I'm perfectly willing to accept that our 'smart'
munitions are much better able to hit their
targets than any previous generation of military
hardware and that our soldiers are doing
their best under extreme duress to use them to
minimize 'colateral damage', i.e. missing
the target and killing civilians.
I'm also perfectly willing to accept that even
with the best intentions, some of our ordnance
misses its mark and kills innocents. That's
one reason why war should be a last resort
(which I see as part of your "unleashing-the-beast"
argument). I can "support the troops" in that.
I'm sorry for that and so we, via our gov't,
should pay reparations to the victims and/or their families.
But.
<<...OLE_Obj...>>
That guy is not an accident. Americans deliberately
contrived that scenario. An American
took a picture of it. Other pictures with
Americans mugging for the camera show the
APPARENT lack of shame in contriving these scenes.
I've been trying to find a difference with the
posters on the internet who have (correctly, in my view)
compared these images with those taken from other
(and not so distant) eras of lynching victims
(usually black) with their white lynchers and
bystanders (including children). So far, I can't.
These tortures and the lynching audiences had
two factors in common for me.
A) Those posing with the victims saw nothing
wrong with what they were associating themselves with and
2--homage to The Tappet Brothers!) Those posing
with the victims believed there would be NO CONSEQUENCES to their posing.
I think the second is very important because,
as James Loewen (author of "Lies My Teacher
Told Me" and "Lies Across America") among others
has pointed out, what IS a lynching but
a PUBLIC murder? There is no question as
to what happened or who carried it out--it's
common knowledge. So why are the perpetrators
safe? Because that common knowledge
will never be held against them. No all-white,
all-"Christian" jury of their peers would convict
them of a crime everyone knew they'd done--hell,
the jurors probably bought copies of the
picture postcards made of the lynching!
Similarly, these guards, interrogaters, private
civilian contractors (WTF is up with that?!),
and whoever else that conceived and executed
these displays thought no one would ever
find out about these atrocities.
[Hmmm, on further reflection, I think the civilian
contractors are, perhaps, a way to
'distance' the military from what happened--just
like sending the prisoners we wanted
to "encourage to talk" to Egypt or the Phillipines
or whatever other place didn't feel
the need to sugar-coat their actions. Again,
acting to remove/reduce accountability.]
I call them atrocities deliberately, with the
sad expectation that whatever we're shown
to be doing, will be visited doubly upon any
of OUR unfortunate POWs. (Why do you
think the words "Bataan", "stalag", "gulag",
and "Andersonville" (or even "Calvary") have
significance for us today?)
What of the people who have done these things?
How many suicides, homicides,
and physical/sexual/psycholocial/alcohol/substance
abusers are going to come home
to America over the next months and years?
I shudder to think and--as you so rightly
remind us--it condemns W's continuing linkage
of Iraq and The War on Terror.
Those pictures are bin Laden's recruiting posters.
I CAN'T "support our troops" for this.
And I guess I do believe there ARE some fates
worse than death.
Thanks for your consideration,
Eddy
Honored to be a Pillar in Oklahoma