"Fox" Mullen plays the blood card on Wikileaks:
Admiral Mike Mullen, who chairs the joint chiefs of staff, said: "Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, called the disclosure of the names of Afghans who had co-operated with Nato and US forces "irresponsible and shocking". He said in Kabul: "Whether those individuals acted legitimately or illegitimately in providing information to the Nato forces, their lives will be in danger."
The first thing that crossed my mind was the irony of a high functionary of the Imperial war machine affecting to be offended by blood on
anyone else's hands ... like Bernie Madoff sniffing at someone else's financial practices. Julian Assange, however, beat me to it:
Assange said today that they had tried to comply with a private White House request to redact the names of informants before publication. But the US authorities had refused to assist them.
He said in a statement: "Secretary Gates speaks about hypothetical blood, but the grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan are covered with real blood."
Thousands of children and adults had been killed and the US could have announced a broad inquiry into these killings, "but he decided to treat these issues with contempt''.
He said: "This behaviour is unacceptable. We will continue to expose abuses by this administration and others."
Meanwhile, both US and UK authorities remained silent about the disclosures in the 92,000 war log files that hundreds of civilians have been killed or wounded by coalition forces in unreported or previously under-reported incidents.
Again, our glorious leaders couldn't possibly care less whether anyone associated with Taliban, Inc. or al-Maybe-Qaeda reads any or all of this material. It's you and me they're worried about. Why, I've no idea ... but there it is.
2 comments:
An AP article in today's paper--third page, ho-hum--reported on the rise of battle deaths in Afghanistan. Oh, excuse me, I mean the rise in American deaths. Throughout, "U.S. deaths" and "American casualties," are repeated. One paragraph starts "The month has brought a sharp increase in the tragic images of war..." and goes on to describe an American soldier's plight with the loss of a limb and that of "shattered relatives" when they "come to receive the bodies of their loved ones" at Dover AFB. There's no mention at all of the human beings in Afghan who suffer and die--combatants and oh, yes, little children, too.
Ironic, indeed. That's a bit like the abusive parent beating the crap out of their kids to teach them not to hit.
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