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“Don’t publish these” warns US Military
Journal of a Futurist - 17 November 2003
How Iraq is shaping the future
I was just about to take my wife’s advice to “lay off America”, when another load of truth bombs struck. Surely these pics will be in tomorrow’s paper, I thought, skimming the Al Jazeera reports of US troops handcuffing children at home. But no, not a peep. The bright young media cowboys were too busy twittering about gladiatorial Rugby and the latest Tarantino bloodbath to worry about the niceties of another Coalition war crime. I didn’t want to publish these images – they deserve the world’s front pages: “Winning the hearts and minds of the next generation … for Al Qaida”.
After the shock downing of a Black Hawk helicopter, the US hits back with “Iron Hammer”. Its troops sweep through Iraqi neighbourhoods, “firing at houses suspected to be harbouring hostile forces.” The commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, Lt. Col. Steven Russell, tells reporters, "This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them.” Can you imagine what it is like for the cowering children? If they survive the hammer, the teeth, the claws, the cluster bombs, they can still be handcuffed and carted off to an unknown location, in defiance of international law.
The Hammer of Injustice
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits “collective penalties” and all measures of intimidation and terrorism. But our Coalition of the Good, the Fat and the Rich, we self styled friends of freedom and law, as attested by Camp X-Ray, couldn’t care less about that.
When asked by Reuters why an Iraqi civilian in Tahrir Square was dragged into the back of a Humvee and had his lips sealed with layers of masking tape, the commanding officer replied: "He has been detained for making anti-coalition statements." What these were he wouldn’t say. George Orwell, are you weeping?
I didn’t mean to get bogged down in Baghdad’s moral morass, because, thank heavens, more and more citizens are waking up to the lunacy, the lies, the depravity. It now turns out that Saddam Hussein had sought to avert disaster. In December his government approached the CIA’s former head of counter terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, and offered, among other concessions, to permit thousands of US troops to search Iraq for WMD’s. Funny, no-one mentioned it at the time. Hussein even offered to hold “internationally monitored elections’ within two years, perhaps with the help of hanging chads. The overture was rebuffed. Instead, in order to save the Iraqis, we’ve been killing them.
Such an old story.
Why the Truth is Hard to Find
The corporate flagships have too much to loose by telling the truth. The interests of their owners are identical to the interests of those who clamoured for war. It is the net and the quirky provincials who break major stories, as in the case of The Blade, a modest sheet from Toledo, Ohio, which has uncovered “another My Lai”. For seven months in 1967 the Tiger Force platoon rampaged through the highlands of Vietnam. They slaughtered hundreds of unarmed farmers, their wives and their children. Babies were decapitated, teenagers tortured and mutilated, their scalps strung from American weapons. Rion Causey, then a 19-year-old medic and now a nuclear physicist, recalled the blood bath: 'If they ran we shot them, and if they didn't run we shot them anyway.' The death squad’s former commander, Lt James Hawkins, now retired to Florida, “thoroughly enjoyed the killings” and says today he doesn’t regret a thing . Pass the sunblock, Corporal.
The army’s files remain classified. No-one has ever been charged, or ever will be. Why do you think America shuns the international criminal court? Why are so many journalists shot in Iraq?
Mrs Thatcher’s Bodily Fluids
Okay, so let’s move on. What is the true meaning of the Iraq debacle? Could the long term outcome be good for the world, if not for the White House?
The Old Order is dying. Both Uncle Sam and Prince Charles have been caught with their pants down. Tony Blair has also been exposed … as a hologram, a hollow-man hologram created at a secret lab by Tory boffins from the saliva of Maggie Thatcher. His task: destroy the soul of the Labour Party. Mission accomplished, and yet ..and yet … the plan is flawed. No-one was supposed to notice. Ooops. The British are baffled, but they’re not beaten. They’re waking up. Gradually, this noble and amusing race will win back its self respect, dump Blair and help build a world in which global justice is spread with a policy, not at the point of a gun.
Australians, meanwhile, are burdened with shame by a lying, cunning, platitudinous Prime Minister, who jails children foolish enough to flee from persecution with inadequate paperwork. Last week, around the time the Iraqi toddlers were apparently being trussed up by God’s marines, a decrepit craft landed on our shores with 14 dehydrated Kurds seeking political asylum. John Howard swept into action in the usual way: 1) Lying in his teeth. “A sea cruise – they didn’t want to land”. 2) Media blackout. The airspace over the vessel was declared “no go”. 3) Acts of cruelty. The exhausted revellers were denied their rights under a UN protocol, then furtively towed back to Indonesia. 4) Judicial humbug. The landing spot was retrospectively “disappeared” from the map.
The Churchill of the Asia Pacific
Dear John, if one of your beloved Wallabies scored a vital goal, only to have it disallowed by an impromptu rule change, wouldn’t you cry foul? Of course you would. Until you became PM, such foul play was not part of our ethos.
“We are good people,” Howard assures the handpicked crowd from every media platform he can claw aboard, “we are wonderful at war … and yet we are not warlike, we are Christ’s chosen accountants, we are the World Cup conquistadors and Don Bradman’s golden offspring, and we only tell lies because God wants us to stay at the helm”. By this stage, the whole nation is vomiting, so Rupert “Cancer” Murdoch commands his corpulent columnists – eerily interchangeable in opinions and looks – to publish stirring profiles of Howard-the-Churchill of Asia, the saviour of civilisation, the bore who brown-noses George Bush and makes suburbia a safe place to double your money, etc.
The Mind Shift has Already Begun
Okay, hurry, let’s get positive. I want to get this online before the spooks knock at the door. Our invasion of Iraq will lead, over the long term, to a slow burning worldwide revulsion against Coalition hypocrisy and hasten the progress towards global governance. Don’t panic, patriots, governance is not the same as government. The integrity of domestic politics need not be threatened. However, US foreign policy is far too vicious to be left to the White House, to corporate lobbyists, to the mugs at the CIA. The loooong term outcome will be a reformed, democratic UN with a muscular mandate. Other agencies under the thumb of Washington, the IMF, the World Bank, will eventually be rendered accountable to Earth, not just to a handful of secretive bean counters. New processes of international decision making will be built from the ground up, a World Environment Organisation for a start. Taxes on weapons and currency fiddles. A General Assembly of Cities, to counter the encrusted jingoism of nation states. (Already bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, cities are forming their own networks and jointly engaging in creating alternative scenarios for 2025.)
My Robot, My Sex Slave
Another consequence will be a mind-shift. The West will extract its collective head from the shopping trolley and notice how the dirt poor actually live. For more than a minute. We will cease to fantasise about robots that hang out the washing and do the drycleaning. We will forget the tribulations of celebrities with eating disorders and marriages that last no longer than the honeymoon. We will beg for a voluntary self taxing mechanism that millions of the global middle class can contribute through micro fees on electronic transactions. It will deliver food and funds at the local level.
Of course our politicians are lying like there’s no tomorrow, because we are all lying to ourselves. The truth is that Earth is the only home we have and everyone is a relative. The division of good and evil is a myth. The division of rich and poor is getting worse. Until we bridge this gap, the war of terror will be a war without end. And the only ones left alive will be the arms dealers, the cockroaches and Rupert Murdoch.
Oh, and by the way, Major David Farlow at the US military headquarters in Florida, warned Aljazeera not to publish the above pictures: “It would be irresponsible”. But not to publish them would be complicit. I don’t know exactly what was taking place at the time, but is it too much to ask for an official explanation? Perhaps it is the army’s way of hosting a dress-up party.
Feel free to cut, paste & email.
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