Tag: Iraq

When all is said and done

What could I add to a quote from Robert Fisk’s recent piece The shaming of America about the recent WikiLeaks disclosure of “The Iraq War Logs”? Not a fuck of a lot. So;

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told…

Typical Fisk fashion, pure class!

The Iraq War Logs

Yesterday I posted an entry citing a talk Chris Hedges recently gave concerning his new book, The Death of the Liberal Class. In said talk he mentioned a few bits of interest that have relevance to what I’m writing about today, illusion and war. Speaking of illusion and war, on Friday WikiLeaks “leaked” the largest classified military leak “that has ever been released into the historic record”, some 391,832 documents, otherwise known as “The Iraq War Logs”.

Putting aside the predictable reactions and infantile tactics we’re now witnessing from, both, the Obama Administration, and their lackey’s, the mainstream media, nothing I’ve read or watched since Friday is, at least in part, as powerful as what Josh Steiber wrote in an open letter to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, An Open Letter on the Needed Response to the Upcoming Wikileaks Report;

I write on behalf of those around the world who are ashamed to have to listen to the President, along with military and political officials, express their great angst over leaks while seeming to ignore the realities of what those leaks reveal about the very nature of these wars. When you fail to take account for what has been done in our names, funded by our taxes, and fought by those who believe that the U.S. should represent something noble, we will search for and tell the truth; if you are ashamed by citizens practicing the accountability that our country was designed to demand, then that says more about you than about us…

I’m urging people who are not so willing to drink the Kool-Aid to check out a the aforementioned letter by Josh Stieber, a couple video’s, featuring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (explaining the logs and defending the logs), and lastly Friday’s Democracy Now! appearance by America’s “most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971”.

Please do yourself a few bits of important reading and watching today…

Absolutely Sickening!

There is very little, of value anyway, I could add to most of today’s Democracy Now’s broadcast [1] [2], so I’ll simply cite a bunch of words Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com, spoke in said episode;

“My concern with the discussions that have been triggered, though, is that there seems to be the suggestion, in many circles […] that this is some sort of extreme event, or this is some sort of aberration, and that’s the reason why we’re all talking about it and are horrified about it. In fact, it’s anything but rare. The only thing that’s rare about this is that we happen to know about it and are seeing it take place on video. This is something that takes place on a virtually daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places where we invade and bomb and occupy. And the reason why there are hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq and thousands of dead in Afghanistan is because this is what happens constantly when we are engaged in warfare in those countries. […] This is what war is. This is what the United States does in these countries. And that, I think, is the crucial point to note, along with the fact that the military fought tooth and nail to prevent this video from surfacing, precisely because they knew that it would shed light on what their actual behavior is during war, and instead of the propaganda to which we’re typically subjected…”

The reality of war and what is asked of those who carry it out, by a certain breed of psychopath, is absolutely sickening!

Anti-Empire Report

November’s edition of Bill Blum’s monthly essay contribution is a “rager;”

“If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries…”

Check it out!