Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Don't Fence Me In

In Qubah, Iraq U.S. soldiers have begun using permanent markers to keep track of residents during curfew hours. They have written numbers on the back of men's necks and on the top of the hands of women and each number corresponds to where that resident lives so that after curfew hours U.S. soldiers can tell whether or not they are where they should be. I don't know about you but this parallels eerily close to what the Nazis did to Jews in concentration camps during WWII. We are the liberators? This illegal occupation of Iraq has taken a new and unsettling turn in tactics used for maintaining control of the local populace.
Also, in today's Florida Today, there was an article subtitled, "U.S. soldier, baby among 15 casualties". Within that article there was a section about a girl who had just finished taking a test at school when a gate fell on her breaking her leg due to an explosion. This article by the way was printed on page 8. I suppose the Gators winning their third national championship this year was a more emotional story.
And just a day after John McCain visited Baghdad reveling in how safe it had become and how the number of terrorist-led executions had dropped, this was said in the same article above: "Baghdad police said they found the bodies of 14 people, most tortured and killed execution-style..." I hope John McCain is getting the full picture now.
And in the continuing news about the president vowing to veto the bill that will fund his war but set a timetable for exiting Iraq, George W. said, "That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it's unacceptable to the American people."
The truth is that this war is unacceptable to the American people and what else is unacceptable to the American people is the president allowing his own personal agenda on the war to interfere with passing the bill into law that would support our troops. I also find that our troops having to use markers to brand Iraqi civilians in a Naziesque manner to be unacceptable. Maybe if the president listened to his people he would know how we felt. But I am sure that he wouldn't like what he'd hear. So while the leader of the free world covers his ears to the screams of human rights violations the world is not becoming a safer place and America is not becoming more secure. Heil Bush and screw peace. This administration is turning the whole world into a new Auschwitz and don't think that we are necessarily on the free side of the fence.