Greenwald on accountability

Greenwald today (emphasis mine):

That Jeffrey Goldberg of all people is the reporter to whom we turn to understand the contours of the Iran debate would be comical if it weren't so troubling, and it illustrates the broader shield from accountability with which political and media elites have vested themselves.

...

Goldberg is still treated as credible and influential despite his unrepentant Iraq falsehoods because the people who determine credibility and influence did essentially the same thing he did, and are thus incentivized to maintain a Look Forward, Not Backward amnesia, ensuring that nobody pays a price for anything that happened (see, as but one example, Slate's Fred Kaplan -- who was also spectacularly wrong in his Iraq-war-enabling reporting -- gushing this week about Goldberg's brilliance: "the best article I've read on the subject -- shrewd and balanced reporting combined with sophisticated analysis of the tangled strategic dilemmas."). Meanwhile, Goldberg's colleague publicly demands that nobody hold Goldberg's past transgressions against him. No profession is more accountability-free than establishment journalism.

Greenwald last month (emphasis mine again):

With the Nasr firing, here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free "objectivity" is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones.

It simply isn't true that establishment journalism is accountability-free. It is true that establishment journalists are not accountable to the truth, nor to the public (though they might purport to be). But they are accountable to power, as Octavia Nasr and Ashleigh Banfield and Eason Jordan and Phil Donahue, among others, well know. Thus, nobody is held accountable for the disaster of the Iraq war because the Iraq war wasn't a disaster to the powerful! Further, people are rewarded for their contributions to the Iraq war because the Iraq war was good for the powerful!

I'm sure Glenn knows this because he documented it quite well in the 2nd linked piece, but I feel like his piece today suffers for not explicitly making the connection.

FW: GOD Is Busy

Here's another wonderful edition in the ongoing series of email forwards I get from my family, and my replies to them.

Subject: FW: GOD Is Busy

----- This is great...keep it going! If you don't know GOD, don't make stupid remarks!!!!!! A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist, and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, GOD if you are real then I want you to knock me off this platform. I'll give you exactly 15 min.' The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, 'Here I am GOD, I'm still waiting.' It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold. The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned, and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, 'What in the world is the matter with you? 'Why did you do that?' The Marine calmly replied, 'GOD was too busy today protecting America's soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an idiot. So He sent me.' The classroom erupted in cheers!

So a student attacks a teacher for saying things he didn't like, and then delivers a sanctimonious lecture about protecting freedom of speech... this violence and hypocrisy is something theists approve of?

There have been over 4,000 US military deaths in Iraq, hundreds in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands wounded. I guess GOD didn't protect those people, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died in these wars and the millions who have been driven from their homes? But instead of reflecting on the carnage and terror our country's leaders and military have inflicted on our own troops and on countless innocent people throughout the world, let's all fantasize about smashing atheists in the face!

Destructive and illegal invasions of other countries have obviously made us less safe, not more, which even US intelligence agencies acknowledge (and which was understood to be the likely consequence beforehand). Holding up these murderous rampages as some glorious acts of protecting freedom is ridiculous. And making war out to be a holy act of god makes me proud to be an atheist.

Heros and Criminals, Shoe-Throwers and Presidents

In terms of the moral significance of the action, throwing a shoe at somebody is somewhere between calling him a motherfucker and punching him (the merciless beatings al-Zaidi has endured are far greater crimes than throwing shoes). It is basically like a hard slap in the face. The primary purpose is to humiliate the victim, but there is also the known risk, if not outright intention, of inflicting minor physical harm. Because of the slightly violent nature of the act, I wouldn't throw a shoe at Bush to make a political point. And I wouldn't call someone who did a hero.

If I accepted the criminal justice system as an appropriate avenue for dealing with these kinds of situations, I'd probably say throwing a shoe at a politician deserves a very minor sentence - a few nights in jail, a small fine, some community service, probation, or whatever. I'd definitely say that anyone who condemns Muntathar al-Zaidi even the slightest bit without noting that his minor transgression was an emotional reaction to a series of unspeakably horrific organized crimes committed by George Bush is so morally depraved as to be unworthy of commenting on such matters.

So I understand why many people consider al-Zaidi a hero. He bravely stood up to a powerful evil, knowing he would face severe consequences for doing so. There is something heroic about that, but I'd prefer to see heroic acts that don't involve even minor levels of violence.

