Rules of Amer­i­can jus­tice: a tale of three cases. The Rules of Amer­i­can Jus­tice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking gov­ern­ment offi­cial who com­mits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immu­nity, both civil and crim­i­nal, and will have the Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent demand that all cit­i­zens Look For­ward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking mem­ber of the mil­i­tary, you will receive rel­a­tively triv­ial pun­ish­ments in order to pro­tect higher-ranking offi­cials and cast the appear­ance of accountability.

(3) If you are a vic­tim of Amer­i­can war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any enti­tle­ment to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk pub­licly about any of these war crimes, you have com­mit­ted the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espi­onage – and will have the full weight of the Amer­i­can crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem come crash­ing down upon you. [Glenn Green­wald]

It’s pretty obvi­ous that the U.S. legal sys­tem really has noth­ing to do with jus­tice except through the occa­sional coin­ci­dence, in much the same way that the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion has noth­ing to do with the U.S. government.

I just noticed that the cur­rent Evil Empire has now been “lib­er­at­ing” Afghanistan for almost two months longer than the pre­vi­ous Evil Empire.

The More Things Change… Part IV.

Post­ing from: Philips­burg, MT

Num­ber of civil­ians killed in Iraq since Obama took office: 41
Ref­er­ence: Iraq Body Count database

Num­ber of coali­tion forces killed in Iraq since Obama took office: 8
Ref­er­ence: DoD Con­fir­ma­tion list hosted by icasualties.org

The above num­bers aren’t even nec­es­sar­ily up to date due to the lag in gath­er­ing and ver­i­fy­ing data before report­ing it, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not doing very well at leav­ing. Imag­ine what 16 months worth of this is going to look like. And that’s assum­ing the highly unlikely best-case sce­nario that Obama has been try­ing to weasel out of since he threw down that deadline.

And that’s just Iraq. What about Afghanistan? Pakistan?

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Yes­ter­day in Iraq, Barack Obama’s respon­si­bly leav­ing army block­aded a vil­lage, invaded a fam­ily home at 2:00 in the morn­ing, and gunned down a mother and father in the bed they shared with their 9 year old daugh­ter. (The girl, besides being orphaned, was also wounded by the gunfire.)

On Fri­day, in Afghanistan, Barack Obama’s army forged peace by troop­ing into Lagh­man province, sur­round­ing houses in a vil­lage, and then launch­ing a raid where they killed 16 civil­ians — 2 women, 3 chil­dren, and 11 men — with gun­fire and pre­ci­sion bombs dropped from planes.

On Fri­day, in Pak­istan, Barack Obama’s army forged peace by fir­ing mis­siles repeat­edly into houses in sev­eral vil­lages in the Waziris­tan region. Barack Obama’s mis­siles killed twenty-two peo­ple, about 15 of them civil­ians and at least 3 of them chil­dren. The idea was to help cre­ate the con­di­tions for a last­ing peace.

Every one of these deaths is blood on Barack Obama’s hands. Every one of these peo­ple who were killed, were killed on Barack Obama’s orders and in the name of his war pol­icy. Because Obama wants to wash his hands of the United States government’s war on Iraq and its war on Afghanistan, every day that he delays get­ting out, com­pletely — delays get­ting out in the name of exit strate­gies and cen­tral fronts and respon­si­bil­ity — which is to say, delays that hap­pen because he is still con­vinced that, with the right sort of grad­u­al­ist pol­icy, he can some­how try to win wars that should never have been fought — is another per­son who is killed so that Barack Obama, after being elected as a peace can­di­date, can adopt and pro­long the col­los­sal, cat­a­strophic mis­takes of a dis­as­trous fail­ure of a pre­de­ces­sor, so that he won’t come off as being soft on national defense.

I am impressed. Obama seems to be expand­ing the United States’ mess beyond where Bush left it. And yet this man was elected in large part on the sup­port of those who want these wars to end.

Please. Please. Please. Think about how this hap­pened. Enough with the feel-good dra­mat­ics. It is well past time to THINK.

[Enjoy Every Sand­wich]

A bit of real­ity for those fools who believed that the can­on­iza­tion inau­gu­ra­tion of Saint Barack the Obames­siah was going to change any­thing about the real­i­ties of the Evil Empire.

Geor­gia accused of tar­get­ing civil­ians. The BBC has dis­cov­ered evi­dence that Geor­gia may have com­mit­ted war crimes in its attack on its break­away region of South Osse­tia in August.

Eye­wit­nesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apart­ment block, and how civil­ians were shot at as they tried to escape the fight­ing. [BBC News]

Of course The Exile ran a post about this story on Sep­tem­ber 4. They didn’t rely on unspec­i­fied eye­wit­nesses, though–they had actual video footage taken by a Geor­gian solider of him­self indis­crim­i­nately and con­tin­u­ously fir­ing his tank’s anti­air­craft machine gun into civil­ian res­i­dences as the tank drove by.

The BBC makes no men­tion of this ear­lier coverage.