The Chris Moeller Archives

Torture is our business and business is good

WikiLeaks' Document Dump Day #2 has come and gone, and another 400,000 classified military documents have been made public, revealing several horrible truths about the policies and actions of the United States military. Among other items yet to be revealed through extended research, the latest batch of documents makes public that a U.S. Army helicopter fired a series of rounds at surrendering Iraqi insurgents in February, 2007, killing them all, that Abu Ghraib was more like the beginning of our organized torture efforts against Iraqis, not the end (widespread torture has continued at least through the first year of the Obama presidency), and of course, that none of these offenses clearly categorized as war crimes, and which also include murders at military checkpoints and the suppression of reports of civilian casualties, were reported publicly, investigated, or prosecuted despite meticulous documentation.

The myths of the righteousness of the United States military are finally fading, even among the "love it or leave it" crowd here in the U.S. Recruiters trolling through shopping centers are now able to enlist only the children with the most desperate futures. What remains is a sorry conglomeration of predominantly the most undereducated and uninformed of our young citizens ripe for exploitation. Our wars have nothing to do with our national defense or security. They're orchestrated for the conquest of resources by the national forces of capital and for the benefit of stock prices on the global exchange for private, borderless companies. Our enemies don't "hate us for our freedoms." They hate us for our violent aggressions, our occupations, our institutional support for tyrants-- theirs and ours, and of course, for our many hypocrisies.

Veterans of the war on Iraq, themselves also heinous victims of their government, have been making many of these individual claims publicly, and those claims have gone ignored by news divisions and politicians. The soldiers are powerless against a traditional news media and a political culture that favors the institutional position on all matters military.

No one disputes the accuracy of these documents being released. None of the previously-released documents numbering in the hundreds of thousands have been found to be inaccurate. The only criticisms being leveled have been the ones designed to slander the lead whistleblower at WikiLeaks or, like the one from the Pentagon spokesman, noting that the documents "expose secret information that make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future." But is it the exposure of these war crimes by Wikileaks that's to blame for such dangers or is it the actions themselves by a conscienceless world superpower that values domination over mutual respect? The continued classified cover of these despotic abuses made the planet even more vulnerable to attack by the United States in the future.

posted by CM @ 3:43 PM