A not so tough question for Mr. Bush: Who are the real cold blooded killers? [Archives:2007/1080/Opinion]

By: Hassan Al-Haifi
Quite often Mr. George W. Bush uses the phrase “cold blooded killers” to denote the insurgents, he is supposedly challenging in Iraq and Afghanistan and just anywhere else in the world where trigger happy US GIs, intelligence officers or security personnel are given a free hand to shoot at anything “suspicious”, threatening or just for the hell of it. For the most part, most of these killings have actually been civilian hits with the number of innocent civilians (women and children mostly). Of course all these killings are justified by US military brass, Defense Department officials and Bush Administration officials as accidents or collateral damage and other lightly dubious excuses that even a third grader would find difficult to swallow.

So as not to be outdone by the American cowboy affinity with spilling blood for fun and games, the Israeli “Defense” Forces and security apparatus and other paramilitary units (including “lunatic” murderers) in illegal Israeli settlements seem to find it permissible to race with their American allies for the number of civilian kills per mission.

The number of civilians killed by sanctioned and unsanctioned American (and Israeli) ordnances of all kinds would be enough to make the Marquis de Sade salivate. Yet, Mr. George W. Bush continues to label his enemies as Cold Blooded Killers while stating that his forces in Iraq and elsewhere are carrying a heavenly ordained messianic mission to liquidate the Saracen bandits that stand in the way of fulfilling the prerequisites for the Day of Judgment. One only needs to look at Human Rights Watch, United Nations Human Rights and Amnesty International reports for the hundreds of violations of international laws and conventions concerning the treatment of civilians free or under occupation that American and Israeli forces have inflicted over the last decade, just to get a sense of who the real cold blooded killers are these days. If that is not enough, even the cold-blooded bulldozer killing of Rachel Corrie, an American advocate for Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories on March 16, 2003 was cause for Mr. Bush to reward to reward the Israelis with US 10 billion (see http://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=628&p=opinion&a=1 and substitute Corrie Smith with Rachel Corrie accordingly). On the repeated killing of civilians in Iraq, the following link gives some interesting highlights (http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/report/atrocities.htm). Surely, Mr. Bush is not hoping that the excessive use of the term “cold blooded” killers would be sufficient enough to exonerate him or his Israeli friends for all the thousands of civilians, who have lost their lives “for the love of Israel” over the years that Mr. Bush has vowed to carry out his evangelical mission to enrich Raytheon and the other weapons manufacturers within the American military industrial complex and to ensure the fulfillment of Eretz Israel as Zionist demagogues envision it to be.

One has no justifications or rationale for the murder of civilians, no matter who undertakes such killings or who instigates them. But it is widely suggested that even the civilian killings by so-called insurgents in Iraq are actually carried out by civilian security apparatus covertly contracted to help decorate the American flops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One important fact to remember is that all these American misadventures of the Bush Administration are actually for the “love of Israel” and so far all the rationale used to justify them (Weapons of Mass Destruction, Saddam and Al-Qaeda and Bin Ladin and the Taliban, etc.) have all been proven to be a fallacy, either by their obvious falsehoods or by their deliberate failures. This has been proven on more than one occasion by independent studies, as well as the Administration’s own “fact finding” missions. So for the love of God, who are the real cold blooded killers of our times?

Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.

[Archives:2007/1080/Opinion]