By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
What would you do if your brother — or perhaps your son, father, or husband — was charged with murder? With deliberately taking the life of another human being.
For sure, it would be an agonizing decision — making the choice between practicing what you preach about justice, or standing by your devastated family. A choice no one would envy — defend your blood or obey the laws of God and society.
And then, what if it was a particularly bad murder? Say he shot an old woman in the back, and watched her die — all the while preventing medical personnel from tending to her. Maybe she was already wounded and he finished her off. From a helicopter, even.
It sure would be tough to keep your family — your mind, your heart — together in that situation. Who could blame you whatever you decided?
Of course, things are different in the middle of a war, even a completly illegal war based on well-publicized lies like the situation in Iraq.
I mean, it's easy to say your were just following orders. That's what lots of Nazis did in World War II, but they still were put to death in the trials following the war.
I wonder what will happen when and if Americans find themselves in that situation in the near future.
Being in a military situation means everything is different. Innocent civilians always get killed accidentally when the military's involved. Some are accidental, some are deliberate, but mostly we never get to know the difference. Bodies get thrown in holes and are forgotten, except by some of the living who years later wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
Long after the grisly facts become known, sometimes we get a little tardy justice. Mostly we don't. Remember when former Senator Bob Kerrey tried to give back his Vietnam medals, admitting he killed women and children rather than the dangerous enemy gunmen his valor citations described. How did the public react? Hell, we didn't want to hear him. We told him to keep his medals, keep quiet, and forget about the whole thing.
Demonic demagogues like Joseph Farah, Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh all have recently recommended killing large numbers of innocent Iraqis "to teach them a lesson." The "lesson" being it's not cool to mess with Uncle Sam and mutilate his hired killers, the highly paid mercenaries he hired to assassinate Iraqi intellectuals so when America has that tortured nation sufficiently lobotomized, there will be a minimum of intelligent people around to protest the new "democratic" prison camp that America has created.
The United States and Britain have decided to adopt the Pol Pot theory of social engineering — kill everyone with academic credentials. And when the irate Iraqis decide to strike back at this masterpiece of Israeli-style population control, the U.S. ups the ante on its already-high atrocity level — and bombs a totally defenseless town from the air, no matter who gets killed, and murders all the males under 45. Repeat: murders all the males under 45. That's what's going on right now, my dear American compatriots, in the inferno called Fallujah, Iraq. It's called genocide. No question about it.
This is how your American boys are behaving in a foreign country. Your sons, your husbands, your fathers.
Hey! They were just following orders. Based on lies.
This is what your country is doing to innocent people. Killing them without a second thought, without regard for who they are or what they've done, how many children they might have or how many wonderful things they've done in this life.
Hell, they don't worry about the children because they're killing them, too. Listen to that doctor, forced to set up his clinic in a filthy garage, describe a little boy with a shell of a skull missing its brains. Or the man who was brought to the clinic with burns so bad he will automatically dehydrate to death in 24 hours. How about the boy they threw in the river, and he couldn't swim so he drowned? Or when the fighting first began, the hundred teenagers hooded and kept in the sun, and then shot to death by your beloved Americans boys, one by one.
This was all done by your sons, your husbands, your fathers. Just following orders.
You know, we all ought to be very scared that these killer punks will be coming home soon, all with the taste of blood on their tongues, ready and willing to tell us all about the wonderful experiences they had in Iraq, or at least the ones who don't immediately get sick and die from the radioactive ammunition they had to handle or the poisonous vaccines they had to endure, at least they'll be able to tell us how they fought the War on Terror in Iraq by shooting defenseless women in the back and bombing residential neighborhoods and splattering body parts all over the tan brick walls of Baghdad.
They were scared. It's OK to kill people when you're scared.
This is the kind of behavior approved by Fox news every night, only they don't tell you about this stuff — they tell you about our tough guy president saying "Bring it on", and how the folks back home are cheering about the lives they are throwing away.
Pretending to be brave and patriotic when they plant their own children in the peaceful soil, saying how proud they are that their children gave their lives for an unjust genocide that was based on lies.
America. What a country. A country gone mad.
And this isn't something new, you know. Don't pretend to be surprised. Don't tell me you didn't know this is the kind of stuff we noble Americans do on a regular basis.
It has been going on — in Iraq, anyway, for FIFTEEN years! But hey, in Palestine it has been going on for FIFTY-FIVE years, at least officially (actually it has been much longer).
I haven't heard the phrase Geneva Conventions lately. The last time I heard it was when Rumsfeld complained about Iraqis taking photos of American POWs being a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The U.S. uses the phrase Geneva Conventions when it's somebody else they can complain about. Americans forget to use the phrase when it pertains to U.S. behavior in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Palestine, the Philippines, Colombia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Vietnam or any of a hundred other places all related to Fort Benning, Georgia, where they teach courses on how to violate the Geneva Conventions.
At the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, our famous drug czar Barry McCaffrey supervised the slaughter on the Highway of Death which killed thousands of Iraqi soldiers who had already surrendered. This was noted as an egregious violation of the Geneva Conventions — killing soldiers who were trying to surrender.
But Americans cheered. Sons, husbands, fathers.
Then, for nearly 15 more years, the Americans and the Brits — WITHOUT approval of the United Nations — continued to bomb large parts of Iraq, and in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, bombed water treatment plants, hospitals and other necessary services (all direct violations of the Geneva Conventions), resulting in the deaths of ONE MILLION Iraqi children from birth defects and childhood diseases that could have been easily cured were it not for the embargo of necessary medicines.
Now, the new Iraqi death toll (various American generals said it wasn't necessary to count Iraqi dead — another endearing American trait) stands at more than 30,000. Ninety percent were innocent civilians.
Obliterated by America's video game weapons, by your sons, your husbands, your fathers.
Worst of all, the whole world now knows America had absolutely no reason to invade Iraq this time around (not that it did before in the era of the April Glaspie sucker punch, either). Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (just as Scott Ritter, Hans Blix and others said) and Iraq had no connection to al-Qaida (although now reportedly the U.S. is trying to smuggle in WMDs and claim that Saddam had them hidden all the time). No legitimate reason whatsoever to go to war.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq is entirely unjustified, a massive crime against humanity, carried out by your sons, your husbands, your fathers, who murdered innocents on the cynical say-so of the lies our leaders told us, and are still telling us.
And now the opposition presidential candidate, supposedly a war hero himself who only recently found out he was Jewish, says he will continue the same policy of random murders and denial of self-determination should he win the totally-fixed elections of 2004. This means America is destined to be a soulless, killer nation indefinitely into the future. And it's only a matter of time before this kind of thing starts happening here.
Your sons, your husbands, your fathers are murderers. The Geneva Conventions state that when soldiers know their leaders are giving them illegal or immoral orders, it is their duty to disobey them. America used that argument in the post-World War II trials against the Japanese and the Germans, and the whole world damn well better use it against the Americans when it puts America on trial for its illegal genocide against the Iraqis.
Do the world a big favor and think of all these things the next time you hear the Star Spangled Banner, or listen to some pompous ass in a faux military hat say in a drunken stupor, "Support our troops!"
Tip your glass to him, and say, with all sincerity and that American killer smile, "Yes, brother, support our killer troops."
Just don't go to church afterwards. God would puke on you.
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