The figureheads of the Bush Administration have condemned the routine torture and harassment of Iraqi detainees as being “un-American.” They target the perpetrators as being the sole source of embarrassment in the Iraq war and heap blame on them as corrupting their moral, preemptive war. Washington has assured the world in shortsighted apologies that these “isolated” incidents will not corrode their stewardship of Iraq, a region they have pledged to bring peace and democracy. 

What a way to achieve it-to employ private contractors, trained by a Pentagon offshoot, to achieve “peace” in the same Orwellian way Saddam did. A glance at recent history would reveal war is as American as apple pie. This country doesn’t shy away from creating conflict to advance its interests. And every war involves the death of innocents, the “interrogating” of POW’s, the forced exodus of people from their homes into a manmade environment of destruction, war. The men down in Washington now making these decisions to send these contractors to their nine to fives are not novice warmongers. A select few have made lucrative careers orchestrating war from the public and private sector. Chickenhawks, plagued with complexes that drive them to seek this blood and destruction in their professional lives, somehow keep their homefronts free from the malice they create at work.  

These men are the first to balk at what their underlings do with the fodder of their ideologies. These detainees, prisoners in their own country, are being held at the men in Washington’s request and it escapes them that their messengers, the contractors, might get lost in the death and destruction they were employed to undertake and oversee. These messengers were delivering a message that is redefined every moment with every barbarous turn of events that accompany any war. 

There’s no excuse for what these messengers have done. They are truly depraved, vile individuals but one should equally question the crocodile tears shed by their employers in Washington. War is and always has been a dirty business. No man in power is insulated from its dreadful consequences. Somehow the public conscious can be manipulated on the eve of war and becomes naïve again to the true atrocities of war.  

The only thing one can do to stop these atrocities from happening is to prevent the politicos from getting the blank check that provides them with the capability to provide these messengers with their dubious work. We undersign that check and it is only our prevention that can force the messengers to look for other work besides humiliating and dehumanizing the people their leaders claimed to be liberating. Shooting the messenger won’t stop the message from being sent. Making sure these kinds of messages aren’t being sent is the only certain method of prevention and currently that message is being sent by a man we can chose to fire.

Shoot Up the Message Boards