Focus: America's shame

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2210069,00.html

The elite of the US army, the marines, stand accused of butchering 24 Iraqi civilians including women and children. If proved, the massacre could change the course of the war in Iraq. Sarah Baxter reports from Washington

When he had finished photographing the bodies, he gingerly carried them out of the house. Six of the slain were children. He picked up the corpse of a little girl.

“I held her out like this,” Briones said, spreading his arms, “but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs.”

{snip}

For Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, this horrific incident shows that “things that shouldn’t happen do happen in war”. Consciously or not, it is an echo of his brutally dismissive “stuff happens” when looting broke out in Baghdad after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Three years on from the invasion, however, Rumsfeld can no longer shrug off such a disaster. Already tainted as torturers by the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, the heroes and liberators of Iraq now face accusations of murder. President George W Bush promised last week that the results of an official inquiry will be published.

The danger for the beleaguered president and the US military is that the execution-style killings at Haditha could mark a turning point in America’s perception of the war.

{snip}

The events at Haditha have shattered the credibility of official military accounts of Iraqi deaths. It has left Bush lamely insisting that the marines who “violated the law, if they did, will be punished”. Yet, had it been up to the military, the public would never have learnt what happened at Haditha.

and the military acquiesces to the take over, the military then becomes an agent of fascism. For any of us to be shocked that a fascist military would commit war crimes and crimes against humanity just shows how removed from reality we all really are. The US military is the armed force of the fascist government of the US, under the George W. Bush dictatorship - of course they commit crimes, of course they murder innocent civilians, of course they use terror to advance the fascist government's agenda. The surprise would be if they didn't...

:kick: