In Abu Ghraib the military was handling the situation long before
the story got into the MSM and all involved had bene removed from duty
and their charges were being drawn up. Then that reporter (Seymour
Hersch) blew the whole story out of proportion and disregarded what the
military had already done months before and we ended up with a disaster
of a story. Now it looks like the MSM is trying to do the same thing
all over again. It would be good if the story as Michael Yon tells it
here were the one that gets out into the media rather than the one that
the MSM is already trying to put over.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/calling-bullshit-on-rolling-stone.htm
On 03/29/2011 07:18 PM, MJ wrote:
*Why They Hate Us
*By Anthony Gregory <http://www.independent.org/blog/?author=2>
Tuesday March 29, 2011 at 2:29:51 PM PDT
Because the population stands by its government and war machine,
despite years of continuing murder, torture and unspeakable spectacles
of inhumanity like this
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0602176>.
If you don’t have the stomach to see the photos, here’s a bit of prose
from the
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327?page=2>/Rolling
Stone/ feature
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327?page=2>
to digest:
[A] review of internal Army records and investigative files
obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with
members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators,
indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of
a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain
view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as
the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common
knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty
much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained
about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation,
and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man
Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The
platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin
Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have
had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.”
Despite the provocative title of this blog, “they” don’t really hate
“us.” Much of the Muslim world still looks fondly upon American
culture. As Ivan Eland noted in 2003
<http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1195>:
If the U.S. government really wanted to find out what the people
in Islamic countries really thought about America, rather than
commissioning a study, it would have been much cheaper to have
asked John Zogby, a prominent pollster and study group member, and
other prominent independent pollsters for the results of their
numerous polls in those nations. Those polls show that people in
those countries like American culture and political and economic
freedoms, but despise U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world.
Somehow many in the Muslim world have been generally able to separate
the American people from our government, even more charitably than
many Americans seem to distinguish foreigners from their rulers. It is
so easy for the common victims of U.S. wars to become dehumanized,
whether by rogue soldiers or an indifferent political culture. While
the premeditated slaughter described in the Rolling Stone story is
widely seen as immoral, most of the inevitable deaths of tens or
hundreds of thousands in America’s elective wars are dismissed as
“collateral damage.”
Foreigners should be forgiven if they resented “the American people”
far more than they actually do. Most of us seem to care nothing of the
atrocities committed in our name. Even worse, many of us actively
support the politicians and military who bring these horrors to other
people. We implicitly celebrate these acts of slaughter in parades for
veterans. We “support our troops.” We name streets and buildings after
presidents who ended the lives of literally millions of innocent
people. In the name of humanitarianism abroad, we enlist the help of a
state that jails without trial, claims the right to do anything to
anyone on earth, and has tortured hundreds or thousands of detainees
to death.
By “we” I am referring, of course, to the American people as a group,
which is problematic. Even worse is considering the government an
extension of the popular will. American voters fight over which
sociopath should run the war machine, condemning other nations for
nuclear ambitions and human rights abuses while sitting comfortably
amidst the largest prison population on earth and an unsurpassed
arsenal of inherently aggressive weapons, including tens of thousands
of nukes.
We argue seriously about what “we” should do to stop Iran from one day
obtaining nuclear weapons, almost all in agreement that this is the
U.S. government’s business, even as we do not stand up and demand our
government, the only one ever to intentionally murder civilians with
atomic bombs, disarm unilaterally and unconditionally. We debate
endlessly about the most minor details of domestic politics as a
bipartisan empire financed with our tax dollars and central bank lays
waste to countries, destroys the most priceless archives of cultural
records, deliberately poisons foreigners by the thousands, prevents
people from getting food and medicine, and drops terroristic death
from the sky, perhaps more than all other governments in history combined.
Then there are those troops on the ground, chopping off body parts,
shooting helpless kids for sport, gleefully playing with the remains
of some of the millions of casualties of America’s post-9/11 killing
spree. The military apologizes for the photos, but not for the war
that makes these atrocities inevitable. This is the rot at the soul of
the American empire. When its leaders claim that their last round of
bombing in intended to and will effectively secure human rights, why
on earth would anyone in his right mind believe them?
http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=10014 --
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