http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/06/09/120.htmlThe last few weeks have seen disastrous news breaking over President George W. Bush's administration like another Hurricane Katrina. This time, though, it's not winds and surging seas but waves of innocent blood overtopping the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates to turn the White House crimson. Report after report of horrific atrocities -- long held back by a levee of lies, fear, obfuscation and the natural confusion of war -- has broken through, flooding the imperial capital with the reeking, corpse-filled backwash of the vast criminal folly committed by its grubby little Caesar.
So great is the stench of moral corruption that even America's corporate media, for so long a simpering handmaiden to the ruling thugs, have been forced to take notice, just as they did, all too briefly, during the Bushist abandonment of New Orleans. New sites of shame have entered the American lexicon: Haditha, Ishaqi, Hamandiya, Samarra -- places where horrors large and small, confirmed and alleged, comprehensible and unfathomable, have marked this beginning of the fourth year of occupation.
Indeed, as the tormented land flails in agony -- racked by civil war, unbounded corruption, religious repression, infrastructure collapse, the violent subjugation of women and all the other evils introduced by Bush's war of aggression -- U.S. forces seem to be gripped by an increasing frenzy of their own. In just the last three months, a string of incidents has seen Iraqi civilians gunned down by U.S. soldiers in outbursts of fury and panic, as Scotland's Sunday Herald reports. The innocent victims include unarmed women (one of them a pregnant woman trying to reach a hospital), infants, children, the elderly and the mentally handicapped. There will be more such killings brought to light as Iraqis, incensed by the Haditha massacre and emboldened by the new government's apparent willingness to confront their colonial overseers, come forth with new allegations.