Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Atrocities are the legacy of war

We deserve a place in heaven not just for all the bull we’ve had to listen to justifying endless US wars but the grief of seeing generations of our young men & women inculcated with racism, trained as killers, set loose on civilian populations, & the horror of knowing these atrocities are done in our name. In the past few months, in Afghanistan alone, US soldiers urinated on Afghan corpses, desecrated religious beliefs by burning the Quran like garbage, massacred & burned 17 people & then denied the victims justice in a court of law. Ritual apologies slobber from Obama & the Pentagon. Now, a US soldier has released 18 photos to the LA Times showing US combatants posing gleefully on two different occasions with Afghan corpses & body parts. There is a pattern of atrocities because war creates monsters & kill teams--& no one knows that better than the Afghan people who have suffered unspeakable depredations at the hands of the US military. The Times has complied with a US military request not to publish the photos. This censorship isn’t because they think we haven’t the stomach for the macabre character of the crimes depicted but because the photos would strengthen popular opposition to the war. The Times article explaining their censorship is a masterpiece of apologia attributing the barbarism to a breakdown in military discipline because soldiers felt vengeful about losing buddies in suicide bombings. Next to the apologetics they’ve placed a photo montage of US soldiers killed in Iraq & Afghanistan going back to 2001. One wonders why they stopped there. Why not go back to WWI? That’ll really work up some sympathy for barbarous retributions. So while elementary justice is denied the Afghan victims of the recent massacre, US soldiers are allowed to wreak revenge & have our sympathies for doing so. The Pentagon has promised one of their criminal investigations but these are nothing but black holes for justice. We will deserve a place in hell if we do not gather in numbers to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all US-NATO troops from Afghanistan. This photo is of Afghans protesting outside a NATO base against the massacre of 17 civilians. (Photo by Mustafa Khan/European Pressphoto Agency)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-afghan-photos-20120418,0,6471010,full.story

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