Inhumane (from Mad Max To Headcutters)

I wanted to post on this yesterday, but Lenin's Tomb beat me to it: four former employees of US mercenary firm Custer Battles, who quit outraged after one or two days, testified that regular escorted runs in Iraq are conducted in the fashion of the Mad Max movies, only those shot or rolled over by the Western and Kurdish mercenaries are mostly unarmed, including children.

The four were ex-soldiers, but it was soldiers who turned Fallujah into an extermination camp. Read about their conduct and look at photos of all those killed "armed militants" here, if you can bear them. And there is worse.

Raed Jarrar[*] discovered a site where US soldiers put up pictures they made of their "work" - grisly images of blood-splattered, mutilated corpses. Yes, headless ones among them. The photos have "funny" captions. While al-Jazeera and some bolder European channels already showed the real look of this war, the hideous attitude of these producers and consumers of war-porn (and their leaders: "it's a hell of a hoot ... It's fun to shoot some people", not to mention the newest sickest version of Christianity developing behind it), is the new(ly revealed) low.

Over the past year, the hypocrisy of those really got me who are perfectly capable to see the inhumanity of decapitations when done by terrorists with knifes on Western hostages and shown on (Western) TV, but think it is somehow less cruel if the same thing is done with heavy machine guns, rockets and bombs on local people, or if people are cut to pieces alive by cluster bomb(let)s - and this indiscriminately and on an industrial scale, like in Nassiriyah 2003 or Fallujah (2x) and Najaf in 2004 -, yet not shown on (Western) TV. Even many liberals cling to the fantasy that among the armed bands in Iraq, the Western ones are somehow 'more civilised' (some citing some regulations and discipline, which amounts to not seeing the forest from the tree).

It's fitting to finish this post with the image I would pick as the Press Photo Of The Year, which, tough not too graphic, cuts brutally through the haze of moral theoretics, and which also symbolizes the fate of the common people in Iraq (story behind the picture at LeftI):

[*] He was the addressee of Salam "Baghdad Blogger" Pax's historic "Read Raed" blog. Raed was quite the moderate when I discovered his own blog a year ago (kind of a centrist liberal who professed expectations that the US will ultimately learn from mistakes and work with Iraqis for a better future). But with his triple affectedness - he has Palestinian and Iraqi parents, and an Iranian girlfriend -, and the flood of US fascists into his comments boxes, it is no surprise he is now fuming like a secular Jihadi (more a sign to the warhawks that yes, 'Arabs' can hate 'us' even more than before - but the Huntingtonite culture warriors never really cared about liberal Arabs).