Jesus Sales, a 21-year-old who joined the army to pay for college fees, is the unit’s reserve sniper. He shot a man a few weeks earlier: ‘I didn’t feel anything weird. I just felt satisfied.’

Wilks is equally phlegmatic: ‘Sometimes I feel like I should feel guilty, but I don’t. Everyone I shot deserved it. It doesn’t bother me.’
(Source: The Observer)

Those are the words of two US Army snipers.

They feel happy that they’re shooting Iraqis dead. They feel those Iraqis deserve death for daring to stand up to an army of marauding invaders who have bombed schools, hospitals and mosques. By now, even the stupidest US military know they’re not an army of liberation. If they were liberators, they would have been welcomed by the Iraqi people instead of being shot at. They’re an occupying army fighting native resistance just as surely as the Nazis were in France.

But there’s something else. These two soldiers feel their targets deserve death. They don’t feel guilty. They’re just following orders, doing their part for their country.

Just the same as the people who flew those planes into the World Trade Centre. Human life didn’t matter to them either. What did they care about the thousands of lives they took that day? They probably thought all those innocent people deserved to die. Just the same as the snipers. Did the monsters of 9/11 feel a pang of guilt as they destroyed so many lives? Did they think of the children and families of those they murdered on their insane mission? No.

It’s not a question of right versus left, of Islam versus Christianity, of West versus East. It’s the same as it always has been.

It’s about good versus evil. Anyone who destroys human life so casually, so callously, is evil.

Anyone.

A British Muslim man arrested during a terrorism raid suffered 50 separate injuries after being repeatedly kicked, punched and stamped upon, according to a medical report seen by the Guardian.

The Crown Prosecution Service yesterday announced that no officer would be charged for allegedly assaulting Babar Ahmad, who was arrested in December 2003 at his south London home.
(Source: The Guardian)

This is what Bush and Blair’s phony War On Terrorism means: a war on innocent civilians, beaten up by the Metropolitan Police, tortured and then unable to even receive justice from the British legal system.

The report found that Mr Ahmad, 30, had been left with blood coming from his ear and in his urine after being arrested, and with injuries to his face, torso, arms and legs.

Mr Gavalas [the consultant who treated Ahmad] wrote: “There is clearly unequivocal evidence that he was subjected to a harrowing physical and psychological assault by police officers. He was clearly badly beaten up although in a reasonably controlled manner … aimed at inflicting significant soft tissue trauma with pain, but not to cause any life-threatening injuries.”
(Source: The Guardian)

But perhaps he is a dangerous terrorist? What are the charges against him?

There weren’t any.

He was released after six days without one charge being laid against him.

This could happen to any of us. A knock at our door in the middle of the night and then we’re bundled off, tortured and abused by our wonderful British bobbies. No charges, no explanations, no apologies and no justice. The War On Terrorism is being used to justify the removal of our human rights.

And if anyone complains, if anyone speaks out – well, they’re obviously loony lefties or secret terrorist sympathisers. Enemies of the state. Just as anyone who spoke out for the Jews against the Nazis was automatically branded an enemy of the state.

The CPS said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute any officers, following an investigation by the Met itself.

That inquiry was supervised by the Police Complaints Authority and, after it was abolished, by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
(Source: The Guardian)

Forget what the consultant who examined Ahmad found, let’s just have the criminals investigate the crime and decide that nothing bad happened. That makes perfect sense.

Doesn’t it?

Ahmad is now under arrest again, this time for extradition to the USA:

The suspicion remains that after Babar Ahmad exposed last December the barbaric cruelty with which around 600 members of the Muslim community have been arrested under terrorism legislation, with a only a fraction of them charged and virtually none convicted, he has become a marked man. With no evidence against him, there is an extradition request to send him to a country where this does not matter, and the use of torture has become legitimised. The US is far form being seen as impartial distributor of justice with smells like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib hanging round their necks.

Babar Ahmad should be tried in the UK, if found guilty then punished according to the law, if innocent then given all the ability to live the rest of his life in a normal fashion.
(Source: Muslim Association of Britain)

In the USA, under the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens, Ahmad will be denied justice just as surely as he has been in Britain.

The War On Terrorism, the alleged war for our freedom, erodes and eliminates our existing human rights a little more each day.

A: When those children are Iraqis:

A boy weeps as others survey the damage caused by a US air strike on Fallujah. Picture:AFP

US forces launched new attacks yesterday in the towns of Fallujah and Tal Afar, which they say are havens for foreign militant fighters, killing at least 30 Iraqis, according to doctors.

Doctors in Fallujah said at least eight people were killed and 16 wounded. Doctor Rafi Hayad said half of those killed and injured were children.

