And to keep you caught up on what US taxpayers purchased as the Pope lay dying..
Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Iraq, describes what happened in Hilla as “a horror, dozens of severed bodies and scattered limbs”. Initially, Murtada Abbas, the director of Hilla hospital, was questioned about the bombing only by Iraqi journalists – and only Arab cameramen working for Reuters and Associated Press were allowed on site. What they filmed is horror itself – the first images shot by Western news agencies of what is also happening on the Iraqi frontlines: babies cut in half, amputated limbs, kids with their faces a web of deep cuts caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs. Nobody in the West will ever see these images because they were censored by editors in Baghdad: only a “soft” version made it to worldwide TV distribution.
link
America continues to fight its war on terror on the home front, too.
Great. Abu Ghraib in a minute.
First, i have to say that I saw that video of them handcuffing that five-year-old kindergartner today on MSNBC. Dear lord.
The parents are suing the police. As well they should.
The worst part were the child’s terrified screams.
Also: The lame excuses of the school administrators who were the ones who called the police were pathetic.
was jumping on desks, yelling, throwing things, and trying to hit the teacher for a while before they called the heat in. I’ve worked with kids like that… do they honestly think that having three policemen terrorize her is theraputic? That poor little thing. It was a good symbol for Ductape Fatwa to choose: pointless violence against another innocent.
Because they are, in my view, illustrative of the cultural cancer that has metastasized throughout the US political classes, and threatens not only those outside of the US, but Americans as well.
The culture of atrocity, the culture of brutality, has eaten away whatever potential might have once existed for a viable opposition to US policies that, once again, endanger the world.
I visited a couple of other message boards today, that present themselves as “left” or “progressive,” and was struck by the number of messages in support of the police brutalizing the toddler. Some advocated beatings as an alternative.
Then I went to another board, ostensibly even more “left” and noted that there were very few posters left there who oppose US atrocities in Iraq. Most link their support to a politician they admire, who is also pro-crusade, and construct strained and febrile pseudo-Nixonian arguments to support the continued shredding of tiny bodies, the concentration camps, the torture, the rape.
To oppose these things is simply not pragmatic.
My speculation is that few are old enough, or travelled enough to remember another time not (to me 🙂 ) so long ago, another place, when another population learned about pragmatism.
On the positive side, they are not in danger of being “detained” by Mr. Negroponte. The Democrats are, in their own way, I suppose, protecting their own, as the sun’s last rays turn the corpses to gold.
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A permanent blog or BTribopedia page should be set up to list all atrocities of war and the innocent victims. The suffering endured by the Iraqis in the Bush | Cheney adventure to invade and occupy another nation for American Oil ventures.
PS You are aware the Hilla attack occurred two years ago – many similar tragedies have followed and caused total civilian deaths to surpass 30,000 lives lost.
See also the Afghan losses due to unnecessary atrocities in early stages of US Special Forces operation – the Convoy of Death – in Fall of 2001. An examplary diary written on Fallujah at dKos.
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
Ducttape,
All 3 of your linked reports bring me to a deep, deep immobility. I lend my voice at all turns, appropriately timed or not, willingly heard or not. We barely have relations with family/friends who won’t engage themselves in seeing this horror.
We are all, perhaps, waiting to see the possible future scenarios:
It has since become clear, however, that on the contrary, if there is “one voice” it is one of approval, whether the tacit complicity of silence or shouts of acclaim and praise, that one voice has heeded Bush’s wise words, you are with us, or with the terrorists.
Some of us were rather astonished to learn we were terrorists, having thought of it as a bad thing, we had no idea it was a synonym for common decency.
Your list left out one other option. The chances that the rest of the world will continue to sit by quietly waiting for the buzz of the bombs over their cities, the splintering sound of boots kicking through their door, waiting to watch rough hands seize their own little ones and haul them off for some good old American-style “interrogation,” are not good.
The warlords in Washington have placed the fate of the US, the fate of its people, firmly into the hands of those who loved the victims of US policy, and those who refuse to join the ranks of those victims.
How low can the US military go? Continuing slaughter of innocents (reported widely around the globe). Complete failure to prosecute war criminals. No attemt to even pay lip service to such annoyances as the Geneva convention. What can redeem this institution?
I chose that particular one because of the focus on media coverage, without the release of the unauthorized photos of US activities in Abu Ghraib, for instance, who in the US would know?
I guess from Abu Ghraib we have learned that it really does not matter whether crimes against humanity are documented within the context of a cultural acceptance of them.
