The real criminals

The real criminals

One of Bush?s excuses for invading Afghanistan and Iraq has been the ?defence of democracy and human rights? against the dictatorial regimes overriding in those countries. Reality has clearly disclosed the hypocrisy of this claim and that imperialism was the real criminal constantly violating human rights.

In 2004 we learned about humiliating tortures and murders inflicted on Iraqi prisoner in the Abu Grahib jail. Now information is beginning to leak out on the slaughter of unarmed civilian population committed by the imperialist troops. One of them took place in November 2005 in Haditha city. Fifteen inhabitants were found dead after an explosive device killed marine Miguel Terrazas. Time showed that they were murdered in as reprisal. Among the victims, there were old people and a child aged three.

This was not an isolated case: a video shows a marine singing a song telling how he had slain an Iraqi family: ?I grabbed his little sister and put he in front of me. Bullets began to fly. Blood slid from between her eyes. I laughed as mad.  I sent those little children of bitches to eternity?. Such a degree of human degradation looks like part of Apocalypses Now ? a film of the Vietnam war. Actually, it is an expression of the criminal character that any occupation force must adopt in the face of nation who hates them.

Another sample of criminality can be seen in the Guantanamo concentration camp the American military enclave in Cuba. Seven hundred and 60 prisoners of war have walked into this camp since in invasion in Afghanistan. Five years after the end of the war, only 10 of them have been formally accused and none of them has been tried, something that goes against all the international norms referring to prisoners of war.

They live in real cages and are constantly subject to tortures and humiliations. As no escape is possible, the main function of the guardians is to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide and even for this purpose to feed them by force. Recently, three of the prisoners managed to mislead the surveillance and committed suicide. The explanation of the commanding officer of the camp is so cynical that we need not make any other comments. ?I do not believe this to be a token action of despair but rather a planned action to disgrace the USA. It was an act of war against us?.

The situation in Guantanamo has reached such a point that even the UNO, traditional instrument of imperialism, has had to expose it and to advise the closure of this centre of detention and a swift trial for all the detainees.

Lastly, there is the disclosure of the nearly a thousand clandestine flights carried out by the CIA over Europe in order to carry war prisoners from Iraq together with the already acknowledged existence of clandestine prisons of the entity in the European countries of the NATO. It is impossible to believe that such amount of flights can have been unobserved without the complicity of the European governments.