Oh, The Humanity

From the trial of Trent Thomas for the murder of a lame Iraqi civilian...

Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.

"We were told to crank up the violence level," said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.

When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: "We beat people, sir."

  Yahoo

But that didn't bother corporal Lopezromo.

Lopezromo said a procedure called "dead-checking" was routine. If Marines entered a house where a man was wounded, instead of checking to see whether he needed medical aid, they shot him to make sure he was dead, he testified.

"If somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice," he said.

[...]

Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the village of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison.

[...]

Lopezromo said the suspected insurgent was known to his neighbors as the "prince of jihad," and had been arrested several times and later released by the Iraqi legal system.

Unable to find him, the Marines and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it appear he had been killed in a shootout, according to court testimony.

[...]

Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong [...]

"I don't see it as an execution, sir," he told the judge. "I see it as killing the enemy."

He said Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.

Perhaps this is a good time to read (or re-read) an open letter to enlistees from Stan Goff, an ex-Special Forces Ranger who had tours in Viet Nam, Latin America, and Haiti.

We're a long, long way from home Bob
Home's a long, long way from us
Feel the dirty winds blowin'
Devils and dust

I've got my finger on the trigger
Tonight faith just ain't enough
And I look inside my heart
There's just devils and dust

But I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive
But if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love

Fear is a dangerous thing
It'll turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God-filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust

Bruce Springstein

And speaking of John Edwards

The Democrats are already grooming a few 2008 candidates, including the execrable Hillary Rodham Clinton who has already stated her intention to beef up the war against Southwest Asia. Let’s not forget that her husband presided over an Iraqi holocaust that George W. Bush is still trying to match. The Republicans are secure for now with their white nationalist popular base. An active and increasingly militant left is a more immediate threat to the Democrats – who have prospered from Repubilican reaction for decades now by capturing social bases that feel they have nowhere else to go. That dilemma is real, but it is also predicated on the notion that to “go there” we need to contain ourselves in electoralism and pluralist policy fights that are engineered by corporations and NGOs.

That’s why Sheehan and others who propose the radical option of simply leaving Iraq are now being surrounded by the friendly faces of “progressives” who will try and redirect this newfound mobilization along acceptable paths.

Enter Tom Hayden with his “proposal” for disengagement in Iraq. The logic is – antiwar Congresspeople cannot advance their agenda without an alternative to the fake “exit strategies” of the right. Of course, this is just another Moveon proposal. Nothing unilateral about it, and no demand for immediate withdrawal. Moreover, it depends on actions taken by Iraqis that the US will ultimately have no control over unless it is coercive. This plan is no less racist in its implications than the Republican myth of democracy-implants. It still calls for outsiders (including possibly the CIA!) to broker the withdrawal and oversee the “reconciliation” of those troublesome brown people. Sorry, Tom. This is bullshit. Just because you ask for guarantees of no permanent US bases and no preferential US contracts does not erase the fact that you have taken self-determination off the board and are attempting to redirect the demand (yet unmet!) for a political decision to leave into a policy debate.

Let me just say something about how to withdraw. This is my plan, and it requires nothing of the Iraqis.

  Continue reading Stan Goff

And catch this thoughtful and thought-provoking comment to Stan's article:

Stan, civil disobedience is good. We should do it more, and en masse. But I feel you are just on the edge of advocating armed insurrection. When you talk about bleeding bringing down the beast, whose blood are you talking about? Because, if it’s our blood or Iraqi blood or Haitian or whosever blood, you know the beast likes that blood; it feeds on that blood. If you mean making the beast itself bleed, how are we going to do that enough to bring it down? If we merely wound it, we will just anger it, as the right-wing response to Cindy Sheehan demonstrates. Serious massive civil disobedience will certainly result in bloodshed (ours, not the beast’s). The only harm to the beast will be increased international opprobrium, and we already know how much the current beast cares about that, which is not a whit. Nevertheless, I and countless other gray-haired grannies would be happy to put ourselves on the front line, suffer beatings, imprisonment, and all the rest, IF we believed that our sacrifice would result in changing not just the mask but the real face, eyes and heart of the United States for the better. Can you make us believe? Because if you can’t, we will just go on quietly living our lives as liberals, trying politely to help others be happy who otherwise might suffer, and indulging in cafe latte when it suits us.