Obama Pentagon's Tactic of Blaming (Innocent) Victims, and Others, for Their Own Reckless Attacks

[bigtree]

Monday, 11 May 2009

The Children's Crusade

by Chris Floyd

Day after day, week after week, Barack Obama's "Overseas Contingency Operations" keep churning through the bodies of children: sometimes with chemical weapons that sear their flesh and leave them maimed and disfigured for life; sometimes with carefully aimed bullets ripping through their organs and leaving them dead right on the spot.

And in every such case, our brave and noble Terror Warriors -- who, lest we forget, are upholding the highest values of world civilization, bringing hope and change to benighted lands and defending our sacred way of life -- run screaming like spinsters in a hissy fit from the slightest hint of responsibility for their actions. Their first response, always, is to blame someone else: either the designated enemy of the day -- or else the burned and shredded children themselves.

This tendency was on vivid display this week in two stories from separate fronts in the ever-spreading Terror War. (Both pieces, from McClatchy and Reuters, come via the Angry Arab, who rightly notes Obama's moral ownership of the bullets and bombs of the militarist campaigns).

The most garish example can be found in Iraq, where American soldiers shot a 12-year-old boy in the streets of Mosul, one of the most troubled cities in the conquered land. Mosul, you may recall, is where Generalissimo David Petraeus -- now in military command of the entire Terror War -- built his vaunted but vaporous reputation for "effective counterinsurgency techniques" early in the war. It was a miniature model of the later "surge": using a massive influx of American troops, along with payoffs to favored local forces, to suppress the endemic chaos and violence unleashed by the invasion just long enough to establish a PR narrative of "success." Once the media spotlight has moved on, the evil, inevitable fruits of the original crime -- the Hitlerian act of military aggression -- flourish once more.

As in Iraq at large, so it is in Mosul. Last Thursday, American occupation troops rolling through the city were attacked by a grenade. In response, they shot a killed a 12-year-old boy, Omar Musa Salih, who was standing on the roadside selling fruit juice. Although eyewitnesses on the scene said the boy had not thrown the grenade -- they had seen, with their own eyes, an older man lobbing it toward the Americans -- President Obama's Pentagon insisted that the dead boy was an "insurgent" who deserved to die. Their proof? He had a handful of Iraqi dinars -- less than $9 -- in his hand when they inspected his corpse. So that means he was in the pay of terrorists, you see.

"We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm's way," a faceless "U.S. military spokesman" told McClatchy, in an email . . .


read more: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/051209Floyd.shtml

[Echo In Light]

1. All hail the National $ecurity State

[jody]

2. They're coming for you. n/t

[bigtree]

7. they've already arrived

[laststeamtrain]

3. K & R - n/t.

[EFerrari]

4. Bob Gates has been in and out of CIA since the mid 60s.

It's his Pentagon, remember?

[bigtree]

5. It's Obama's Pentagon. You know the refrain here . . .

"Gates may be the defense chief, but President Obama has the last word."

I can see well the state of affairs between the present Executive and the Pentagon. There's an absurd notion (expressed by Obama and others in the administration) that the military is best left to it's own designs with the president obliged to just assert his broad outlines of his policy and let the generals manage their own affairs. This president looks to be less determinative of actual military policy 'on the ground' than previous Democratic presidents. That's a fault, in my view, exacerbated by the presence of Bush holdovers throughout the Pentagon leadership and command.

[EFerrari]

6. I'd go further and say that the Pentagon is just as corrupted

as DoJ or State have been under Bush, plus it is inhabited by men like Gates who have a whole career's worth of extra legal activity under their belts. A new boss could find such a crew closing ranks against him pretty quickly if it was felt that he was throwing his weight around.