American Karma
The Sunday New York Times reveals that a Trump-era U.S. air strike in a small town in Syria killed at least 70 women and children. The Pentagon covered up the air strike for over two years, though a military lawyer immediately recognized it as a war crime. Will the U.S. military now be forced to bring those responsible to trial? Of course not. As I've written before, no major felonies against humanity -- or powerful plots against democracy -- are ever punished in America. And so, never learning from history, the U.S. is doomed to keep repeating its worst tragedies.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government (aided by the corporate media, a tool of the national security state), punishes the wrong people. Like Julian Assange. Why has Assange been in captivity for over a decade -- while fighting extradition to the U.S., where he could spend the rest of his life in some super-max dungeon? Because the WikiLeaks founder had the temerity to expose U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
Yes, the New York Times exposed the criminal air strike in Baghuz, Syria. The newspaper also revealed a disastrous drone strike on innocent civilians in the waning days of the Afghanistan War. And it relied on WikiLeaks to report on war crimes in Iraq. But the Times has long since abandoned Julian Assange to the tender mercies of the U.S. criminal justice system.
This is also the same newspaper that published false reports on Saddam Hussein's WMD -- bogus journalism that paved the way for the calamitous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq. This is also the same newspaper that continues to rattle sabers, particularly in the Middle East, where the national security complex still draws battle lines.
While we're on the subject of the Times, is Pamela Paul -- its longtime Book Review editor -- simply stupid or is she a witting tool of the national security establishment? (My guess is she's a bit of both.) Paul's Sunday supplement studiously ignores or derides books that take a deeply critical view of the U.S. empire and its attachment to endless war. Meanwhile, neocons and other warmongers (like Robert D. Kaplan, to name one recent contributor) are routinely asked to review books on foreign policy.
To be fair, the myopia about imperial mayhem extends to the American Left. Progressives have finely tuned radar about racial discrimination at home, as they should. But where is the outrage when non-white innocents abroad are slaughtered by the U.S. war machine? The United States routinely murders civilians in its endless "War on Terror," and there's not a peep from the U.S. Left.
If you're an American, if you pay taxes, there's blood on your hands. But don't worry -- there will be no accounting for our collective crimes. Not in this life, anyway.
Julian Assange, the man in the iron mask