Well, the self appointed chairman of the bush crimes commission, Ramsey Clark, thinks the time has come.
The chilling video came to light because two of the killed Iraqis happened to be Reuters journalists, and because of the heroic effort of a whistleblower inside the Pentagon who leaked the video posted by WikiLeaks.org .
It is difficult to tell from the quality of the de-scrambled black and white video, but there are obviously children in the car. It is also obvious that the US helicopter gunner mistakes the cameraman on the ground with his telephoto lens as a rocket propelled grenade. This kind of mistake is common in war.
The US soldiers are doing what they were trained to do, kill people. They are desensitized to the humanity of the civilians, and make dangerous assumptions about the nature of people on the ground, kill indiscriminately, using overwhelming force. The US Gunner does so with glee and without reason, because the civilians offered no evidence of malicious intent. It is clear that there are no US ground forces in the area, and that the people on the ground are walking around in broad daylight without weapons or cover, as innocent civilians often do.
This is the nature of war, what we need to see every night on the TV news in the USA, but don't. It isn't that the US soldiers are overly cruel or stupid, all soldiers are brainwashed into being so. It isn't that the uneven level of power is unjust, like shooting fish in a barrel, that is what we want from our expensive military. The only 'wrong' truly committed here was the invasion of IRAQ under the false pretenses of WMD and the 'potential' of some future threats. An unnecessary war of conquest.
When we in the USA go out and war on our neighbors, without reason, without proof, and invade them unilaterally (except for the 'coalition of the willing' like Tonga), we are no different than any other empire.
There are two Americas: one is the Christian Nation State, with holy warriors fighting for "God's" against the non-believers who want to destroy our 'way of life', the other is the dying liberal democracy designed by compromise that evolved through slavery to embrace freedom and justice. In today's America there is an internal struggle for the the soul of our nation being waged in the media and in the hearts of our citizens. Who will win? Which America will emerge?