In Tal Afar, a town west of Mosul, which the US says is a haven for foreign militants crossing from Syria, doctors said at least 17 people were killed and 51 wounded in heavy fighting.

Doctors at Tal Afar’s main hospital said fighting was continuing and casualties were expected to rise.
(Source: The Age)

Last week, Russia reeled at the loss of 336 people in a bloody terrorist siege, over half of them children. Understandably, it’s been the top story all week, with an emphasis on the number of children killed. The Western mass media has rightly been horrified and shocked at the loss of life.

But at the same time, US invasion forces still pummel Fallujah, killing countless civilians every single day, many of them children.

Do these children not count too? Are they less human because they’re Iraqis / Muslims?

We’ve been shown the horrific footage from the Russian atrocity. That will remain ingrained on anyone who’s seen it. I know I’ve had trouble sleeping since seeing it, which is partly why I’m typing this at 4am.

But we never see footage of all the Iraqis murdered by the US military. In fact, their murders don’t even merit counting by their “liberators”:

“We don’t do body counts”
General Tommy Franks, US Central Command
(Source: Iraq Body Count)

At the time of writing, between 11793 and 13802 Iraqis have been killed by the illegal invasion. Just how many of those were children, it’s impossible to say and the US military isn’t bothered, as long as they’re kept off our TVs. We never see the truckloads of children’s corpses. Remember this quote?:

This is what Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said last year:

“There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla. We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening.”

That footage was kept off our screens. But we got to see the Russian siege footage. Why? Well, we’re allowed to see the murders committed by our official enemies (Islamic terrorists in this case) but we’re not allowed to see the murders committed by ourselves and our allies.

Therefore, for the vast majority of people who haven’t got the time/inclination to look further, those crimes don’t exist. Thus, our media perpetuates the myth of the heroic liberation of Iraq, by deliberately ignoring the facts of the bloody invasion, our soldiers wading through the blood of the children they killed.

Do not for one instant dare to think I support the monsters who carried out the Russian murders. These people were evil, pure and simple.

All I’m saying is that anyone who treats human life so cheaply is evil. I want an equality of rights. If it’s wrong to kill Russian children, if that’s a supreme act of barbarism, then it’s also wrong to kill Iraqi children.

A life is a life, a human is a human. I don’t care if that human is American, Iraqi or Russian, their right to live is fundamental and anyone who denies that is a terrorist in my eyes.

A: When it’s carried out by the US military:

WASHINGTON – American abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were terrible, but they are not crimes on par with beheadings and other acts carried out by terrorists, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday.

“Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes,” he said. “Does it rank up there with chopping off someone’s head off on television? It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Was it done as a matter of policy? No.”
(Source: Miami Herald)

So… innocent people, held illegally with no charges made against them, tortured and ritually abused by US troops. That’s hunky dory with Rumsfeld. That’s just a minor deviation by a few “bad apples.” Let’s forget all about those pictures of Iraqi corpses with joking US soldiers posing next to them, defiling the dead bodies with the gleeful malice of Waffen SS officers. That was just a hiccup in the glorious liberation of oil-rich Iraq.

The last part of the above quote is yet another lie from Rumsfeld. There have been many reports that the policy of torturing prisoners wasn’t a spontaneous aberration but that it came directly from the officers in charge. So, it was a matter of US military policy. But what else is “a matter of policy?”

Let’s not forget the children held without trial at Guantanmo Bay. No charges, no access to lawyers. These children have been kidnapped by the US military.

Imagine if North Korea had similarly kidnapped a group of American children and been holding them illegally for the past two and a half years. Can you hear the outrage and condemnation that would pour from the mouth of Rumsfeld and the other PNAC Nazis? But when the good ole US of A does it, that’s fine and dandy

It’s all legal, of course, because the PNAC Nazis just invent new laws to justify their terrorism and torture as and when they see fit. Such as the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism, signed by President George W. Bush on 13 November 2001:

The Order allows non-US citizens to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, or to be tried by military commissions — executive bodies, not independent or impartial courts.

Amnesty International has called for the Military Order to be rescinded ever since it was signed, on the grounds that it is fundamentally flawed and because trials under its provisions will violate international fair trial standards. The military commissions will entirely lack independence from the executive, will place severe restrictions on the defence, provide no right of appeal to any court, and may admit coerced evidence. The fact that only foreign nationals are eligible for such trials violates the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights.
(Source: Amnesty International)

According to the US government, if you aren’t a US citizen you have no right to fair trial, no right to proper legal representation and if information is tortured out of you, that’ll be viewed as perfectly legitimate evidence. Those of us who aren’t Americans aren’t really human since our human rights are mercy to the whim of the ever-expanding American empire. We just don’t count. Especially if we happen to have brown skin.

Torture, kidnapping, murder, illegal imprisonment…

All routine matters of US policy.