Below is a link to an article by John Pilger succinctly describing what the UK and the US are and what they've done in Iraq. You can decide for yourself whether Bush and Blair committed a crime against humanity, but Pilger argues "<Blair's> crime and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment."
It's not like this is anything new. The dead in Indonesia and Latin America and Vietnam, if given a forum, could testify compellingly to the National Security State's thirst for blood. Not that they will be given a forum. The US media, just as it's acting to "normalize" our crimes in Iraq, acted to normalize our past crimes. And, if we do nothing, it will happen again and again.
Among the candidates running for President, no one has been more consistently forthright in opposing the war in Iraq than Dennis Kucinich. No one has been more vocal in calling for our need to withdraw from the scene of our crime and to do penance by financing the reconstruction while not partaking of the profits. No one is more vocal about the need to begin dismantling the oppressive killing machine that sucks up 50% of our discretionary spending. "We're not safe enough," some argue in opposition. With a malignant defense budget growing larger every day, we'll never be safe enough. Just as vampires rarely have a large enough supply of blood on hand for consumption, National Security States always need a few more dollars for the military.
As part of their "normalizing" efforts, the US media work hard to marginalize candidates like Kucinich. Even when it's openly done, even when Kucinich disses Ted Koppel one day and loses his "embedded" coverage the very next, even when Kucinich is portrayed as an idiot for using a pie chart to make his point during a radio debate (as if he really thought it was visible to the listening audience), even when discussions of cutting the defense budget or of providing Americans with universal health coverage is ignored for coverage of Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and whatever else can be used to distract us from subjects of much greater importance, we have trouble believing just how complicit the media are in propping up the bloody US regimes and their allies as they go about their daily business of terrorizing the world.
No one is more likely to bring about a genuine alteration to this criminal state of affairs than Dennis Kucinich. As he notes, despite the odds, he's electable if enough people vote for him. The media would suggest otherwise, but, of course, they're always suggesting otherwise when it comes to genuine change that would discomfort our corporate masters. We don't have to believe them and, for the sake of the dead, the dying, and the doomed, we can't.
Note: The article covers a range of atrocities and the excerpts really don't do it justice. You should read the whole thing if you have the time.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger4.htmlWhat They Don't Want You to Know
by John Pilger
January 10, 2004
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In "The Banality of Evil," Edward S. Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'... There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."
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Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA reports that the Bush administration is harboring thousands of foreign torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century," according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Britain supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail of blood. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965–66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorizing the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalizers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgment and blunder, never of high crime. Fueled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism," inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
more...
ON EDIT: Changed title of thread and put in different excerpt.
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