July 13, 2007

Iraq Veterans: "...the entire war is an atrocity."

In a very wide-ranging and in-depth piece of reporting, Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian of The Nation have interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq war. The results are devastating.

...

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

As you would expect, practises allegedly outlawed since Abu Ghraib continue, including the hooding. The arrests are usually abitrary, or based on bullshit evidence or rumour or worse. Most of those who ended up at harsh camps like Abu Ghraib were there for petty crimes like theft, but were treated like animals anyway. (When there was a riot against conditions in the prison, the soldiers shot it up, killing nine people, and one of them posed next to the cracked skull of one corpse, pretending to eat the brains again). The racist language that goes with these practises are as you would expect: "haji", "camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger." Naturally, the second there's trouble, they open fire on every "haji" in sight:

...

"And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."

Doesn't make you proud?

And we let this continue.

Don't forget, it's being done in your name.

Read the rest.

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