One wonders if this monster will walk away scot-free like Frank Wuterich.
Marine gets no jail time in killing of 24 Iraqi civilians
Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich will not serve a jail sentence following his guilty plea in the killing of 24 Iraqis in 2005, a military judge said Tuesday.
The announcement by Lt. Col. David Jones came after Wuterich took responsibility during his sentencing hearing at Camp Pendleton for the killings in the Euphrates River town of Haditha and expressed remorse to the victims’ families.
Jones said he had planned to recommend 90 days in the brig — the maximum as requested by the prosecution — but that the plea bargain approved by Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser had called for no jail time.
Wuterich, 31, was the last of eight Marines charged in the Haditha killings to have his case resolved. Six had the charges against them dropped, and one Marine was acquitted.
As the squad leader, Wuterich ordered his Marines “to shoot first, ask questions later” as they stormed two houses on Nov. 19, 2005, after a roadside bomb had killed one Marine and injured two others.
Imagine what would happen if this person committed a similar act against white people in a suburban American town. The entire country would be calling for his head, but since his crimes were committed against nameless and faceless Iraqis in the middle of a war zone, no one gives a fuck that a murderer is still a member of our military and free to walk our streets.
I’m guessing that Iraqi leaders heard about the American Kill Squad in Afghanistan, or maybe that our bombers can’t seem to discern between children or adults, or the American soldiers who called in an airstrike to cover up their murder of an Iraqi family.
What I’m hearing here is: “We’ll pay you to let us do whatever the fuck we want”.
If you want to make sure troops are ‘protected’, Panetta, you need to put protections in for whistleblowers who expose bastards like the ones I’ve listed above, not seek legal immunity for the monsters who perpetrate these war crimes.
Per CNN:
The U.S. Secretary of Defense says any agreement reached that keeps American troops in Iraq past an end-of-the-year deadline to withdraw must include immunity from Iraqi prosecution.
“If they want the benefits of what we can provide, if they want the assistance, if they want the training, if they want the operational skills that we can provide, then I think they have to understand that they’ve got to give us some protections in that process,” Leon Panetta told sailors Friday during a visit to Naples, Italy, home of the U.S. 6th Fleet.
Never Forget: The U.S. has spent the last ten years doing to others exactly what happened to it on 9/11/01.
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9/11 marked the beginning of what would become a decade of war.
On September 12, America awoke to the world’s sympathy; an unrivalled opportunity to transform the world for the better, but all Washington wanted was retribution.
Just as Osama bin Laden had hoped, a series of mismanaged and misconceived wars in the Muslim world ensued. Wars that have bankrupt America financially, militarily and perhaps most detrimentally, in its global standing.
Ten years on many questions remain unanswered. Were the attacks of September 11 a case of blowback, or, as President Bush professed, ‘a hatred of Western freedoms’? And why, if the hijackers came from friendly Gulf countries, did the US launch a war against Iraq?
Was the global ‘war on terror’ a cynical pretext for neocon policy hawks and the vested interests of the military industrial complex; or a war of necessity against a new type of global enemy?
Has the killing of Osama bin Laden meant the death of al-Qaeda, or was any hope of claiming that victory superseded by the Arab Spring?
So many lives lost, so many millions squandered, so many opportunities wasted; as the global political order starts to shift, does the US regret its “stupid war”?
Empire finds out.
Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal and coauthor with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, looks back at the 10 years since the September 11 attacks—and how politicians have exploited the tragedy.
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TEN YEARS after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the world is still reeling from the consequences of the terrorist attacks and the geopolitical shifts that followed.
Moments after the attack, President George W. Bush and his military planners were discussing how to use people’s anger and fear for their political advantage.
The Bush administration saw the horrific events of September 11 as a rare chance to carry out plans that long predated the attacks and package these as defensive rather than offensive measures. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, immediately set to work to target Iraq, despite the fact that the country had no link at all to the attacks.
Leading members of the Bush administration were open about describing the post-September 11 moment as an “opportunity.” After September 11, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, asked senior national security staff to think about how to “capitalize on these opportunities,” which were “shifting the tectonic plates in international politics” to U.S. advantage.
“I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947,” Rice told one journalist. “And it’s important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all of that before they harden again.”
During the commemorations of September 11 this week, it’s up to everyone dedicated to peace and justice to honor the victims of the U.S. “war of terror.”
AFTER THE attacks of September 11 in New York City and Washington, D.C., Socialist Worker produced a special edition of our newspaper with the front-page headline, “Don’t turn tragedy into war.”
But of course, the Bush administration did just that—first with the invasion of Afghanistan, and then Iraq. One decade later, those wars have spawned countless tragedies of their own, throughout the Bush years and continuing into the presidency of Barack Obama.
The scale of the state-sponsored terrorism that took place after September 11 will never be known in its entirety—precisely because its scope is so vast.
At the end of August, for example, an unclassified diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks focused attention on another little-known atrocity of the U.S. war on Iraq—when American troops executed 11 Iraqi civilians in a house in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, and then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence.
What made this incident different from so many hundreds of others was that a U.S.-trained Iraqi police colonel and other high-ranking officials were willing to talk on the record about the massacre, even though it cast U.S. troops in an unfavorable light.
BUT THIS case of a massacre followed by a cover-up is merely an extension of the daily conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.
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We are a nation of hypocrites.
Spc. Jeremy Morlock admitted to the murder of unarmed Afghan boy Gul Mudin (depicted here). He was only 15 years old. They lined him against a wall and ordered him to stand still before they shot him. Pfc. Andrew Holmes cut off his pinky as a memento. Morlock admitted that this wasn’t the first time he murdered civilians. According to him, soldiers in his Platoon “[threw] candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village [and shot] children who came running to pick up the sweets.” The Pentagon worked for months to get these pictures deleted and suppressed. He was recently sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Private Bradley Manning, horrified at the war crimes unfolding around him, reported them to higher authorities in his chain of command. When they told him to keep quiet about it he published the details of the crimes to the public. He is facing the death sentence. Is there something wrong here?
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Warning: Very graphic photographs below the ‘read more’ link.
These men were monsters, and if they’d committed these crimes against white Americans, our country might actually be outraged. As it is, they committed their crimes against faceless brown-skinned civilians in a war zone, so there are far too few who give a damn about it.
