Month: August 2008

Okay, I’m confused. For the last six years the justice system at Guantanamo Bay has been taking a pasting. Guys have been locked up for years without trial, tortured, generally treated badly. Finally, they get round to trying one of these ‘terrorists’; he’s found guilty but only sentenced to serve an additional six months – but they say they may not let him out anyway.

So, what’s the point of the trial?

And another thing: all of sudden these military trials are being called ‘war crimes tribunals’, but the defendants aren’t prisoners of war because otherwise they’d be subject to the Geneva Conventions, and Bush/Cheney would be the one’s on trial. So, if they’re not prisoners of war, how can they be tried for war crimes?

And, who ever heard of a driver being accused of war crimes, anyway? So he drove bin Laden around Afghanistan with a coupla rockets in his trunk. Did Hitler’s driver end up at Nuremburg? Or, Himmler’s? No, once the war was lost they both buggered off to their families in Austria, and went back to making snitchels and home-brewed lager.

And you can tell he’s a nice man; just look at his face. I ask you, is this the face of a rabid terrorist?

If he ever gets out he’ll make a fortune advertising for Colgate.

American justice is very confusing. Unlike other nations, the US is back to front. First you serve your sentence, then you get tried for the crime.

And I thought Gilbert & Sullivan were British.

Apparently, after the verdict had been given and the judge read out his lenient sentence, all the court participants hugged each other and wept. They were so happy it had all worked out right for the defendant. No-one is going to criticize them anymore. Suddenly, the Guantanamo Bay tribunals are a model of fair play and true American justice.

Now they can get on with handing out the really stiff sentences without fear of reproach.

Hmmm! Am I the only one noting a certain method in this madness?

Filed under: A cunning plan?

HIROSHIMA – AUGUST 6TH 1945
NAGASAKI AUGUST 9TH 1945

The crimes against humanity committed by the American government on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two, and with full support of its allies, are perhaps the two most appalling war crimes in the history of the world. Greater than any atrocity in Africa, Bosnia; greater than the Nazi extermination of Jews that is now known as the Holocaust.

Some would argue the veracity of that statement. After all, six million died in the Holocaust, while probably only a quarter to half a million died as a result of the atom bombs, though many over a much longer period of time.

The difference was that the allies considered themselves the “good” guys, fighting evil. Yet, even when ‘evil’ was defeated, the “good” guys went ahead and used evil methods to achieve solely political objectives.

There are those who still refuse to accept the enormity of these crimes committed in our names. They stubbornly insist the bombings shortened the war by weeks, and thus saved American lives. The vast majority of those slaughtered horribly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocent civilians. To argue such justification is to argue that the lives of a few American soldiers were worth the loss of countless Japanese.

I would ask the questions: was then, one innocent American life more important than one innocent Japanese life? Are Americans a superior species of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens americanus, as opposed to Homo sapien restoftheworldus?). If the answer to both is “no”, then any justification for the bombings falls apart. Answer “yes”, and your arrogance proves the falsehood of the response.

Those who ordered the horrors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945 were never forced to answer for their crimes. After the war, many top Japanese officials paid for their temerity with their lives, but the perpetrators of the bombings went unpunished, some lauded as “heroes” by their people.

They committed their crimes in my name, and in your name. Those who, to this day, still deny the evil committed on the Japanese people need to be reminded, persuaded of the truth.

Until America, and those other nations still insisting the atrocities were a ‘positive’ action, accept responsibility and admit their country perpetrated a war crime of immense proportions, we must never let them forget.

It’s the least we can do to honor the memory of those innocents who suffered and died so horribly, and so needlessly.

Filed under: Crimes against humanity

It’s truly fascinating the differences encountered between the various news media reporting on Iraq these days. Mainstream media videos show Iraqis wandering happily around the various markets; normal life, as though no war had ever been encountered.

BBC World America recently made much of a Baghdad park full of picnickers, small children happily playing on swings and slides and, just tonight in Basra, a shopping mall packed with happy-faced customers.

Leila Fadel of McClatchy reports on her blog today:

“In Basra the city is rivers of sewage, destroyed buildings and bridges from war after war after war…………Every day I pass by the same buildings destroyed during the U.S. led invasion in my neighborhood in Baghdad. Every day they look exactly the same, a pile of rubble. The electricity problem seems to be getting worse; Iraqis have an average of about four hours of electricity a day. While there is talk of reconstruction, a bridge here, flowers planted there the people don’t feel a change.”^[1]

Sometimes it’s hard to grant any credibility whatever to the mainstream media. The problem is, they’re fooling a lot of people.

Thank God for McClatchy.

^{[1] “Bridges and Water and Power, Oh No!” Baghdad Observer, Aug 5th 2008}

Filed under: Rose colored spectacles