Assassination Politics
Harold Pinter Nobel Laureate
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We have brought
torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people
and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. How many people
do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than
enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court
of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice... Death in this
context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by
American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They
are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks ...
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive,
out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot,
in different kinds of graves.” |
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