Bush and Company in the Indian Monkey Trap By Abid Ullah Jan

Bush and Company in the Indian Monkey Trap

By Abid Ullah Jan

Al-Jazeerah, May 23, 2006.

The more we read news reports of continuing butchery in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more we get disappointed. Most of us — from dictators, such as General Musharraf, at the top to the common man in the United States and the Muslim world, have come to believe that there is no option but to submit to the will of Bush and company. The situation, however, is not that simple. I have a simple theory of Bush and company’s dilemma and the dichotomy.

There is a device known as south Indian monkey trap. It is a coconut shell, tethered to a pole and with a hole in the centre. A small fruit or nut is put in it. Monkey will put its hand through the hole, grab hold of the fruit or nut. The hole is small enough that the monkey cannot take its hand out with the closed fist. The monkey is trapped, simply because it is not smart enough to release the nut so that it can escape, usually from certain death. Letting go the fruit can save their life. Usually monkeys don’t.

Bush’s insistence to “stay the course” and the unrepentant Blair’s determination that he would "do it all again" shows that they won’t let the fruit go and are destined to pay the price in the near future. There are great advantages to changing the mind set than facing forced amputation or certain death. The signs are all around us that show that time for Bush, Blair and company to pay the price is fast approaching.

A quick review shows that the unforgettable rhetoric to which the world was subjected soon after the 9/11 attacks, repeatedly threatened: The world will never be the same again. Of course, the world is not the same since then. But what happened on 9/11 and what is happening since then has some serious signs for to ponder about. It would be naive on the part of the U.S. administration and its allies to believe that the world will get away with their criminal acts and mindset despite their setting new records in brutality and barbarism.

The pigheaded insistence of the warlords is pushing the world into becoming a far worse place than what we witness today. Even the most exaggerated crimes of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein together pale by comparison to what the United States and its allies are presently doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thinking that the world will remain the same for the war criminals to remain at large amounts to living in fool’s paradise.

It takes only one military person’s testimony from the U.S. forces to make even the worst barbarians of the human history look like the noble men of human history. Army Ranger, Jessie Macbeth, recently admitted to some war crimes in Iraq, which were ordered from higher up the chain of command. His graphic accounts tell us about the systematic ways in which crimes against humanity are being perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few more bold admissions like this, and the real culprits will have no place to hide.

The “mainstream” media is silent and U.S. officials insist that butchering whole families is not a standard procedure. To expose the real face of modern day barbarians, Jessie Macbeth blows the lid off the real crimes. Macbeth is a former US Army Ranger, who served in Iraq for 16 months before being wounded and ultimately discharged. His squad did night raids, using the same techniques the Marines are accused of, 4 or 5 times a night for many months. In all these raids, the main victims were women and children. Macbeth is one of the few who dared to come out and speak the truth in these words:

“We’d do that like may be in several houses, most of the houses, slaughtering 30, 40 people a night some times, women and children. I didn’t sign up to kill women and children. I was trained in all the rangers school, and 18 months of all that crap, I want the challenge, I want to fight other elite soldiers. I had to go fight kids, and women and innocent people. They don’t know how to fight.”

Macbeth, who is now a member of "Iraq Veterans Against the War," was interviewed for the public access TV show "Indymedia Presents."[1] In this interview Jessie describes butchering whole families, beginning with killing children to make the parents talk. He describes how U.S. soldiers would kick a person’s wife and fondle her to “piss him off.” In his words:

“When we were doing the night raids in the houses, we would pull people out and have them all on their knees and zip-tied. We would ask the man of the house questions. If he didn't answer the way we liked, we would shoot his youngest kid in the head. We would keep going, this was our interrogation. He could be innocent. He could be just an average Joe trying to support his family. If he didn't give us a satisfactory answer, we'd start killing off his family until he told us something. If he didn't know anything, I guess he was SOL.”

Macbeth and other U.S. soldiers have no option but to engage in this kind of butchery. This is by policy and by order from above. Describing an event of butchering another family, Macbeth recounts:

“One time over there, man. There was this family. Its after we raided a house. We didn’t see them at first and this lady, she was holding her kids, three kids. She was holding them. They were young, like one was I think about an year old, a little older than my own son. And a couple of them like may be five or seven, I don’t know. She was holding on them. One of them children was hurt. She was sitting there. She was begging me to save her and to save the kids but I didn’t. You know. I wanted to be …I killed them. You know. Because that’s what I had to do. Now that days go by I regret that,…I think about my son….my family, what we are doing over there is wrong…”

He describes one episode where his squad responded to the much-reported incident in Falluja where four U.S. mercenaries were killed and hung from a bridge. Shortly after Iraqis killed the mercenaries, according to Macbeth, his squad of Rangers gunned down Iraqis praying inside a mosque on a holy day, then hung some of the burned bodies from rafters in the mosque, and defaced the mosque with graffiti, saying: “You are not save. Allah can kiss my ass.” In Macbeth’s words:

“Another thing that we did was to go to the mosque. We were order to go to a mosque. This really hurts me a lot man. My nightmares come from this most of the time. We were order to go to a mosque man. This people were doing some kind of late night prayers. They usually don’t do late night prayers. They do it when they have holy days or something. So we infiltrated the mosque ahead of time. We were all posted up there. We were waiting for them to come in. A couple of hundred people, they were praying of all ages, you know, women and men. While in the prayers, we started slaughtering them, started shooting them, taking them out. And then we burned their bodies just like they did to us. We hanged their bodies from the rafters in the mosque. And we’ll write up on the wall, and tell, like you are not saved and got leave here and Allah can kiss my ass, you know, America, and leave some bodies in the streets for the people. ….it is sickening. I think that the ethic part in it. You know. My country trying the same thing that we are fighting against. Now that I look back at it, we are the terrorist. We are terrorizing the country, a whole nation of people who did nothing wrong to us. Iraqis have nothing to do with 9/11 attacks. I didn’t know it then. I know it now.”

Macbeth is one of the 140,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq, who admits: “I didn’t keep count, but I would say by my hands alone probably almost 200 people, you know, that were taken out, by me. That is a rough estimate.” He says that the death count in Iraq given by mainstream is not correct. He believes:

“The death toll of Iraqis is not what they are telling in the news. It is like hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t know that many people could die and could be hidden from the world, you know. I have seen huge ground pits. There were bodies. They were being burned, buried and covered up. How can they hide it from the rest of the world? How can the hide all them deaths, all them innocent people? It’s like a mass genocide on us, our country has become terrorist. That’s why people hate us.”

If the U.S. administration, the pundits in the “mainstream” media, their allies in the non-Muslim world and the puppets in the Muslim world believe that they will remain the same despite their crimes against humanity, they are totally out of their mind like a monkey in the Indian trap. The world will never remain the same without making the unknown culprits behind 9/11 and the known culprits behind the Iraqi and Afghan occupation pay the price. The military might and the “mainstream” media’s covering the truth will never sustain these crimes against humanity for too long.

Many fascists and barbarians of the past were under the same misconception and trapped in their respective Indian traps in their age. We also know that all of them have paid the price one way or the other. The only problem this time around is that along with the guilty, many of the seemingly non-guilty are set to pay a much higher price than before. The reason in Macbeth’s view is: “Our government doesn’t care. Most of our people doesn’t care.” He is right but mild in his concern. In fact, most of the people share the same monkey-mindset and still defend words and deeds of the modern day fascists in the West and their stooges in the Muslim world. This confirms that time for Bush, Blair and company to pay the price is well at hand. The world will never remain the same for the fascists to continue their crimes against humanity.

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[1] His story is available here: www.peacefilms.org. and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13140.htm

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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