Let us Pray they GOT Zawahiri!

Not because he is so important, but may this reduce killing innocents for no reason. After all, he is nothing more than a numbers in a series of terrorist unit.

While all the headlines concentrate on the Zawahiri and his expected death, all the news media ignore the fact that the air strike in the remote Pakistani tribal area killed at least 18 innocent people (including 14 members of a family). Among which are 6 kids below 10 years old, mothers and elderly men. No one cares for these; after all they are Pakistanis, villagers, poor, Muslims!!! Why should anyone care?

The American regime could start a war if the same number of American was killed, and no one would blame them. In fact I would support that too. But, because they are not citizens of the Rich North, who cares?

No One!

Uncover the wreckage, dig and dig... hey Sam, can you see our fellow, Zawahiri, anywhere?

Sam: No Mike. He is not here.

Mike: Ok Sam, let's leave before these villagers comes and eat us. I heard they eat human flesh.
...
Apaches pilot: I think I hit the wrong button, over.

Base: Never mind, the 'Rumsfeld' can coverup and say that you might have killed Zawahiri. Come back to base, over.

And the game goes on.

Official announcement: This is a war. We are in a war against terrorism. Civilian causalities are expected. We are sorry that this might happen, but this is the war.

Talking of civilians, remember last year study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal by a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers who reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the US and its allies.

Did anyone care? No one! Why? The same reason, civilians, poor, Arab, Muslims, etc...

Here is the Times account of what happened on last January 3rd in the small town of Baiji, 240 kilometers north of Baghdad, based on interviews with various unidentified "American officials":

A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men planting a roadside bomb about 9pm. The men "dug a hole following the common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement", the military said in a statement. "The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots. The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which was then bombed with 'precision guided munitions'," the military said. The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at the site. An additional military statement said navy F-14s had "strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds" and dropped one bomb.

Crucial to this report is the phrase "precision guided munitions", an affirmation that US forces used technology less likely than older munitions to accidentally hit the wrong target. It is this precision that allows us to glimpse the callous brutality of US military strategy in Iraq and elsewhere.

The target was a "building nearby", identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy hiding place. According to witness reports given to the Washington Post, the attack in effect demolished the building, and damaged six surrounding buildings. While in a perfect world, the surrounding buildings would have been undamaged, the reported human casualties in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.

The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that 14 members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed. The Washington Post, which reported 12 killed, offered a chilling description of the scene:

The dead included women and children whose bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping. A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday from the house.

Because in this case - unlike in so many others in which US air power uses "precisely guided munitions" - there was on-the-spot reporting for a US newspaper, the military command was required to explain these casualties. Without conceding that the deaths actually occurred, Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, commented, "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."

Notice that Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had actually died) did assert US policy: if suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield themselves". These are, in other words, essential US rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures. Put another way, it is more important to stop the insurgents than protect the innocent.

And notice that the military, single-mindedly determined to kill or capture the insurgents, cannot stop to allow for the evacuation of civilians either. Any delay might let the insurgents escape, either disguised as civilians or through windows, back doors, cellars or any of the other obvious escape routes urban guerrillas might take. Any attack must be quickly organized and - if possible - unexpected.

We can gain some perspective on this military strategy by imagining similar rules of engagement for a police force in some large US city. Imagine, for example, a team of criminals in that city fleeing into a nearby apartment building after gunning down a police officer. It would be unthinkable for the police simply to call in airships to demolish the structure, killing any people - helpless hostages, neighbors or even friends of the perpetrators - who were with or near them.

In fact, the rules of engagement for the police, even in such a situation of extreme provocation, call for them to "hold their fire" - if necessary allowing the perpetrators to escape - if there is a risk of injuring civilians. And this is a reasonable rule ... because we value the lives of innocent US citizens over our determination to capture a criminal, even a cop-killer.

But in Iraqi cities or elsewhere, US values and priorities are quite differently arranged. The contrast derives from three important principles under which these wars are being fought: that the war should be conducted to absolutely minimize the risk to US troops; that guerrilla fighters should not be allowed to escape if there is any way to capture or kill them; and that civilians should not be allowed to harbor or encourage the resistance fighters.

As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which US military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating". A marine calling in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."

This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism - attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever US troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.

This is the US strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, which actually is a formula for the slaughter of civilians. [source]

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• Criminal Powerful States: Civilization vs. Barbarism
• Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media
• Pictures of the year 2005

It seems that the general ideological picture painted for Americans by their administration and conservative outlets is that the overall so-called war on terror is about the "civilized" world combating "barbarism," a position Business Week recently voiced. This is historically and politically inaccurate, in terms of the scale and intensity of the crimes committed by USA versus the "barbarians," presumably Islamists and nationalists in Iraq and Palestine.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states (such as US and Israel) far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

The best current example is in Iraq. Estimates of deaths after the invasion is 100,000 maybe more, maybe less. Take say, the most extensive terrorist act attributed to Islamic terrorists, 9-11. About 3,000 people killed, which is a pretty horrible atrocity. But as atrocities go, does it rank as high as the US crimes?

