Category: War Crimes

Dirty little wars

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

http://youtu.be/53zLkeIXZvg

Amy Goodman:

As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill.

The increasing pace of US drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a US press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. Dirty Wars, along with Scahill’sforthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul,Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported. Scahill told me:

“In Gardez, US special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US.”

Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of US foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of 12 February 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by US special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the US soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.

War whores

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

James Wolcott:

The war against Iraq was wrong from the start, nothing will ever make it right, it is a never-ending injustice against a people that did us no harm and whose we destroyed under false pretenses: the claims by the pro-war propagandists of Saddam Hussein’s hand in 9/11 and stockpiles of WWDs that could make the next 9/11 a mushroom cloud rising over rubble-reduced Manhattan (remember the scary scenarios of suitcase nukes being smuggled in by terrorists? I do). I was recently going through my Vanity Fair clips from that post 9/11 period and the apocalyptic hysteria and macho bullying of those years–the kneejerk invocations of Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, the Churchillian cadences of the war’s advocates–were headache-making. It’s as if the entire political and media establishment entered a fever dream that would allow them to play liberators and anyone who didn’t want to play was an appeaser, a superannunated hippie. How the chickenhawks loved to castigate their opponents as chicken-hearted. I’ll never forget the sick feeling I had watching the live coverage of the first US “shock and awe” bombing runs on Baghdad, with so much of the media in vainglorious hoopla mode, as if it were Super Bowl halftime entertainment. The war would cost so much more and last so much longer than its peddlers anticipated, and, as Justin Raimondo and others have pointed out, there is no penalty whatsoever in political punditsphere for being so wildly, bloody-mindedly wrong.

A dying vet says a final ‘fuck you’ to George Bush and Dick Cheney

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

This is all over the place, and it’s quite moving:

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all — the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
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