Killing America's Kids

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:40:57 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Fred Reed at LewRockwell.com - Why Secretary of Defense Robert Gates doesn't like it when the press publishes photos of war deaths. Makes it hard to sell the military to impressionable young kids. L. Neil Smith likes this essay so much that he's going to try to get it nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

But Gates. The words "decency" and "unconscionable" coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. "Intelligence" agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK -- they're all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don't want kids to die in Afghanistan, don't send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

[photo of Joshua Bernard, lying on the ground with his legs blown off]

It could almost make you turn against the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Antiwar.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled The War in Afghanistan is Not Worth Another American Life. I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed ninety-five Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis.

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