By John S. Hatch

September 01, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Henry Kissinger once referred to military service people as ‘dumb, stupid animals to be used’ as tools of foreign policy. One wonders if this man of no regrets nevertheless wishes he had not vocalized what in fact has been the position of successive US governments including the present one? Madeleine Albright, after famously stating that the undisputed deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to hunger and easily preventable diseases during the post Gulf War I sanctions ‘were worth it’ later admitted that the statement did not have a nice ring to it. But Herr Doktor doesn’t apologise. Not for millions of deaths in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Not for Agent Orange. Not for Operation Phoenix. Not for demanding more death in Iraq.

But could his swinish assertion be true? After all, hundreds of thousands went willingly to Viet Nam, or allowed themselves to be sent virtually as killer slaves to magically protect ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ by murdering peasant men, women and babies, by drowning them in buckets, throwing them out of helicopters, raping women and then shooting them in the back of the head. Often they helicopter bombed every shanty in every random village they came across. They drove themselves insane in their frenzy of violence. Once there, there was no return from the reptile side. Fifty-eight thousand died for nothing, as it turned out, because Sec Def McNamara had miscalculated the Domino Effect. Oops. An unknown number committed suicide, committed murder back home, or were shot by police. ‘We don’t do body counts.’

Dumb, stupid animals. But even animals don’t behave like that. Not even stupid ones. Well, homo americanus. He does. He does, over and over.

And how did psycho Uncle Sam say ‘thank you’? By pretending Agent Orange was benign. By denying that PTSD is real. No Gulf War Syndrome. By abandoning its veterans. Just as it did after the Gulf War, fought for reasons as bogus as Viet Nam.

Just as it continues to do regarding the equally bogus reasons for the savage invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Depleted Uranium is good for you. Take a deep breath. Got a brain injury? Well we happen to think that you were already nuts, so piss off.

We now know that people were tortured to make them assert that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Quieda, blamed with Lee Harvey Oswald accusatory speed for 9/11 (despite the fact that mounting evidence, including the presence of nano-thermite in WTC dust tends to point in quite a different direction). Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others made the connection in countless speeches, along with the baseless claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that the good ‘ol USA was in imminent danger. Mushroom clouds turned up only in Condoleezza’s fetid mind. Oops.

The vile draft was gone, so Sam couldn’t ship off mostly Black kids or poor white trash whose names didn’t end in C-h-e-n-e-y, so they used the above lies, calls to patriotic duty, and good old cash inducements to get the job done. They let criminals join, sociopaths, the mildly mentally ill, the elderly, even illegal immigrants. They did heavy recruiting in high schools in poor neighborhoods, Indian reserves (even some in Canada, until they were stopped). They were allowed to call kids at home, barrage them with bullshit, threats, false promises, and false patriotism. Only you can save the Homeland, kid!

And so the poor suckers went, but they mostly didn’t know what they were getting in to. They were getting into murder, pure and simple. They were getting into torture. Snipers shot children, sometimes purposely only wounding them so that their screams would cause maximum torment and terror. They shot people for fun. They karate-kicked people to death. They crucified some. They used depleted uranium, infecting even themselves. They employed white phosphorous and thermobaric weapons against innocent civilians. They imprisoned thousands of children and sodomized some of them. They threatened people with electric drills, a favorite torture trick of the rightfully vilified Saddam, Rumsfeld’s friend (‘But if we do it, it’s not a crime…’)

‘Kill, kill, kill!’ the Marines madly shriek in training. But a human being, no matter how stupid, how duped, can only engage in so much of the real thing before his soul is irretrievably lost and he becomes mad, a monster. (I spoke to Damien Corsetti, known as ‘The Monster’ and ‘Chief Torturer’ at Bagram and Abu Grahaib. He has a tattoo which reads ‘Il Mostro’. He may have done monstrous things, but he didn’t start out that way, and suffers serious remorse and perhaps life threatening PTSD. He said they tortured out of sheer boredom, not for ‘freedom and democracy’.) And then the ex-soldier goes back to Chicago and shoots people on the street. Or himself. And remember, no WMD’s. No Osama. No nothing. Oil. Thermite in WTC dust particles. Inside job. All that death for nothing. All that suffering so that Cheney could sneer. I bet Kissinger liked it too, but wanted more. For those guys, there’s never enough death. Never.

Capitalizing on the outrage and disgust of the American people toward the worst, the most corrupt and criminal Administration in American history, Barack Obama promised change. ‘Change you can believe in.’ Transparency. Honesty. Re-Constitution. Hope.

And then he delivered—Omerta.

He joined the Cheney crime family, or perhaps he was already a member all along. He elected to ‘look forward’, as if massive war crimes and crimes against humanity can be dismissed, erased if you just pretend hard enough that they didn’t happen, or that they don’t matter. Albright’s children, all over again. Ragheads, after all. By that logic, OJ should be head of the Department of Justice. Or maybe even President. In this looking-glass world, anything can happen. Bad things.

As a sop, maybe a couple more Lyndie Englands will go to jail, even though at the very least one hundred and eight people are known to have been tortured to death on orders that came right from the top in the Bush Administration (Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bybee, Yoo…). How many homicide charges have been laid? Americans who put to death Japanese and Germans for ‘just following orders’ (and in the case of some Japanese, the crime was waterboarding), now cite it as a legitimate defense while excusing those who gave the orders in the first place. If hypocrisy could kill, Washington would be a ghost town, and the world would be a better place.

And meanwhile there are reports that Guantanamo guards are still crazy with sadistic violence in anticipation of its closing (an event upon which I would not take bets). There still exists an unknown number of ‘black’ sites at undisclosed locations, where conditions might be even worse. Red Cross not welcome. Bagram prison in Afghanistan is being expanded, its hopeless inhabitants still denied all human rights under Mr. Obama, who asserts that many prisoners will never be tried or released. Thousands of children remain imprisoned. Meanwhile any suggestion that inmates be moved to US soil is met with the most hysterical shrieks of protest by residents, terrified out of their dim little wits of ‘terrorists’ who are mostly innocent kidnap victims, bought for ransom by a shameless US government, the successor to which would rather see them die in captivity than admit its predecessor’s criminal mistakes.

It’s very difficult to watch President Obama talk of America’s greatness with a straight face in the midst of such moral degeneracy even as the banksters steal and he caves in to AIPEC, Big Pharma and Big Insurance, and once again the American people get sold out with barely a whimper. Even as America goes bankrupt, there are always calls for more military, more bases, more guns. Less butter.

When it comes to America, perhaps it’s not just the military who are comprised of ‘dumb stupid animals’. Kissinger must be laughing his ass off. Cheney too. Welcome to the brute factory. It’s a veritable slaughterhouse.

John S. Hatch is a Vancouver writer and film-maker.