Remember last year when Bush claimed the US had evidence of “ties” between Al-Quaeda and Iraq? Now he admits there’s no such connection. But of course the invasion must continue, says Blair.
Greenpeace:An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered “unhelpful and directed against the United States.” They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be “harmful to the UN.”
Mideast_AFP: WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US State Department has quietly withdrawn all CD-ROM copies of its annual human rights report due to a one-word error that was thought to overstate the extent of Israel’s rights abuses, officials said.
Did you read about the Washington Post correspondent “detained” for asking questions?
Remembering these our “brave troops”, our “courageous soldiers”, those who painted “Happy Easter” on bombs before dropping them on Serbia. Those who killed as though playing video games in Afghanistan. Those who now look forward to their current work in Iraq… here are some worthy quotations reminding us just how brave our soldiers are, and how nothing has changed:
“When our troops enter a bombed village the pariah dogs are already at work eating the corpses of the babies and old women who have been killed. Many suffer from ghastly wounds, especially some of the younger children who…are covered with flies and crying for water.” —Colonel Osburn of Britain, quoted in a May 1935 issue of the Manchester Guardian. Reprinted in A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist (The New Press, 2001), p 68.
“I could watch a burned infant trying to nurse from its dead mother’s breast, see young men with their faces blown away, witness a boy deliberately gutted…and never protest.” —reporter Richard Boyle in Vietnam. The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the US Army in Vietnam by Richard Boyle (San Francisco, 1972), p. 22. Reprinted in An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke (Basic Books, 1999), p 199.
“But [bombings] arouse a completely personal hate that no one can really understand who has not huddled in a cellar or burrowed his face in a field to escape dive bombers or seen a mother search for her son’s torn-off head or smelled the stench of burning schoolchildren.” —Reporter Edgar Snow in Chunking, China. Quoted in A History of Bombing, p 75.
“Those poor bastards sat in the air-raid shelters of 16,000 apartment buildings that burned down. Those who followed instructions and dutifully sat there, as I myself would have done, were all killed. They were suffocated when the shelter filled with smoke or when the firestorm had consumed all the oxygen. Only their bodies could testify as to how they had died.
The corpses often lay crowded into heaps near the barricaded exits. Other bodies were stuck in the hardened black mass of their own fat, which had melted and run out onto the floor.
The infants lay in rows like grilled chickens. Other corpses had vanished completely; nothing was left but a fine layer of ash on the tables and chairs.
Most of those who left the shelters burned to death out on the street instead. Many lay facedown, with one arm over their heads, as if to shield themselves. Many had shrunk to the size of dwarves; others had blown up like balloons. Some seemed completely unharmed but were naked—all of their clothes except their shoes had disappeared. Others lay with outstretched arms and blank faces, like mannequins. Still others were totally charred. Their skulls had burst at the temples where the brain pushed out, and their intestines bulged out under their ribs.” —Sven Lindqvist, describing the British firebombing of Hamburg, Germany in 1943. From his book A History of Bombing.
Vietnam, June 8, 1972
“By the time Calley and men sat down to lunch, they had rounded up and slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians. Within those few hours, members of Charlie Company had ‘fooled around’ and laughed as they sodomized and raped women, ripped vaginas open with knives, bayoneted civilians, scalped corpses, and carved “C Company” or the ace of spades onto their chests, slaughtered animals, and torched hooches. Other soldiers had wept openly as they fired on crowds of unresisting old men, women, children, and babies.” —description of the My Lai massacre (16 March 1968). From An Intimate History of Killing, p 160.
“[Sergeant Bruce F. Anello] describes the grotesque pranks played upon corpses, the rapes, and the way platoons were ‘willing to kill any body’ simply in order to beat another platoon’s ‘kill record.’” —from An Intimate History of Killing, p 205.
Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/yj5yjo6
