Former U.S. soldier droppin’ some Truth about this bullshit war in Iraq. Do your self and your conscience and your country and your fellow human beings a favor by watching this and then doing something about it.
Tag: Iraq
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The Highest Cost of War
If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.
I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.
Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.
That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.
The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.
I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.
It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.
The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.
In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”
“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”
“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”
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Baghdad, With Trenches
Iraqis Plan to Ring Baghdad With Trenches
So that’s what the future of democracy looks like! I can hear it now: “Thank you for bringing democracy to our formerly sovereign nation, Americans!”
No wonder the entire world hates the United States. No wonder at all.
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random commentary
- In case you’re thinking about voting for former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2008, think again. The guy is a regular Hermann Goering. Read the entry to find out more about that sick, twisted sunofabitch, with no respect for people (oooh, it’s the underdogs that he hates most!) or civil liberties whatsoever. He’s nothing more than a thug with a pretty grin – but watch out, America! Those teeth are sharp.
- As of 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available, the state of Texas has killed 666 people. And some of them may not have been guilty at all. Death penalty propagandists always like to say that there’s no conclusive evidence that an innocent human being has ever been executed. Today, the New York Times tells a different story of one of those: Cameron T. Willingham, who was executed two years ago, ostensibly for an arson in which his three daughters died. Apparently, the fire was very likely only an accident all along.
- See if you can guess the plot of the story!
“Soldier killed detainee in violation of ROE“; “Soldier killed detainee while handcuffed”; “1 strangulation found outside isolation unit”; “1 blunt force trauma and choking, died during interrogation” (there are three of these); “Soldier drowned detainee, body not found”; and “died sleeping after interrogation.” (source)To this day, no U.S. agent has been prosecuted for “torture” or “war crimes”:
“The heaviest sentence imposed on anyone to date for a torture-related death while in U.S. custody is five months — the same sentence that you might receive in the U.S. for stealing a bicycle. In this case, the five-month sentence was for assaulting a 22-year-old taxi-driver who was hooded and chained to a ceiling while being kicked and beaten until he died,” said Goering. [emphasis mine -ed.]
“While the government continues to try to claim that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was mainly due to a few ‘aberrant’ soldiers, there is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of the torture and ill-treatment stemmed directly from officially sanctioned procedures and policies — including interrogation techniques approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,” said Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International’s Americas Program Director. (source) - Douglas Rushkoff has had it with religion (and i don’t blame him!):
“When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual – a community event or an excuse to get together and not work – it doesn’t really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped.“Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation’s ability to behave in a rational way, and – given our weapons capabilities – posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world.”
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link roundup
from the Missing Link files: 375 million year old Fishapod fossil discovered. A fish with a freaking neck. Oh, and finger-like bones attached to wrist-like bones. Fuck you, Creationistas! (See also: Ray Troll’s related artwork)
“Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age”, a fabulous piece by Josh Ellis (see also: video of Ed Grothus’ Black Hole tour)
SXSW video coverage. Sweet.
Big Brother is (or will soon be) watching you, via SkySeer. Already this drone camera-plane is in use in L.A. skies.
Remember this, GWB? “Leaks of classified information are bad things. We’ve got too much leaking in Washington… I want to know who the leakers are.” Does anyone have a mirror for Mister Bush?
It’s All in the Mind, man: psychedelics research.
Israeli soldier murders journalist. From a related BBC News story:
“The inquest has heard that Mr Miller approached an armoured personnel carrier, carrying a white flag which he shone a torch on, calling out that he was a British journalist and wearing a helmet marked TV. He was shot in the neck, unprotected by his body armour.He had been attempting to ask for permission to leave the area.”
So, yeah, just keep on supporting Israel, all you Left Behind-reading end-times obsessed know-nothing Revelationist fuckwits.