Lots of houses have been destroyed and more than 90 non-combatants including women, children and elders have died.

So far it is not clear for us why the coalition [NATO murderers] conducted the air strikes”

The dead are 19 women, seven men and the rest children all under 15 years of age

Azizabad villagers gather in angry demonstration hurling stones at Afghan troops — August 23, 2008

Shots fired by the puppet Afghan troops wounding two more people

Children, women, men hit by rockets in the Sangin district of Helmand province — August 17, 2008

The deaths just multiply

What do they think the reason is for you creatures who press buttons to kill people, what is your reason to remain on this planet!

Missiles killing children?

Your reason for living is to kill children!

The nausea of loathing for you who do this has no bounds

In your soul you know you have no reason for doing what you are doing

In this deepest part of you, you know you have been tricked, you have been fooled, you are a fool — You are a murderer

You supervisors who command this, you men and woman who press the buttons, you men and women who fly on the planes and assist in these killings:

You life is over for doing this

You life on this planet ends the moment that you kill those you do not see

I guarantee you from the moment you allow your mind and body to command and perform this heinous task of killing, you are a walking zombie

This is my promise to you

No excuse!

You have no excuse!

You who press these button, who fly these planes killing people you cannot see, you are workers for evil

There is no explanation!

There is no excuse!

You are war criminals!

You are murderers

And the dumbed-down fools sheltering in their homes in Britain and America, untouched by the missiles and bombs that they work to pay for?

In every way, the life of British and American people, all those who allow and accept this death, in mind, in action, life for you also is ending

Those of you killing in these foreign lands, you must go back where you came from

You must stop

For your nations, for the very survival of your nations you must stop

Your armies and military must return back to your lands

A spiritual law is working here

A law that is exact

That does not deviate

For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs — more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total — 3,572 bombs.

This is the genteel, bloodless language of geopolitics, spoken by the Gray Lady and the heads of state and makers of policy whom she serves.

You wouldn’t know that “carelessness” referred to killing a bride (and twenty-some guests) on her wedding day, except that the observation comes at the end of the New York Times’ account of our July 6 bombing of an Afghani wedding, which followed a Fourth of July missile strike in that country — look at the fireworks, Mom! — that killed 15 innocent civilians.

Careless superpower indeed.

Careless murdering superpower indeed

What you would never guess is that “carelessness” meant a deliberate U.S. policy of waging the war on terror from the air.

But that has been our policy all along, from “shock and awe” and “mission accomplished” to “the surge is working.”

It is undebated, unreported, unquestioned, this policy conceived with the vacuous single-mindedness of serial killers.

The death it has caused has not been calculated and is perhaps incalculable, especially when you factor in the time-bomb effects of depleted uranium and other deadly substances that bombing spreads both locally and around the world.

To my mind, nothing, not even the torture we practice at Guantanamo and throughout the war on terror gulag, exemplifies the disconnect between U.S. policy and the American people like the sanitized horror of the air war.

When the Nazis dropped 50 tons of explosives on the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937, the world called it barbaric.

Today, such a pummeling of some hapless Third World region is routine, transformed by an embedded and co-opted media into “humdrum ordinariness,” as Tom Engelhardt has pointed out.

Colin Powell had Picasso’s “Guernica” covered up

(You’ll recall, of course, that Colin Powell, when he lied before the U.N. General Assembly about Iraqi WMD shortly before we invaded, had the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” covered up to avoid any awkward triggering of conscience.)

That we have lost control of our government, money-dominated and obsessed with secrecy as it is, is less surprising to me than the extent to which we have lost our watchdog media, which can’t even rouse itself awake long enough to spot the patterns in its own routine coverage of the war.

Shall we take a stroll down Memory Lane?

“Ooh, that’s gotta hurt,” I recall a colleague of mine saying back in mid-March of ’03, as the invasion got under way and the shock-and-awe campaign played nonstop on the tube.

They found one boy’s body on the roof of that house

The relentless air assault on Baghdad killed untold Iraqis but utterly failed in its intended purpose of “decapitating” the Saddam Hussein regime, killing not a single high government official.

