In an absolutely vile miscarriage of justice, Frank Wuterich, the Marine sergeant who instructed his soldiers to massacre civilian Iraqis, could receive the maximum sentence of three months of “confinement” for the 24 he and henchmen slaughtered.

Is this really how this country treats war crimes? But then again, look at how the Obama administration failed to prosecute members of the Bush administration for their war crimes…

More on this war criminal here.

Robin Munro’s account of the Tiananmen Square crackdown for The Nation last year wonders what is the importance of a Tiananmen Square “massacre” that didn’t actually happen in Tiananmen Square, or rather, that the bulk of the killings of workers (and not students) happened in Beijing’s suburbs of Muxidi, Nanchizi, and Liubukou? He writes:

A “revisionist” trend currently emerging in some Western circles maintains that there was no massacre. That is preposterous. A massacre did take place—but not in Tiananmen Square, and not predominantly of students. The great majority of those who died (perhaps as many as a thousand in all) were workers, or laobaixing (“common folk,” or “old hundred names”), and they died mainly on the approach roads in western Beijing. Several dozen people died in the immediate environs of the square and a few in the square itself. But to speak of that as the real massacre distorts the citywide nature of the carnage and diminishes the real political drama that unfolded in Tiananmen Square.

Munro’s gripping account dismantles some the mythos surrounding the events that transpired from mid-April to early June of 1989, and shows Western media’s primary role in constructing a false narrative of what happened that obscures the real threat to the Communist regime’s stranglehold on power then and now. Munro offers:

Journalism may be only the rough draft of history, but if left uncorrected it can forever distort the future course of events. Nothing serves the cause of China’s students and laobaixing better than the unvarnished truth, for it speaks eloquently of their heroism and of the regime’s cowardice and brutality. But Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. They have also distracted attention from the main target of the continuing repression: the mass movement that eventually superseded the students’ protest actions. The credit for inspiring the movement and upholding the banner of nonviolence will always belong to the students. But only by refocusing attention on the laobaixing will we understand why China, a year later, continues to be ruled by the jackboot, the rifle and the thought police.

Read the full piece here.

[via:The Nation]