The Nightmare: The Iraq Invasion's Atrocities, Unearthing the Unthinkable

The Nightmare: The Iraq Invasion's Atrocities, Unearthing the Unthinkable

By Felicity Arbuthnot
October 9, 2010
Global Research

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." François-Marie Arouet -"Voltaire" (1694-1778.)

I have a deeply held belief that the duty of a commentator is, to the best of one's ability, to record, to shine light in often dark places, to act as a voice for those whose own voice, fears, plights might not be heard or known. To write about the emotions one sometimes feels when doing it, is an anathema and anyway a redundancy. The purpose is to attempt to draw attention to wrongs, not to whinge about the effects they can have - and any way, a private life should be just that. If politicians wish to strip themselves of their dignity and allude to everything from their sex life, to using private grief to gain sympathy votes, those with a shred of self-respect do not wish to emulate them. Here, I am breaking my taboo, for a reason.

Over the last several weeks I have again researched in depth, invasion's atrocities in Iraq, unearthing the unthinkable, switching off emotion and reading of terror, torture, monstrous wickednesses, word after sickening word. Then, Fallujah revisited (1) with document after document revealing the depth of the darkest depravities towards others, which can be plumbed, by "some mother's son" - or daughter. Indeed, some child's father or mother, able to shoot the children, toddlers, babies of others, in cold blood, drive over them in tanks, leaving the pathetic remains to be eaten by stray dogs.

Photographs viewed have included many which even hardened investigators have deemed: "too disturbing to view." This is not a view I hold. If family members who have survived, emergency workers (when not incinerated by U.S., troops themselves) medical staff, if not shot, imprisoned, tortured, or tied up with a bag over their head) can view, identify, bury with love and respect - or in the case of medical staff, carefully photograph, and note time, location of finding, then number, wrap and retain for a period, before burial, hoping a relative will claim the charred, mutilated, or worse, remains. It is a duty for those with any "voice", from countries responsible for this first documentable U.S., U.K., genocide of the 21st century, to draw attention to it, in the memory of and in tribute to, the voiceless, nameless, uncounted victims, in the hope that eventually, legal recourse might result.

In fact it was compassion which over came all - bodies and faces burned near beyond recognition, or the eviscerated, the all with the eyes, often, still staring out in a desperate silent plea for help, combined with utter bewilderment. "We have the scumbags on the run", wrote a marine on his website. "We lit them up", wrote another, as many took photographs of these lost souls - and sent them to porn sites in exchange for free viewing. And between the U.S., occupiers (now, surreally, re-branded "advisors" - same car, new paint) and what Hussein al-Alak of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign has called: " the U.S., imposed Vichy government, with their foreign passports ..", who will fight for justice for the Iraqis?

And, as since 1991, this is also a war against the unborn, new born and under fives. After the bodies and the rubble, the gore, blood and limbs, there are the deformities. The fledgling life, born without eyes, brain, with one cyclops eye, with no head, with two heads, with no limbs, or fingers - or too many. A biblical land turned to genetic and ecological Armageddon, for current and future generations, till the end of time. "Mission accomplished", said George W. Bush, in his ridiculous little flying suit, on the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1st May 2003. "Let freedom reign", he scribbled, after the first, corrupt, murderous, corpse-littered "elections". Result: "Let genocide commence."

Continued. . .