While watching television yesterday I stumbled upon CNN’s coverage of the investigation into the massacre in Haditha last November (comments made by John Murtha on CNN are worth a listen). Straining to present what I imagine they consider ‘both sides of the story’, they interviewed the grandfather of the Kilo Company marine that was killed that day, whose death led to the murderous actions of others. And while I agree with him that it’s unfortunate that his grandson’s name is being tied to such a horrible event, I was stunned at how callous the coverage was with regards to the fact that dozens of innocent people had been murdered. There is no questioning the fact that it is a tragedy that American service men and women are losing their lives in an absolutely pointless war, but it is utterly irresponsible for American news agencies such as CNN to so blatantly disregard the price paid by the people of Iraq.

While this event will most assuredly become a partisan nightmare in the US, let’s not forget that woman and children were executed by American soldiers. No matter how it’s spun, or from what angle it is presented, that fact must remain the focus. So too must the realization that if it’s taken almost 6 months for this to come to light, what else has occurred during the occupation that hasn’t?

I’ve been bookmarking a variety of articles to do with this issue on my del.icio.us page if you’re looking for background information.

Also of interest is an excerpt from Noam Chomsky’s new book “Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy,â€? provided by yesterday’s Independent.

The more that I learn about events in Haditha last November, the more sickened I become.

Despite the usual convolution of information presented by the US military that commonly accompanies such occurrences, the events that day have been pieced together by various sources, including an NCIS inquiry. They detail how, after the death of their comrade, marines moved through the area entering houses, shooting unarmed civilians, some women and children. According to information divulged to The New York Times by a military official, “This was not a burst of fire but a sustained operation over several hours, maybe five hours…”.

And the reason why the investigation was undertaken? According to The Independent, it’s primarily because a survivor of the incident video taped it and forwarded the footage to Time Magazine.

Whatever moral ascendancy the West claims in it’s keeping has been thoroughly exhausted by incidents of this nature, Abu Ghraib included, and must raise the question of how many other cases of misconduct and murder have taken place since the 2003 invasion and been covered up by evoking the name of the insurgency as justification. One can only imagine how many innocent Fallujahn’s fall into that black category. All one need do is examine the recent air strike in Afghanistan to recognize how easy it is to explain away civilian deaths to a largely apathetic Western public by placing the onus on enemy combatants.

From today’s Independent…

“Many veterans have talked about the brutalising effects of the war. Hart Viges, who was in the 82nd Airborne Division and saw action in Baghdad and Fallujah, said troops were forced into impossible situations. He even witnessed an order to open fire on all taxis in the city of Samawa because it was believed Iraqi forces were using them. He still suffers nightmares: “You can’t wash your hands when they’re covered in blood. The wounds carry on. This is what war does to your soul, to your humanity.”

Another veteran, Specialist Jody Casey, told the BBC his unit was advised to carry shovels in their vehicles which they could plant on civilian victims to make it look as if they were concealing roadside bombs.

“I have seen innocent people being killed. IEDs [improvised explosive devices] go off and [you] just zap any farmer that is close to you,” he said. “You’re driving down the road at three in the morning. There’s a guy on the side of the road, you shoot him … you throw a shovel off.”

Updated

It gets worse. From today’s Los Angeles Times…

“Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them “execution-style,” in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.

The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.

One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results.”

The case may be the most serious incident of alleged war crimes in Iraq by US troops. Marine officers have long been worried that Iraq’s deadly insurgency could prompt such a reaction by combat teams.”

My god.

This morning saw the release of two stories, one in the Los Angeles Times and the other in the New York Times, about the ongoing investigation into Iraqi civilian killings by US Marines in Haditha. The first paragraph of the LA Times story is a bomb shell…

“Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found.�

One wonders if this, because of the lack of the sort of overwhelming visual evidence that helped expose the Abu Ghraib scandal, will slip beneath the public’s radar?

Is it now safe to say that killing innocent women and children in a desert and attempting to cover it up is no less cowardly or abominable than flying airplanes into buildings? And if it is, then who precisely are ‘we’ at war with?

Not unlike numerous left leaning movements throughout Latin American history, the majority of which were begun in opposition to Western interference and exploitative practices, the current government of Venezuela has most certainly been the victim of a great deal of Western propaganda. This month the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a report by Mark Weisbrot, Luis Sandoval, and David Rosnick entitled Poverty Rates In Venezuela: Getting The Numbers Right (pdf) which exposes much of the misinformation regarding the poverty rate in Venezuela that has been spread by anti-Chavez interests.

