Three years of goddamn

From www.rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

They ask me if I feel remorse and I answer, Why of course:
There's so much more I could have done if they'd let me - Nick Cave

There's a lot I want to say about a number of things, but I can't seem to find those words until I scream some others.

Have you read the Iraqi police report of last week's little Helter Skelter outside Tikrit? From Knight Ridder:

At 230 of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram (report) of the Ishaqi police directorate, American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including 5 children, 4 women and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals (map coordinates 098702).

They were:

Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months

(Signed)

Staff Colonel Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf
Assistant Chief of the Joint Coordination Center

3/16/2006

Three years into this atrocity circus, and the already pathetic annual demonstrations against the war are shrinking and growing quieter. Understandably so. As I've said, we're habituating to it. Meanwhile, the vicarious revolutionaries were in the theatres getting a fix of serotonin from V for Vendetta. "When are they going to ban the movie?" I've actually read, as though anything that keeps people off the streets and on their asses were a threat to those who own both the streets and their behinds. Winning the weekend box office does not a revolution make.

Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months. She probably had a tooth or two coming in. She must have been wailing as the strangers shouted foreign words to her family and pointed those shiny black things, and at the noise that they made. Unless she was the first.

If all we can do is feel bad, and think we've accomplished something by having been moved, then perhaps we deserve to be judged with Husam's murderers. Because then we're scavenging the losses of others and making them our own, garlanding ourselves in tragedy, building an anti-war sentiment upon how upsetting it is to us. In that event, we won't be seeking justice, we'll just be looking to feel better. And the illusion of action will be more satisfying than its ambiguous reality.

Information warriors. Jesus Christ, how precious of us.
posted by Jeff at 8:58 AM 11 comments