Chris Hedges has a wonderful post in the Common Dreams website from yesterday, but I just started reading it. And now I have to stop.
Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
Collateral Damage
What It Really
Means When America Goes to War
by Chris Hedges
War as Betrayal
“This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun,” remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. “And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that’s a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.
“And they briefed this to the general,” Millard said, “and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘If these f—ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn’t happen.’”
I can't argue with that. Damn Iraqis' own fault that we kill them indiscriminately.
Or my other favorite, "hey this s**t just happens, man. It's war."
Tell that to the parents whose children are killed. Or tell it to the kids whose parents aren't ever coming home again. Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives... kids. Who knows which ones are insurgents, or supporters of insurgents? Think about that word, insurgents. That means they're against us. Not the Iraqi government (though many Iraqis refer to them as the "puppets"). Not the Iraqi police. Not the Iraqi army. Us. If we weren't there, would there be an insurgency?
Slow Intelligence
So the Senate Intelligence Committee finally got to complete part two of their report on the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, leading up to the war. Part one was an examination of the intelligence, and gee, how did the CIA and the DOD and whoever else get it so wrong? The second part has to do with whether or not the sketchy intelligence that we had was perhaps misused by our leaders in order to bolster an otherwise untenable case to go to war with a country that was perhaps less of a threat than say, Jamaica.
Sure enough, Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz... tired now... need a nap. All of these bastards lied to us in one form or another, either by inflating unlikely claims made by unappetizing sources, or, in the classic phrase, "making s**t up." Rumsfeld comes under fire in particular for making claims "unsupported by the intelligence."
There's another word for that - lying.
WMDs? no hard evidence whatsoever. Claims made by "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi turned out to be not much more than interesting fantasies, but no one in the administration questioned their veracity, because they really wanted it to be true.
Ties to Al Qaeda? Outright BS, with no evidence at all to back it up, but plenty to contradict it. Mohammed Atta was in Florida when he was supposedly meeting with the Iraqi secret police in Prague. We know this, because we were keeping an eye on him at the time.
Nukular Weapons? Nothing. Some paperwork, but no labs, nor access to nuclear materials.
And the White House response to this report? "Old news." Another non-denial denial. They don't say it's not true, they just dismiss it as "playing politics." So it's true, therefore the perpetrators of these various deeds should be brought up at least for impeachment, if not war crimes. I have to wonder if the Senate Intelligence Committee could give their report to the Hague, and let the chips fall where they may. Would Bush be unable to leave Crawford, TX for fear of being extradited? Would Rummy ever get to visit his friends in Europe without being grabbed right as he stepped off the plane?
One can only hope...
No comments:
Post a Comment