The video, which was posted on YouTube and other websites, shows four men in camouflage Marine combat uniforms urinating on three corpses. One of them jokes: “Have a nice day, buddy.” Another makes a lewd joke.
At the Pentagon, Captain John Kirby said the defense department was “deeply troubled” by the video.
“Whoever it is, and whatever the circumstances – which we know is under investigation – it is egregious behavior and unacceptable for a member of the military,” said Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.
US Troops Defile Dead Afghans on Camera
Videos Shows U.S. Marines Urinating On Dead Taliban Fighters
A still image taken January 11, 2012 from an undated YouTube video shows what is believed to be US Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.
On January 15th, 2010, U.S. soldiers in Bravo Company stationed near Kandahar executed an unarmed Afghan boy named Gul Mudin in the village of La Mohammad Kalay. Reports by soldiers at the scene indicate that Mudin was about 15 years old. According to sworn statements, two soldiers – Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes ? staged the killing to make it look like they had been under attack. Ordering the boy to stand still, they crouched behind a mud wall, tossed a grenade at him and opened fire from close range.
These soldiers routinely collected errant weapons and planted them on the bodies of unarmed civilians they killed, in order to frame their victim as enemy combatants. The presence of a “drop weapon” virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill.
Photographs published in March by two magazines – Der Spiegel and Rolling Stone – showed soldiers posing with the bloodied corpse of the Afghan boy they had just killed. The images can be seen below:
Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, the soldiers cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Here they are shown scanning his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.
The soldiers also took photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. In the photos, Morlock grins and gives a thumbs-up sign as he poses with Mudin’s body. Note that the boy’s right pinky finger appears to have been severed. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs reportedly used a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears to cut off the finger, which he presented to Holmes as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.
Holmes poses with Mudin’s body. According to a fellow soldier, Holmes took to carrying Mudin’s severed finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”
Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Capt. Jeremy Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. Back in those days, it seemed like he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident.
Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.
The photos collected by soldiers included many shots of local children, often filed alongside images of bloody casualties. At one point, soldiers in 3rd Platoon talked about throwing candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shooting the children who came running to pick up the sweets.
According to one soldier, members of 3rd Platoon also talked about a scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.”
Gibbs allegedly used a pair of medic’s shears to cut off the finger of at least two Afghan civilians murdered by members of his platoon.
In the process of suppressing the photographs, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In this image, the bodies of two Afghan men have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road.
Columnist – John Sammon Eight heavily armed men dressed in camouflage show up at a door and knock. A servant answers the door.
“Excuse me sir, we’re working our way through college. Would you like to buy an encyclopedia?”
The servant disappears into a hallway and a bearded man appears. Bin laden.
“Would you like to buy an encyclopedia, the Saudi updated version?” the college student asks.
Bin laden nods. He reaches into his robe like he’s going for a gun.
“Get interested in this.” The college students open fire.
BLAM!
“Take that!”
BLAM!
“How about another?”
BLAM!
“How about one on the layaway plan?”
BLAM!
“Hey Marcel, watch this.”
BLAM!
“You want leaded or unleaded?”
BLAM!
“One Lump or Two?”
BLAM!
Evidently, Bin laden thought he could out-draw eight Navy Seals who already had their guns out. It would have been nice if he could have been taken alive to stand trial and demonstrate the rule of law Americans like to say they’re so fond of.
Thus opens a new phase in the soon-to-be 25th unresolved year in the war on terror, the Upscale Condo Mansion Gated Community Raid. Navy Seals disguised as college students go to exclusive residential neighborhoods and dispatch a miserable wretch.
Meanwhile, George Bush, the world’s other arch terrorist, claims credit for the operation. He feels like donning his old National Guard uniform that he wore to avoid service in Vietnam, the uniform he seldom wore because he skipped Guard meetings. Or better yet, the flight suit he paraded around in when he posted that dopey “Mission Accomplished” sign on the aircraft carrier, years before thousands of U.S. servicemen were killed.
Bush, who with his lord-high inquisitor fat-boy Dick Cheney, killed a million Iraqis to get even with Bin Laden and his handful of wretches for 9-11 even though Iraq had nothing to do with it.
Bush, who validated torture and wiretap spying on Americans and setting up an American Gulag Archipelago of secret torture camps in foreign countries and threw out the Geneva Convention to which America for decades had adhered. There would be no trials like the Nuremburg trials to demonstrate the rule of law by the civilized countries of the world.
Bush and Cheney with the apathy of the American people operated under the principal that to combat terror, you have to abandon democratic ideals and act more like the terrorists.
Such a man deserves praise.
And isn’t it fascinating in a Freudian way that the operation to get Bin laden was partly code-named Geronimo after the famous Chiracahua leader of the 1880s. Native American Indian activists were angered the government compared Bin laden to Geronimo. I get it, our government leaders, most of them paunchy white boys in their 60s, grew up watching John Wayne movies.
