Iraq slaughter not an aberration
Documentarian Glenn Greenwald reviews the WikiLeaks video of the soldiers in the Apache and shows how they did not take a single step without first receiving formal permission from their superiorsI was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.
But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.
A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.
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RELATED: WikiLeaks' Iraq Killings Video: Military 'Can't Find' Its Copyearlier:
Obama's Volcker Wants Regressive Value-Added Tax
It's a quick way for governments to raise cash, but the tax could wind up being a burden on the poor, critics sayAcknowledging it would be a highly unpopular move, White House economic adviser Paul Volcker said yesterday the United States should consider imposing a "value added tax" similar to those charged in Europe to help get the deficit under control.
A VAT is a national sales tax that, like state and city sales taxes, would be collected by retailers.
Volcker, at the New-York Historical Society, told a panel on the global financial crisis that Congress might also have to consider new taxes on carbon and energy.
The VAT suggestion was immediately met with outrage by Republicans.
Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, told the global economic panel that a VAT is "not as toxic an idea as it has been in the past."
He added, "If, at the end of the day, we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes."
The tax has long had backing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who last year said it is "on the table" for dealing with the country's fiscal woes.
Some say the tax can be a good way to raise money because -- depending on how it's imposed -- the burden does not have to fall on the consumer alone.
A VAT can also be imposed down the line on manufacturers, producers and any other business that adds value -- as well as retailers.
Presumably, each could be asked to pay a smaller amount, since the burden would be spread out.
Also, since the government would be collecting at each step of the manufacturing process, if a retailer cheated, the taxman wouldn't be left completely in the cold, because levies would have been collected at earlier steps leading up to the sale.
A major reason the tax is so hated is that it does not eliminate sales taxes, but is charged on top of them.
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