Oh I do feel sure that all those nasty comments about 'ragheads' could not have made it easier for some soldiers to rape and to murder Iraqis.
I feel so sure that comments about killing others made by Coulter, Limpbaugh, Savage Weiner, Malkin, and others might not have contributed to an atmosphere in which heinous acts were permissible.
Oh but what about the pro-torture, pro-atrocity attitudes of the Commander-in-Chief, his VP, and Nutty Rummy? Hmm.
Well, the boys played All-American golf before they murdered this child and her family. Having raped her.
Then, right after that rape and murder, there were All-American barbecued chicken wings.
And today? In court? Why, it's All-American lollipops and Bazooka gum!
Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while [defendant Sgt. Anthony] Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.
(Reuters)A U.S. military court in Baghdad heard graphic testimony on Monday of how three U.S. soldiers took turns raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family.
At the hearing into whether four U.S. soldiers should be court-martialled for rape and murder, a special agent described what took place in Mahmudiya in March, based on an interview he had with one of the men, Specialist James Barker. . . Special Agent Benjamin Bierce recalled that Barker described to him how they put a couple and their six-year-old daughter into a bedroom of their home, but kept the teenage girl in the living room, where Barker held her hands while Sergeant Paul Cortez raped her or tried to rape her. . .
Barker also told the special agent he heard shots from the bedroom and shortly afterwards Private Steven Green emerged from the room, put down an AK-47 assault rifle and raped the girl while Cortez held her down.
Barker told Bierce that Green then picked up the weapon and shot her once, paused, and shot her several more times.
Military prosecutors are expected to set out their case against Private First Class Jesse Spielman, 21, Barker, 23, Cortez, 23 and Private First Class Bryan Howard, 19, who face charges of rape and murder among others. . .
Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.
An Iraqi army medic told the hearing on Sunday he entered the house and found the body of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi naked and burned from the waist up, with a single bullet wound beneath her left eye.
Special Agent Gary Griesmyer recounted Cortez' account of the day. "While they were playing cards and drinking Iraqi whiskey, the idea came to go out to an Iraqi house, rape a woman and murder her family," he testified.
Cortez said Barker told the young girl to "shut up" after she was raped, Griesmyer said.
Bierce said Barker told him he poured kerosene from a lamp on to the girl. It was not clear who set her on fire.
Barker later signed a sworn statement based on the interview, in which he said that on the day of the attack he, Cortez, Spielman and Green had been playing cards and drinking whisky mixed with an energy drink. They then went to the rear of the checkpoint where they were based to hit golf balls.
Green said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Barker wrote in his sworn statement.
After the rape and murders, he wrote that he began to grill chicken wings.
Full story here.
WaPo, here.
NBFH--"The Pro-Atrocity Crowd," here.
Mahmudiya
Bush, Rummy, Cheney
culture of torture
Marine rape at Mahmudiya
4 comments:
Look son, I don't care what you THINK you saw. There are NO SNAKES on this goddamn plane. You just keep telling yerself that: "There are no snakes on this plane" and calm down so I don't have to stick you with this needle. AAAH! What the fuck was that just bit me?!?
You da man, Bukko.
GET THE SNAKES OFF THE PLANE!
Hate talk's alive and well right on my own blog. I'm doing an experiment and seeing if it's possible to talk people down from bigotry. I doubt it.
Thanks for calling attention to this astonishing scene at the Mahmoudiya court-martial, where the US Military defense attorney and the defendant in a rape-multiple murder trial are allowed by the court to engage in activities so incredibly contemptuous of the gravity of the proceedings in which not only the defendants' lives, but the "honor" (if such a concept can be said to exist anymore) of the United States of America itself are at stake!
I can only imagine what would happen to that defense attorney if he started blowing chewing-gum bubbles in a typical US courtroom during a rape-murder trial such as this one. Undoubtedly, the significance of these details which so graphically illustrate the lack of seriousness of this military trial will not go unnoticed by all the working people of the world, whose "hearts and minds" the US Government is supposedly so determined to win over.
The longer that the working people of the United States allow the brutal killing machine of the US ruling class to run roughshod all over the world, the more deeply discredited our nation will become in the eyes of every decent human being on this planet. It's up to us to kick this racist, brutal, morally and economically bankrupt US capitalist class out of power, permanently. To try to patch up this rotten world capitalist system with reformist band-aids is a hopeless, Sisyphean task.
It has become chic among the "intelligentsia" of the capitalist world to deride Marxism as a hopelessly discredited ideology. Certainly, the crimes of the Stalinists and Maoists have gone a long way toward discouraging workers who might otherwise look towards a revolutionary, socialist solution to the capitalist world's never-ending death-spiral into religious obscurantism and ecological disaster. Thankfully, the historical fact of the perversion of socialist ideals by Stalin, Mao, et al. in no way discredits the political ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which provide us with a way out of this blind alley we find the entire capitalist world in today. To claim that the Stalin regime showed the inevitable end result of any attempt at building an egalitarian socialist society is just like saying that the Hitler regime showed the inevitable end result of any attempt at building a functioning capitalist society.
It's way past time for the working people of the world to join together and sweep the capitalist class' murderous rulers into the dustbin of history through workers revolution. Fortunately, we do not have to "re-invent the wheel" when it comes to building political parties capable of hauling ourselves out of this maelstrom: the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky provide a firm foundation upon which to build workers parties capable of creating a society far better than the one we live in today.
The Trotskyists have a saying: the choice is between egalitarian, progressive socialism or a long descent into capitalist-led world war, poverty, religious obscurantism and barbarism. Which side are you on?
US Out of the Middle East!
Workers of the World, Unite!
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