Another example, what south of the Rio Grande is often called the other 9-11. September 11th, 1973, in which the United States was very indirectly (heavily) involved -- that's the bombing of the presidential palace, the military coup, the death of the president, the destruction of the leading democracy, the oldest democracy, in Latin America. The official death toll for that 9-11 is ­ the official death toll is over 3,000, but that's just the bodies they can actually count. The estimated toll is probably twice that. If you give that number in comparative terms, comparative population terms, that'd be the equivalent of about 50 to 100,000 people killed in the United States. The numbers of people tortured -- is 30,000, that's 700,000 in the United States, thousands of cases of rapes and other abuse, and many people just lost, disappeared, who knows what happened to them.

Well that's one event ­ September 11th, 1973. Happens to be one in which the US was only indirectly involved. If we take those which the US carried out itself, then the scale is uncountable. Take the one case where the US was indeed condemned for international terrorism and ordered to terminate the crime, namely the attack on Nicaragua, which went to the World Court. The World Court had to take a very narrow case, because the US had excluded itself from all international treaties. So the US cannot be brought to the World Court for major crimes, for example the supreme international crime, invasion, or violation of the UN Charter, or violation of the Genocide Convention, these are things the US is exempt from, because they exempted themselves from being subjected to international treaties in World Court proceedings.

So the World Court had to deal with Nicaragua case on extremely narrow grounds, just bilateral Nicaragua-US treaties, and customary international law. Nevertheless the Court condemned the US for what it called unlawful use of force, gave a pretty broad judgment, well beyond the actual terms of the case, ordered the US to terminate the crimes, pay substantial reparations. The US ignored the ruling, vetoed two Security Council resolutions affirming it, and went on with the war.

The end result was, again in per capita terms, about the equivalent of 2.5 million people being killed in the United States. More than the number of deaths in all wars including the Civil War in US history, destroyed the country, it's now the second poorest country in the hemisphere. After the US took it over again in 1990, it went downhill further -- by now, it's estimated that over half the children under 2 are suffering from severe malnutrition, I mean, probable brain damage.

In the early 80's, when the US started the war, Nicaragua was being praised by international organizations, even international banks, for its substantial progress, won prizes for improvement, UNICEF prizes for ­ awards for improvement in child health and development. Now it's quite the opposite.

This is a single incident, so it totally outweighs all terrorist activities you can attribute to anyone else, but it's not even worth discussing.

And that's only one, I'm not even talking about the major wars like say, Vietnam, which was straight aggression, can't call it terror, with, who knows, four million people or so killed, and people still dying from the effects of massive chemical warfare started by Kennedy. And that's just the United States. Take a look at other states, they're not as powerful as the US, but their violence is extraordinary ­ France in Africa, the British in Kenya and elsewhere, just far beyond the scale of any terrorist activity.

Back to Iraq example. It's interesting to note that ­ 100,000 casualties in Iraq ­ it's interesting to note that while much media attention is focused on the sensationalistic and gruesome beheadings of perhaps a few dozen foreigners in Iraq, the same media is more or less silent about the Lancet report ­ Lancet being the British medical journal ­ that said about 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, mostly by US bombing, and also missing in the media is talk about the Iraqi children's malnutrition rates which have apparently doubled. They're worse than - at the level of Burundi ­ they're worse than Uganda and Haiti ­ and that's since the war.

In fact the way the media treated this Lancet report is kind of interesting. I mean it was mentioned ­ it's not that you couldn't find it. But it was either ignored or downplayed. The standard reaction to it was well, that it was just a sample. In fact they did it very conservatively. They excluded Fallujah because that would have raised the estimate!

And in fact, it's not exactly correct that the media haven't reported the war crimes. They often report them and celebrate them. So take for example the invasion of Fallujah, which is one of the US major war crimes, it's very similar to the Russian destruction of Grozny 10 years earlier, a city of approximately the same size, bombed to rubble, people driven out.

Well, with Fallujah, the US didn't truck out the women and children, it bombed them out. There was about a month of bombing, bombed out of the city, if they could get out somehow, a couple hundred thousand people fled, or somehow got out, and men were kept in.

But what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New York Times, a big picture of the first major step in the offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general hospital. And there's a picture of people lying on the ground, soldier guarding them, and then there's a story that tells that patients and doctors were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the picture described it.

The president of the United States is subject to death penalty under US law for that crime - alone. That's a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn't have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that.

There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them, that means the commanders. They weren't thinking about the United States of course, but take it literally, that's what it means.

And then they went onto explain why they carried out this war crime in the general hospital. New York Times explained calmly that it was done because the US command described the Fallujah general hospital as a propaganda outlet for the guerrillas because they were reporting casualties. I don't know if the Nazis produced things like that. Of course the Times said it was "inflated" casualties - how do we know it was inflated?

And then it went on, destroying the whole city. Finally they end up saying well the Marines are going to face a serious challenge of regaining the confidence of the people of Fallujah after having destroyed their city. Yeah, it's going to be a pretty serious challenge. It's also described how they're going to do it by instituting a police state.

