What`s Become of Americans?
Imagine knocking on America`s door
and being told, “Americans don`t live here any longer.
They have gone away.”
But isn`t that what we are hearing,
that Americans have gone away?
Alan Shore told us so on ABC`s
Boston Legal on March 14:
“When
the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out not to
be true, I expected the American people to rise up.
They didn`t.
Then,
when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was
revealed that our government participated in rendition,
a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to
regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the
American people would be heard from. We stood mute.
Then
came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called
terrorist suspects, locked them up without the right to
a trial or even the right to confront their accusers.
Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.
And
now, it`s been discovered the executive branch has been
conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on
its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled
myself that finally, finally the American people will
have had enough. Evidentially, we haven`t.
In
fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the
message is we`re okay with it all. Torture, warrantless
search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without
a fair trial or any trial, war on false pretenses. We,
as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.
There
are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact,
there`s no clear indication that young people even seem
to notice. . . .
The
Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to
contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest.
Stop for a second and try to fathom that. At a
presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on
a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you`re
wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be
removed.
This!
In the United States of America.”
Readers tell me that Americans
don`t live here any more. They ask what responsible
American citizenry would put up with the trashing of the
Bill of Rights and the separation of powers, with wars
based on deception, and with pathological liars in
control of their government? One reader recently wrote
that he believes that “no element of the U.S.
government has been left untainted” by the lies and
manipulations that have driven away accountability.
So-called leaders, he wrote, “talk a great story of
American pride and patriotism,” but in their hands
patriotism is merely a device for “cynical manipulation
and fraud.”
The Bush regime acknowledges that
30,000 Iraqi civilians, largely women and children, have
been killed as a result of Bush`s invasion. Others who
have looked at civilian casualties with greater
attention have come up with numbers three to six times
as large. The Johns Hopkins study accounted for
98,000 civilian deaths. Patrick Cockburn, using more
sophisticated statistical analysis, concluded that
180,000 Iraqis died as a result of Bush`s invasion. The
former prime minister Iyad Allawi says that Iraqi
sectarian violence alone is claiming 50-60 deaths per
day, or 18,000-22,000 annually, a figure that could
quickly worsen.
Some were killed by “smart
bombs” that weren`t very smart and dropped on
hospitals, schools, and weddings. Others were mistaken
for resistance fighters and killed. Still others were
killed by spooked, trigger-happy U.S. troops.
Now comes a report in the online
edition of Time magazine that U.S. Marines went
on a rampage in the village of Haditha and deliberately
slaughtered 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes. The
Iraqis were still in their bed clothes, and 10 of the 15
were women and children.
The Marines turned in a false
report that the civilians were killed by an insurgent
bomb. But the evidence of wanton carnage was too
powerful. Pressed by Time`s collection of
evidence, U.S. military officials in Baghdad opened an
investigation. Time reports that “according to
military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that,
contrary to the military`s initial report, the 15
civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the
Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last
week that the matter has been handed over to the
Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which will
conduct a criminal investigation.” [Collateral
Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha? By Tim
McGirk, Mar. 19, 2006]
If this story is true, under Donald
Rumsfeld and George Bush`s leadership, proud and
honorable U.S. Marines have degenerated into the Waffen
SS. Those of us raised on John Wayne war movies find
this very hard to take.
A fish rots from the head.
Clearly, deception in the Oval Office is corrupting the
U.S. military. One reader reported that on March 19 his
local PBS station
aired a program which
discussed the deaths of two young American soldiers
in
friendly fire incidents similar to Pat Tillman`s
death. In each case, he reports, “elements within
the military falsified reports and attempted to shift
blame to either enemy combatants or allied (Polish)
forces.”
The neocons have yet to tell us the
real reason for their assault on Iraq, which has so far
produced 20,000 dead, maimed, and wounded U.S. soldiers,
between 30,000 and 180,000 (and rising) dead Iraqis, and
demoralized U.S. Marines to the point that they commit
atrocities on women and children.
Would real Americans accept these
blows for the sake of an undeclared agenda? Perhaps it
is true that Americans don`t live here any longer.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts [email
him] is the author
of
Alienation and the Soviet Economy
and
Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the author
with Lawrence M.
Stratton of
here
for Peter Brimelow`s
Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the
recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
