(UPDATED BELOW)
Yet another confirmation has come to light of the machinations by the self-professed Christian leaders of the West to manipulate their nations into a murderous war of aggression against Iraq, the Guardian reports.
A letter has come to light confirming the UK government’s firm intention to join the United States in the Hitlerian action against Iraq, even if a UN resolution specifically authorizing the action could not be obtained.
In one sense, the new revelation adds nothing to the veritable mountain of evidence we already have of the Western leaders’ criminal intent — much of it directly, and unashamedly, from the principal criminals themselves, in the memoirs from Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others.
But it is useful as a reminder of what is already becoming ancient, irrelevant history to the populace and to the political class: the murder of a million human beings, one of the most heinous crimes of the modern era.
And of course, one primary reason — perhaps the primary reason — why this unspeakable atrocity has been so thoroughly buried is the obscene insistence of the Obama Administration to bury, several fathoms deep, all the crimes of its predecessors … while adding to them with relentless, unflagging energy.
Try to understand this: the murderers of a million (and almost certainly more) innocent people are walking free today, protected, pampered and honored by a system that their successors have adamantly sought to maintain and expand … by adding new crimes to the ledger of blood, destruction, suffering and death.
You can look up this sordid and evil history yourself, in a myriad of sources. (For example: just search “Iraq” in this website, and plow through years and years of compilations of the evidence for this putrid crime, and the eager complicity of the ruling classes, and their media servitors, in it.) No one in a position of power on either side of the Atlantic has named these war crimes for what they are, nor made even the slightest move toward bringing the murderers of a million people to justice.
On the contrary; they have instead praised and countenanced and continued these abominations, and have built upon to them to commit other, similar crimes elsewhere.
And you want me to take these people seriously as leaders of democratic nations? You want me to enter into deep and complex analyses of their political fortunes? All of these people — the original perpetrators and accomplices, and their continuers — should be standing trial for the wanton destruction of human life, for the international war crime of military aggression, for firing hot metal into the guts of a three-year-old child and ripping her body and mind and soul into shreds of inert viscera.
The very sight of these people — Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Straw, Brown, Obama, Biden, Cameron, Gates, Petraeus, Osborne, Clinton, and the rest of the whole sick crew — should make any thinking, feeling person start throwing up. Get this into your head at last: these sleazeballs, these blood-soaked, blood-caked, bloodthirsty cretins, are murderers. Child-killers. Worse, by many orders of magnitude, than the serial killers and “lunatic dictators” so beloved by the modern imaginative fictions known as the movies … and the news.
Get this into your head, and have done with them, with all of them, and with all their works, past, present and future, at last. Or, by God, count yourself as their accomplice.
UPDATE: John Glaser at Antiwar.com adds to the mountain of evidence for the bipartisan American war crime in Iraq, with new deals on atrocities committed under both the past and present commander-in-chief of the occupation forces:
As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed.
The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006.
“It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” before the “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid.
Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”
The details revealed in the cable are a valuable insight into how many of these house raids turn out. The raids, often carried out in the middle of the night, have become one of the primary strategies of the US war in Afghanistan, with tens of thousands orchestrated just in the last year.
That last point is worth reiterating. The often murderous home invasions developed in Iraq are now the meat and drink of the occupation in Afghanistan. They have become the American way of war: storming and bombing family homes with massive, obliterating firepower, in the poverty-stricken villages of lands ravaged and shattered by the Washington war machine, its local proxies, and the hydra-headed violence these wars of imperial domination have unleashed on the targeted countries. How brave, how bold, how noble it all is.
And of course, the beat goes on. As Glaser notes:
In one notable and comparable incident in February of 2010, US Special Operations Forces surrounded a house in a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan. Two civilian men exited the home to ask why they had been surrounded and were shot and killed. US forces then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).
Instead of calling in an airstrike to hide the evidence, US troops, realizing their mistake, lied and tampered with the evidence at the scene. The initial claim, which was corroborated by the Pentagon, was that the two men were insurgents who had “engaged” the troops, and the three murdered women were simply found by US soldiers, in what they described as an apparent honor killing. Investigations into the incident eventually forced the Pentagon to retract its initial story and issue an apology.
This is how they do it — and are still doing it — in Iraq under the enlightened leadership of the Nobel Peace Laureate: storm, shoot, murder, lie. Rinse — with apology or blood money when caught — and repeat. Over and over and over.
But hey, have you seen the latest opinion polls? Glorioski, ain’t it exciting, trying to figure out which feckless, fatuous, fourth-rate poltroon gets to have a turn at the wheel of the blood-greased war machine?!
UPDATE II: In another important story at Antiwar.com, Kelly Vlahos details the Peace Laureate’s amazing strides in expanding the privatization of war and “security,” as he pours millions upon millions of dollars into the coffers of some of the most vile war profiteers on earth.