Throughout this war, there have been few reports on U.S. war crimes in our controlled media with its history of loyal embeds and patriotic correctness.
No one in the mainstream media here has reminded us of the US torturers of Abu Ghraib prison or the counter terror campaigns we waged against towns like Fallujah and the people we demonized as "bad guys."
It may also be time revisit our own baggage, by going deeper into our own history, the history before the imperial era and the U.S. invasions of The Philippines, Haiti and Vietnam.
Pick up a copy of the latest edition of the NY Review of Books to read about the unspeakable crimes that Americans imposed on each other during the civil war, supposedly the war for freedom against slavery.
Civil war expert James M. McPherson tells us about professional historian Michael C.C. Adam's new book, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press.) It is an American story of gore, not glory in which black solders who surrender are slaughtered and POWs on both sides perish in unspeakably horrific prison camps on both sides.
"The guerilla warfare that wracked parts of the South and the border states," notes McPherson, "was especially vicious, sometimes featuring 'the burning alive of enemy civilians thrown into flaming buildings as well as random torturing and killing accompanied by grisly trophies including ears, genitals, scalps." Rape and plunder was pervasive, justified as the "spoils" of war. (Adams wrote an earlier book with similar evidence in a dissection of the myth of World War 11. See his, The Best War Ever: America and World War 11, 2004.)
The point here is not to rationalize ISIS brutality, but to take the luster off US hypocrisy, to make the old point about who is calling the kettle black? In our faith in American "exceptionalism," recently re-enunciated by President Obama, most of our media and educators ignore crimes committed but rarely acknowledged in our name.
Our failure to demand or take part in a truth and reconciliation process in Iraq not only makes us culpable, but assured the spectacle that we are seeing. In fact, according to journalist Dahr Jamail, US policymakers systematically pursued divide and conquer policies reinforcing a Sunni/Shia divide.
To complain now that Iraq President al Maliki is not representative of all communities there is a disgrace, especially after President Obama and his predecessor hailed our great victory in Iraq in fostering this faux democracy. Al-Maliki was pushed into prominence by a former U.S. Ambassador.
Saddam Hussein and his era suddenly looks far better than the legacy of our war for "Iraqi Freedom."
Who helped create and fund ISIS? Is Rand Paul correct in suggesting the US played a role? What role was played by our "allies," the Kuwaitis, Saudis and Qataris? Shouldn't the media try to find out? Why are ordinary Iraqis telling reporters that they prefer ISIS to the brutal Iraqi Army, even welcoming them in some areas as liberators.
When did "we" know about ISIS attack plans? According the Telegraph in London as relayed by VICE news: --Kurdish sources tipped off US and UK intelligence agencies about ISIS plans five months ago. Apparently, a plan to seize northern Iraqi cities and move on Baghdad had been in the works for months. The Telegraph quotes a senior Kurdish intelligence official as saying "We had this information then, and we passed it on to your [British] government and the US government. We used our official liaisons. "We knew exactly what strategy they were going to use, we knew the military planners. It fell on deaf ears."
Why are ISIS people saying they welcome US air strikes because they will once again demonstrate Washington's complicity with the hated al-Maliki dictatorship? (Their forces are apparently well dispersed to neutralize the effectiveness of targeted bombing.)
Does anyone remember the media hype around "democratic elections" in Iraq with all those voters with purple inked fingers waving them aloft for the cameras? Were those elections free and fair? Apparently not!
Those fraudulent exercises only postponed the inevitable counter-push that may not prevail but will leave Iraq even more devastated, if not dismembered.
Israel is cheering on the country's break-up now that Kurdish oil is flowing to Tel Aviv's pipelines. Oil is once again at the center of this conflict everywhere but in the media.
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