<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->US had decided to give political Asylum to 7000 Iraqies per year.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->If they had properly rebuilt Iraq (made it better than when Hussein was in charge), this would not be required.
In the end, no one actually cares about the Iraqis, it was all merely invade-and-goodbye.
http://xtramsn.co.nz/news/0,,11965-6989320,00.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Soldier Gets 100 Years For Rape, Murder</b>
23/02/2007 07:33 PM
Reuters
A US soldier who pleaded guilty to raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her family was sentenced to 100 years in a military prison, the US Army said on Thursday.
Sgt. Paul Cortez, 24, was also given a dishonorable discharge under a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors prior to a court-martial that spanned three days, an Army spokesman said.
Cortez, of Barstow, California, was not eligible for the death penalty under his plea agreement, accepted by the court on Wednesday.
Col. Stephen R. Henley, the military judge, found Cortez guilty of conspiracy to commit rape, four counts of felony murder, rape, housebreaking and violating a general order.
Under terms of his plea agreement, Cortez agreed to testify against the three others still facing prosecution in the case.
During the court-martial, a sometimes emotional Cortez recounted how he and his companions drank whiskey, played cards and plotted to attack the family at Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. The group poured kerosene on the girl's body and lit her on fire in an attempt to cover up the crime.
Cortez testified that Spc. James Barker, who also pleaded guilty in the case, and a since-discharged soldier, Pvt. Steven Green, chose the family to attack because there was only one man in the house and it was an "easy target."
Once at the house, Green, the suspected ringleader, took the girl's mother, father and little sister into a bedroom, Cortez said, while he and Barker took the teenager, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, to the living room, where they took turns raping her.
He said Green, who has been charged as a civilian and awaits trial in a Kentucky jail, shot the girl's family in another room and then raped the teenager.
The deaths of the girl and her family outraged Iraqis and ratcheted up tension in the war zone.
Barker pleaded guilty in November and was sentenced to 90 years in a military prison. Green was discharged from the Army for a "personality disorder."
Two other soldiers are accused in the case, Pvt. Jesse Spielman and Pvt. Bryan Howard. (Additional reporting by John Sommers at Ft. Campbell)<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->So, one could argue that at least the vile criminal who raped a little girl and then murdered her and her family is getting life imprisonment. But wait, why does he get sentenced for life, when similar crimes by US soldiers in Japan and Vietnam have gone unpunished (see below)?
It's unlikely that it's because the Iraqi girl was christoislamic and so deserves more respect, whilst the Japanese and Vietnamese girls are Shinto and/or Buddhist heathens and don't matter.
I think the reason is merely that US army 'mistakes' in Iraq will have greater repercussions on their troops stationed in the country and on the US (also US military actions in Iraq are more transparent because of some media outlets). So that's possibly why this soldier is punished properly, but not those who committed the same crimes amongst the heathen Asians.
The following is not for sensitive people.
(1) <b>Japan:</b>
<i>Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire</i> by Chalmers Johnson
I think I had saved the following reviews from Amazon several years ago. (Confirmed. These are Amazon reviews, and they're still there.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->This no-holds-barred indictment of what Johnson calls the post-Cold War American "global empire" is not for the faint of heart. Among the opening images is a plastic bag containing three pairs of bloodied men's underwear gathered as evidence from the brutal 1995 gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two American marines and an American sailor, a crime that was officially passed off as an aberration but may qualify more accurately as another move in the endgame of, in Johnson's astringent phrase, "stealth imperialism." In his highly critical appraisal of the global U.S. military presence, Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and prolific commentator on Japan and Asia, focuses on the effects of "blowback," a term coined by the CIA to denote the unintended consequences of policies that were in many cases kept secret from the American public. From anti-Chinese pogroms carried out by U.S.-trained soldiers in Indonesia to the viciously suppressed 1980 pro-democracy demonstration in Kwangju, South Korea, Johnson examines the fallout from what he sees as American "economic colonialism." Detailed assessments of American engagement in Japan, Korea and China are coupled with closer-to-home observations on the liquidation of American jobs in places such as Birmingham, Ala., and Pittsburgh, the latter yet another consequence of the massive U.S. trade deficit with the countries of East Asia. Brazenly spending ever-swollen defense budgets, Johnson argues, the Pentagon is fueling an "antiglobalization time bomb" that could blow up at any moment. His chilling conclusion--backed by copious and livid detail--is that a nation reaps precisely what it sows. (Apr.) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Another review: <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Johnson explains America's imperialist influence in Japan, in particular, the notorious rape case in Okinawa in 1995. That was the most publicized case. <b>In fact assault and harassment of Okinawans is commonplace. There's a clause in the U.S. forces occupation treaty that gives the U.S. military accused of crimes the right not to hand over guilty soldiers to the local authorities.</b> It's kind of like the diplomatic immunity ambassadors in foreign countries get. (Remember Lethal Weapon 2?)<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
