Arun Gandhi And The Jewish Conspiracy

Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of the famous Mahatma Gandhi, a public figure and an established and true man of peace. So what was he doing spreading nefarious ‘conspiracy theories’ about the Jews back in January 2008?

In 1987, along with his entire family, Arun Gandhi moved to the United States to work on a project at the University of Mississippi. The project examined and contrasted the sorts of prejudices that existed in India, the U.S., and South Africa. Afterward the moved to Memphis, Tennessee and founded the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence hosted by the Christian Brothers University, a Catholic academic institution. This institute was dedicated to applying the principles of nonviolence at both local and global scales. In 2007, the institute moved to Rochester, New York, and is currently located on the University of Rochester River Campus.

Arun has given many speeches about non-violence in many countries. During his tour of Israel and Palestine in 2004, he urged the Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation peacefully to assure their freedom. He proposed to the Palestinian Parliament a peaceful march of 50,000 Palestinian refugees across the Jordan River to return to their homeland in Palestine, and said MPs should lead the way. Arun stated:

What would happen? Maybe the Israeli army would shoot and kill several. They may kill 100. They may kill 200 men, women and children. And that would shock the world. The world will get up and say, 'What is going on?'

Given the brutal conditions under which the Palestinians are being forced to live, attacked and murdered on a daily basis, Arun's proposal for the solution of the Palestinian question makes good sense. Rather than be picked off, one by one by the Israeli military and have their deaths ignored by the mainstream media, why not undertake such a march, and potential sacrifice, and increase the chances that the world would be forced to sit up and take notice? An act of this type is very probably what the ordinary Palestinian people, both in Palestine and elsewhere, would decide upon if ordinary Palestinians had any say in their future. But Palestinians today have no real voice, no true representation, their political leadership having been infiltrated and co-opted long ago by the forces of the state of Israel. Israel calls all the shots and carefully stage-manages both sides in its one-sided "war" against the Palestinian people.

In 2006 The Board of Governors of the BBC published an Independent Panel Report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The scope of the inquiry was "assess the impartiality of BBC news and current affairs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with particular regard to accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias, actual or perceived".

The inquiry found that the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was "incomplete and misleading" and “failed to adequately report the hardships of Palestinians living under occupation.”

In 2006 the research group If Americans Knew released a study into the reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the Associated Press (AP) for the period Jan-Dec 2004. The study found “a significant correlation between the likelihood of a death receiving coverage and the nationality of the person killed.” In 2004, there were 141 reports in AP headlines or first paragraphs of Israeli deaths. During this time, there had actually been 108 Israelis killed (the discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of Israeli deaths were reported multiple times).

During the same period, 543 Palestinian deaths were reported in headlines or first paragraphs. During this time, 821 Palestinians had actually been killed. In other words, 131% of Israeli deaths and 66% of Palestinian deaths were reported in AP headlines or first paragraphs. That is, AP reported prominently on Israeli deaths at a rate 2.0 times greater than Palestinian deaths. In reality, 7.6 times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis in 2004.

Previous studies into the reporting of Palestinian versus Israeli deaths have shown newspaper coverage to be even more distorted than the pattern that was found for AP. For example a six-month study of the San Francisco Chronicle showed a 30:1 differential of Israeli children’s deaths to Palestinian children’s deaths; a six-month study of The Oregonian by AUPHR showed the paper’s headlines had reported Israeli children’s deaths to Palestinians children’s deaths at a rate 44:1.

We live in a world where truth and justice have been turned on their heads. While the daily murder of Palestinians by the forces of Israel goes unreported and therefore unrecognised by the rest of the world, any high-profile criticism of these crimes is immediately met with outrage and condemnation by (mainly Western) political leaders and the infamous Israel lobby in the US, and of course by the mainstream Western press.

In an episode with strong echoes of the Walt and Mearsheimer debacle, Arun Gandhi made the headlines in January 2008 because of comments he made about the state of Israel, the Palestinian people's plight and the danger that the insane policies of what can loosely be termed "Zionism" pose to the entire world.

Gandhi wrote that Jewish identity "has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.

"The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. ... The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger."

Describing Israel as "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs," Gandhi asked whether it would "not be better to befriend those who hate you?" He added:

"Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Gandhi later apologized for his “poorly worded post," saying he shouldn't have implied that Israeli government policies reflected the views of all Jewish people.