From an Issue Brief released by the CEPR…

- The household poverty rate was thus reduced by nearly 5 percentage points, or 12.9 percent, from 42.8 percent in the first half of 1999 (when President Chavez took office) to 37.9 percent in the second half of 2005. Since the economy has continued to grow rapidly this year (first quarter growth came in at 9.4 percent), the poverty rate is almost certainly significantly lower today.

- There is no evidence that the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics has changed its methodology, so these numbers are directly comparable. The most recent figures are about what would be expected as a result of the rapid economic recovery.

- Most of the erroneous reporting on this issue results from using numbers gathered in the first quarter of 2004. These numbers reflect sharp increase in the poverty rate caused by the severe economic downturn of 2002-2003.

- Since the preliminary poverty numbers for 2005 were released in September 2005, it is not clear why the out-of-date, early 2004 numbers have continued to be widely used. The early 2004 numbers quickly became out of date because of the rapid growth of the Venezuelan economy in 2004 (17.9 percent) and 2005 (9.4 percent), which pulled millions of people out of poverty.

- The reduction in poverty noted above, since 1999, measures only cash income. This, however, does not really capture the changes in the living standards of the poor in Venezuela, since there have been major changes in non-cash benefits and services in the last few years - for example health care is now provided to an estimated 54 percent of the population. The paper looks briefly at the impact of these changes.

As mentioned in my last entry, Amnesty International’s 2006 Report was released yesterday. Here are a few of the facts presented by Amnesty on their website from the report with regards to extraordinary rendition…

2005= the year in which evidence was made public of the involvement of European governments in US-led renditions.

1000 = the approximate number of secret flights directly linked to the CIA that used European airspace between 2001 and 2005, some of which may have carried prisoners.

100’s of people = the estimated number of persons who may have been subject to renditions around the world.

6 = the number of European countries implicated in the rendition of 14 individuals to countries where they were tortured.

There is, of course, a great deal more. I urge you to visit Amnesty’s website to learn more about the state of human rights worldwide.

Also of interest…

- the resignation letter penned by adjunct professor Steve Almond to Father William P. Leahy of Boston College over the school’s decision to invite Condolezza Rice to give the commencement speech at the school’s graduation ceremony.

- a piece by Jim Lobe entitled Bush Democracy Doctrine, RIP, which includes some fantastic points that most certainly should not be overlooked…

Less than 18 months after U.S. President George W. Bush declared in his 2005 Inaugural Address his unequivocal commitment to the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” tyrants, particularly in the Islamic world, are taking heart.

From North Africa to Central Asia, top U.S. officials are busy embracing dictators – and their sons, where appropriate – even as they continue to mouth the pro-democracy rhetoric that became the hallmark of the administration’s foreign policy pronouncements, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed to turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al-Qaeda.

Particularly notable in just the past month have been White House receptions for Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s heir-apparent, his son Gamal; the praise lavished by Vice President Dick Cheney on Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev during a recent visit to Almaty; and last week’s normalization of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

“You add up all the pieces, and the message to the world is, ‘We have a lot of other business than just democracy in this region,’” according to Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) here. “And that business means friendly relations with all sorts of autocrats.”

For those of you that keep up on such things, tomorrow sees the release of Amnesty International’s annual report. Last year you may remember that the adverse reaction of the Bush administration ironically helped publicize last year’s report and the role of the United States in considerably contributing to a decline in global human rights standards. There is no question that the US led War On Terror has provided justification for suspect behavior, as was demonstrated in Andizhan, Uzbekistan, in May of 2005 when Uzbek security forces indiscriminately fired on a crowd of demonstrators protesting government corruption and widespread poverty. The government of Islam Karimov justified the incident by evoking the now globally convenient excuse of counter-terrorism.

From the May 15th edition of The Observer (UK)…

“Outrage among human rights groups followed claims by the White House on Friday that appeared designed to justify the violence of the regime of President Islam Karimov, claiming - as Karimov has - that ‘terrorist groups’ may have been involved in the uprising.

Critics said the US was prepared to support pro-democracy unrest in some states, but condemn it in others where such policies were inconvenient.

Witnesses and analysts familiar with the region said most protesters were complaining about government corruption and poverty, not espousing Islamic extremism.

The US comments were seized on by Karimov, who said yesterday that the protests were organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group often accused by Tashkent of seditious extremism. Yet Washington, which has expressed concern over the group’s often hardline message, has yet to designate it a terrorist group.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, tried to deflect accusations of the contradictory stance when he said it was clear the ‘people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government. But that should come through peaceful means, not through violence.’