They can’t help compare today’s Middle Eastern terrorists with Indians. Subconscious and psychologically, it reminds them of snug safe days as five-year-olds when the world was simple, when they curled around a TV set with a cup of hot coco watching Wayne dispatch Indians and bad guys, the annihilation of our native population complimentarily called by racist America as the “Winning of the West.”
Gopher Killed: Will Ferrell Brutally Spoofs George Bush on Bin Laden
There are similarities between the Indian Wars of the 1870s and today’s struggle against terrorists. In both cases, the government spent billions of dollars and involved millions of troops going after perceived ignorant savages who never numbered more than a few thousand. In an eerily reminiscent echo of the present, in 1875, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors were imprisoned in a prison in Ft. Augustine, Florida, erased from memory without trial or attorney, not even 100 miles from Guantanamo.
The Bin laden operation was also code-named “Neptune.” This ties in nicely because in a further bizarre twist Bin laden, who spent his life on sand dunes, was buried at sea. The fish probably felt like throwing him back.
And look at the now-famous picture of the big-shots in the Pentagon White House War Room watching the Bin laden raid results. Obama looks like a college kid who wandered into the room, which is what his Republican detractors and even some of his white subordinates probably consider him to be, a college kid on an ethnic studies scholarship temporarily occupying the White House. Hillary Clinton’s hand is to her mouth as though readying to chew her nails, as though she’s watching a favorite soap opera.
By the looks on their faces you’d think they were planning D Day.
Is this the same country that took on Nazi Germany and Japan, the most powerful military power in the history of the world terrified of a bunch of wretches who 50 years ago would have been stealing sheep?
It’s to Obama’s credit that he didn’t pose with the body for photos. You can tell a lot about the immorality of a society in the way they pose with bodies for propaganda purposes, like we did with the sons of Saddam Hussein, or even the Abu Ghraib Prison dungeon S&M pictures where the bound bodies were still alive.
As we celebrate and Obama says “We won’t forget,” how come our memory is selective?
It begs the question. Is America incapable of doing wrong? Do Americans ever study the history of events that lead up to the current situation?
Is America operating in a vacuum, or an ivory tower?
For example, Ronald Reagan, everybody’s icon and hero, backing right-wing death squads in South America that killed millions. Or giving Israel a blank check to run wild and dispossess Palestinians which fueled the current conflict and gave Bin laden the opportunity to prominence he never should have attained. Or supporting Saddam Hussein with military equipment and guarantees leading him to miscalculate he could invade Kuwait and we wouldn’t do anything about it.
Or meddling in the internal affairs for economic or natural resources gain (oil) of a dozen other countries.
Or Bush killing a million Iraqis over false weapons of mass destruction to get even with Bin laden. We love the Saudis even though the 9-11 plotters including Bin laden were Saudis.
Today, we’ve largely forgotten the Viet Cong. We have friendly relations with North Vietnam. Our tourists go there. See, we do forget in a sense. Over time.
WHY DO WE FORGET WHERE AMERICA HAS BEEN WRONG?
Has America ever been wrong?
We’re never wrong, and even if we are, it’s not wrong. That’s called being a patriot. Ask Bush and Cheney.
————————————————————–
High Crimes & Misdemeanors: Why Condoleezza Rice Should Be in Jail For Life – (Part 1)
The only two countries George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of their torture regime can travel to right now are Israel and Saudi Arabia. Apartheid Israel cannot survive without America’s patronage, while the fascist, uncivilized Saudi Arabian monarchy needs America to extract and consume its oil — in order to continue bribing its lazy citizens. Even traveling to Britain, the number one ally is potentially dangerous.
Amnesty International insists that “Anywhere in the world that the ‘Bushies’ travel, they could face investigation and potential prosecution for their responsibility for torture and other crimes in international law, particularly in any of the 147 countries that are party to the U.N. convention against torture.”
And, the guilty are afraid.
Bush canceled a trip to Geneva in February amid threats by human rights groups that they’d pursue legal charges against him for sanctioning torture.
Propelling prisoners’ heads into concrete walls by means of towels wrapped around their necks, savage beatings with fists and rifles that left prisoners crippled, hanging prisoners by the arms with their arms strung up behind them, depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, which has been thought the worst torture possible for 500 years, causing prisoners to freeze — sometimes to death, and waterboarding are but a partial list of the torture methods ordered by the Bush regime.
The above mentioned are the real reasons why the failed ‘Bushies‘ are out in force, lying and spinning — since Obama “executed” of Osama Bin Laden last Sunday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says he’d like to waterboard Donald Rumsfeld.
Unhinged bigot Pam Geller, a sufferer of terminal Islamophobia — allowed her overriding hatred of President Obama to take her to new and scary places as she reported that the military defied an order from Obama to abort the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. She had, in effect, accused unspecified members of the military of treason. [ READ MORE ]
President Obama’s scheduled visit to “Ground Zero” today, to meet with 9/11 families has been summarily denounced by right-wing Republican media as a “disgusting political victory Lap!”
Fox News’ in house-baboon, Glenn Beck notched it higher – calling the trip “disgusting,” “obscene,” and “grotesque.”
