So says the gifted and incisive Philippino writer Red Constantino in this piece (scroll down). An excerpt:
"One ghastly day in May, at close to three in the morning, a US helicopter fires its missiles at the village of Mukaradeeb in western Iraq. 'Coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided,' the Pentagon explains later. The target was 'a suspected foreign fighter safe house,' the deputy director of U.S. military operations in Iraq, Gen. Mark Kimmitt, adds.
"Once the smoke peels away from Mukaradeeb, the counting begins. Over 40 people are dead, many of them women and children. It was a wedding party.
"Almost a year earlier, in the early hours of a July morning, the U.S. Air Force pounds the Afghan village of Kararak with bombs. 'Close air support from U.S. Air Force B-52 and AC-130 aircraft struck several ground targets, including anti-aircraft artillery sites that were engaging the aircraft,' explained the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. By the end of the attack, over 40 people are dead -- all of them civilians, many of them children. Another wedding party.
"In Southeast Asia over a hundred years ago, the American annexation of the Philippines has just commenced and the crescendo of carnage is nearing a state of continuous climax. In a humid theater somewhere in the ex-future first republic of Asia, the 11th Cavalry encounters a festive gathering -- another wedding party, of course. The soldiers fire into the throng, kill the bride and two men, and wound another woman and two children. The cursory statement from the Army in response to the atrocity, which explains that 'American troops ran into a beehive of insurgents and responded valiantly with covering fire,' has yet to be discovered. We are certain, however, that it's tucked somewhere in the growing scrapbook of imperial nuptials, the remedy to insatiable greed.
"Till death do us part?
"The exchange of vows under the American boot has been going on for some time now. Everyone is invited, depending on the matrimonial gift one brings. The wedding of avarice with gluttony: imperial groom -- that ugly, muscular, festering wound of a suitor -- seeks and swallows lonely girl, professing love, the good life, and liberty. We don't do torture; we don't occupy; we don't do massacres; we reject Satan and all other evildoers.
"'Those are my principles,' said Groucho Marx. 'If you don't like them, I have others.'
"What a curious thing, today's trends. The rage is Abu Ghraib. The shame of the few 'bad apples' that have sullied the good name of the United States. The Rumsfeld memorandum. The August 2002 memo on 'standards of conduct for interrogation' prepared by the misnamed Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The isolated incidents.
"Yes. The isolated incidents.
"In 1901, in the course of interrogating 'treacherous' Filipinos who did not have the good sense to accept America's seizure of the Philippines, Lieutenant Frederick Arnold and one Sergeant Edwards were accused of torturing Filipino prisoners. Their acts of 'prisoner abuse'? Stripping a young man naked, then subjecting him to the water cure (the essential memory-recovery medication of the occupation army's battle kit and predecessor to today's 'water-boarding'): The prisoner's mouth is forced open to respectfully facilitate down his throat five to ten gallons of water (or whatever his bloated stomach can endure). Once filled up, the interrogators politely step on the prisoner's tummy until the prisoner blurts out the desired information.
"For data validation purposes, the same prisoner is interrogated once more by his American liberators and 'whipped and beaten unmercifully with rattan rods' and 'then strung up by his thumbs.' Efficiency is everything.
"Another feat of the imagination -- before questioning, a strip of skin is cut from a Filipino prisoner's ankle and attached to a piece of wood. Then 'the flesh' is coiled 'with the wood.' Think can-opener."
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