Islam Knows War Is Depraved

Update: Greenwald: We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment:

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to 'look to the future.'

We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions 'inflame anti-American sentiment' is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would 'inflame anti-American sentiment.' It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

---
Do not look at the pictures below - they are disgusting and repulsive to any civilized human being. [ I took them down, they make me feel sick. AfterDowningStreet keeps them to remind people that war is not a video game.]

But they make a point: That War, is awful and depraved.

Understand that President Obama's sub-moronic statement - "(T)he most direct consequence of releasing (the Abu Ghraib photos), I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger" - is ludicrous in the face of the 1,000,000s killed, wounded and traumatized for life in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Who wrote that for Obama?

Put aside the anti-democratic nature of secrecy and domestic government censorship for a moment, the families of the people we killed would gladly be tortured if they could bring back their children, their brothers, their fathers. Hey, these guys are actual human beings.

To reduce it to political terms President Obama, think of war as a bad PR strategy, a rude thing to do to your fellow human beings in other countries and something that inflames anti-American opinion. War supports the message that we don't like you.

What the hell do you think war does for anti-American opinion?