Once again the US military has massacred a large number of civilians in the occupied territories. 51 Afghan villagers were killed. Many of them women and children. Of course the Pentagon denies any knowledge of any wrong doing - as they always do, until a whistle blower comes forward.

Those denials work on American TV, because the Pentagton statements are repeated verbatim by the US media, thus ensuring that American audiences never know what is true and what is not. The media doesn’t bother to check whether those Pentagon denials are actually true or not, they just repeat them word for word and call that journalism. And republican sheep are trained that one must always believe their own government. They would never lie to us, would they?

So if some foreign “ragheads” claim their women and children were massacred, and a Pentagon spokesperson says it didn’t happen, of course we should believe the Pentagon, not the ragheads, right?

Unfortunately the past few years have shown time and time again that the foreigners’ story is usually far more credible that the claims of some government spokesman.

Remember when Bush and co claimed that Saddam had WMD but Saddam insisted that he did not? Bush lied, and Saddam told the truth.

Remember the staged media event surrounding Saddam’s statue?

Remember all those lies surrounding Tillman’s death? Remember those lies about Jessica Lynch? The families of Tillman and Lynch went to Capitol Hill, trying to expose Pentagon lies.

There have been countless incidents in which large groups of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were murdered by US troops. The Pentagon officially denies them almost all the time. Only the rarest of instances get exposed - like Haditha.

Week after week, month after month, wedding parties are bombed, students are gunned down, demonstrators are shot, civilians are ruthlessly killed during interrogations, and Iraqi families are sprayed with bullets.

Right-wing Americans couldn’t care less. To them the carnage isn’t real. Foreigners aren’t really human, and their deaths don’t count. That cognitive dissonance is aided by the fact that the supposedly liberal US media (which has been in bed with the government throughout both wars) goes through great lengths to hide unpleasant images of the war zones.

It’s easy to pontificate about the glory of war as long as you don’t have to look at it on TV, let alone live through it in real life. But to the Iraqi and Afghan civilians on the other end of US guns, war is very real - and it’s not a virtue, but a life shattering catastrophe.

Every time US stormtroopers randomly kill “worthless” foreign civilians, the Pentagon may deny it, and the American public may ignore it, but the murdered locals and their relatives and neighbors don’t have that luxury. They are left with the blood running in their streets and the maimed corpses littering their neighborhoods.

To a Middle Easterner who witnesses that kind of neo-colonial cruelty, it is clear who the bad guys are: Americans. And every time US troops massacre yet another wedding party or family or group of innocent demonstrators, every time they breed more people who hate America. That’s why the so-called War on Terror is creating far more “terrorists” than it kills. Every time US troops kill a foreigner, his family and neighbors become “terrorists” because they vow to avenge his death and join the anti-American resistance.

Like Iraqis, most Afghans see American troops not as liberators but as foreign occupiers, and they see the Taliban as the legitimate local resistance. Support for the Taliban is growing in neighboring countries as well, and some experts fear that the Taliban controlled territory may reach Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The Pentagon may deny the massacres, and right-wing Americans may ignore them, but the massacres will continue to add fire to worldwide anti-Americanism and every massacre is great recruitment material for potential enemies.

Unfortunately it appears that right-wing Americans are so blinded by their “my country is never wrong” kind of “patriotism” (aka nationalist extremism) that they will not recognize the incredible damage Bush and the Neo-Cons are causing for America (as well as the rest of the world, but right-wing extremists don’t care about the rest of the world), until it is too late.

Tags: lies war crimes human rights massacre afghanistan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.