Washington has often been accused of being involved in a conspiracy of silence over Uzbekistan’s human rights record since that country was declared an ally in the ‘war on terror’ in 2001.

Uzbekistan is believed to be one of the destination countries for the highly secretive ‘renditions programme’, whereby the CIA ships terrorist suspects to third-party countries where torture is used that cannot be employed in the US. Newspaper reports in America say dozens of suspects have been transferred to Uzbek jails.”

During the fallout that followed, and aided by pressure from Russia, China, and others, the United States lost K2 (Karshi-Kanabad), a strategic airbase in Uzbekistan that had acted as a vital hub with regards to operations in Afghanistan and rendition flights. One has to wonder – had international condemnation, and the outrage of human rights groups, not been as prevalent, would this transgression have slipped under the Whitehouse radar in favour of securing a strategic military option?

Over the last five years the actions of the United States, and its partners in the War On Terror, have set a global precedent that has enabled suspect governments to justify increasingly overt authoritarian action by sighting terrorism as their primary excuse. But this phenomenon is not confined to the likes of Uzbekistan. It is alive and well in the United States itself, though many refuse to believe that possible - which is, of course, precisely why it is.

According to a recent Angus Reid poll, some 62% of Americans are against current US military involvement in Iraq. Ironically, according to another recent poll, some 38% of Americans admit to the repeated use of crack cocaine.

I’ve been somewhat busy of late. If you’re at all curious to know what I’ve been reading on a daily basis, pop by my del.icio.us.

Were I to say that Iraq is little more than a chaotic, sectarian disaster, would that merely be conjecture on my part? Is there information that has failed to reach me, or a great many others, that paints Iraq in any other light than an example of US hegemony gone awry, the product of egotistical ‘chicken-hawk’ assumption?

Since the late afternoon of September 11th, 2001, the neoconservative element that clung to the coattails of George W. Bush as he slipped into office was well aware that they had been gifted what little in a lifetime are – the opportunity to completely alter the foreign policy platform of a global super power. Given the ambiguous nature of The War On Terror there was little to deter the once eyebrow raising passages of Paul Wolfowitz’s ’92 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, later revisited and dubbed ‘the Wolfowitz Doctrine’, from being ushered in as solid policy. Iraq became the focal point of the policy’s enactment, a pre-emptive, unilateralist invasion that would send a clear and terrible message to the rest of the world – that international law and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations were void in the face of superior military and economic might.

Is it merely speculation to say that Iraq is worse off now than it was prior to the invasion in 2003? There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but there is also no doubt that any successful democratic movement in such a fractionalized country would need to have been populist to truly succeed. That being the case, how can the invasion of Iraq be seen as anything but imperial foot-printing in one of the world’s most vital regions?

The Bush administration continues to send mixed messages about Iraq. Even Bush himself has confessed that US involvement in Iraq may very well outlast his presidency (along with a number of other disastrous foreign policy initiatives that will be entirely detrimental to the United States lest future representatives adhere to the principles that were required for them to be initiated in the first place). Realistically, the damage done by this administration may very well take decades to overcome.

I have often wondered at the ability of others to view the world as if recorded history commenced the day after 9/11. To say that I have been amazed these past three years that more people haven’t woken up to the reality of the relationship between the United States and Hussein’s regime would be an understatement. When Saddam Hussein was of use to the United States he was an ally. When he ceased to be, and posed a threat to other US interests in the region, it’s as if the American people’s memories were erased and the demonizing of Hussein flooded the newly freed space. Culpability is not something of interest to super powers, and therefore of little concern to those that number themselves initiates of the new Rome.

While some address the myriad of daily information and the confusion it presents with disdain and minimal interest, the perpetration of some of the greatest lies sold a Western public since the reign of the Third Reich have passed unchallenged in what is supposed to be one of the world’s most ardent democracies. And unlike the millions of Germans that ultimately paid for their unwillingness to question, a fraction of Americans have been confronted with the terrible realities of this new era of American hegemony. Beyond that handful, the human price for this folly has been paid by others, by Iraqis and Afghans, people innocent of any involvement in the attacks of 9/11. These are the victims that lay forgotten, the images of their destruction kept from those that have supported the effort that ended their lives.

In any free society silence is one of the greatest public evils. For with it not only comes the decay of liberty, but byproducts which often claim the lives of those unable to challenge the decisions that ultimately sign their death warrants.