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: military
i was reading about the new Bryan Singer movie about the July 20 Plot against Hitler, and i found this out: a November 1943 allied bombing destroyed a truckload of new winter uniforms which were to be personally inspected by Hitler. Axel von dem Bussche was to have demonstrated them for Hitler, with two live grenades in the pockets for the purpose of a suicide-bomb assassination, on the very next day.
Oops!
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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.”
Looks like the Army may get its way: Rumsfeld is quitting a disgraceful failure. The man who made Saddam Hussein is finally leaving.
These are good times, indeed!
Former CIA chief Robert Gates may be taking over. I’d like to think that any human being (or chimpanzee, for that matter) could do the job of U.S. Secretary of Defense better than Donald Rumsfeld has, but I’m not counting my chickens until they botch the war in Iraq further. Kind of feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop in a way, doesn’t it?
Scientists Take Step Toward Invisibility
Dr. [David R.] Smith warned against getting ahead of the day’s announcement and envisioning the disappearing Romulan warbirds of “Star Trek†on the horizon. The work “is really a scientific explanation,†he said, adding, “Whether it’s useful is always a question.â€Creating a cloaking device in the visible spectrum would be vastly more complex, he said, since the device would have to warp all of the wavelengths of light. The chance of creating such a device is “dim,†he said, but, “The theory doesn’t prevent it from an electromagnetic point of view.â€
A real invisibility cloak? Wizard!
“Our cloak allows a concealed volume, plus the cloak, to appear to have properties similar to free space when viewed externally,†Professor David Smith, of Duke University, said. “The cloak deflects microwave beams so they flow around a ‘hidden’ object, making it appear almost as if nothing were there at all. The waves’ movement is similar to river water flowing around a smooth rock.â€
Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)
[youtube]uqxmPjB0WSs[/youtube]
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NORAD 9/11 tapes
Listen to these 9/11 tapes from NORAD’s NEAD base for chills. Read the whole story of how the effort to quell the 9/11 attacks was doomed from the beginning by faulty communications and a military that was sadly outmanned, overwhelmed, and ultimately outgunned. From Vanity Fair. Chilling, terrifying stuff. The candor, and humanity, on these tapes is stone-cold real.
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link apeshit
National Film Board of Canada: 50 animated shorts – excellent stuff!
Dr. Miracles – short film. Completely juvenile, and hilarious. ER gone badly weird.
This Flash “mind reader” seems spooky at first – until you figure out how it works (but do try it first, following the site’s instructions): Notice that the symbols repeat. Also notice how one number may have different symbols when you repeat the process. Then, notice that you can’t just pick a symbol, you HAVE to do the math. NOW… try this: Do the math for 5 different numbers. Do you see a pattern? They’ll all be the same symbol! So no matter what number you pick, if you do the math and pick the correct symbol, it will ALWAYS be right!
Bizarre fish with human-like teeth caught in Texas lake. (Not just human… British.)
Speaking of which… catfish, um, really get this big?!
Bandai’s hilariously weird “God-Jesus” robot toy from the 1980s.
Experiments in the Revival of Dead Organisms. Fucking creepy. Found via Grey Lodge Podcasting Company’s YouTube link dump.
Mazen Kerboj, musician and artist, blogs from ground zero in Lebanon. Check out his improv piece, Starry Night, during which you can hear bombs and air $raid$ sirens in the background. Beautiful and unsettling, all at once. Read his blog and pass it along. Chilling. I hope that he stays safe. He seems like a good man. He says things like:
“we know you are with us. we know you are seeing us. we know you hear the fucking bombs we are hearing. we know you worry for us. but don’t. because you know we are tough guys. you know that we’ll [survive?] this shit. you know that we survived massacre and we’ll do it again today. you know we’ll see each other soon. keep in touch and stay with us.”
People get ready: all this Middle East violence is giving the End-Timers a serious hard-on for the Rapture. A sicker bunch of fuckwits probably do not exist. Zealots are fools. It is religious zeal that has got the world into the mess that it’s in now. How do you spell worldwide suicide? Z-E-A-L-O-T-R-Y.
Zealots of the world: fuck you. I do hope that you all die the vainglorious deaths that you ridiculous, ignorant fools are all hoping for. So GO APESHIT FOR JESUS/MOSES/MUHAMMED! Kill each other to bloody, pulpy fucking smithereens and let the rest of us get on with our futures!
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On this day…
130 years ago, a genocidal maniac was finally put down. Long may Gen. George Armstrong Custer rest.
NDNs pwnd U sucka!!1!!
I can see it now: “But sir! Nobody told us we couldn’t torture & humiliate suspected enemy combatants!”
Pentagon to omit Geneva ban from new army manual: report – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – New policies on prisoners being drawn up by the Pentagon will reportedly omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment.”Citing unidentified but knowledgeable military officials, the Los Angeles Times said the step would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift by the US government away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
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Today in 1989…
Today i went over to see my grandfather. He seems confused, as usual, and asking him a question requires waiting around for at least a minute before he figures out how to say the answer, if he remembers what the question was at that time. So that’s nice and depressing.
But a really weird thing happened. We were sitting there, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, when suddenly a little toy Douglas C-47 (a metal/plastic replica of the troop carrier my grandfather was in through all four Market Garden missions during WWII; about 3 inches long, something like this one) that was sitting on top of the television set came flying off and crashed onto the carpet about 5 feet away, right at my feet.
…As in, “WTF”!
I tested it to see how far it would bounce if it had just fallen off on its own due to the vibrations of the television. It landed directly in front of the television, bouncing a few inches at the most. That’s not five feet, i thought to myself.
My dad and Charlie (sp?), the caretaker for the night, said that this had happened before. She said that she herself hadn’t seen it happen, but was extraordinarily nonplussed. She told me that Jennifer, another caretaker, was sitting on the floor in front of the sofa (just about where i was when it happened tonight), when the exact same thing happened.
…As in, “WTF”!?
And then i remembered that my friend Tony once stayed over, not terribly long after my grandmother had died, and had stayed in her room. He reported the next day that he had seen someone in the room with him. I told him at the time that, in the darkness, and in his drunken state, it had probably only been his own reflection in a mirror. He vehemently denied any possibility of that. My friend Tony, who’s pretty skeptical about anything even remotely implausible…
So… now what? I’m a skeptic, goddammit! I do not believe in ghosts! How am i supposed to reconcile this event with reason? I mean, there simply MUST be a logical explanation for this, other than that my grandmother is haunting their house.
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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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USAF ignores FOIA requests
Freedom Of Information Act requests are apparently not worth much to the US Air Force. “Too little, too late,” says Federal Judge of USAF’s new (and, erm… unfunded) web-based request-tracking system.
[U.S. District Judge Rosemary] Collyer found that the Air Force had no defense – or essentially conceded – that it had failed to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act for up to 18 years in at least one case. The Air Force also ignored appeals of its denials of access to records for up to nine years, she said. …In a 12-page opinion, Collyer chastised the Air Force for its “dismal record” in responding to requests by the [National Security Archive], whose collection of documents is used by historians, academics and other researchers interested in national security.