(Article changed on September 9, 2013 at 07:34)
In a last gasp attempt to try to inflame the American people and its Congress into our own irrational acts of international murder in Syria, the administration has flooded our media with pictures of dead bodies. Do they really think all they have to do is show us some bodies lined up in burial shrouds and like Pavlov's mad dogs we will all start foaming at the mouth for war?
The war mongers, having burnt the American people so badly in Vietnam, have bent over backwards since to assure us they have learned the "lessons" of Vietnam. In truth, the only lesson they learned from Vietnam was for PR and propaganda purposes to keep pictures of the dead bodies piling up of the people WE'RE killing off our media screens. That is what makes what they are doing now so completely reprehensible.
Once they start a war all they will want us to see are sexy videos of high tech missiles lying though windows, showcased on our entertainment news channels with flashy graphics. The true gruesome scale of the death and destruction we are inflicting they will do everything possible to suppress, so we can all feel good about bringing utter mayhem to yet another pawn country.
If they want to show pictures of dead bodies, why don't they show us pictures of some the victims of our OWN chemical weapons attack on Fallujah, where they have admitted we used white phosphorous as an offensive weapon? Show us the horrific pictures of THOSE dead bodies, with their flesh burnt away down to the bone. This practice was so widespread and approved at such a high level they coined their own colorful name for it, "shake and bake", which is to bombard people with artillery and then rain white phosphorous on their heads. And if we can't seem to find those pictures maybe we can get some from the Israelis, who did the same thing to the Palestinians during multiple military campaigns.
Suppression of inconvenient pictures of our own war crimes has been strictly enforced standard operating procedure in recent years, on the grounds of national "security". If the world were to see what we've actually done, and continue to do, there would be avenging reprisals against us they argue, making Americans less "safe". The only security they are really concerned about is for the war criminals themselves, to be safe from any accountability or prosecution. And if we were prosecuting our own, maybe other people around the world would not feel the need to take international law into THEIR own hands.
During the war in Iraq, all news reporters were required to be "embedded" in military units, for the purpose of controlling the content of the images coming out of the war zone. It was forbidden to even take pictures of the flag draped coffins coming home, lest the American people get the idea that any of our soldiers were actually dying.
There were video tapes of the CIA torturing people in Guantanamo. Those tapes were destroyed in direct violation of a federal court order that they be preserved. Not only was the person who ordered that destruction of evidence not prosecuted for that crime, they were promoted.
In 2004, when some pictures from Abu Ghraib escaped their blanket of blindness, it was reported that many more such pictures existed, and videos, much more repulsive that the ones already out there, including evidence of the rape of young boys and their screams. Members of Congress who viewed this material described it as disgusting, depraved, horrific, appalling. One senator said, "My stomach gave out." And who made the ultimate decision to suppress the release of these pictures and videos? None other than President Obama himself.
And the reason is that while a couple grunts were made into scapegoats, the higher ups who created the culture of gross human abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, who encouraged and promoted this behavior, who were on a mission to in their own words Gitmo-ize that prison in Iraq, were never charged with anything. And you can be very sure that it was made clear to those hapless grunts that if they implicated any higher ups they would never again see the light of day again.
Just like all the pictures they DON'T want you to see.
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