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Wednesday, December 14, 2011


 

The Haditha massacre, (almost) up in flames


A telling article from the New York Times about the massacre of 20 Iraqis at Haditha:
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.
...
Told about the documents that had been found, Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, said that many of the documents remain classified and should have been destroyed.
"Classified" not because it was such "top secret" information, but because of what they have to say about the U.S. role in Iraq.

This event did stand out, although the fact that not a single soldier has been punished makes it not stand out, but fit right in with everything else that happened in Iraq. And here's the truth:

Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not "remarkable," but as routine.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as "a cost of doing business."
"Doing business", that is, for imperialism.


// posted @ 12/14/2011 05:07:00 PM // 

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