Of course, Gandhi was wrong to blame ‘the Jews’, not merely because it is entirely inaccurate to suggest that all Jews support the policies of the state of Israel, but because it also left him and his otherwise reasonable and important message open to immediate dismissal as anti-Semitic, which is exactly what happened.

To his credit, Gandhi immediately recognised his error and asserted that he understood that not all Jewish people support Israel. The simple fact is that ‘the Jews’ are not to blame for the most extreme injustices being perpetrated throughout the world today, the spittle-flecked rants of some alternative news pundits notwithstanding. How can they be? Are we to believe that all 15 million Jews throughout the world regularly get together in secret and drive forward the political and economic policies of the major world governments?

Of course, certain Jewish politicians in Israel, the US the UK and elsewhere do wield inordinate power, this is a verifiable fact. If, as some would have it, the actions of these few make ‘all Jews’ responsible, then it follows that every American that supports the Obama government or the Republican or Democratic parties for that matter (i.e. significantly more than half of all Americans) is personally guilty of the murder of over 1 million Iraqis! So if it is ‘the Jews!’ then it is also ‘the Americans!’ (and ‘the British’!)

Clearly this is nonsense. To those who subscribe to such beliefs, it is worth remembering that Israeli policy makers and their policies thrive on the preponderance of such extremism. Why? Because such opinions are clearly illogical and it is extremely easy to use them as evidence to convince the world that anti-Semitism, or hatred of Jews, is ‘on the rise’, which in turn facilitates continued Israeli aggression against Palestinians and Arabs of the Middle East and the compounding of Israeli influence over Western governments (aka the Israel lobby).

Yet Ghandi was in error only on this point. His statement that "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs," and "would it not be better to befriend those who hate you?" is eminently rational.

Equally defensible is his comment:

"apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

But we are still left with the problem of who to blame, because make no mistake, someone or some group is responsible for the horrors that have beset humanity for so long. The culprits do not belong to any organised religion, nor do they adhere to any political or social views, these are but distractions used to cement this controlling group's domination of the masses of ordinary people.

There is a word for the people of which I speak, a word which does not rely on ideologically derived definitions or convoluted rhetorical formulae, a word which cuts to the root of this human problem in a scientific and psychologically precise manner, circumventing the infinite feedback loop of speculation which has enabled a lasting solution to evade us for so long.

The word is psychopath.

Estimated at up to 6% of any given population, they are human beings in appearance only. Lacking the ability to empathise with the feelings of another person, they therefore lack that which defines a person as truly human. Recent research by British scientists has shown that the brains of psychopaths are fundamentally different to the brains of ordinary humans. Such deviants not only possess a natural advantage over normal human beings in the ease and speed with which they rise to positions of power, once there, they are free of the constraints of conscience and driven only by their need to dominate, control and ultimately destroy others. It is not hard to imagine that a group of such deviants, having recognised kindred spirits in each other and joined forces, and subsequently attained to positions of near absolute power, would wreak havoc on the rest of humanity. Indeed, in his seminal work on the subject, Without Conscience, Canadian psychologist Dr Robert Hare estimates that psychopaths are responsible for up to 50% of crime committed in society.

But the crimes of the common or garden psychopath pale into insignificance when we consider the crimes of our psychopaths in power, aka our political leaders. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and his White Hall civil servants, all of these men (and more) committed the supreme international war crime (as defined in the Nuremberg trials) when they lied to the public and ordered the invasion of a sovereign country in 2003 without due cause. The Iraq invasion (there was no ‘war’) resulted in the violent deaths of 1.3 million Iraqi citizens, and a further 1.2 million non-violent deaths, and some 6 million displaced and left homeless. On the direct orders of the office of the Vice President, the CIA ran a death squad operation out of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior which involved dozens of covert car bombings and massacres of Iraqi Shia and Sunni Muslims in an effort to create the ‘reality’ of a civil war in Iraq and thereby justify the continued US military and economic colonisation of the country. Today, those responsible for these massive crimes are not in jail but instead remain in positions of power and are lauded as ‘elder statesmen’.

