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May 26, 2006
Will They Call This Abuse too?
I just watched a segment on CNN where the anchor and the pentagon correspondent competed with each other to explain how great Marines are, and how the Haditha case is still under investigation, how much stress everyone's under, how "unprofessional" conduct is not the norm, etc. etc.
It's quite sickening. Frankly, the military seems to be a lot more honest than the media. "Unprovoked murders" was the word used by a "senior defense official" quoted by CNN:
Investigators believe that their criminal investigation into the deaths of about two dozen Iraqi civilians points toward a conclusion that Marines committed unprovoked murders, a senior defense official said Friday.
You can see the media's apolegetics in the original exchange between Rep. Murtha and Chris Matthews. Murtha calmly points out that the Iraqis were killed in "cold blood." Matthews has a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Murtha just said what he said...
I'm just waiting till the media dubs this "the worst abuse," or "horrific abuse," or some other form of abuse. After all, they only killed dozens of unarmed, crouching, crying, praying women, men, and children at close-range.
Posted by zeynep at May 26, 2006 03:31 PM
Comments
A blog called Lenin's Tomb actually managed to call it what it really is: terrorism. Of course there aren't that many here in the US who would dare to even think such a thing.
Posted by: James at May 31, 2006 04:37 AM
I don't know how far your rage over Haditha goes, but I've come to as far a stretch as is possible about America's Manifest Destiny being extended to the rest of the world, particularly that part that rafts over seas of oil. After Haditha, my take is this: Every US soldier who dies in Iraq deserves to die: he gets a salary to kill and, occasionally, to end up in a casket. When he signs up for conscription, it's his call. So why do we feel dolorous when we know that he who lives by the sword is destined to die by it? The problem is that the noncombatants who died at Haditha, and scores of other places in Iraq I could name off the bat, did not sign up to die. That's why they're called "noncombatants", although US military linguists did a good job by diffusing the meaning of the word by calling it "collateral damage". The Nazis in World War III get to set the definition of la mort des innocents?
Posted by: Kajal Basu at May 31, 2006 05:52 PM
These days the media is prone to use the government's propaganda and merely label the civilians or noncombatants as "insurgents". Completely false, but what passes for "journalists" in the US media won't bother to do the requisite digging to find out what's really going on.
Posted by: James at June 1, 2006 12:46 AM
terrorism: the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims
That's the dictionary definition. One must be completely blind to not see that this is what the United States military is doing. "Support our troops" = "support terrorism"
Posted by: JustZisGuy at June 3, 2006 10:22 AM