That said, I'll add my powerless voice to those calling for al-Zaidi's immediate release. And I'll continue to call for real criminals like George Bush to face justice.

Truth is not important

I came across the video below, a compilation of a guy named Peter Schiff on various news talk shows in 2006 and 2007. It is 10 minutes of him being right forecasting the current economic collapse, while all the other talking heads literally laugh at him. It is kind of fun to watch. My first thought was that those idiots who mocked him while they predicted endless booming growth should never get a job again.

But that was very silly of me, a vestige of my naive former worldview. I was imagining a world in which news programs are in the business of getting things right, of telling the truth.

News television, like all television (and other media for that matter), is in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. As such, we expect the programming to reflect these interests. Also, the major television networks are owned by a small handful of wealthy conglomerate corporations. As such, we expect the programming to reflect the interests of those corporations and their owners. These two interests largely overlap, though there can be a few conflicts, as in all cases where the same parties have multiple interests. In those cases strategic decisions have to be made. But in the case at hand, it is pretty easy to see that an audience of people who believe that endless economic prosperity is always just around the corner is easier to sell to advertisers, and is better for the corporations who own the media.

The only thing truth has to do with it is if the audience figures out how unreliable the programs are and stops watching. The immense popularity of Fox "News" is a prominent, but certainly not isolated, demonstration of the appropriate level of concern TV networks need have for such a scenario. If their dishonesty becomes impossible for the audience to ignore, they have ways of handling that too. After US forces failed to find any WMDs in Iraq, what did the TV networks that credulously amplified the false WMD justification for war tell you? That everyone believed there were WMDs, and nobody could have predicted otherwise. There is ample documentation to prove otherwise, but that doesn't matter. They just lie after the fact to cover up their previous lies.

So the idea that the laughing fools in the video will never work again is foolish. They've shown that they're willing to say whatever needs to be said to advance their careers. Networks make good use of such people.



(By the way I know nothing about this Schiff guy. He may or may not be advancing his own interests here, which may or may not have anything to do with the truth. Maybe he just got lucky. I don't know and don't really care.)

Why bother? (Surely I must already have used that post title by now?)

In mid-June I sent this email to a bunch of family and friends:

"The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." -Italo Calvino

This essay by Chris Floyd documents how Iraqi civilians in Fallujah are suffering high rates of miscarriage, birth defects ("These infants include many with heart defects, cleft lip or palate, Down's syndrome, and limb defects."), and cancer, because of the illegal use of chemical and radioactive weapons by US forces in the siege of that city in 2004. The public health crisis was certainly not helped by the illegal targeting by US forces of medical clinics and personnel for destruction or capture, or by the illegal intentional disruption of water and electricity services. These massive war crimes are never reported by the US corporate media, but they outrage the rest of the world along with the few Americans who are able to access such information through alternative sources. And they've destroyed countless lives of Iraqis.

By the standards of the Nuremberg Trials, a war of aggression is the ultimate international crime, considered to encompass the whole of all the evils it contains, like the evils mentioned above. As such, civilian and military leadership, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others should be on trial for war crimes for their roles in launching this war. But in the US, the impeachment charges brought up by Dennis Kucinich are barely even acknowledged, except as subject of ridicule, even by the purported opposition party. And so criminal prosecution is unthinkable, making mockery of any concept of law or justice.

Part of my decision to move to Canada was because I wanted to morally disassociate myself from the actions of the US Government and political class. I don't know if crossing an imaginary line really achieves that or not, but my feelings of outrage and disgust aren't likely to improve even if my conscience does. And so I'll continue to "seek out what is not inferno" and share my thoughts with my family, in the fleeting hope that it will make some kind of difference somehow.

- Adam

I received barely any response. I can count on one hand the number of people who have even acknowledged that I sent it. Email is a tricky medium, and we've all seen that people have trouble replying even to messages with very clear requests or instructions. And I don't suppose many people welcome receiving unsolicited politically charged mass emails (even if they are personally composed by a family member or close friend, as opposed to a forward of unknown origin). So I don't know that I should interpret the deafening silence in response to this missive of informative despair as complete disinterest. But it is hard not to do so.