Having identified the problem, the question then is what we can do about it.
A capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation for psychopaths, so the scope for saintliness to spontaneously spread throughout the world looks implausible in practice. Brotherly and sisterly love today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who have a conscience, is all too common. The manipulations of psychopathic leaders, such as the promotion of torture as somehow justified, are designed to make psychopaths of us all. Nevertheless, a predisposition to conscience and ethics can prevail if and when it is able to make the enhancing of freedom and altruism in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants, its primary goal.

So our first efforts must be focused on rejecting the black and white ‘us versus them’ thinking that has gained much ground over the past few decades. We must stop idiotically decrying the imminent dangers of the great ‘Jewish conspiracy’ or the Muslim hoard sweeping the world. It is not ‘the Jews’ ‘the Muslims, ‘the Christians’, ‘the Iranians’ or any other religious or ethnic group that we should be concerned about, but rather the existence of psychopaths in positions of power who use religious and cultural beliefs to divide and conquer the normal human population. In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

This means that if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the future of normal humanity - which it is doing - then it can be only be dealt with by widespread refusal to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis. Preserving freedom for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves freedom for others. Protection of our own rights as the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness and a peaceful future of all.


Notes

1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1766215,00.html
2 http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/ap-report.pdf
3 http://www.auphr.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3226&Itemid=86
4 Psychophasia: The Unwritten Doctrine by R.R. Foster
5 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6736973.ece
6 http://www.hare.org/
7 http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/
8 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1230

Would The Real War Criminals Please Stand Up

Diamonds are a spooks best friend

Charles Taylor, Liberian President for 6 years until 2003, is currently on trial for international war crimes at a U.N.-backed special court in the Hague. Those that facilitated his crimes will not be there.

Taylor seized the presidency in 1998 after an appalling eight-year campaign of terror. Taylor is accused of orchestrating rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during the 1991-2002 civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Some of the harrowing testimony has been provided by Alex Tamba Teh. Teh claims that he saw a rebel commander from Liberia called "Rocky" shoot 101 people:

"After he killed the civilians... he gave the instruction that they should be decapitated. Rocky gave the order to the small boy units"

Tamba Teh recounted how child soldiers rounded on one child and chopped off his hand, then his arm, then both his feet, before tossing him into a toilet pit. In all somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 Sierra Leoneans were killed (estimates vary) with many more suffering mutilations and around 2 million left homeless.

[Today Sierra Leon's shy teenagers] show you their scars and explain that RUF rebel commanders cut them and rubbed cocaine into the wound to make them mad enough to fight or to chop people's limbs off. Sometimes the victims were their neighbours, or their brothers and sisters.

"They gave us drugs the whole time," says Saidu, 16, who was abducted and recruited into the RUF when he was five. First, he worked as a bearer and messenger for the soldiers' "wives", most of whom were themselves abducted adolescent girls. When he was seven he was given a gun, a couple of months' training in Liberia, and sent to fight.

"It was fun, like a big boy's game," he says. "They made us so crazy, we enjoyed the smoking, the drinking, the shooting, all that." He didn't enjoy having to cut a man's arm off, though, one morning on the road in from the airport. They were all lined up at gunpoint, the men, shaking, their arms obediently held out. Saidu couldn't look when it was his turn to swing his machete. He doesn't think the man survived. "I can't forget his scream," he says.

The civil war in Sierra Leon was fought over control of the lucrative diamond mining trade with the neighboring nations of Guinea and Liberia deeply involved. In 1991 a small band of men calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under the leadership of a former-corporal, Foday Sankoh, began to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone on the Liberian border. The RUF's signature terror tactic was physical mutilation. An estimated 20,000 civilians suffered amputation, with machetes and axes being used to sever arms, legs, lips, and ears. Over the course of the next 12 years a series of coups and counter-coups followed with the British, who ruled Sierra Leon as a colony until 1961, choosing to do little but observe the bloodshed, until the UN chose to enforce a relative peace in 2003 which still holds.

Foday Sankoah created the RFU with substantial support from Liberian leader Taylor who remained one of the primary antagonists throughout the conflict. In that respect, the current proceedings against him are indeed justified, but the evidence that will be undoubtedly missing from his trial concerns the claims of former Washington Post West African Bureau chief Douglas Farah. In 2004 Farah published Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror detailing the ties between "al-Qaeda" and diamond networks in West Africa. Farah is also a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center, a "right-wing think tank for military strategy with a history of working with hard-line, anti-Soviet groups promoting an aggressive U. S. foreign policy", according to Group Watch.

