A U.S. soldier guards the thrashed home in northern Iraq where the U.S. military assassinated Saddam Hussein's two sons yesterday (Saddam Hussein's son Odai is on the left and son Qusai is on the right).
assassination, n. The act of deliberately killing someone, esp. a public figure, usu. for hire or for political reasons. -- assassinate, vb. -- assassin, n.
-- Black's Law Dictionary, 7th ed.
Assassinations: Fruit of a poisonous tree
One thing the Bush regime does do well is the mass Jedi mindfuck. The Bush regime can make the American people believe just about anything, no matter how much it flies in the face of readily available evidence.
To accomplish this feat, the Bush regime counts on Americans' short memories (writer Gore Vidal calls us "the United States of Amnesia"), Americans' psychological need to appear and to feel morally irreproachable no matter what their nation has done, and the fact that Americans, most of whom are mentally lazy, are rather easily worn down: repeat your propaganda to them enough and after a short while they'll acquiesce.
For instance, even though Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000; even though George W. Bush's brother was the governor of the state with the disputed votes; even though Republican Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had done such things as knowingly allow non-felons to be placed on lists of felons who could not vote (most of these dicked-over voters were black and would have voted for Gore); even though all five members of the U.S. Supreme Court who said no, all of the Florida ballots may not be counted, were appointed by Republican presidents -- despite all of this, the majority of Americans still consider George W. Bush to be the legitimate president of the United States of America. It is stunning.
Now, when I see even otherwise intelligent, liberal bloggers celebrating yesterday's assassination of Saddam Hussein's two sons -- I won't name the bloggers; you know who you are, and I want to maintain a good working relationship with you -- it is evident that the Bush regime has done it again.
They've convinced the American people that yes, indeed, we bombed the holy shit out of Iraq to free its people from the horrible clutches of Saddam Hussein's regime. Nevermind that for months and months the Bush regime lied to the American people and to the world about the imminent threat that Iraq, with its weapons of mass destruction, posed to the United States and its allies -- a threat so imminent that the United States and its coalition of the willing had to pre-emptively strike Iraq posthaste.
(Actually, perhaps most Americans have not actually forgotten the original reason for which the Bush regime stated it was pounding Iraq into the sand. Perhaps Americans are so damned collectively embarrassed that thousands of Iraqi civilians were just slaughtered in our name for no apparent reason that when we hear that Saddam's two kids have just been rubbed out, and that they had been very, very naughty, we need to celebrate this fact so as to not feel as much the assholes that we are.)
Before I progress further, let me make it clear that I have no love for the Hussein clan. Saddam’s sons Odai, 39, and Qusai, 37, had grisly resumes:
"Iraqi exiles say Odai murdered at will and tortured with zeal, and routinely ordered his guards to snatch young women off the street so he could rape them," reports the Associated Press. "The London-based human-rights group Indict said Odai ordered prisoners to be dropped into acid baths as punishment."
"Odai also shot an army officer who did not salute him," the AP reported among many other lovely things about him.
Qusai’s reported resume is similar: "Qusai … oversaw Iraqs notorious detention centers and is believed to have initiated ‘prison cleansing’ -- a means of relieving severe overcrowding in jails with arbitrary killings," reports the AP. "Citing testimony from former Iraqi intelligence officers and other state employees, New York-based Human Rights Watch said several thousand inmates were executed at Iraqs prisons over the past several years.
"Prisoners were often eliminated with a bullet to the head, but one witness told the London-based human rights group Indict that inmates were sometimes murdered by being dropped into shredding machines. Some prisoners went in head first and died quickly, while others were put in feet first and died screaming. The witness said that on at least one occasion, Qusai supervised shredding-machine murders."
Saddam’s sons were real pieces of work. But I have difficulty seeing how murdering murderers makes the murderers’ murderers any better than the murderers.
The U.S. military did not have to assassinate Saddam's sons; as I heard a pundit remark on National Public Radio today, they were surrounded and would have had to surrender eventually, and if they had been caught alive they possibly would have revealed their father's location and even perhaps the location of those peskily hard-to-find alleged weapons of mass destruction. But their faces were printed on those decks of cards, so they were assassinated without hesitation.
