<Finally, would you arrest our returning GI's and put them behind bars for murdering?>
It's a sham, Michael. The fantasy that we are championing freedom, gets increasing harder to believe in. It requires ignoring more and more facts.
Here's what's really happening:
nationinstitute.org
The most vociferous complaints, however, concerned nighttime raids and detentions. Military people had previously acknowledged to us a policy of "45 seconds of rage and fury"on entering a house. They consider this necessary to obtain immediate submission and keep their troops safe. Soldiers break down doors, yell commands to lie on the floor, run through the house, and generally try to frighten the occupants into submissive behavior.
"Why do the soldiers break down our doors and smash our cupboards. We would give them the key if they just asked?" was a typical question from the outraged lawyers.
"When Saddam raided," said one, "he took only the person he was after. Now the whole family is taken, even when the soldiers know they have the wrong house."
(my comment: this is classic chimp dominance behavior and threat display. Word for word, this is how Goodall describes alpha male chimps acting.)
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He flatly denied that either men or women had been taken in without being allowed to clothe themselves fully, and he emphasized that he is not authorized to detain people just because they are family members of suspects. He assured us that his troops didn't usually handcuff the detainees. He preferred, he said, to leave them uncuffed, so that "if they run we can use any level of force necessary to control them. Once we cuff 'em, we can't touch 'em."
(my comment: what do you think "any level of force" means? Examine his thinking process, that results in the decision to leave the detainees without handcuffs.)
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"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." - Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, and commanding officer of the U.S. military base in the Yithrib District of Iraq.
(My comment: that last is almost as good as "We had to destroy the village in order to save it.")
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No, I wouldn't arrest U.S. infantrymen, or even Lt. Col Sassaman, for the same reason I wouldn't arrest German infantrymen in 1945. I would, however, arrest Bush, and try him for the crime of waging a war of aggression. Since I don't believe in the death penalty, I wouldn't hang him, as we did at Nurenburg. I'd chain him by the ankles to Saddam Hussain, and have those two thugs spend the rest of their lives picking up unexploded cluster bombs and land mines. That would be justice.
There are a list of war criminals in the U.S., whose crimes have been exhaustively documented, and who go unpunished, protected and even honored. Kissinger, Calley, all the Iran-Contra crowd (many of whom now work for Bush, and who pose as humanitarian imperialists), etc., etc. Most of the American war criminals are political, not military, leaders. No infantrymen. |