I bring this up because another Floyd essay is tempting me to repeat this exercise. I guess something about the combination of US military violence and child suffering and death makes me want to reach out and... and what? Try to make it stop? See that someone else gives a shit? Torture myself over my own guilt? Force people to confront things they'd rather ignore? I don't know. I wonder how many of the people who read the email gave more thought to why I sent it than to the overt content it contained. I suspect that any time spent on either could be measured with the second hand of a watch, and recorded with one digit. I suppose I should be envious.

I will prosecute myself for my crimes

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said earlier this week that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

Hahahaha, yeah right. Will they also pursue criminal charges against themselves for repeatedly funding Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Look at this! (Ignore that.)

As BO's supporters see their list of excuses shrinking hourly, they increasingly hide behind "but... Iraq!!" Apparently BO's expressed desire to shift a small percentage of our machinery of death to focus elsewhere is some kind of improvement, one of his impressive examples of change. That's like using your VISA to pay off your Mastercard balance, and citing the improved Mastercard situation as evidence of your financial accumen. Except instead of redistributed credit card debt, it's redistributed slaughter of innocent brown people. But... different brown people!!

No shelter here

Obviously this is quite disappointing to me.

Canada has deported Robin Long, a US Army deserter who fled the country rather than accept deployment to Iraq. The majority of Canadians wanted to let such soldiers stay, and Parliament passed a non-binding resolution saying they should be able to stay, but the conservative Harper government deported Long anyway.

Basketball War Crimes

Jesus Christ, people cream their shorts for military leaders. The link is to ESPN's pro basketball blogger, Henry Abbott, drooling over NBA commissioner David Stern's decision to hire retired General Ronald Johnson to the newly created position of VP of Referee Operations.

See the NBA has had some image problems lately, such as refs threatening to beat up star players, or refs working games where they gave "tips" to organized crime figures. So in what Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is calling "the exact right move," the NBA brings in an Army General to straighten things out.

I guess it is the exact right move the way Abbott is responding, too blinded by the uniform to realize that this guy was the leader in an organization of tens of thousands of trained killers, a manager in a war crime responsible for the deaths of over a million people. I guess genocide and frenzied looting and war profiteering make fixing games and starting fights seem like less of a big deal. The article mentions that in Iraq, Johnson oversaw billions of dollars of reconstruction. As far as I know, the reconstruction has been little more than a sloppily run corporate boondoggle, with billions of dollars missing and completely unaccounted for. Not sure exactly what role Johnson played, but "oversight of Iraq reconstruction" isn't something I'd highlight on a resume.

So, yeah, way to go NBA.

War as environmental disaster

From here via Mahatma X Files:

Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.



The war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.



Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed, but that the Bush Administration has struck down. Finally, if the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries on the planet.



Just the $600 billion that Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the country’s current electricity demand. If 25% of our power came from wind, rather than coal, it would reduce US GHG emissions by over 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to approximately 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions in 2006.



In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.



US presidential candidate Barack Obama has committed to spending "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure." The US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.

Jesus fucking Christ. The North Pole might be ice-free this summer and war is our priority.

Why I won't vote: Al Gore Iraq myth debunked

An idea that I've encountered (most recently in an email conversation with Trakker, but other times as well) in response to my stance against voting is that if only Al Gore had won in 2000, we never would have invaded Iraq. And somehow this proves that voting, and voting for Democrats specifically, is a very important obligation. I don't get the logic, but I don't think logic is really the point with this argument. Nevertheless I'll respond to it.

First of all, Al Gore did win the election in 2000 and the votes didn't matter because the Supreme Court said the son of the guy who gave them their job was the winner. And, as I've mentioned before, Al Gore in his role as Senate President blocked the attempts of a few Democrats from the House of Representatives to contest the election. So the votes didn't matter, and even the guy who won the election agreed that the votes didn't matter.

But more to the heart of it, was there any reason in fall of 2000 to think Gore would advance a less destructive foreign policy than Bush? Specifically in regards to Iraq, Gore had just been part of 8 years of the Clinton regime that imposed brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people. When it was pointed out to Secretary of State Madeline Albright that these sanctions caused the death of over half a million Iraqi children, her response was "we think the price is worth it." I think it is reasonable to assume that "we" includes Gore, and as far as I know Gore never spoke against those sanctions as a candidate.

