We have no great love for Al Jazeeerah Television. Its dissemination of Osama bin Ladin's propaganda videos has doubtless helped to inspire terrorists around the world. It was our opinion that its broadcast facilities should have been bombed into rubble in 2001.
There is, however, terror, and there is terror. George Shrub's adoption of the military policies set forth in the book Shock and Awe indicate that, for all his hypocritical prattle about the Geneva Conventions, he has no intention of waging anything but a war of terror against the Iraqi people, and then, hiding behind the dubious security of the so-called "Patriot I" law, shield himself from public scrutiny of his own terrorist network.
We present the following photos from aljazeerah.net Arabic News to graphically (and gruesomely) illustrate Shrub's blatant hypocrisy and the murderous campaign which he is waging against the Iraqi (and American) people. The Iraqis he is simply terrorising with war; the American people he is terrorising with false warnings, blatant lies, and the looming spectre of "Patriot II," a law which would give him more power to control the American people than Adolf Hitler had to control the Germans, or Joseph Stalin to control the Russians and their occupied territories.
For an Arabic viewpoint of the war, uncensored by the fascistic "Homeland Security" secret police, readers may wish to visit Al Jazeerah USA, which we do not in any way endorse, but which at least provides the world with information unfiltered by the American "news-o-tainment" industry and its major stockholders in the Shrub administration. (What?! Did you think that government officials didn't own stock in the companies which promote their policies and help their careers? Tsk. Tsk.)
Since we posted these pictures, two events of note have come to our attention.
First, the New York Stock Exchange has banned an Al Jazeerah reporter from its trading floor, stating that it was restricting access to "responsible" news organizations only. Apparently, the largest news organization in the Arab world, which has billions of dollars invested in the United States, is not "responsible." One wonders who at the NYSE would accept "responsibility" if ten or twenty billion oil dollars were pulled out of U.S. markets causing the bloated, over-inflated stock market to collapse and plunge the U.S. into a major depression.
Second, just a day after we obtained the images on this page, Al Jazeerah's overseas web site became magically inaccessible to us, and to countless other Americans. We iterate and reiterate: this is information that George bush does not want you to see! That makes it all the more imperative that you do see it.
One of the biggest of the "big lies" told by Bush and Blair and parroted by the news-o-tainment industry in the U.S. and Britain is that the display of photos and videotape of American and British prisoners of war by Iraqi TV and Al Jazeerah is a violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of P.O.W.s. President Shrub, however, has seen to it that nearly every major U.S. military force in Iraq and Kuwait is accompanied by so-called "journalists" whose job it is to present candy-coated propaganda to the American people in lieu of news. Among this tidal wave of unadulterated proganda has been a daily barrage of photographs and videotapes of Iraqi prisoners of war, sent out with a complete disregard for their rights under the Geneva Conventions. By the definitions used by Bush and Blair, their own propaganda toadies are war criminals and should be tried as such.
CONSIDER THIS: most Iraqi soldiers are draftees; the penalty for draft avoidance in Iraq is death; by flashing the faces of surrendering Iraqi troops around the world, Bush and Blair and their news-o-tainment lapdogs risk exposing the families of those surrendering troops to imprisonment, torture, or death (we never said that Hussein and the Saddamites were good people, did we?). If that is not a criminal exploitation of these Iraqi P.O.W.s, we cannot imagine what else might be, short of actually using them as slave labor or human guinea pigs. The families of U.S. service personnel who are captured are lionized by the American news-o-tainment industry (there might, after all, be a good TeeVee movie or three in some such story!); the families of surrendering Iraqi P.O.W.s are endangered so that pretzel-chomping couch potatos who are viewing this holocaust as if it were a video game may get a vicarious thrill at the glorious prospect of Iraqi farm boys and old men surrendering to American forces with weapons that are capable of blowing whole Iraqi villages to smithereens.
We see no difference whatsoever in the degree or nature of the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair, or George Bush (the First or the Second). We believe that the lot of them should be hauled before the International War Crimes Tribunal and given the just punishment which their actions have earned for them.
