korea. [ICH’s stories also include] how nearly as many US soldiers were wounded in Iraq last month as during the entire six-week period of major combat operations, an evocative piece on how an American father visited Iraq to mourn his dead son killed in combat, and a story on how a Spanish journalist was deliberately killed by coalition troops.
But the capper was this:
An Iraqi Mother Asks Bush: ‘Where Is My Son?’
• An Iraqi mother has written to President Bush and other top politicos around the world to ask them to explain why her son was deliberately murdered by US troops. In her heart-wrenching letter, she explained that her 19-year-old son, who was soon to be married, was returning home with friends when their truck broke down. After being confronted by an American patrol, they were searched and handcuffed, and led three kilometers to a nearby dam, then ordered to jump into the raging waters.
One of the three boys survived to tell the tale, but her son, who could not swim, was never found, only his jacket. Then as a final signature, US soldiers flattened the boys’ vehicle by running over it with heavy equipment.
The distraught mother, wrote: “To document the incident, my son’s name is Zaydun Ma’mun Fadhil Hassun Al-Samarrai, born in the 1st of June 1984.… Yes, they killed him and they broke my heart, try to imagine that dear sirs and ask your wives how hard it is for a mother to see her fruit ripen only to be thrown by sinful hands and to be swept away without any mercy or humanity. Those soldiers have turned everything America has ever stood for into one big lie. I was a victim, and there are and will be many more.”
You need to read this whole story and see the boy’s photo. f you want to really cry Click here)
John Kaminski is the author of “America’s Autopsy Report,” a collection of his Internet essays posted on hundreds of websites around the world. This is an edited version of a longer article that can be read at http://www.johnkaminski.com/ To read more of his essays, click http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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Note: Information Clearing House, the prodigious and informative compendium compiled daily by a single high-integrity gentleman named Tom, is the single most valuable daily newspaper in America, in my humble opinion. You can get it by signing up at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