So Al Gore was part of an administration willing to kill over 500,000 children on the theory that starving the Iraqi population would cause them to overthrow Saddam and enhance US access to Middle East oil. But at the time of the 2000 election, even if everyone could have magically known that a group of fanatical religious fundamentalists with no connection to Iraq would fly planes into U.S. buildings, we were supposed to be quite certain that Gore would be less inclined than Bush to respond by killing more Iraqis in an effort to overthrown Saddam. Decisions must be judged by the expected outcomes at the time of the decision, and I don't see any way that it would have been possible to forecast the Iraq outcome.

And so now here were are, worrying about the 2008 election and how McCain will be more of a disaster than Obama for some reason or another. And who is the headliner of Obama's national security advisory group? Madeline "worth it" Albright. As far as I can tell, the decision available to voters is between Republicans, who drop bombs on brown folks, and Democrats, who prefer to starve them to death.

spending someone else's money

I haven't looked at the numbers recently as to exactly how much the Iraq invasion and occupation has cost, but I'd guess offhand that $10,000 per US taxpayer is the right ballpark. Maybe double that. Now, if the idiot Emperor had gone before the nation and announced that we were going to war and that it was going to cost each of you 5 figures, there's no fucking way he could have pulled it off. Everyone would have gone ape shit, no matter how much we all just wanted to kill some brown people.

Of course he didn't do that because he doesn't have to. They never have to. They can just go to war whenever the fuck they want, and we have to pay for it no matter what we think of it. This is morally wrong. I can think of no possible justification for the government forcibly taking taxes out of every paycheck before I even get it, and using that money to pay for a war that I don't approve of. And it is a betrayal of every tax payer that these fucking clowns can just spend as much as they want and borrow the difference if tax revenues don't cover it. That borrowing is offensive enough when we aren't using it to slaughter families while they sleep and anally rape shackled prisoners who've been locked up without charges for 5 years. But that's exactly what we are using our credit to pay for. The depths of depravity of our government are beyond words.

The only way to opt out of the whole sickening mess without risking imprisonment is to leave the country. I was able to do that, but that's a really fucking hard option to choose, no matter how pissed off you are. And it fucking sucks that it had to come to that.

Of course up here the same logic applies. There is just a significant difference in the amount of damage being done with the income the government steals.

RIP

"weak Democrats" my ass

I've been meaning to write this up more formally but I'm just going to jot down some notes. Perhaps I'll come back and fill in links and more reasoning later.

• Read through the last few days of Greenwald's columns, covering Democrat leader Steny Hoyer's back-room maneuvers to force immunity through telecoms through Congress, while publicly lying about it, and while also arranging to be able to actually vote against the deal he creates so he'll be able to falsely claim he didn't support it.
  
• Meanwhile Obama is doing nothing to stop it, but is issuing bland statements that mildly oppose it.
• Internet progressives continue to lament the "spinelessness" or the "weakness" of the Democratic Party. Liberal blog hero Digby just can't understand why Democrats won't stop shredding the Constitution and figures there must be some deep dark secret that they're afraid will be let out or something.
  
• Wake the fuck up! Democrats WANT this shit. They don't care about the Constitution. They WANT telecom immunity! They WANT domestic spying! Their highest levels of leadership work to make it happen, while maintaining in public that they don't want it but can't help it.
  
• They'd rather you think they're weak than have you realize what they really want. That way you can believe that they're really good people deep down, but if only they had more courage...
  
• This shit is so fucking obvious, but every day you hear a new complaint about how bumbling and cowardly the Democrats are. The media perpetuates this narrative because they're in on it too.
• Remember how the Democratic takeover in 2006 was supposed to end the war but instead the war was escalated? That's because the Democrats don't want to end the war. They want to get votes from people who want the war to end. So they say they want to end the war, then they discretely make sure the war goes on, while they publicly pretend that they just couldn't fight the bully Republicans, but maybe if we elect even more Democrats then maybe they'll be able to stand up for themselves. Bullshit. Same with torture, rendition, domestic spying, Iran, and everything else. More Democrats won't do any better.
  

WAKE THE FUCK UP AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH

live blogging my visit to Obama's website

After reading Chris Floyd's recent post, where he mentions that Obama's website "calls for fighting the War on Terror in a 'smarter way,'" I decided I'd visit this website and see how Obama presents himself. I've watched very little of his speeches (though I've read the text of many), and haven't really watched any TV coverage or commercials, so this is one of my first experiences of Obama as he wants to be seen. Let the fun begin.