(2) <b>Vietnam</b>
http://modelminority.com/article74.html
<i>The Nature of G.I. Racism</i>
(VC stands for 'Viet Cong')
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Testimony of Jamie Henry, Third Marine Division, in Detroit, January 31, 1971:</b>
Okay, what I have to say is a direct result of the policy by the United States Army in Vietnam and what I'm going to detail was reported to the United States Army CID [Civilian Irregular Defense]. I made a full statement to them. I gave names, dates, grid coordinates, etc., etc., etc. We have my signing of the statement on film with the two CID agents, who are really--but we have it on film so they can't deny it and it's witnessed, etc., etc., etc. So there's no way that they can deny this. This statement was given to the CID over a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, and I'm sure they'll come out with something to say about it--why they haven't done anything about it. They'll probably say it's a lie, but it has been corroborated. I just want to give a brief account of what happened. On August 8th our company executed a ten year old boy. We shot him in the back with a full magazine M-16. Approximately August 16th to August 20th, I'm not sure of the date, a man was taken out of his hootch sleeping, was put into a cave, and he was used for target practice by a lieutenant, the same lieutenant who had ordered the boy killed. Now they used him for target practice with an M-60, an M-16, and a .45. After they had pretty well shot him up with the 60, they backed off aways to see how good a shot they were with a .45 because it's such a lousy pistol. By this time, he was dead. On February 8th, this was after a fire fight and we had lost eight men, on February 8th, we found a man in a spider hole. He was of military age. He spoke no English, of course. We did not have an interrogator, which was one of the problems in the fields. He was asked if he were VC and, of course, he kept denying it, "No VC, No VC." He was held down under an APC [armored personnel carrier] and he was run over twice--the first time didn't kill him. About an hour later we moved into a small hamlet, this was in I Corps [the northermost military region in South Vietnam] it was in a Marine AO [area of operations], we moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS--Viet Cong Suspects--and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them.
The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it. When the captain told the lieutenant this, the lieutenant rang off. I got up and I started walking over to the captain thinking that the lieutenant just might do it because I had served in his platoon for a long time. As I started over there, I think the captain panicked, he thought the lieutenant might do it too, and this was a little more atrocious than the other executions that our company had participated in, only because of the numbers. But the captain tried to call him up, tried to get him back on the horn, and he couldn't get ahold of him. As I was walking over to him, I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, <b>which was pretty SOP [standard operating procedure]</b>, and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that. Now there was a lieutenant who heard this over the radio in our company--he had stayed back with some mortars--he, when we got back to our night location, he was going half way out of his mind because he had just gotten there, relatively. He was one of these--I don't know, I guess he was naive or something, believed in the old American ideal. He was going nuts. He was going to report it to everybody. After that day he calmed down and the next day he didn't say anything about it. We got in a wretched fire fight the next day and the whole thing was just sort of lost in the intensity of the war. Now when I got out of the Army an article was written about this and we got in contact with the lt. who was mad and he denied even remembering the company commander's name, which is a bunch of _____ because he's a lifer and he doesn't want to jeopardize his chances for getting promoted, etc., etc. I don't want to go into the details of these executions because the executions are the direct result of a policy. It's the policy that is important.
The executions are secondary because the executions are created by the policy that is, I believe, a conscious policy within the military. Number one, the racism in the military is so rampant. <b>Now you have all heard of the military racism. It's institutionalized; it is policy; it is SOP; you are trained to be a racist.</b> When you go into basic training, you are taught they are gooks and all you hear is, "gook, gook, gook, gook." And once you take the Vietnamese people or any of the Asian people, because the Asian serviceman in Vietnam is the brunt of the same racism, because the GIs over there do not distinguish one Asian from another. They are trained so thoroughly that all Asians become the brunt of this racism. You are trained, "gook, gook, gook," and once the military has got the idea implanted in your mind that these people are not humans, they are subhuman, it makes it a little bit easier to kill 'em. One barrier is removed and this is intentional, because obviously, the purpose of the military is to kill people. And if you're not an effective killer, they don't want you. The military doesn't distinguish between North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilian--all of them are gooks, all of them are considered to be subhuman. None of them are any good, etc. And all of them can be killed and all of them are killed.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->This institutionalised racism in the American army is still there to a large extent, it's what has conditioned US soldiers to view Arabians ('Arabs') as 'rags' or whatever other terms they have for them nowadays. That's why many American soldiers have been caught mistreating and abusing not just the terrorists they've caught, but also regular Iraqis.
Shia and Sunni men kill each other off. Islamic women are no longer under threat of rape/other attack. The women and male moderates remaining deconvert, and become free to raise their children in sane humanity. I like.
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