Robert Fisk: The very sick American cult culture of cruelty 2164

Yes, the mere mention of his name is enough to make low-IQ rightist f***tards run away crying, as goneTroppo demonstrated! B^D

In the week that George Bush took to fantasizing that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty" I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with U.S. forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration--from that of "soldier" to that of "warrior"--is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities.

From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black" prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and liquidate have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers.

My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin?

Like most Europeans--and an awful lot of Americans- -I was quite unaware of this ferocious "code" for U.S. armed forces, although it's not hard to see how it fits in with Bush's rantings. I'm tempted to point this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in his words: "The Warrior Creed", he wrote, "allows no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the 'enemy'. It allows no defeat ... and does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of the 'long war'). It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonorable actions ...".

Each day now, I come across new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of an American mobile interrogation team working with U.S. marines, interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now!

describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: "Every time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by the Force Recon Marines ... One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe of a Humvee ... he had a giant blister, third-degree burns on the back of his leg".

Lagouranis, whose story is powerfully recalled in Goodman's new book, Static, reported this brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the U.S. Judge Advocate General's Office. "But they just wouldn'tlisten, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of persons apprehended ... so they could brief that to the general".

The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day. In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when U.S. forces saw babies lying inthe road in Fallujah- -outrageously, it appears, insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans to halt and face ambush--they were under orders to drive over the children without stopping.

Which is what happens when you always "place the mission first" when you are going to "destroy"--rather than defeat--your enemies. As my American vet put it: "the activities in American military prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations--they are part of what the U.S. military, according to the ethos, is intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than the U.S. Army. But those armies don't claim to be the "good guys" ... I think we need... a military composed of soldiers, not warriors".

Winston Churchill understood military honor. "In defeat, defiance", he advised Britons in the Second World War. "In victory, magnanimity". Not any more. According to George W Bush this week "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad" because we are only in the "early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom".

I suppose, in the end, we are supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty in the dungeons of "black" prisons, under the fists of U.S. Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy. Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.

Independent and author of "Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon" CounterPunch's collection, "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" Fisk's new book is "The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the

It was Zombietime.com that promoted a hoax, because, like you, it didn't have all the facts. The ambulances were attacked by the Zionazis, as has been shown to Zombiecom's, and Downers, embarasment! B^)

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"A US intelligence report has found the Iraq war gave birth to a new generation of Islamic radicals and the person threat had grown"

"A national intelligence estimate in April said Islamic radicalism had mushroomed worldwide and the Iraqi War was one reason" - AFP Reuters 25-9-2006

"We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties." - Eureka Oath

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