Call It What It Really Is: Sick
A Nation of Assassins
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE, Counterpunch, July 24, 2003

What do you call it when George W. Bush, without provocation and based on false pretenses, sends an army to invade a foreign nation; and then, without any attempt to negotiate a surrender, effect an arrest, or put this nation's leaders on trial and present evidence of their crimes, instead puts multimillion dollar bounties on their heads, relies on collaborators and spies to track them down, and then corners them and blows them away in their homes, in their own country?

Do you call it what the Israelis, who lately have done it hundreds of times, call it?

A targeted kill?

What would you call it if Saddam Hussein hunted down and killed George Bush's daughters in Texas?

Cold-blooded murder?

How about calling this sort of behavior assassination?

Why call it anything? A rose by any other name, right?

And don't even ask if targeted kills, cold blooded murders, and assassinations are legal or moral. Who the hell cares?

They're popular. It's so much fun, you can even find death cards on the Internet, naming the people that Bush plans to kill in Iraq. It's like a videogame, or that old Steve McQueen show, Wanted Dead or Alive.

Bush really gets into it too; "Bring 'em on," he said, playing the role of Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel; and since then a couple of GIs have gotten killed every day. But what the hell, it's a volunteer army, and it isn't you or me. So they die for Bush's vainglory. Who cares? It's the vicarious thrill that counts. [...]

- posted by ARYABHATT @ 9:10 pm