I googled "Obama" and found his official site. The first thing that happens is that he asks you for money. In exchange he offers a "new direction for America" and says that "This is our time to turn the page on the policies of the past." Which policies he'll be changing are not yet mentioned, nor is the direction of the new direction. But the new direction will be new. We know that much.

Before clicking through to skip the donation page I noticed something odd. The suggested donation denominations: $5, $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000, $2300. Uh, $2300? I'm guessing there's some weird explanation for that. Obama is from Chicago right? A shout-out to Michael Jordan perhaps? Anyway.

The first thing I notice on the next page is this quote. "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington... I'm asking you to believe in yours." He's also asking you to believe in fairies! If you believe, clap, clap your hands!

I look around the main page a bit more and find a part that asks where I'm from. I notice "American Samoa" on the list and click that, hoping against hope that it will detail Obama's position on issues of importance to the brave Samoans. Nope, just links to join local Obama teams. Back to the main page.

At the top there's a tab for "issues." On the drop down list is "faith." I click that. This should be good. The faith page tells us that Obama has made glorious speeches about faith. There's a link to "Barack's faith principles." There we learn that GOD is always present in our lives, and not only that, GOD is a constant source of hope. Wait, isn't Obama's campaign all about hope? This must mean GOD is for Obama! Next we learn that progressives ought to be approaching religion "boldly" which he explains means that "we" ought to be using it for our own partisan ends, so as to prevent others from using it for their own partisan ends. Truly brilliant stuff here. Back to main page.

Let's get into the meaty stuff. Issues --> Foreign Policy. Click.

We already know from Floyd that he has no problem whatsoever with the basic formulation of the US waging a war on an abstract concept. He just thinks we need to be smarter about it. So he's off to a good start.

He says he will end the war in Iraq. He also says he will leave troops in Iraq. Don't let that confuse anyone though; the war will definitely be over! He says he will "make it clear" that we won't have any permanent bases in Iraq. He also says we'll need to guard our embassy (the largest embassy in the history of the galaxy, which some people might mistakenly think was more like a permanent base, but it totally isn't). He also mentions humanitarian aid, which I suppose is nice, considering all the slaughter we've been doing. That ought to make us even.

He tells us that Iran has sought nuclear weapons. Dick Cheney says that too! He tells us Iran's leaders have threatened Israel. He doesn't mention if Israel's leaders have threatened Iran. They probably haven't.

He tells us that the gravest threat to the American people is a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons. I would have gone with global warming or heart disease or automobile accidents or a crippling recession. But terrorism is much more scary, allowing you to invoke disturbing images of Arabs, and you can spend lots of money on that without pissing off big business, so I guess recession and heart disease aren't as grave. That's why I now say that Africanized Killer Bees are the gravest threat to America!

Obama says he will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Maybe that means he'll adhere to it, unlike every other President. He says countries that break the rules should face sanctions, specifically mentioning Iran and North Korea (hey didn't someone include them in an "axis of evil" at some point?), but doesn't mention whether the US should face sanctions for breaking the rules. I think we should just assume that he'll follow the laws and accept the same justice he wants to apply to everyone else. That seems like a safe assumption, given his lack of comment on the matter.

Obama says that we need a bigger military. Whew, I was worried that spending more on military than the rest of the world combined was kind of too much already, maybe even a huge fucking waste, and that when you carry a gigantic fucking hammer everything starts to look like a nail (and by "look like a nail" I mean "we better bomb the shit out of that shit"). Good to know I was wrong about that. Obama will massively swell our military into an erect stabbing machine, suitable for deep penetration into the most dangerous of deployment regions. This will arouse the passionate love of country that Americans used to feel deep in their loins, and bring us all to a quivering climax of safety and love and relaxing naps. I suspect the neighbors won't appreciate all the noise, but they're just prudes so who gives a fuck, right? Cock-blockers.

Obama specifically mentions that he support Israel's right to self defense. He doesn't mention whether the people of the occupied territories have this right. Or the people or Iraq, or Iran, or Somalia, or Cuba, or Ecuador, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan. I'll assume that they don't. Just Israel.

Obama calls for a brutal warlord to be brought to justice. So he is interested in that kind of thing. I wonder if any brutal warlords who deserve to be brought to justice will be residing anywhere in the US during an Obama Presidency? Hmmm... probably not. Better just worry about the former Liberian President.

