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This article appeared in the July 24, 2003 edition of CounterPunch.com

Call It What It Really Is: Sick

A Nation of Assassins
By Douglas Valentine

What do you call it when George W. Bush, without provocation and based on false pretenses, invades a foreign country? Say he makes up a Big Lie and claims that country has Weapons of Mass Destruction, when he knows damn well that it doesn’t. What do you call it?
 
What do you call it when George W. Bush sends an army to invade, conquer and destroy a foreign nation, without any attempt to negotiate a surrender? And what do you call it when, after illegally killing tens of thousands of innocent people, he puts multimillion dollar bounties on the heads of that nation’s leaders. What do you call it when, on Bush’s orders, the CIA turns to collaborators and spies to track these leaders down, and then corners them and blows them away in their homes, in their own country, like they did to Saddam Hussein’s sons?
 
Do you call it what the Israelis, who have done it hundreds of times, call it? They call it a targeted kill.
 
What would you call it if Saddam Hussein hunted down and killed George Bush's daughters in Texas? You’d call it cold-blooded murder, wouldn’t you?
 
And don't even ask if targeted kills and cold-blooded murders are legal or moral. Who the hell cares? When it’s done to someone else, it’s popular and fun.
 
Assassination is so popular, televangalist Pat Robertson even called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In the name of God, one presumes.
 
Assassination is so much fun, you can even find death cards on the Internet, naming the people that Bush plans to kill in Iraq. It's like a videogame, or that old Steve McQueen show, Wanted Dead or Alive. Bush, being a closet homicidal maniac, really gets into it too; "Bring 'em on," he said, playing the role of Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel; and since then a couple of GIs have gotten killed every day. But what the hell, it's a volunteer army, they’re mostly poor slobs, and it isn't you or me. So they die for Bush's vainglory. Who cares? It's the vicarious thrill that counts.
 
Back when the CIA was assassinating foreign leaders all over the world, in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, they secretly liked to call assassination Executive Action. Those were the bad old days, when the CIA had to secretly go about its dirty business of mass murder. Back then they had to resort to euphemisms to get the job done. In the Republic of Vietnam, first the CIA called the mass murder of its enemies, in their own country, elimination. But that sounded too harsh, so it changed the term to neutralize.
 
In 1967 the CIA created the infamous Phoenix Program to neutralize (which meant to hunt down through informants and then kill, capture, torture and detain indefinitely) a revolving door of some 70,000 members of Communist and Nationalist insurgents, and anyone supporting them politically or administratively, in their own country.
 
The United States government admits that the CIA killed some 25,000 people through the Phoenix Program. It successfully and gleefully neutralized some hundreds of thousands
 
Bush and the CIA know how to do it and they're ready to cast the Phoenix spell worldwide.
 
We have it from Richard Perle (one of the corrupt cabal that rules the White House, and makes Israeli policy American policy in cahoots with the Bush oil régime, whose loyalty lies not to the American public but to its own self-enrichment) that America will not leave Iraq as long as some 30,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, in Perle's words, remain active.
 
So now maybe they're gonna change the term from assassination to inactivating?
 
By inactivating, Bush, Perle, Wolfowitz and the other members of their criminal régime mean the planned mass murder of some 30,000 Iraqis in Iraq. If they do it the way they did it in Vietnam, they also plan to inactivate the families and friends of these 30,000 people.
 
You can't terrorize insurgents into submission unless you do it this way, as we learned from the Phoenix Program, and as the Israelis have taught us so well. You have to terrorize everyone. Just like the Israelis have terrorized the Palestinians into a state of submission.
 
The newspaper and TV commentators applaud this experiment in targeted kills and mass murder Iraqi as boosting the morale of the American occupation army.
 
Just today the headlines hailed the inactivating of Saddam Hussein sons as a righteous act that was more than morally justifiable, but something akin to Divine justice.
 
No one is astounded, because the vast majority of Americans were ethically inactivated a long time ago, through 50 years of government propaganda. In order to enjoy their SUVs and cell phones, they will rejoice while George W. Bush, in his role as God Almighty, cuts a swath of righteous savagery through the world, mass murdering everyone he and the cabal designate as their personal enemies, just like George W. Bush, all by his little lonesome, tried convicted and sentenced Saddam Hussein and his family to death, and then went out and killed them.
 
From now on, Bush alone chooses who lives or dies, and no one can stop him. It is the One Commandment that the American empire is based upon. And that's how we became a nation of assassins, void of conscience.
 
Call it Apotheosis by the Divine Right of Execution.
 
Or call it what it really is: sick.

Douglas Valentine, is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968, was published in May 2004 by Verso. The Strength of the Wolf, has received the Choice Academic Excellence Award and is being published in Russia. The sequel, The Strength of the Pack, is being published by the University Press of Kansas in December 2005.

Article © 2003 Douglas Valentine
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