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Seen against, and as part of, the vast historical canvass of U.S. racist-imperial slaughter, the monumental US crimes in Southeast Asia that John Kerry hinted at in his 1971 testimony are part of a larger story that renders self-delusional many Americans' notion that their nation-state is some sort of great exceptional moral and ethical city on a global hill.

It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the vicious, often explicitly genocidal "homeland" assaults on native-Americans, which set foundational racist and national-narcissist patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery, disproportionately directed at non-European people of color.

The deletion of the real story of the so-called "battle of Washita" from the official Seventh Cavalry history given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri massacre is no small detail.

Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US savagery at Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the Philippines, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Korea, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of which (and all before) has recently encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's a vicious circle of recurrent violence, well known to mental health practitioners who deal with countless victims of domestic violence living in the dark shadows of the imperial homeland's crippling, stunted, and itself-occupied social and political order.

Power-mad US forces deploying the latest genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that white North American "pioneers" tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, "Apache," "Blackhawk," and "Comanche" helicopters) are walking in bloody footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and plains to the leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt acknowledged as America's "original inhabitants."

Racist imperial carnage and its denial, like charity, begin at home. Those who deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their offenses in the future as long as they retain the means and motive to do so.

It is folly, however, for any nation to think that it can stand above the judgments of history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for what Ward Churchill calls "imperial arrogance and criminality." Every new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold numbers of anti-imperial resistance fighters, ready to die and eager to use the latest available technologies and techniques to kill representatives – even just ordinary citizens – of what they see as an American Predator state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable return of US power to the grounds of earth and history.

As that fall accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful choice, full of potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity and the earth.

It will accept its fall with relief and gratitude, asking for forgiveness, and making true reparation at home and abroad, consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of native-American ancestry, calls "the realities of [its] national history and the responsibilities that history has bequeathed": goodbye American Exceptionalism and Woodrow Wilson's guns.

Or Americans and the world will face the likely alternative of permanent imperial war and the construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state, perpetuated by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance.

This savage barbarism of dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will be defended in the last wagon-train instance by missiles and bombs loaded with radioactive materials wrenched from lands once freely roamed by an immeasurably more civilized people than those who came to destroy.

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you can show the maimed, the injured, the mutilated, the dead, the humiliated and the tortured, but you've got to blur out nudity

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Iranian radio accused the western media of showing pictures from the video for propaganda purposes.


"As a result, the issue of Iraqi prisoners' torture has been totally ignored by these media," the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran said.


"The American authorities too, have entered this news-making propaganda. These authorities have described the killing method of the American national as loathsome, and implicitly indicated that the American troops were justified to torture Iraqi prisoners."


Arab media reacted cautiously to the execution, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.





Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired edited snippets of the video. "The news story itself is strong enough," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. "To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency."

Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading Wednesday. An editor said the news came too late for the paper to confirm the video's authenticity with the U.S. government.

Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report the execution at all.

Five of Kuwait's seven dailies published the report with photographs on their front pages. The other two published brief reports. The Al-Siyassah daily ran two photos, including one with a masked militant holding up Berg's severed head.

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