John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST AND PROMPTLY REMOVED

This man’s words are pathetically ignorant special pleading and, in publishing them, the National Post shows how far it will go to stir up the right-wing against the proper working of justice. The comments generated by the article, the ones left posted, resemble an orgy of right-wing hate-masturbation.

You go to war, sometimes you get wounded. You don’t whine and snivel about it long afterward, even more so when you were a paid professional killer in America’s special services, as this man was.

The man was a Green Beret, the guys who made their wonderful reputation crawling around at night in the jungles of Vietnam to sneak into villages and cut civilian officials’ throats. They were part of the CIA’s Project Phoenix which included perhaps 40,000 such brave and honorable acts.

But here he is, whining about a 15-year old who was caught up in the bloody mess of war, as though he were a criminal.

Omar Khadr is not a criminal, full stop.

Otherwise every soldier and volunteer who ever went to a foreign war is a criminal, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, including many who ran off to Israel’s various wars to help the IDF kill Arabs.

But they are not treated as criminals by the law.

It has never been the practice, after a war is over, for the winners to try the losers as criminals, unless flagrant war crimes were involved, and even then, it generally has not been the practice.

The United States has itself behaved as a massive war criminal in Western Asia. War after war. Threat after threat. Killing after killing. Massacres. Assassinations. And plenty of torture. The “laws” of war were broken countless times by the United States, and then it had the arrogance to try others for war crimes after torturing them for confessions, including a child, no less.

Only recently, it has been confirmed that a million souls perished in America’s totally illegal invasion of Iraq. Criminal acts do not come a great deal larger than that, but no one received years of confinement and torture for being part of them, much less planning and authorizing them.

This young man was fifteen when American soldiers shot him – twice in the back, a little detail often left out in the telling of the story.

Then they shipped him off for years of torture and isolation in Guantanamo, denying him for a long time all Red Cross-guaranteed rights. His interrogator was a Nazi-like American who made this kid sit up – pulling at his serious and unhealed wounds each time he brutally questioned him, and that after sleep-deprivation.

After years of abuse and without a hope of improving his situation, Khadr finally gave his torturers what they wanted and confessed to killing an American. I am virtually certain he did not kill anyone, but even if he did, he was a mere child and in a war the United States launched. The U.S. in its abuse of him has violated countless laws, including violating the UN Treaty on Child Soldiers, the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War, and Red Cross International Conventions on the Rights of Prisoners.

If you want a world governed by law, then you yourself must live by the law. Otherwise, we have international anarchy where might makes right and where America feels free to tell everyone, everywhere what they can and can’t do and even decide who may live and who may die.

And this man who is whining about Khadr’s finally receiving bail was himself nothing less than part of America’s bloody enforcement mechanism.

Thank God for a Canadian judge with some courage and proper legal values. A lot of the most beloved qualities of our Canada have suffered under the hateful government of Stephen Harper, but every once in a while it’s nice to see the old values shine through the gloom.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALEXANDER HIGGINS IN HIS BLOG

No, the true toll is tens of thousands of Afghans, not to mention the Pakistanis now being killed.

One could throw in the million dead Iraqis since the Afghan adventure was used as an excuse for that adventure.

Americans tend always to measure the impact of their wars by the number of Americans killed.

That is neither accurate nor ethical.

How many times did we hear about the 60-odd thousand Americans killed in Vietnam?

And it was the rate of those deaths which ended the war.

But the real toll was 3 million Vietnamese killed, many horribly, millions made homeless, an ancient society torn apart, and a sea of Agent Orange and landmines left to kill and maim for decades.

You could fairly add, too, the horrors of Cambodia, for America’s incursions and secret bombing were responsible for the neutral government’s fall. America is doing much the same today in Pakistan.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Afghanistan” and the word “prospects” in the same sentence are pretty much an oxymoron.

This is one of the poorest regions on earth, a vast sprawl of deserts and mountains with few valuable resources.

The U.S. always had the option of dropping dollar bills rather than bombs, but that’s just not the American way.

Afghanistan will have “prospects” after decades of economic growth and not before, if that ever comes to pass.

The U.S. went there to kill (something it did plenty of), not to help anyone, but the world’s press picked up on all the propaganda and seems to pretend it means something.

The culture and backward ways of the people are the natural adaptations of countless centuries and are, in that sense, normal.

What the U.S. is trying to impose is definitely abnormal, not fitting the land and its people at its stage of their development.

Of course, the stupidity of making the Taleban a bitter enemy was foolish.

No Taleban ever attacked the U.S., a point so easily glided over by the press in the last eight years.

Yes, they housed bin Laden (a Saudi) for a time, but then so did the U.S. for a time.

They offered, eight years ago, to comply with extradition if offered some evidence for the accused, the completely normal behavior of any government, but the U.S. rejected the request and proceeded to attack, as useless and mindless an act of destruction as Israel’s assault on the giant refugee camp called Gaza.

To this day, by the way, we have never been given a single piece of evidence that bin Laden himself was responsible for anything. I’m not claiming his innocence, just pointing out how irrational and lawless all this has been.

General McChrystal is a nasty killer, of the type that carried out that shameful Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, a man absolutely without a larger view. What else would he do but ask for more troops?

Well, there’s light at the end of the tunnel apparently.

Wait, now, I believe I heard that somewhere else. Was it Vietnam?

Good luck, Obama, you are now being squeezed on all sides by the Military-Industrial Complex.