War Criminals in Our Midst

From CounterPunch:

What the State Department needs is an office that rounds up American war criminals.

They are in abundance and not hard to find. Indeed, recently 56 of them made themselves public by signing a letter to President Obama demanding that he send in the US Army to complete the destruction of Syria and its people that Washington has begun.

At the Nuremberg Trials of the defeated Germans after World War II, the US government established the principle that naked aggression–the American way in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen–is a war crime. Therefore, there is a very strong precedent for the State Department to round up those neoconservatives who are fomenting more war crimes.

But don’t expect it to happen. Today, war criminals run the State Department and the entire US Government. They are elected to the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and appointed to the federal courts as judges. American soldiers, such as Bradley Manning, who behave as the State Department expects German soldiers to have behaved, are not honored, but are thrown into dungeons and tortured while a court martial case is concocted against them.

More here.

So the point is, and it's become pretty clear to me since Obama adopted his drone-'em-all-and-let-god-sort-'em-out policy, that it's not just a few bad apples. It's not simply the twisted and fucked up Bush administration. It's the entire political establishment and culture. American war crimes are no longer to be considered as an aberration. War crimes are now official policy of the United States, and both political parties, the vast majority of federal elected officials, and the corporate news media, are all in on the act. Amazingly, we continue to hold other nations to the standard to which we once held ourselves. And, as the essay above achingly observes, when Americans of conscience do what the Court at Nuremberg expected German military personnel to do, we prosecute them as traitors, which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what the Nazis did with Germans of conscience.

Yeah yeah, I know. I'm not supposed to compare anybody to the Nazis because they killed six million Jews. On the other hand, how many Vietnamese did we kill, how many Native Americans, how many African-Americans under slavery? Oh yeah, right, we didn't send them to death camps, so it's okay. But you see how absurd all these caveats and conditionals become the deeper you dig. Point is, the US has committed countless war crimes, and the party isn't even halfway over. If it looks, smells, and tastes like dog shit, it is extraordinarily likely that it is dog shit. So yeah. We're acting like the fucking Nazis, and nobody in power, nobody with a voice loud enough to be heard, appears to give a flying fuck about it.

How the hell am I supposed to be proud of my country?

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