(Speaking of assassination, the AP reports that in 1976, Republican President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning assassinations.
"Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said before the start of the Iraq war that the assassination ban would not apply once hostilities broke out," the AP reports, noting, "The ban on assassinations ... made no distinction between wartime and peacetime. There are no loopholes; no matter how awful the leader, he could not be a U.S. target either directly or by a hired hand."
Of course, the rogue Bush regime circumvented the United Nations when it was clear that its Security Council was going to vote down a U.S. attack on Iraq; if the Bush regime flouts international law, why should it respect U.S. law?)
I have great difficulty seeing where the United States has the higher moral ground in its assassination of Saddam Hussein's sons. The fact that the Bush regime violated U.S. law against assassination aside, if an enemy nation assassinated American government officials, the United States would be up in arms – literally. But if the United States wants to knock off some enemies (well, I use the word "enemies," but there remains no proof that Saddam's regime posed any real threat to the United States), that’s supposed to be acceptable to everyone.
And if others are killed during the United States' assassination attempts -- such as how thousands of Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered in the Bush regime's attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein (it is attempted assassination because Iraq did not start this war), and how not just Saddam's two sons were killed yesterday, but also a teenager thought to be Qusai's son and a bodyguard -- that's supposed to be acceptable to everyone, too. The morally superior United States' ends always justify its means. If some innocents die in the process of the United States meting out its impeccable sense of justice, then so be it. (And we wonder why they hate us.)
I don’t know how many thousands of people Saddam and his sons have killed. But I know that the United States also is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people -- Iraqis, Americans, British and others -- in the "pre-emptive" invasion and occupation of Iraq that has turned out to be for absolutely nothing (other than for profits for the U.S. corporations to which the Bush regime awarded multi-billion-dollar government contracts for which the American taxpayers are paying, of course).
I can’t celebrate the assassinations of Saddam Hussein’s two sons when the United States slaughters innocent people as casually as Saddam’s sons did. We are more sophisticated murderers, of course; a henchman of Saddam Hussein might kill you slowly, employing an acid bath or a shredder, while we morally superior Americans are above that -- we'll drop a bomb on you.
Perhaps the biggest reason that we Americans cannot celebrate the assassinations of Saddam Hussein's sons is because the U.S. military has no business in Iraq in the first place. Because we have no business in Iraq in the first place, nothing that we do there can be called heroic or can be celebrated -- just as because he was never fairly, legally elected, nothing that "President" Bush does during his hostile occupation of the White House has any legitimacy.
You can't get good fruit from a poisonous tree.
Update (Sunday, July 27, 2003): Facing criticism for having hastily assassinated Saddam Hussein's sons, the Bush regime is lying that it had no other choice. Reports the Associated Press:
Saddam Hussein's sons responded to U.S. soldiers' demand to surrender with a hail of gunfire, so there was no way they could have been captured alive, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says.
Some Iraqis say they would have preferred that the sons had been captured and put on trial, but Rumsfeld said there was no reason to second-guess the actions of the 101st Airborne troops who carried out the quick-reaction mission Tuesday at a villa in the city of Mosul.
"Given the amount of gunfire that came from that building ... it is I think obvious that there was no chance of taking them alive," the defense secretary told a Pentagon news conference Thursday.
We are to believe that the largest military force on the planet could not handle a few people with guns holed up in a large house? That if the Bush regime really wants to find those supposed weapons of mass destruction as badly as it claims, it would not have waited a day or two or three -- or even a week or two or three -- for the inhabitants of the house to surrender? Sure, they might have killed themselves before they allowed themselves to be captured, but they might also have given the U.S. military valuable information it claims it wants.
Note that Rumsfeld, according to the AP, said that "there was no reason to second-guess the actions of the 101st Airborne troops who carried out the quick-reaction mission," as though the troops weren't acting on orders of the Bush regime to snuff out the Hussein brothers. Rumsfeld wants his critics to look as though they are criticizing the troops and not the shitty, shitty leadership of the Bush regime.
That Jedi mindfuck thing again.
9:24:53 PM 
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