By the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which the US initiated and carried out, it concluded that the supreme international crime is invasion, aggression, and that supreme crime includes within it all the evil that follows. So therefore the doubling of malnutrition rates, the maybe 100,000 casualties, the grave war crimes in Fallujah, they're all footnotes, they're footnotes to the supreme international crime.

And that crime is taken pretty seriously. In Nuremberg they did not try soldiers, and they didn't try company commanders, the people who were on trial and hanged were the top command. Like the German Foreign Minister was hanged. Because of participation in the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows.

Do we hear anything about that?

Furthermore if Americans go a step further and ask themselves ­ speaking of barbarism ­ "what kind of society do we live in where the only way we can think of preventing Rwanda-level killing among children everyday is by bribing private tyrannies to do something about it?"

That itself is beyond barbarism.

But they accept that, they don't think about it, they prefer not to think about it. It's not that they worry about small crimes rather than big ones, it's that attention is focused on anything that's done against them. What they do to others just doesn't matter. And it's not specific to the United States, it's quite general. It's an unfortunate part of dominant cultures and powerful societies.

With all the grandiose rhetoric about "barbarism," it's also interesting to note that the Pentagon's own Defense Science Board, composed of top military commanders and intelligence figures, issued a report about two months ago declaring that resentment in the Islamic world is mainly due to US support for Israel and US support for Arab dictatorships, and not about an inner hatred or hatred of Western values themselves. But if the top people in the Pentagon and the military understand this, then why is there such a large disconnect in what they themselves concede and what they say ­ I mean what are the strategic imperatives that are so great that they are willing to incur the wrath?

This report was a repetition, almost a verbatim repetition of a report by the NSC in 1958 when President Eisenhower raised the question with his staff, why there is a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world, and not among governments but from the people. That's Eisenhower, 1958, why is there a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. An answer was given in an analysis by the National Security Council in 1958: it's because there's a perception in the Arab that the United States supports brutal and repressive regimes and blocks democracy and development, and US do it because they want to get control of oil and resources ­ their oil. That's 1958. And they went on to say, yes the perception's accurate, and we're going to continue doing it. That's been perfectly well known for years that that was the case.

It's exacerbated further by specific policies. Right after 9-11, as far as I know one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world, the Wall Street Journal. They kept to the people they cared about, what they called moneyed Muslims, managers of multinational corporations, international lawyers, you know ­ their type of people ­ so there's no concern about globalization or anything else, they're part of the US-run system. But they had the same results they had as in 1958, as the Pentagon just reported. They hate and fear Bin Laden, who's trying to destroy them, but nevertheless they express understanding for the position that he articulates, and they hate US policy, because it supports brutal and oppressive regimes, blocks democracy and development, because of the support for Israeli aggression and atrocities at that time, because of the Iraq sanctions, which were killing hundreds of thousands of people, devastating society, and caused enormous anger.

The Pentagon report is just repeating what anybody knew who had their eyes open. The fact that it was regarded as a surprise in the United States just shows how much intellectuals prefer to keep their eyes closed. What they said is correct, furthermore you can read it - it's articulated almost the same way in 1958, it's found in every study since. Furthermore you can find it in any book on terrorism ­ any serious book on terrorism, not just anyone ranting and screaming ­ but someone taking it seriously, say, Jason Burke's study of al-Qaeda, which is the best one around, or just about anyone you pick.

We don't hate their freedom, what we hate is US policies, and for good reason, because those policies have been crushing us for years. So yeah, we hate the policies. Pentagon just discovered ­ re-discovered ­ what everybody with eyes open already knew, and these 1958 reports have been declassified for about 15 years. They decided just better not to ­ it's easier to just stand on a pedestal and scream about Islamic fascism and how it's trying to destroy USA. It doesn't require thinking about the policies and doing something about them.

Furthermore that's true of what's called terrorism in general, it doesn't come out of nowhere. I'll not take Bin Laden as an example, but take say the IRA - which the US was pretty much supporting, it was being funded ­ IRA terrorism, which was pretty serious was being funded from the United States including church collections, FBI knew about it, wouldn't do anything about it. It was pretty awful, but it was not without reasons, it did draw on a reservoir of sympathy among the population, who understood the grievances that they were talking about were real... In fact when the British finally responded not by greater violence, but by paying some attention to the grievances, it led to significant improvements. In fact, big improvements. Of course, Belfast is not heaven, but it's enormously improved over what it was ten years ago.

So is Israel. Why they are not willing to incur the wrath?

Israeli intelligence, the former heads of this Shin Bet have spoken about this - the current ones can't but the former ones have - the former heads of military intelligence, and they all said the same thing: until you treat the Palestinians with respect, until you grant them their elementary rights, you're never going to stop terrorism. That's the way to do it ­ they have grievances, the grievances are real, we're treating them with contempt and humiliation and destruction, we're stealing their land and resources. There's something like a near-universal consensus on this, among people who care about the topic.

Related posts:

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• U.S. Media Censorship
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