As horrible as the Haditha massacre was, it is only the tip
of the iceberg in atrocities carried out by the US military in an unjust
war. As the details of how 24 unarmed
Iraqi civilians in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005 become known to the world after
months of military cover-up, more reports are coming out of Iraq showing that
Haditha is not an aberration, but the nature of this war and the Bush agenda.
March 15, 2005: In the town of Ishaqi, 11 Iraqis, including
5 children (one of whom was not even one-year-old), 4 women (including a
75-year-old grandmother) were all murdered in cold-blood by the US
military. The details of the massacre
make this even more disgusting: autopsies reveal they were all shot in the
head, and the bodies were bound inside their home, which was bombed by the US
military, most likely to cover-up the details.
The military’s cover-up at the time was that 2 women and a child were
killed in an attempt to capture an al Qaeda militant from inside the house. Clearly, the details we do know tell a
different story. And the pictures
(below) should make anyone with a conscience horrified.
But the atrocities don’t end there.
In April, an Iraqi civilian in Hamandiya was dragged from
his home and shot by US Marines. They
planted a shovel and a gun next to the dead body to make it look as though he
was planting a bomb. (Reports are
beginning to come to light that it is routine practice for the US military to
carry shovels with them to place next to their victims in order to justify the
deaths.)
And just this week in Samarra, two women, including one who
was pregnant, were shot dead by the US military. Some reports have indicated that the women were driving quickly
to get to the hospital so that the pregnant woman could give birth.
Even top Iraqi government officials, who have ordinarily
bowed down to the US occupation, have denounced what they call daily attacks on
Iraqi civilians by the US military.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said, “They crush them with
their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable.”
What was first revealed in the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and
now the Haditha massacre, are not isolated incidents, a few bad apples,
misconduct, or the result of stress and pressure on US military personnel. These atrocities are the very nature of this
unjust war; they are exactly the kind of conduct demanded of the military by
the Bush regime in its permanent state of war on the world. If you can look at the outrageous pictures
and repeat the refrains coming from Congress of ‘but if we pull out now it’d be
chaos’ or ‘we need to set a reasonable timetable for withdrawal’, then look
again and think about what an unjust war means for the people living under
occupation.
And think about this: while Bush has expressed concern about
the Haditha massacre and promised an investigation, and while some soldiers
might face prosecution, the responsibility for these atrocities lie not only
with the murderers on the ground, but also with the war criminals presiding
over all this. Just think about the Abu
Ghraib scandal ( while a handful of the torturers have been prosecuted and
received short prison terms at most, no top official in government or the
military were ever charged, and US torture chambers have not been shut down,
but if anything increased.
Not only is Haditha just the tip of the iceberg, it is
exactly what the Bush agenda is all about.
And this agenda will only get further along if this criminal regime is
not driven out by millions of people who refuse to sit by while these
atrocities continue. That which you
will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn ( or be forced ( to
accept.
The World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime!
(Sources: ‘U.S. probes more claims of Iraq civilian
killings’, CNN News, 6/2/06; ‘Iraqi Assails U.S. for Strikes on
Civilians’, NY
Times, 6/2/06; ‘Graphic photographs show bodies of civilians killed in
Ishaqi, Iraq’, RawStory.com, 6/2/06; Photos by Chris Floyd
from http://www.chris-floyd.com/march/)
For more on the Haditha massacre, see:
Video interview with a young girl who survived the massacre