In 2004 the news web site AllAfrica.com conducted an interview with Farah on the 9-11 Commission findings, the interaction between "al-Qaeda" and West Africa's diamond trade, and his view of the role U.S. intelligence has played. Excerpts from the Allafrica article and interview follow with my emphasis:

West Africa: Debate Over al Qaeda's Connection to West Africa's Diamond Trade Takes New Turns

August 5, 2004
AllAfrica.com

Washington Post correspondent Douglas Farah, in a recently published 225-page book entitled "Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror," provides a detailed description of al Qaeda's activity in West Africa.

According to Farah, American intelligence agencies "overlooked" the connection between diamond trading and al Qaeda and the central role played in harboring and profiting from the illicit dealing by Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was forced into exile in Nigeria last year under a deal brokered by the U.S. government.

Farah's findings have been hotly disputed by the CIA and FBI, and their viewpoint was reflected in the recently release report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission. "We have seen no persuasive evidence that al Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds," the report states (page 171).

But a confidential investigation by the Sierra Leone Special Court further bolsters the view that that the alliance between Taylor and al Qaeda was substantial, according to an article in Wednesday's Boston Globe by Washington correspondent Bryan Bender.

"Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents," Bender wrote.

Citing the Special Court's investigation and U.S. intelligence official, Bender said a planned raid a few weeks after September 11, 2001 by U.S. Special Forces aimed at capturing Ghailani and an associate in Liberia was called off for unexplained reasons. One explanation raised by Bender's sources was Taylor's reported longstanding relations with the CIA.

In 2002 the Washington Post reported that European intelligence agencies had found evidence that Taylor hosted "senior terrorist operatives" who oversaw a $20 million diamond-buying spree that effectively cornered the market on the region's precious stones, receiving a $1 million payment for his help. Senior European intelligence sources were however "baffled" by the lack of U.S. interest from the CIA in these findings.

AllAfrica: What is your reaction to the single sentence in the 9-11 Commission report that dismisses African diamonds as a source of al Qaeda funding?

Farah: If you look at the footnotes of that particular citation, it's all FBI and CIA reports with the exception of an interview they quote with Allan White from the Special Court in Sierra Leone. I find it disturbing because they had access to the Belgium police report, which I have on my website, which they were given. The Special Court also wrote a special brief to them and the intelligence indicating al Qaeda's presence. The book, the Global Witness Report - none of those are cited as having been used at all in making their determination.

I think the 9-11 Commission was under a great deal of pressure to make hurried judgments. In my limited communication with them, they told me that they could not get to the bottom of the dispute. If you read my book, I have a lot of discussion of why the CIA tried to discredit the story, and the great lengths that they went to do so, despite the fact that they did not succeed, and the fact that more evidence continues to emerge [that] the story is actually correct. But there is a great hostility towards the story from the intelligence community, and all the commission did was take the intelligence community reports and use them as their basis for making their assertions.

AllAfrica: The 9-11 Commission also stated "to date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9-11 attacks?" How do you respond to that?

Farah: The proof of the telephone contacts to Afghanistan on September 10th and the prior communications from the Belgium police who traced the phone call from the satellite phone used by Aziz Nassour and Samih Osailly [two al Qaeda operatives whose activities in west Africa are detailed in Farah's book] is not hearsay evidence. They made numerous calls and it's documented. I have the phone bills for them, and more importantly, the police got them out of the official records. I do not think it's something you can easily dismiss. Neither are the bank records from Artesia Bank that show $20m flowing and being unaccounted for, and all the other indications that other people came up with. [...]

AllAfrica: Alex Yearsley of Global Witness asserts that, "Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001." You write about dealings between the CIA and Ibrahim Bah, the Senegalese mastermind who coordinated the diamond trade with al Qaeda. Why would the CIA form this kind of partnership?

Farah: It's a disturbing question. I do not have direct knowledge myself of the CIA dealings with Taylor. Taylor has told others and me that he has worked for the CIA over time.

AllAfrica: You write that the diamond trade in Africa transcends ideological and religious differences. Could you please talk more about the business dealings between Israeli and Lebanese merchants in West Africa?