Alright well that's about all the BarrackObama.com I can stomach for now, as fun as this has been. I've truly witnessed a new page in history, one very different from the old pages. Obama boldly offers ambiguous notions that lend themselves to whatever glorious interpretation his supporters want to hear, while never actually committing to anything that would deviate from the imperial agenda, which I think is definitely a new direction for America.

Tomgram: Chris Hedges, War and Occupation, American-style

This Tomgram by Chris Hedges is a must-read.

This is what our war is:

"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.'"

And this:

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."

And this:

Mejía also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really f---ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Mejía noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

I'm sure this was all done with the best of intentions.

Glory to the killers

Most of these "heroes," however, are dupes. They think they are fighting for our freedoms when instead they are helping to destroy our freedoms. They think they are retaliating for 9/11 when instead they are paving the way for another terrorist attack. They think they are preventing terrorism when instead they are making terrorists. They think they went to Iraq to fight al-Qaeda when instead al-Qaeda came to Iraq because of them. They think they are protecting Israel when instead they are contributing to increased hatred of Israel. They think that our cause is just when instead it violates every just war principle ever formulated. They think they are fighting injustice when instead they are committing a crime against the Iraqi people. They think they are defending the United States when instead they are helping to destroy it.

I don't quite agree with all of that, but its basic thrust is a point that needs to be made. US soldiers aren't heroes. They are murderers with uniforms and medals.

War Made Easy

War Made Easy

I just watched this 70 minute film, and I don't even know what to say. One thing that really shocked me was seeing television coverage of the early part of the Iraq invasion again. The glorification of the violence was sickening beyond my ability to express.

Watch the whole thing.

Bush: I lied. Heh heh heh!

Bush: I supported the troops by lying to them. Wouldn't you do the same?

Hey, asshole, if you're so worried about morale, here's an idea. Don't fucking send them to invade and occupy a country that doesn't want them there. Don't extend their tours indefinitely. Don't send broken men back into battle and hide their wounded comrades in roach-infested shitboxes. Don't put them in situations where torturing and slaughtering innocent civilians is bound to happen. Don't blame their PTSD on preexisting condition and make them repay their signing bonuses. Bring them all home, and make sure their medical and psychiatric care is fully funded.

Fuck you, you lying coward.

Support the Troops?

"Support the troops" is simple sounding phrase that encompasses multiple layers of complicated bullshit. Anyone bothering to read my thoughts on the matter knows that fascist warmongers conflate any criticism of war with criticism of soldiers. And criticism of soldiers is the ultimate sin, so the standard response is that the criticism is directed at the civilians at the top of government who are making the choices to go to war, and maybe at some of the top generals, but certainly no maligning of the average 19 year old marine is intended.

Well I say fuck that. Why should I support any of them? I know that a large portion of the US Armed forces came from poor backgrounds and saw the military as a way out of a shitty situation. I know they've been deceived and intimidated and subject to various other shit that renders them sympathetic figures, pawns of the really evil people. But what they're doing on a daily basis in Iraq is fucking wrong, no matter how much they believe they're somehow defending my freedom. I don't support that. If that means I don't support them, then so be it.

But there are some troops I do support. I support Ehren Watada, a commissioned Army officer who refused deployment to Iraq. He did so knowing he could face a court-martial and years in prison. His case is currently working through some complicated legal procedures.

I support Matthew Diaz, a Navy lawyer who illegally sent a list of names of Guantanamo detainees to a civil rights lawyer. He did it because he knew the the Bush administration's refusal to provide such a list to the Red Cross was a crime against humanity. He served 6 months in jail, emerging jobless and bankrupt. The Pentagon is actively seeking to have him disbarred.

So Watada and Diaz are some brave troops who are actually fighting for something worthwhile. There are others like them who deserve support and respect. The rest of the sheep in Iraq may be brave, but their actions are immoral and not worthy of my support. However, here's how I would like to see them supported. I'd like all of them to be brought home immediately. Every wounded soldier should receive excellent medical care, and every soldier should receive excellent psychiatric care. Lots of it.

And then every crime they committed against innocent civilians should be investigated. "I'm just following orders" is not a defense for war crimes. Every solider who took part in those crimes should be prosecuted, though I would hope for some leniency for the more sympathetic and contrite figures. And if people higher in the chain of command are willing to plea guilty in exchange for more leniency for those under their command, I'd support that too.