The 10,000th Haditha. (ATTN : Plagiarism) (505 hits)
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Submitted by Roger Flemming<happydogfish.at.yahoo.co.nz> (View user info) at 2006-06-03 02:51:23 EDT
By Ted Rall
06/01/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- NEW YORK--Months after Time magazine reported that U.S. Marines had carried out a My Lai-style massacre of at least two dozen innocent Iraqi civilians, the average "support our troops" American is waking up and smelling the butchery.
As usual, the U.S. government tried to cover up the mass murder--it initially claimed that the victims were blown up by an insurgent IED. But, as Time reported in March, the "civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children." As at My Lai, the bloodlust was not easily sated. "The raids took five hours and left at least 23 people dead."
Jane and Joe Sixpack are shocked. Congressional Democrats are calling for an investigation and, for once, will probably get one. Political analysts worry that the Haditha massacre could hurt U.S. propaganda efforts even more than the infamous photos of torture at its Abu Ghraib concentration camp.
So far reaction to Haditha has been the reverse of what you might expect. Republicans and other pro-war types are running around like it's the end of the world. Meanwhile the streets of Arab capitals, recently ablaze over the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy, are quiet.
The reason is simple: For Iraqis, American atrocities are old news, dating back to the invasion in March 2003 and a full decade earlier. (U.S. planes dropped so many bombs on Iraqi schools, hospitals and power plants during the 1990s that they ran out of targets.) So are the boulevards of New York, San Francisco and other cities where hundreds of thousands of American lefties once marched against the invasion of Iraq.
"As the war in Iraq rages on," CBS News' Dotty Lynch asks, "Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?" Well, Chomsky's still around. Over a million young Americans, many of them college students, protested Iraq. They certainly had allies in the media. (Hi.)
But The System is even less responsive to protest now than it was during Vietnam. State-run media made fun of antiwar activists as tattooed neo-hippies, called them treasonous and refused airtime to Administration critics. When is the last time a hard-hitting opponent of the Iraq war showed his or her face on national TV? Those of us who raised our voices against this war from the start, having fruitlessly complained about stories of battlefield abuse reported by the European media, are suffering from marginalization fatigue.
Meanwhile, in the "new" Iraq, Abdel Salam al-Qubaisy of Iraq's Sunni Muslim Scholars Association says, U.S. massacres of civilians occur routinely. "The American soldier has become an expert in killing," he shrugs. Like many Iraqis, Baghdad shopkeeper Mohammed Jawdaat says that U.S. troops have never shown respect for the lives of Iraqi civilians. "Six months ago," remembers Jawdaat, "a car pulled out of a street towards an American convoy and a soldier just opened fire. The driver was shot in the head. There were no warning shots and the Americans didn't even stop."
Abd Mohammed Falah, a Ramadi attorney, says: "U.S. forces have committed more crimes against the Iraqi people than appears in the media. The U.S. defense secretary and his generals should be sent to court instead of two or three soldiers who will be scapegoats."
Newspapers don't bother to report when the sun rises in the east nor do they assign reporters to cover when dogs bite men. Likewise, says Baghdad newspaper boy Imad Mohammed, Iraqi newspapers haven't mentioned Haditha. Same-old, same-old massacres of Iraqis by American forces are no longer news: "The Americans see a Muslim go into a mosque and just assume he is a terrorist. They either arrest him or blow it up."
Rami Khouri, editor at The Daily Star in Lebanon tells NPR that Haditha is "not a huge story [in the Middle East]. It's getting a lot of coverage in the United States, obviously, but most people in the Arab world are against what the United States did in Iraq...They say look, this was a catastrophe from the beginning and they're not surprised that this is happening. They kind of take it in stride because everything the United States is doing in Iraq is seen as morally and politically unacceptable."
Most of the world's population--including virtually every Muslim and about a third Americans--always believed that the war against Iraq was a genocidal attempt to intimidate the Muslim world and extort its oil at gunpoint. They don't see a difference between Haditha and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since 2003. Because the entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the outset, sold and perpetuated with countless lies, all of the 200,000-plus civilians and Iraqi soldiers who have died--whether by bomb or by bullet--were effectively murdered by the U.S. military.
Haditha, where two dozen were executed, was merely the 10,000th Haditha.
The morality-come-latelies still don't understand that nothing good will ever come out of the U.S. war against Iraq. Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that massacres of civilians by U.S. soldiers do "not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened." Actually, similar incidents have taken place in every war, including World War II. Pace's statement is either a dazzling display of ahistorical ignorance or a bald-faced lie--take your pick. Pace adds that if some of his men committed an atrocity at Haditha, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have."
That's not what the Iraqis say.
User Reviews
Submitted by HighVoltage900 (user info) at 2006-07-23 21:41:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
The first review is better.
Submitted by domenad (user info) at 2006-07-23 20:56:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
I would like to give anything by a scumbag like Ted Rall the proper rating, but the number scale doesn't go beyond negative infinity.
Submitted by Ingsoc (user info) at 2006-07-23 20:46:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Nothing makes me love anything more than an admission of plagiarism!
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2006-06-05 18:26:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
didn't read it
Submitted by domenad (user info) at 2006-06-03 10:59:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Were you to get a red hot poker inserted right up your royal American, it wouldn't begin to pay for posting this fuckhead's work.
Submitted by GodChicken (user info) at 2006-06-03 10:25:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
No Comment
Submitted by Doodles (user info) at 2006-06-03 09:53:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Submitted by Doodies (user info) at 2006-06-03 04:55:12 (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by DonovanMD (user info) at 2006-06-03 05:04:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: -1
Weak.
Submitted by Doodies (user info) at 2006-06-03 04:55:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by jgreening (user info) at 2006-06-03 03:08:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
This sounds quite ETS-ish...
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-06-03 03:02:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Troops cleared in Iraqi deaths in Ishaqi (ATTN : Plagiarism)
Jun 2, 5:32 PM (ET)
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. military probe has exonerated U.S. troops in the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the town of Ishaqi in March, finding American forces followed standard procedures and committed no misconduct, defense officials said on Friday.
The Ishaqi incident was one of a handful involving civilian deaths being investigated by the U.S. military, including the deaths of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha last November.
Police in Ishaqi, 60 miles north of Baghdad, have said six adults and five children were shot dead in a U.S. military raid on a home on March 15.
The U.S. military maintains there were four dead in the incident, including a guerrilla, two women and a child, and said they died after troops were fired upon from the house as they arrived to arrest an al Qaeda suspect.
The defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an investigation found no wrongdoing by U.S. forces.
The officials said a military fact-finding inquiry determined that U.S. forces followed proper procedures and that the civilian deaths were unintentional.
In the Haditha case, which some commentators are comparing to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the military is investigating civilian deaths in the town west of Baghdad on November 19.
The military is investigating whether U.S. Marines went on a rampage after a comrade was killed by an insurgent roadside bomb and shot dead two dozen civilians, including women and children. U.S. defense officials have said Marines could face charges including murder.
A military spokesman announced the investigation into the Ishaqi incident on March 21.