One thing that surprised me was how many of these killings mentioned how the victims had just been standing around when they were shot. Imagine having your country filled with large men who didn’t speak your language, carrying weapons of awesome power, who might shoot you dead at any moment. It’s like one of the space alien movies from the 1950s, where the Earth was occupied by creatures that would zap humans without a second thought. The U.S. military is doing what the movie aliens did. Toni, we’ve learned nothing from Vietnam.

“I WISH YOU WELL IN A FREE IRAQ” What idiot thought up that one?  Probably the same one who decided that of the 2,000,000 Iraqis who have fled the country, only 466 have been allowed into the US because - are you ready for this - more would indicate that many Iraqis prefer not to live under ‘freedom.’

I am thoroughly convinced that the Bush Team has taken great pains to hire the most lamebrained among us to work in its administration.

Yet another reason I strongly believe that we need to virtually dismantle this beast of a National OFF-ense, and instead focus, for our security and for peace, on a national DE-fense instead.

Think about it, if this government didn’t have the ability to wage aggressive wars and instead only had the ability to protect our country here at home, we wouldn’t have anymore foreign bases, no more foreign meddling, no more terrorist attacks in response, no more blood money paid for the killing in foreign wars, etc, etc.

If you’re interested in reading more on this, try “Leaders Don’t Kill People...”

http://www.populistamerica.com/leaders_dont_kill_people

How much different is the carnage in Iraq from what happened in:

“Vietnam, the reality of it, where the US lost almost sixty thousand soldiers, hardly any civilians. But we killed two million people, mostly civilians – in South Vietnam alone – the country we were said to be protecting. In North Vietnam one million. Cambodia half a million. Laos half a million. That’s some considerable killing. When you’re butchering at that rate, about seventy to one, most of them civilians, you tend to give little thought to the other side’s suffering. You just do the job. I did it well. Colonel Oran Henderson told reporters the truth in 1971 when he said ‘every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.’ My Lai – more than 400 people massacred by US soldiers – mainly elderly men, women, children and babies, some tortured and raped. Thrown in a ditch and machine gunned. The only thing unusual about it was that one soldier stood up against the rest. That’s the real US policy in the third world then and now – destroy people who can’t be controlled, crush those who refuse to be dominated and exploited by the corporate economy. So much US military aid goes to thugs. I should know. I taught them.... We taxpayers in the US are sheep with our wool pulled over our own eyes, paying our tax dollars for the slaughter. My god, what would we say if we saw every day the blood we have on our hands? What would we do? Has the wool been tied around our wrists, too, taped over our mouths?”

--the fictional character Jim Fielder speaking to a reporter in my fact-based novella, Glory:

http://www.mainstaypress.org/MP-homefront-trilogy.htm

John Pilger writing in The Guardian today:

“We need to look behind the one-way moral screen, urgently. Last October, the Lancet published research led by Johns Hopkins University in the US that calculated the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street acolytes derided the study as “flawed”. They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as “robust” and “close to best practice”, and that other government officials had secretly approved the “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”. The figure of Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million.”