Farah: [...] I think it's one of the truly extraordinary demonstrations of the depth to which people will sink in their greed for diamonds. It's the epitomy of the worst kind of greed and corruption of moral principles. They come with the desire to make money at any cost. What both the Arabs and Israelis told me was, 'Business is business. Here we do business. Back there is war and back there is not our problem.' If you look at Lebanese with ties to radical Islamists trying to buy weapons with Israelis to ship [elsewhere], it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand, and very hard to believe unless you see it and talk to people yourself.

As Farah states, all of it is certainly very disturbing, and his comment that "it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand" is indeed true but the web is made infinitely more complex and becomes impossible to understand when, as appears to be the case with Farah, the conclusions that the data points to conflict with the lies fed to us by our governments and the mainstream media. Lies like the one that says that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are fighting a "war against terror" when the reality is that they are waging a war of terror on the entire planet.

Lies like the one that says "al-Qaeda" is an Islamic terror group when in fact it is just a name given by Western governments to a fictitious group that is used to take the blame for terrorist attacks carried out by Western intelligence agencies (Mossad, CIA, MI5).

Lies like the claim that the US, Israeli and British governments and their agencies are doing everything they can to stamp out "Islamic terrorism" when in truth they have for many years been actively creating a false reality of "Islamic terrorism" which they use as a cover for their own illegal and murderous activities around the world.

Charles Taylor is currently being tried in the Hague for war crimes in Sierra Leon that were financed in part by the diamond trade. It is something of an irony that not 40 miles to the south of the Hague sits the Belgian city of Antwerp where 90 percent of the world's diamonds are cut and polished by the city's large Hasidic Jewish community. Surely the court in the Hague could find a few answers to the real source of the Sierra Leon tragedy there?

But I digress, in fact I have been digressing since the second paragraph. What I really wanted to say as regards Charles Taylor's ongoing trial for war crimes is that I have a question that I need someone to answer, and it is a very pressing question indeed:

Charles Taylor is being tried by an international war crimes tribunal because he is responsible for sending an army into another nation in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. If the moral standards by which Taylor is being measured are just and fair, why then are George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a host of other Neocons and Israel-firsters (both in the US and in Israel) not waiting in line behind him?

The Bush government, at the behest of their Israeli friends and with the complicity of their British lackeys, also sent an army into another country in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so caused the deaths of not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The following is but a tiny fraction of the massive evidence for US government war crimes in Iraq:

'I saw the heads of my two little girls come off'

April 2 2003
Smh.com.au

An Iraqi mother in a van fired on by US soldiers says she saw her two young daughters decapitated in the incident that also killed her son and eight other members of her family.

The children's father, who was also in the van, said US soldiers fired on them as they fled towards a checkpoint because they thought a leaflet dropped by US helicopters told them to "be safe", and they believed that meant getting out of their village to Karbala.

Bakhat Hassan - who lost his daughters, aged two and five, his three-year-old son, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15, in the incident - said US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through.

As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers.

"We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe," Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf.

The soldiers didn't wave back. They fired.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Hassan's heavily pregnant wife, Lamea, 36, said numbly.

She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: "My girls - I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

US officials originally gave the death toll from the incident as seven, but reporters at the scene placed it at 10. And Bakhat Hassan terrible toll was 11 members of his family.

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

"The bombing started at 3 am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me."

U.S. soldier poured kerosene on raped, slain Iraqi

One of the U.S. soldiers accused of raping and killing a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and slaying her family told investigators that after the killings he poured kerosene on the girl's bullet-ridden body.

In an interview with the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division in June, Spec. James P. Barker, 23, said that he held the girl down while she was raped by another soldier, Sgt. Paul Cortez, during an incident in March in Mahmoudiya, according to testimony from CID Special Agent Benjamin Bierce.

Barker said that he then attempted to rape the girl himself, before she was shot to death by former Pfc. Steven D. Green, Bierce said.

For the last five years the US government and military have waged a war on the Iraqi people that dwarfs the Sierra Leon conflict in terms of its mindless brutality. The people of Sierra Leon, while traumatised for years to come, are at least enjoying relative peace - the people of Iraq continue to suffer bombings, mutilations and the predations of US soldiers on an almost daily basis. Can we therefore expect the American, Israeli and British war criminals to appear in the dock in the Hague any time soon? If not, why not?

There is something VERY wrong with this world.