U.S. Atrocities: Collateral Murder

The following is excerpted verbatim from Wikileaks. It is an account of the murder of civilians by the U.S. military which has absolutely NO legitimate business in Iraq in the first place! Out of Iraq now! Round up and charge ALL U.S. personnel involved must be arrested, charged and detained until they can be tried for murder.

Additionally, every U.S. government official involved in the U.S. government's conspiracy to attack and invade Iraq upon lies and deceptions should be arrested now and detained until they can be tried for capital war crimes including overt violations of U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441, war crimes for which the penalty is death.

Not only are the perps depicted in the act of committing murder, they lied about afterward. That's a crime in and of itself!

International law and common decency requires that every member of the U.S. government materially involved in the illegal war crime --the U.S. attack and invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq be held to account now!

Overview

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

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The Banality of Evil Applies to Everyone

by Guest Columnist, Jacob G. Hornberger

One of the aspects of the Iraq War that has fascinated me the most is how CIA agents and U.S. soldiers could actually bring themselves to kill, torture, and sexually abuse Iraqis. After all, don’t forget that neither the Iraqi people nor their government participated in the 9/11 attacks. The worst “crime” that any Iraqi committed against any American was resisting an unlawful invasion of his country.

Nonetheless, even though the Iraqi people were innocent of any attacks on the United States, many CIA agents and most U.S. soldiers have been able to bring themselves to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in an invasion and occupation of a country that never attacked the United States, and murder, torture, and sexually abuse dozens of Iraqis detainees and prisoners.

How is a government able to bring men and women to do such things to people who never did anything to harm the United States?

I’m currently reading a fascinating book entitled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. It’s about a police unit from Hamburg, Germany, which was assigned the task of rounding up hundreds of Jews in villages in Poland and shooting them at point-blank range.

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

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Bombs and Bailouts: How the US 'Pissed Away' 14 Trillion Dollars

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

After four years sifting through a morass of US government records, the Brookings Institution reports that the US government has spent $5.1 trillion on the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons, adding that if 'clean up, stockpiling and dismantlement' is included, the cost rises to $5.5 trillion.

US officials have called it: "money well-spent". Having spent trillions threatening the world, the US has recently bailed out the crooked banksters and other robber barons to the tune of $8.5 trillion for the total cost of the bailouts. See the spreadsheet graphic below. Click on it for the complete story.

Since 1945, the United States has manufactured and deployed more than 70,000 nuclear weapons to deter and if necessary fight a nuclear war. Some observers believe the absence of a third world war confirms that these weapons were a prudent and cost-effective response to the uncertainty and fear surrounding the Soviet Union's military and political ambitions during the cold war. As early as 1950, nuclear weapons were considered relatively inexpensive- providing "a bigger bang for a buck"-and were thoroughly integrated into U.S. forces on that basis. Yet this assumption was never validated. Indeed, for more than fifty years scant attention has been paid to the enormous costs of this effort-more than $5 trillion thus far-and its short and long-term consequences for the nation.

--Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, Brookings Institution

Elsewhere, Brookings reports that even as the Cold War ended, the US continued spending some $35 billion a year [$96 million a day], 14 percent of the defense budget on nuclear weapons and maintenance. Even Brookings concedes '..with the benefit of hindsight and objectivity, the waste, the duplication and occasional foolishness.'

Much is made of an 'atmosphere of tension, ambiguity and fear'! But the fact of the matter is this: much of that 'atmosphere' is traceable directly to the presence of a US nuclear arsenal that threatens the world. Brookings concedes that the moneys were not always well spent but does not go far enough. How many of the starving millions might have been fed with just one percent of some 14 trillion squandered by the US on weaponry and bailouts? How much more goodwill might have been achieved with the investment of just half that amount in peaceful projects that would have benefited all mankind? The US may have blown a golden opportunity forever!

``Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.''

-- Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Baghavad Gita

That might describe as well the ruinous effects of a wastral US fiscal policy, a bloated bailout for banksters, an impending implosion that will directly result from the US enrichment of just one percent of its population as some 95 percent descend into poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness and all of it a result of the right wing export of US industries, jobs, and hope!

Adendum:

The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.”

The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.”

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

And we still don’t seem to have learned the proper lessons. We’ve allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one — not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party — has a clue about how to put them back to work.

--Bob Herbert, Safety Nets for the Rich

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

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