WikiLeaks, a website that publishes anonymously-sourced confidential documents, has published a previously unseen footage showing a US helicopter firing at civilians in Iraq, killing a dozen of them.
Among the dead were two journalists, Namir Nour El Deen, a photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, a driver, both employees of the Reuters news agency.
Namir’s brother, Nabil Nour El Deen, tells Al Jazeera after watching the footage that it is clearly a crime committed by the US military. (Apr 6, 2010)
A few days ago it was the story of the coverup of the murder by U.S. forces of civilians in Afghanistan, today it's the story of a 2007 massacre in which U.S. helicopter gunships fired on civilians in Iraq. WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald were on Democracy Now! this morning, drawing the (hopefully obvious long ago) conclusion that you can't trust a word the U.S. military says, and also the conclusion that these type of events are absolutely daily occurrences, with only the tip of the iceberg of them being exposed to the public.All true. But I'd like to point readers to an additional conclusion. Over the years I've written a great deal about the number of people killed in Iraq, and one of the points I have made repeatedly is that when you look at various statistics, some of them (e.g., Iraq Body Count) want to count only "civilians", while others (the statistical surveys) count all the dead (and some count only "violent" deaths, while others count all deaths, e.g., deaths from lack of medical care or poor public health conditions caused by the invasion).
And so one point that can't be emphasized enough is that, whether you agree with me or not that all the deaths, be they of members of the Iraqi armed forces, members of the Iraqi resistance, or "innocent civilians" are equally reprehensible, and all the result of the U.S. invasion, is that the numbers for "civilian" deaths are completely and utterly skewed and rendered meaningless by the kind of false reporting represented by these two incidents. I'm not going to look up this specific incident in IBC, but it's an absolute certainty that a huge number of deaths were excluded from that count because they were reported (first by the U.S. military, and then by the U.S. press stenographic pool) as "insurgents" or perhaps "terrorists" (or maybe "suspected terrorists"). Which is just one more reason why the numbers to focus on are the total number of Iraqis killed, not the bogus and almost completely arbitrary "civilian" totals.
Notice I'm not dwelling on the actual numbers in this post. I've been over that ground before, and for the purposes of this discussion the actual numbers really don't matter. Needless to say they do matter to the actual people involved, those no longer living and those still mourning (and suffering from in very real ways) their loss.
Protest Obama's Escalation
Saturday December 12th
12 Noon - 1:30 PM
Burlington City Hall Steps
Burlington, VT
If a definitive history is ever written of the challenges to Americans’ civil liberties in the tumultuous aftermath of Sept. 11, Sharon resident Adrienne Kinne might well be one of the sources.There are several comments in the Free Press denouncing her (showing a vitriolic, vomituous Vermont you rarely read about).
Kinne is more than a footnote in a new book on National Security Agency eavesdropping, and her allegations — widely reported over the past year — have prompted calls for a full investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and ranking member Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
After she was called to active duty as a sergeant in the Army Reserve after Sept. 11, Kinne said in a recent phone interview, she was assigned to eavesdrop on satellite phone communications over a broad territorial expanse that included Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. The intercepts included calls to and from aid workers and journalists, among them Americans and citizens of U.S. allies. The intercepts began several months after Sept. 11 and continued through the invasion of Iraq until she was demobilized in August 2003, she said.
American churches can contribute enormously by seeing how pathologically dysfunctional war is rapidly becoming. Let them affirm the psalmist’s contention that “the war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (33:17). Churches have a special obligation to point out that “God’n’country” is not one word, and to summon America to a higher vision of its meaning and destiny.Via Speaking to the Soul - From “Beyond War” in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004):
War turns Republics into dictatorships. The logic is actually quite simple. The Constitution says that the Congress is responsible for declaring war. But in 2002 Congress turned that responsibility over to Bush, gutting the constitution and allowing the American Right to start referring to him not as president but as 'commander in chief' (that is a function of the civilian presidency, not a title.)
Now Bush has now turned over the decision-making about the course of the Iraq War to Gen. David Petraeus.
So Congress abdicated to Bush. Bush has abdicated to the generals in the field.
That is not a Republic. That is a military dictatorship achieved not by coup but by moral laziness.
Always, we have betrayed them. We backed "Flossy" in Yemen. The French backed their local "harkis" in Algeria; then the FLN victory forced them to swallow their own French military medals before dispatching them into mass graves. In Vietnam, the Americans demanded democracy and, one by one - after praising the Vietnamese for voting under fire in so many cities, towns and villages - they destroyed the elected prime ministers because they were not abiding by American orders.
Now we are at work in Iraq. Those pesky Iraqis don't deserve our sacrifice, it seems, because their elected leaders are not doing what we want them to do...
And now, get rid of Maliki. Chap doesn't know how to unify his own people, for God's sake. No interference, of course. It's up to the Iraqis, or at least, it's up to the Iraqis who live under American protection in the green zone. The word in the Middle East - where the "plot" (al-moammarer) has the power of reality - is that Maliki's cosy trips to Tehran and Damascus these past two weeks have been the final straw for the fantasists in Washington. Because Iran and Syria are part of the axis of evil or the cradle of evil or whatever nonsense Bush and his cohorts and the Israelis dream up, take a look at the $30bn in arms heading to Israel in the next decade in the cause of "peace".