In April 2003, we got word that Hussein and his two sons were meeting in a building in the Mansur district of Baghdad.

Within 45 minutes, we flattened the building with four high explosive bombs, creating a crater 40 feet deep and killing an unknown number of people, but not Hussein or his sons.

“They found one boy’s body on the roof of that house over there,” an Iraqi later told a reporter.

Shortly before Christmas 2003, USA Today, in a rare instance of independent war coverage, published the results of its four-month investigation of cluster bomb usage in the first months of the war.

10,800 cluster weapons; their British allies used almost 2,200

“Although U.S. forces sought to limit what they call ‘collateral damage’ in the Iraq campaign, they defied international criticism and used nearly 10,800 cluster weapons; their British allies used almost 2,200,” reporter Paul Wiseman wrote.

Describing the “steel rain” that devastated the central Iraq city of Al Hillah, he noted that images of the aftermath, “including footage of a baby torn in half, were so gruesome that Western television networks refused to air them.”

Back to Afghanistan, where Taliban-hunting with bombs and missiles has been commonplace.

University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, who monitored the early phases of the war, wrote in 2002 that “the documented high level of civilian casualties” is caused by “the apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into, and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan.”

Seven children died

One example, from about a year ago: We bombed a school in eastern Afghanistan; seven children died.

A Pentagon spokesman explained: “If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that air strike would have occurred.”

We can’t wage war without a wide moral latitude.

The public has limited capacity for collateral damage even in the abstract, and none at all for actual details, such as babies torn in half by cluster bombs.

But this is the war on terror, [See comment below — TheWE.cc] which we will never win [We cannot win something that never was — TheWE.cc] until we face the truth about what we’re doing and stop doing it.

Forever.

For Ever

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. 
commonwonders.com.

          Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled       

          The American Conservative:  Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle:  The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.   Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?   

May 1, 2007

We highlighted an example of this a few months ago, when the paper ran what was meant to be a panting, gushing paean to a super-duper Anglo-American unit in Iraq — and unwittingly revealed the criminal heart of a very dirty “dirty war” being run by the Bush-Blair coalition in the conquered land.

(See Ulster on the Euphrates.)

Whose ultimate aim is nothing more than the aggrandizement of a predatory elite

Now the ST has struck again, with another rah-rah piece that peels back some of the drapery obscuring the grisly realities of the “good war” in Afghanistan: US Aircrews Show Taliban No Mercy.

The Tory story’s political intent is two-fold: to portray the Blair government as a bunch of wussies in its prosecution of the Afghan war, and to exalt the Bush way of dealing with the dusky races, so redolent of the much-lamented Empire in its prime.

But the piece goes beyond the interesting interplay of politics and journalism to a much darker, deeper truth: the degradation of the human spirit in war.

This is true in every conflict, of course, even the most limited and justified; but in unending campaigns of conquest and domination like the Terror War, whose ultimate aim is nothing more than the aggrandizement of a predatory elite, the brutalization and coarsening of the forces involved is all the greater.

And we can see that in this Telegraph story, which is meant to show American soldiers at their strutting, manly best, but is instead a sad indictment of the Bush Imperium’s all-pervading moral rot.

They too often refrained from instant, massive retaliation in fear of killing civilians.

But now the Americans have come down to show them how it’s done, with the “uncompromising use of air power” and orders to “show no mercy” against suspected Taliban fighters.

The centerpiece of the story is an attack by Apache helicopter gunships on a boatload of men crossing a Helmand river.

Even though the copter crew “didn’t have hostile intent or a positive ID from the ground commander,” Special Ops told them “that although they could not themselves see the men on the boat, they must be the Taliban who had [earlier] attacked them.”

And so the Apaches swung in low and opened up with 30mm cannons on the Afghans, who had by this time scrambled to shore.

