Another head hangs lowly,
Child is slowly taken.
And the violence caused such silence,
Who are we mistaken?
But you see, it's not me, it's not my family.
In your head, in your head they are fighting,
With their tanks and their bombs,
And their bombs and their guns.
In your head, in your head, they are crying...
Zombie, by the Cranberries
Calling the release of about a half a million documents regarding despicable crimes in the USA’s illegal and immoral occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by WikiLeaks.org “leaks” is like calling the oil that gushed (and may still be gushing) from BP’s Deepwater Horizon, well, a “leak.”
The info that came from the WikiLeaks’ gusher is disturbing enough—but as much as I hate to agree with the World Wide War Machine (WWWM)—the WikiLeaks.org info is not anything new to those of us who pay attention.
I am grateful, though, that there are still a few people out there who have courage and integrity and sorry that someone like Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking the Wikileaks.org Collateral Murder video will have to be doing some very hard time (up to 52 years), if he is convicted---because in reality, very few people care about these leaks and they are not altering the trajectory of the Empire in any measurable way.
Let’s face it—there was very little outcry when we learned of the Abu Ghraib scandal in early 2004, although we had full proof in living color that the most horrid of crimes were occurring in that hellhole. A few low ranking scum (as opposed to the high ranking scum) were convicted and literally given slaps on the wrist for their crimes against humanity. The torture and human degradation that went on in Abu Ghraib, though, was nothing compared to the intense blowback to our soldiers when the Iraqi people responded to that. The Empire’s response to the Iraqi response was a couple of sieges of Fallujah and an unconscionable increase in the slaughter of Iraqis.
It’s Hypocrisy in the First Degree when the president of the U.S. and Pentagon officials pretend to get upset over the Wikileaks.org info saying that the spillage will “harm” our soldiers in the field! Our Empire (indeed, many Empires before it) couldn’t care a whit about our soldiers in the field. The rich men always send the young working class off to die in their wars and pay other unspeakable prices as they are massacring the enemy du jour. Unless their deaths are being exploited for imperial glory, even our needlessly killed soldiers get short shrift in this nation. For all intents and purposes, the War on Terror only registers in public opinion if someone with an Arab sounding last name decides to make an incendiary device out of his own underpants.
So, if the sacrifice of our troops is practically invisible in the US psyche, then the innocent people of Iraq don’t even have the relevancy, of say, an ant infestation. Few people that aren’t Buddhists have qualms about killing ants, like few people here have any qualms about killing Native Americans, Japanese, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, or any other groups of people that the Empire tells us are not worthy of having breath. The Empire needs “enemy agreement” with us to be able use up its rapidly expiring gunpowder on.
Pictures of bloodied and battered babies at U.S. checkpoints have been seared into my brain for years and I have been reading the words of unembedded journalists like the courageous Dahr Jamail for years now, also—so the “revelation” that civilians were being targeted is not new info—and just because documents get leaked from the Mordor of War Departments don’t give them any more legitimacy than the testimonies of the Iraqis and the eye-witness accounts by Dahr.
Again, the introduction of this information, although not new, was sensational and it was greeted by the zombies of the U.S. with a colossal yawn and by the Empire with pretend indignation, because, and here is the kicker: Most of us just don’t give a frig about human life, unless its unborn human life. The Empire only wants us to be born so they can either exploit our labor or have cannon fodder for their wars: otherwise we have been trained from the top down to a have cavalier approach to life and human suffering. Even if it is our own suffering, we are taught that it is our fault if we are suffering, not the fault of the rotting system we exist for.
I have two problems with the Wikileaks’ info, though—the first problem is that the semi-official count for the Iraqis is about 1/5 of the count that credible studies from the Lancet (which was given the same respect as the National Enquirer here in the states) last reported in 2006 that over 650,000 excess Iraqi deaths had occurred since the U.S. invasion in 2003! The documents procured by Wikileaks gives that number to be just over 100,000. Of course, one Iraqi death was one too many, but the horror cannot be exaggerated, nor the carnage be minimized in this way.
The other problem I have with the current info dump, that shows me that perhaps WikiLeaks is doing the job of psyops, as was the case in the dump of the Afghan leaks, where Pakistan was implicated in assisting al Qaeda (US drone bombing dramatically increased after that), Iran is highlighted as a major player in this U.S. war of terror.
Is Iran supporting the resistance against the U.S in Iraq? The documents say so, but I need to know who supplied that information to Wikileaks. Was it a controlled leak? Was it a partial controlled leak? Was there an unwitting “middleman” that uploaded the docs to Wikileaks?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do know that the Empire has been ginning up a case against Iran for years, now.
Every piece of info that came out is earth shattering to someone: a child was killed, a brother tortured, a husband disappeared; but sadly there was nothing there that shattered the earth.
If I were President Obama, I would use the opportunity that the revelation of these crimes presented to me! I would, as gracefully, speedily, and humbly as possible remove our troops from that region. Instead, the regime is condemning the leakers and WikiLeaks, but not the criminals portrayed therein.
Shameful, to say the least!
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