Wake Up!

It’s not unusual for me to be shocked and appalled by our government. I count it as a sign of my own naivete that I am still consistently surprised by the lack of humanity and common decency displayed by the leaders of this country, and, frankly, their coddled constituency. There’s just so much to be enraged over that whenever it’s time to write a column, it’s hard to know where to begin.\nHowever, our military leaders did something so staggeringly vile last week that anyone with eyes couldn’t help but be infuriated. You do have eyes, don’t you? Following some of the bloodiest insurgence activity in Afghanistan since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, a U.S.-led NATO bombing of a compound, which housed both a mosque and a school in Eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, June 17, in pursuit of some important Al-Qaida targets. Despite “credible intelligence” informing them that there were no children present at the school, seven innocent teenagers were murdered in the raid. The perpetrators of the raid claimed ignorance of their presence and attempted to blame the insurgents who “used the children as human shields.”\nWhether the targets were using the children as shields is insignificant at this point. Seven more kids are dead, and it’s our fault. In an age of moles and “Star Wars” surveillance, our government, without a doubt, has the capacity to know better. The Army is claiming bad intelligence, but MSNBC correspondents Keith Olbermann and retired four-star general Wesley Clark have said there is evidence that the military was in fact aware of the presence of kids but determined the targets were high-enough priority to validate their deaths. Do I really need to state what should be obvious?\nThe loss of innocent life, especially children, is never valid, no matter how delicious the target. \nThe definition of a terrorist is generally agreed to be one who targets non-combatants in a fashion of war. If the military strategists responsible for this grave error did, in fact, know about the presence of children, they have made our own servicemen and women into terrorists, and this heinous mistake should be evidence enough that the two American wars in Middle East are horribly off-base.\nThis story came right on the heels of the heartwarming/sickening story of American forces liberating a Romanian-style orphanage for mentally disabled children in Iraq. The servicemen discovered severely malnourished children tied to their beds, lying in their own excrement, mere feet away from fresh clothes and food meant to sustain them. In video clips aired on CNN, the servicemen, visibly disturbed that people would treat children in such a fashion, were overwhelmed with joy at being able to do something so good in a place where things are going to horribly wrong. \nThe fact that a few thousand miles away, a week later, our own service-people were ordered to kill children in pursuit of the enemy puts that into eerie perspective. Are you outraged yet?