You just see a big dust cloud where the person used to be

1st Lt. Jack Denton, 26, described it for the Telegraph:

Soul-less men with glazed-over eyes

PPS: Another contractor just called me — I guess my 15 minutes of fame isn’t quite over yet — and this one started telling me some really scary stories about a mysterious place called “Area 51” where trained-killer special-ops forces hunker down in between “jobs”.

And he REALLY scared me as he described soul-less men with glazed-over eyes who lived like those hordes of evil bad guys from The Lord of the Rings — just waiting to be let out of their cages.

[The above left over from an earlier piece — decided to leave it in — Kewe TheWE.cc

The attack was “typical of a new, aggressive, approach adopted by American forces in southern Afghanistan and particularly in Helmand,” said the ST.

“Aircrews say they have been told to show no mercy, but to press home their advantage until all their targets have been destroyed.”

For a moment, the ST reporter, Gethin Chamberlain, makes a brief feint in the direction of actual journalism, by bringing up a slight caveat about the “no mercy” missions:

May 1, 2007

Even here, of course, Gethin does yeoman service for the Terror War cause, with some perhaps deliberately muddled syntax that leaves the impression that only some few “dozens” of civilians have been killed by Anglo-American air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, when in fact that number runs into the thousands.

Because after all, what are a few dozen innocent lives here or there when you are putting whole countries on the right path? As that old breaker of nations, Josef Stalin, used to say: “When wood is chopped, chips fly.”

In any case, such womanish scruples do not trouble the Telegraph’s no-mercy Americans:

A prime example of that “extreme aggression” so prized by the Telegraph and by Capt. Staley in the Pentagon and Oval Office was on display in Afghanistan just last month, in Nangarhar province, as David J. Morris reports in Salon.com (America’s Dangerous Trigger Finger):

Perhaps these Marines too had been ordered to “show no mercy, but to press home their advantage until all their targets have been destroyed” — even if, as in the Apache attack in Helmland, they “didn’t have hostile intent or positive ID from the ground commander” before their “uncompromising use” of firepower.

Perhaps if they hadn’t turned that 16-year-old girl into a dust cloud — or had been quicker in destroying the evidence — they could have claimed that all the dust clouds were Taliban, and gotten a laudatory write-up in the Sunday Telegraph.

But the spiritual degradation does not only show in blatant atrocities like the Nangarhar rampage (or the Haditha rampage in Iraq, or the slaughter of the innocents in Ishaqi).

It has permeated the minds of ordinary soldiers carrying out their ordinary duties — if anything can said to be “ordinary” about Bush’s intervention in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war on the side of a coalition of war criminals, drug barons, warlords and woman-hating religious fanatics, that is.

You die, you die, you die

Witness the Telegraph story’s closing words, from young Lt. Denton.

The passage is obviously meant to be a bit of gung-ho G.I. bravado of World War II vintage, the kind of line you might hear in an old movie from a cheerful, apple-cheeked, tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold dogface played by, say, Ronald Reagan:

“You die, you die, you die….You can see the person but you can’t see the features of his face…You just see a big dust cloud where the person used to be…I really enjoy it…I really enjoy it….You just see a big dust cloud…I really enjoy it…you die, you die…you can’t see his face…you die…I really enjoy it.”

Even in a justified or unavoidable war, the thought of killing another human being — the thought that we, the common human family, have sunk to such a low point, yet again — should be a matter of deepest tragedy, of enduring regret.

It is a terrible thing to have to do, even when compelled by the most extreme necessity.

Yet the Terror War is leeching the terror out of this dreadful act.

Because the Terror War has no deeper meaning — no real purpose beyond loot and power for a few — it devalues and degrades everything it touches.

To kill a human being is nothing more than stirring up a bit of dust; it’s easy — “the odds are on our side” — it’s fun, “I really enjoy it.”

This is the ethos of the War on Terror (on every side of this hydra-headed conflict): “No mercy.” “Extreme aggression.” “Uncompromising force.”

And this is the dictum with which Bush now sends his troops into battle — a directive that echoes almost precisely the instructions given by another “war leader” to his armies as they stood poised to launch a war of aggression based on false pretenses, some 68 years ago:

“Close your hearts to pity.”