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Slaughter of the
Innocents
Something is Rotten
in Iraq and the Pentagon
By Dave Lindorff
10/15/07 "Counterpunch" -- --
Isn't it odd that in the air attack that the US military
claims killed 19 high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
and 15 civilians, all the slain Al Qaeda members were men and
all the men were Al Qaeda, while all the civilians were women
(6) and children (9)?
Think about this a minute.
This means that no women were Al
Qaeda--and yet we know that women also fight, and also blow
themselves up as suicide bombers. Yet these women were
all civilians. The children, of course, were children.
And we're to believe that there
were no men who were innocent bystanders? All those adult
males who were killed were "bad guys."
Yet there were innocent
bystanders: the women and the children. Somehow, any innocent
bystanding men managed to duck out of the way, or the bullets
and bomb fragments (and I'm sure they were fragmentation bombs
that were used, as well as a withering spray of machine-gun
fire) that hit all those poor women and kids, just somehow
(magically?) missed the men.
Pretty amazing huh?
Except that it's an absurd claim
that should insult our intelligence.
It's not like the Pentagon has a
list of all the enemy fighters, after all. What actually happens
is the military has people come in after an action, and they
find all these dead people. They look at the guys and have to
decide, are they fighters or are they civilians? If the guy's
got a gun in his hand, or nearby, they might assume he's a
fighter, but is that a good test in a country where every guy
has an AK47? And if he doesn't have a gun? Do you honestly think
all 19 of those dead guys had a gun with him? I doubt it. These
were people fleeing an attack by US troops and planes. They
were--whether fighters or ordinary citizens--fleeing for their
lives in a surprise attack. If they didn't have a gun with them
at the time, they wouldn't have stopped to get one.
And since they don't let
reporters travel independently to these battle sites and check
what happened, who knows if they even bother looking for
evidence. (And this doesn't even get to the point that they call
every kill a "terrorist" or member of Al Qaeda, when odds are
that if they are combatants they are neither, but rather some
other insurgent group or other just fighting to drive the US
out.)
It's clear to me that what we're
getting is a big lie. Just as in Vietnam the troops would just
count the bodies and turn in a report saying that was how many
VC were killed, in Iraq (and Afghanistan), they count the men
and call them the enemy.
Nobody calls them on this.
Certainly nobody in what used to be called the free press.
The numbers are simply accepted
as fact and dutifully reported to us.
The truth: we are conducting a
slaughter of innocents in Iraq that is as bad as anything the
Nazis did in their Eastern Front campaign.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of
Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal. His book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The
Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at:
dlindorff@mindspring.com
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