Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

For Blogs Against War.

Despite all of our whining about the Geneva Convention…oh the hypocrisy. This is how we treat POW’s (exhibit a, b, c, d).

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera is still down.

American mercenaries are killing children and wrecking entire families. Bombing markets and killing innocent people. In this photo according to the caption: The four-year old girl, blood streaming from an eye wound, was screaming for her dead mother, while her father, shot in a leg, begged to be freed from the plastic wrist cuffs slapped on him by U.S. marines, so he could hug his other terrified daughter.

In another photo, an unidentified Iraqi man is cradling the bloodied body of a young girl whose foot is clearly shredded. In yet another, family members weep near the wrapped bodies of their loved ones killed by ‘Allied’ airstrikes. I expect the Iraqi people to never forget this. We have no right to be in their country. As soon as we get rid of Saddam, I hope the Iraqi people toss us out on our ear. We bring nothing but hardship to replace hardship and subjugation to replace subjugation.

Meanwhile US Troops enjoy ‘Operation Playmate’. Is this a screwed up country or what? While we’re destroying countless lives our soldiers are receiving signed Playboy Playmate photos.

‘Die-ins’ target war and news media:

Aaron Unger, one of the coordinators of the protest for a group calling itself the M-27 Coalition, said demonstrators broke the law to drive home a point.

“We believe the war against Iraq is a violation of international law,” Unger said. “And the media is not telling people the whole story. I know people see what we’re doing as a nuisance. But what’s happening to the people of Iraq is much more than a nuisance.”

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn’t carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

“War protester auditions here today … thanks for coming!” read one message. “Who won your right to show up here today?” another questioned. “Protesters or soldiers?”

Said a third: “How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them.”

Still another read: “Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street” – a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary “Bowling for Columbine.”

The protesters said Fox’s sentiments only proved their point: that media coverage, in particular among the television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.

This and the ClearChannel sponsorship of pro-war rallies underscores the fact that corporate America is behind the war in Iraq and will do what it can to disinform and manipulate American sentiments.

The watchword for the day is “death squads“. The Bush government is using this to identify any armed combatants against the United States military. This is to imply that any armed opposition are murderers and predators. The implication also being that these are not the Iraqi people even though the Iraqi people reject the US invasion. I’ve heard this at least five times today. I have yet to see any Iraqi on television reporting the tactics the US ascribes to the Iraqi forces.

U.S. Forces Prepare Martial Law for Iraq:

“The U.S. cannot take over the mantle of law enforcement for the Iraqi people,” said Lt. Col. Richard Vanderlinden, commander of the 709th Military Police Battalion. “The expectation is that the Iraqi law enforcement structure will remain intact.” …

“Any riots and we are going to put them down. We’re going to send in the infantry. Restoring civil authority and peace is the highest priority. We are not going to let people run riot and rampant,” said Capt. Jim Wherry of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the army’s legal arm.

Offenders, Wherry said, could then be tried under the U.S. Code of Military Justice, detained for post-war trials by civil authorities or face punishment meted out by the Americans under Iraqi laws. The entire Iraqi judicial code has been translated into English and made available to the U.S. military. …

How the coalition will establish the boundary between U.S. military and Iraqi laws remains a “work in progress,” Wherry said.

“We’re still making it up as we go along and hope for the best,” Wherry, of Rock Island, Ill., said. “We are trying to have as little to do with this country as possible while, in effect, taking it over.”

Still, Saddam’s vast security apparatus is expected to be purged of loyalists and those suspected of torture and other human rights violations. Some supporters of the regime, however, will have to be kept in place.

“After World War II, we got rid of all the Nazis in six months and then found out we could not run the country without the Nazis,” Wherry said.

A nightmare scenario would be a postwar, revenge-based bloodbath, with the police and judiciary melting away and the United States having to become cop, judge and jailer.

You are seeing that the United States believes more in power than liberty, subjugation than freedom. The tactic of replacing only the topmost layers of authority is not new. The Mongols were very successful in doing so, removing the emperors and local rulers and replacing them with their Mongol chiefs.