In my debate review of, “Is Islam a Threat to Modern Society,” I provided citations to prove the above assertion incorrect. To further my response, I would like to provide a complementary quote from Chris Hedges:

The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis, and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. It is we who remain ignorant. Our terror is delivered daily to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. But to us, it is invisible. We do not stand over the decapitated body and eviscerated bodies left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones and fighter jets.

We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression, and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel’s occupied territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a cauldron of hate over time. We are not aware of this very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moments when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And willfully uninformed, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them.

This is a recipe for endless terror.

He continues:

Manning, by providing a window into the truth, opened up the possibility of redemption. She offered hope for a new relationship with the Muslim world, one based on compassion and honesty, on the rule of law, rather than on the cold brutality of industrial warfare. But by refusing to heed the truth that Manning laid before us, by ignoring the crimes committed daily in our name, we not only continue to swell the ranks of our enemies but put the lives of our citizens in greater jeopardy.

Manning showed us through the documents she released to WikiLeaks what all Iraqis know. They have endured hundreds of rapes and murders, along with systematic torture by the military and police of the puppet government we installed. None of the atrocities from the leaked videos and documents were investigated. Manning provided the data showing that between 2004 and 2009 there were at least 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians, and that coalition troops were responsible for at least 195 unreported civilian deaths.

In the “Collateral Murder” video, she allowed us to watch as a US helicopter attacked unarmed civilians in Baghdad and as a US Army tank then crushed one of the wounded lying on the street. The actions of the US military in this one video alone, as law professor Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, violate Article 85 of the First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the targeting of civilians; Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that the wounded be treated; and Article 17 of the First Protocol, which permits civilians to rescue and care for the wounded without being harmed.

These quotes were taken from Chris Hedges’s, Wages of Rebellion, pages 186-188.

and God knows best.