We Come to Bring You Freedom

Five years ago, I wrote several articles about a horrific massacre of Iraqi civilians in Ishaqi. Credible evidence and eyewitness testimony indicated that American soldiers, in the course of a raid, had executed unarmed civilians -- including several small children -- then called in an airstrike to destroy the house, and the evidence of these murders.

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So here we are: we now know that the Americans themselves strongly suspected that the "allegations" were true, that U.S. soldiers had entered a house in an Iraqi village and executed five children under the age of five -- including a five-month old -- and four women, including a grandmother, and the children's father, a young man in this 20s. They had credible evidence for this, they took the evidence seriously -- and they bent all their efforts toward burying the case and protecting the perpetrators (and their commanders). They have sat on this evidence for five years, beyond the end of the Bush Regime and deep into the reign of the Nobel Peace Laureate.

This would be the same Nobel Peace Laureate whose forces, along with their local proxies, carried out yet another mass killing of civilians in Ishaqi last month, as we noted here.*

Barack Obama has never repudiated the War Machine that routinely produces such atrocities; on the contrary, he has embraced it, praised it, identified himself with it at every opportunity. He has never repudiated the criminal occupation of Iraq, but has instead sought frantically, for months, to extend it, in any way possible, with tens of thousands of "advisers," "trainers," and mercenaries disguised at "State Department security personnel." Along with his favorite general -- now his spymaster -- David Petraeus, he has intensified the Ishaqi-style "home invasion" system in the other war of domination and profiteering that he has not only embraced but boldly escalated, in Afghanistan. He has taken deadly home invasions to new heights -- literally -- with his cowardly drone missile campaign against homes and neighborhoods in undefended villages in Pakistan. And in Yemen. And in Somalia. (And in who knows what other countries in the secret wars and covert ops that his security apparatchiks boast of conducting all over the world?)

  Chris Floyd

*Tuesday, 09 August 2011 10:58

There was a raid in Ishaqi last week. Armed men crept upon the sleeping houses in the dead of night.

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Armed to the teeth with expensive gear bought with public money from bloated war profiteers in the invaders’ home country, the creeping men were not to be frightened off by a rifle shot fired blindly in the darkness. They saw the flash – and lit up the village with heavy gunfire and grenades. They called in a helicopter gunship hovering nearby to support them against the rifle of a villager awakened by the sound of unknown, unidentified, armed men creeping near his house and family.

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“We heard gunfire near our house, and my son woke up and went to the garden because he was afraid,” said the boy’s mother, Nagia Gamas, 51. “They shot him and my husband.”

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The armed men then stalked through the village. Kicking down doors, dragging people out, hogtied, and throwing them into the dirt. They ransacked, they smashed, they ripped, they broke – and, like thieves, they stole.

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It was just another night in the unending American war against Iraq.

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Read carefully the statement on the most recent raid by a PR mouthpiece for the invaders, where he bravely and boldly heaps all blame for any “collateral damage” on the colonial troops:

“This was an Iraqi-planned and -led counterterrorism operation,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, an American military spokesman, said in a statement. “The operation was enabled by U.S. support that included helicopters. Also, there was a small number of U.S. advisers taking part in the operation, although it was predominantly Iraqi forces, and they were in charge of all activities on the ground.”

This follows the line of the Peace Laureate’s earlier scam, when he claimed to have kept his promise to withdraw “all combat troops” from Iraq by simply renaming the tens of thousands of occupying soldiers left behind as “non-combat troops” – although they continued, and continue, to carry out combat missions.

  Chris Floyd

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.