Averting Our Eyes, Holding Our Noses

While America shops, Iraq continues to crumble into a chaotic purgatory of murder, kidnapping, crime, torture, and sectarian violence. Just this morning on NPR's All Things Considered, Phillip Reeves interviewed the relative of a Sunni recently murdered by Shiites who guiltily noted that when he hears of Shias narrowly escaping assassination attacks, he wishes they had "got him". He admits he would have joined in anti-Shiite attacks himself except that he is married and waiting on the birth of his son. Then, later, there is the description of the smell of the city morgue, stifling in the high heat of the Iraqi summer with a record number of bodies, many of them bearing the mutilations of torture.

In an August 17 story, Robert Fisk of The Independent, stated that last July was the bloodiest month on record for Baghdad Iraqis since the start of the war: 1,100 Iraqi bodies were brought into the city morgue during that month. (The NPR report has raised that to 1,700.) As Fisk states, it's impossible to assign reasons for all of the deaths; some were simply criminal acts, some were misogynistic honor killings, some involved no foul play at all. But as both his report and the NPR story point up, the deaths by violence, and by sectarian violence in particular, are skyrocketing, and we would know more, if only our own government, in collusion with our media, was not so intent on hiding the truth from us. Nothing brings this home more clearly than this paragraph, reproduced here from the Fisk article thanks to Kevin at PA For Democracy:

"Doctors have been told that bodies brought to the mortuary by US forces should not be given post-mortem examinations (on the odd ground that the Americans will have already performed this function)."

This means that verifications of causes of death are often ommitted. Not that the fools responsible for this abbatoir care enough to keep track.

We are witnessing a deliberate and concerted effort to hide the costs of this illegal war by a criminal element that has wholly overtaken the government of our nation and is ensuring the same criminality will thrive in the puppet government of the new Iraq.

Go to D.C. on September 24 and make your voice heard over their lies.