22 November 04
Today’s rant was inspired by a picture posted on my new favorite website. It’s a picture of an American tank driving by a row of dead Iraqis. It’s not gory or close-up, but it’s a real picture of real dead people, so you may just want to take my word for it. That said, here it is.
The guy on the right is wearing handcuffs. Take a moment and try to figure out why he’s both cuffed and dead.
Perhaps he was fighting our troops and was killed, sans handcuffs. Then there was some reason to put handcuffs on him. Perhaps the handcuffs make a cool sound when they lock and some soldier needed an excuse to hear it. Perhaps when they were moving the bodies off the road, the guy’s arms were flopping all around and it was just easier to restrain the arms so it didn’t take four people to carefully carry him to the softer grass.
Or it’s crazy theory number 2. That he was handcuffed before somebody shot him. Who shot him? Maybe the guy in the big tank thing. I acknowledge it’s just a theory, but this looks like a war crime. Not sure what rule it violates, but it may have something to do with not shooting prisoners of war. (Okay, maybe it’s not so much a war as a ‘kill lots of people near the oil fields for no reason’-thing, but that’s a different rant.)
Why are there so many war crimes surfacing when our army is so well-trained, well-educated and disciplined? Simple! The powers-that-be followed my ‘Easy 1-2-3 War Crime Checklist’!
* Train several hundred thousand people how to kill legitimate bad guys.
* Tell them that there actually are legitimate bad guys.
* Fail to tell them that most of the legitimate bad guys are dead or don’t exist.
(That would be counter-productive.)
* Give them lots and lots of giant guns.
* Encourage them to shoot things: sand people, wounded sand people, POWs…
* Put them in a desert full of things they don’t like being around.
* Make them aware they’re not going home with both their life and their limbs.
* Get them to destroy a sovereign government for a good cause.
* Let them figure out that the cause was bupkis.
* Encourage the strange sand people to fight your soldiers.
(Do this while wearing a sand person getup. Remember to make clicking noises.)
* Tell the soldiers that the sand people are organized.
* Fail to tell them that the sand people organizers are dead.
(That would be counter-productive.)
* Still following this checklist? I’m amazed. I didn’t think there’d be anybody who was that big of an a-hole against humanity. Congratulate yourself with a bag of pretzels.
Eh, well maybe it’s not so good of an idea. Maybe we should reduce our war crime rate to around one a day. This is getting (dare I say) a little unnecessary.
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Non-related thought… The tempting reader(s) with the comment thing without actually implementing comments might be as useful as a gimmick as not providing months or years to my dates. It might be a good idea to never actually add comment support. If you feel strongly one way or another, feel free to comment.