While we read in lurid
detail about every bomb blast detonated by Shia and Sunni fighters that
hit Iraqis or that kill or wound Americans, we hear barely a word about
the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces, and it's clear that adding
up all of those publicized Iraqi-on-Iraqi attacks you don't come close
to a million dead. Guess who's killing the rest?
Nor are we
getting any figures on the numbers of dead innocents in Afghanistan,
where the blackout on reporting is even more effective than in Iraq.
What
is clear is that American tactics are causing an unending slaughter in
both places-a slaughter that is clearly not just part of but central to
the policy, and that is so serious that it has led to protests from
Britain and other NATO countries that have soldiers in Afghanistan.
And
let's be honest: this is no matter of "collateral damage." It is a
deliberate policy of terror. As I've written before, when your army is
killing vastly more civilians than enemy fighters, the deaths of
innocents cannot be termed "collateral damage." It's the deaths of
enemy fighters which are the "collateral damage." The innocents are the
targets.
Just consider one of the weapons being used by American
forces, the so-called GBU-31. Marc Herold, a professor at the
University of New Hampshire, who has been documenting the violence in
Afghanistan, has investigated the use of this weapon and offers this
description of how it works:
"Dropped from a plane and hurtling
toward its target at 300 mph, the 14-foot steel bomb uses small gears
in its fins to pinpoint its path based on satellite data received by a
small antenna and fed into a computer. Just before impact, a fusing
device triggers a chemical reaction causing the 14-inch-wide weapon to
swell to twice its size. The steel casing shatters, shooting forth
1,000 pounds of white-hot fragments traveling at speeds of 6,000 feet
per second. The explosion creates a shock wave exerting thousands of
pounds of pressure per square inch (psi). By comparison, a shock wave
of 12 psi will knock a person down; and the injury threshold is 15
pounds psi. The pressure from the explosion of a device such as the
Mark-84 JDAM can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off limbs
hundreds of feet from the blast site, according to trauma physicians.
When it hits, the JDAM generates an 8,500-degree fireball, gouges a
20-foot crater as it displaces 10,000 pounds of dirt and rock and
generates enough wind to knock down walls blocks away and hurl metal
fragments a mile or more. "
Herold notes that several of these
terror weapons were dropped by a B-1B bomber earlier this month on a
group of Afghans during an open air market outside the town of Baghran,
killing an untold number of civilians, including children. The US
military described this bombing as a "successful" raid on a gathering
of Taliban leaders, and claimed no civilians were present, but the
severely injured men, women and children delivered to various hospitals
following the attack gave the lie to this cover-up. Furthermore, given
the extensive 2600-foot radius of this weapon's kill-range, it clearly
is no "precision" weapon for targeting fighters, if any were even
present.
Nor is this weapon the only example of American terror. Far from it.
Stan
Goff, in his excellent report on the killing of Cpl. Pat Tillman in
Counterpunch magazine, notes that one reason Tillman was killed by his
own unit is that the members of his own separated team that fired on
him had launched their attack upon a village despite the fact that not
a shot had been fired from that village-a clear violation of the Geneva
Accords, but an instructive example of how US forces are actually
operating in the field. (Tillman himself was also shot while standing
up with his arms raised in a sign of surrender-another violation of
international law.)
Reports are mounting that make it clear that
the US is using a deliberate strategy of terror in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. The documented (and illegal) use of white phosphorus
bombs, which spray wide areas with a substance that burns through flesh
down to the bone, first disclosed in the devastating assault and
leveling of the city of Fallujah in 2004, the widespread use of
helicopter and fixed-wing "gunships" that inundate football-field-sized
areas with bullets and fragmentation weapons, the use of delayed action
cluster bombs and shells, the use of concussion weapons and napalm, all
speak to a policy of indiscriminate killing.
Americans need to
wake up to what the rest of the world already knows: The United States
is indisputably the number one terrorist nation in the world today.
Indeed,
the very administration that is talking about calling Iranian
Republican Guard troops "terrorists" is at this moment developing plans
for an unprovoked aerial assault on Iran that would feature the
dropping of 30,000-lb bombs, all manner of anti-personnel weapons, and
possibly even tactical nuclear weapons, on Iranian targets, many of
them in populated areas.
There is a word for this kind of behavior: terrorism.
The idea that the US could be considering classifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist" organization, based upon some dubious evidence that the organization is supplying some weapons-in particular those shaped charges that have been so effective in roadside bombs against US military vehicles-is pretty preposterous when you consider the source.
