Friday, March 26, 2010

What's Good for the Goosesteppers. . .

This week in Berlin, a man named Heinrich Boere was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes committed 66 years ago; specifically the murder of three Dutch partisans in October 1944.

Bill Van Auken:
In handing down the sentence in Germany, the judge referred to Heinrich Boere’s gunning down of suspected supporters of the Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation as “practically incomparable maliciousness and cowardice—beyond the decency of any soldier.”

What can one say of those who kill defenseless men, women and children—and those suspected of resisting US occupation—by pushing a button while sitting in front of a video screen 7,000 miles away? One can only imagine what Adolf Hitler could have done with such technology.

The main theme of the article in the Washington Post is the role of CIA Director Leon Panetta in directing these assassinations and mass killings. It focuses on one particular drone attack that killed Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last August. CIA officers told Panetta that Mehsud, whose movements were being tracked by a drone camera, was not alone, but with his wife. He ordered them to “take the shot” that killed them both.

What is described is a policy of cold-blooded murder in which so-called “collateral damage”—the slaying of innocent civilians—is not some accident, but a calculated, deliberate act.

In an earlier period, when the CIA gained its epithet “Murder Inc.,” there was an effort made in Washington to keep such bloodthirsty acts secret. Now, US officials—including Obama—openly boast of “taking out” their enemies, provoking little or no controversy in the political establishment and the media.

Such a debased political and moral atmosphere is an unmistakable manifestation of a deep-going crisis of US imperialism, which America’s ruling elite is attempting to resolve by means of war abroad and a wholesale assault on the working class at home.

The reality is that Obama, Panetta and Gates, just like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. before them, are guilty of war crimes. The individual atrocities, assassinations, acts of torture and collective punishment are the inevitable byproducts of waging wars of aggression, the principal offense for which the surviving Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg.
Notice how in Panetta's decision to "take the shot" and kill the wife, the two people were not defined as two humans, a man and a woman, a father and mother, a husband and wife, a son and a daughter. No, merely an object (with spouse) opposed to Leon Panetta's filthy ideology, shit on the ugly dwarf's shoe.