This morning I heard on CNN that some politicians in the US have indicated displeasure with the Abu Ghraib announcement.
Perhaps they have forgotten who they approved to be the attorney general, perhaps they have forgotten who they approved as domestic “security chief.”
Perhaps they have forgotten to whom these “cleared” individuals reported, and on up the chain.
I cannot be too hard on them for forgetting. The clamor of outrage from their constituents has been quite muted.
Heyyyy, wait a minute now…didn’t I see her in that deck of cards of the most wanted terrorists….Naaaahhh, never mind, that guy had a beard!!
I never expected anything else but a whitewash. If this administration is anything, they are consistent. Now we’ll have Negroponte running his death squads (how soon in New York or California?), Gonzales being apologist for and enabler of torture, Condi running around threatening the world, Rumsfeld planning to carry the threats out. Bolton chasing foreign leaders, throwing chairs, little bits of spittle on his chin… now that would complete the cozy little Neocon picture. Absolute power, absolute corruption. Dirty Bastards.
And we are going to wait HOW LONG to start the revolution? And how many Iraqi civilians are dead? And how many democrats are kept out of “town hall” meetings that our tax dollars paid for? And how many times can the president nominate and get a nutcase on board? And when will we invade Iran with Israels help? And how many children will be handcuffed instead of being taken to the principals office or counselors office? That child was out of control for a reason. Did they ever stop to rationalize that this child was really screaming for help? God these atrocities have to stop but who will speak for the innocents? And if you do will they shoot you down or smear your name as they have already started to do to Townsel? Are we totally f’ed?
Considering that we’ve had our grubby paws all over Central and South America, the Middle East, the Far East – I shouldn’t even bother listing this – for eons, without any real public opposition or self analysis, the extreme methods (invasion) we are now applying should not really cause surprise. Not that they weren’t extreme before, but now they are out in the open, and with it any pretense of being a superior civilization – at least in the eyes of the world – gone. (How the rest of the world perceives and acts upon this is another matter for another discussion.)
We react to the deaths of people in our own civilization with horror (i.e. Oklahoma, 911), yet we cannot project that onto people we kill elsewhere. I’ve heard many numbers tossed about as to how many civilians have died in Iraq – the far right will say it’s been several thousand, whereas the far left will put the number into the hundreds of thousands. Though I suspect the higher figure is more accurate, it is that we don’t collectively react negatively to the lower one that bothers me. In short – as a nation we lack empathy, and unless we get to see footage of the destruction we cause, most of us are not creative enough to feel empathy. We do care about our soldiers, people who have been trained to kill or be killed – but even that is limited. Usually when someone mentions: ‘support our troops’, it refers to support of the invasion rather than the safety of the soldiers.
Now let’s look at preempting future criminals in Kindergarten. An enormous amount of kids are being artificially subdued in classrooms, and schools are suing parents for not drugging their children. The police are all to often caught on tape brutalizing people, and they already have a foothold in schools – security and arrests. Kids are often being pulled out of schools by police – even elementary school. We have no system to deal with kids as kids so we use the law. This girl is fortunate in that the incident was caught on tape but I doubt that this will put a hold on any such arrests in the future. We can’t even empathize with our own children – we don’t spend the time analyzing their behavior – instead we do what is convenient for ourselves.
I would say that these three stories fit together very nicely in that they reflect our lack of interest in the events leading up to our cultural crisis.
when I saw the story about the little girl, was how many times every day does this happen to other children, to begin with, without the benefit of being on tape, just happens to them, and they may tell somebody, or they may be afraid to, or whomever they tell may not believe them.
This little girl is also lucky because her mom is suing the police. Not all kids are so lucky. There are parents who would not care, abusive parents who do that or worse to their own kids.
If by some miracle, written language and the recording of history manages to survive the next few years, this particular period will be noted as the beginning of the “breakdown of the social fabric” in the US.
You’re not kidding. I meet so many parents that view the schools as a babysitting service.
I came across an interesting fact about the police in Mass. several years ago. At the time there had been over 80 vehicular homicides that they had caused, and not one of them went to trial. Furthermore there was a (tiny) scandal a few years back on the police training barracks (also in Mass) being more abusive than boot camp. They behave, and have for some time, as if they were above the law. It completely devalues the human beings whose taxes pay their salaries. They are not taught to think (as a matter of fact it’s discouraged – applicants who score too high on the test don’t get in), and the system is already in place so it’s near impossible to do anything about it.
I feel like I’m stuck in Kafka’s The Trial.