Thank You, Laurence Vance
by James Glaser
April 19, 2010

War Crimes
Posted by Laurence Vance on April 17, 2010 04:05 PM
LewRockwell.com Blog

One negative thing about the revealing of the Apache helicopter murders in Iraq, the killing of numerous civilians in Afghanistan, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and other war crimes and "incidents" that embarrass the U.S. military is that people sometimes get the impression that if these things didn't happen then the wars would be okay. The truth rather is that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are crimes from beginning to end.

Laurence Vance, once again hits the nail on the head. So very many Americans get upset when they read about that rogue Soldier or Marine, or that unit that has run amok and is featured in a video or article for doing something so very heinous that even pro-war Americans get upset.

Usually, it is the American people who get particularly upset when they see war crimes like we have seen lately, because most Americans have no concept of what war is really like.

For billions of people all around the globe, the acts shown about our wars that upset Americans are in all actuality just everyday warfare. Americans get upset, because they think these pieces of combat that are caught on video are actually war crimes. What Americans don't understand is that the only thing that makes these particular incidences stand out is that they we caught on video, and we got to see them.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Pentagon has thousands of hours of these same type of videos that upset us so much. The only reason we got to see the video of the chopper gunners killing those two Reuters cameramen and the Iraqis who stopped to help the wounded man, is that somebody leaked it to the internet.

The same is true about the torture pictures from our prisons in Iraq. Nobody released them so the American people could know what was going on. Some soldier let them out, and they were picked up by the media.

We know the Pentagon has hundreds of other (official) photos of our torturing prisoners. We even have, or I should say had, videos of our waterboarding prisoners. The CIA destroyed the videos, and the President of the United States stopped the publication of the torture pictures. Some Senators and Congressmen did see those pictures, and one of them said it was like looking into hell.

The world knows what we do in our wars. For sure the Iraqi and Afghan people know. Combat veterans know, and many of them will suffer with those memories for the rest of their lives, as will the Iraqi and Afghan people who lived through what we have done.

The truth is that most of the world knows what we do in our wars, and much of what we do would be branded as being war crimes by us if any other country were doing what we do when we go to war.

What was so good about what Laurence Vance said, was that the war crimes that we know about are not the only war crimes going on. Rather the whole act of going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yes, Vietnam and almost every other war we have started in the last 60 years are war crimes in themselves. War is a crime! It just makes us remember that fact when somebody like Laurence Vance has the courage to point it out to us.

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