In lockstep with his constituency, war criminal Bush declined to join Obama at ground Zero.
The following is an excerpt from David Swanson’s self-published new book War Is A Lie (David Swanson, 2010).
[ By: David Swanson ] Since the Vietnam War, the United States has dropped all pretense of a military draft equally applied to all. Instead we spend billions of dollars on recruitment, increase military pay, and offer signing bonuses until enough people “voluntarily” join by signing contracts that allow the military to change the terms at will. If more troops are needed, just extend the contracts of the ones you’ve got. Need more still? Federalize the National Guard and send kids off to war who signed up thinking they’d be helping hurricane victims. Still not enough? Hire contractors for transportation, cooking, cleaning, and construction. Let the soldiers be pure soldiers whose only job is to kill, just like the knights of old. Boom, you’ve instantly doubled the size of your force, and nobody’s noticed except the profiteers.
Still need more killers? Hire mercenaries. Hire foreign mercenaries. Not enough? Spend trillions of dollars on technology to maximize the power of each person. Use unmanned aircraft so nobody gets hurt. Promise immigrants they’ll be citizens if they join. Change the standards for enlistment: take ‘em older, fatter, in worse health, with less education, with criminal records. Make high schools give recruiters aptitude test results and students’ contact information, and promise students they can pursue their chosen field within the wonderful world of death, and that you’ll send them to college if they live — hey, just promising it costs you nothing. If they’re resistant, you started too late. Put military video games in shopping malls. Send uniformed generals into kindergartens to warm the children up to the idea of truly and properly swearing allegiance to that flag. Spend 10 times the money on recruiting each new soldier as we spend educating each child. Do anything, anything, anything other than starting a draft.
But there’s a name for this practice of avoiding a traditional draft. It’s called a poverty draft. Because people tend not to want to participate in wars, those who have other career options tend to choose those other options. Those who see the military as one of their only choices, their only shot at a college education, or their only way to escape their troubled lives are more likely to enlist. According to the Not Your Soldier Project:
“The majority of military recruits come from below-median income neighborhoods. “In 2004, 71 percent of black recruits, 65 percent of Latino recruits, and 58 percent of white recruits came from below-median income neighborhoods. “The percentage of recruits who were regular high school graduates dropped from 86 percent in 2004 to 73 percent in 2006. “[The recruiters] never mention that the college money is difficult to come by – only 16 percent of enlisted personnel who completed four years of military duty ever received money for schooling. They don’t say that the job skills they promise won’t transfer into the real world. Only 12 percent of male veterans and 6 percent of female veterans use skills learned in the military in their current jobs. And of course, they downplay the risk of being killed while on duty.”
In a 2007 article Jorge Mariscal cited analysis by the Associated Press that found that “nearly three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.”
“It perhaps should come as no surprise,” wrote Mariscal,”that the Army GED Plus Enlistment Program, in which applicants without high school diplomas are allowed to enlist while they complete a high school equivalency certificate, is focused on inner-city areas.
“When working-class youth make it to their local community college, they often encounter military recruiters working hard to discourage them. ‘You’re not going anywhere here,’ recruiters say. ‘This place is a dead end. I can offer you more.’ Pentagon-sponsored studies — such as the RAND Corporation’s ‘Recruiting Youth in the College Market: Current Practices and Future Policy Options’ – speak openly about college as the recruiter’s number one competitor for the youth market…
“Not all recruits, of course, are driven by financial need. In working-class communities of every color, there are often long- standing traditions of military service and links between service and privileged forms of masculinity. For communities oft en marked as ‘foreign,’ such as Latinos and Asians, there is pressure to serve in order to prove that one is ‘American.’ For recent immigrants, there is the lure of gaining legal resident status or citizenship. Economic pressure, however, is an undeniable motivation. . . .”
Mariscal understands that there are many other motivations as well, including the desire to do something useful and important for others. But he believes those generous impulses are being misdirected:
“In this scenario, the desire to ‘make a difference,’ once inserted into the military apparatus, means young Americans may have to kill innocent people or become brutalized by the realities of combat. Take the tragic example of Sgt. Paul Cortez, who graduated in 2000 from Central High School in the working-class town of Barstow, Calif., joined the Army, and was sent to Iraq. On March 12, 2006, he participated in the gang rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her entire family.
“When asked about Cortez, a classmate said: ‘He would never do something like that. He would never hurt a female. He would never hit one or even raise his hand to one. Fighting for his country is one thing, but not when it comes to raping and murdering. That’s not him.’ Let us accept the claim that ‘that’s not him.’ Nevertheless, because of a series of unspeakable and unpardonable events within the context of an illegal and immoral war, ‘that’ is what he became. On February 21, 2007, Cortez pled guilty to the rape and four counts of felony murder. He was convicted a few days later, sentenced to life in prison and a lifetime in his own personal hell.”
In a 2010 book called The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen look at the data from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. They found that only in World War II was a fair draft employed, while the other three wars drew disproportionately from poorer and less educated Americans, opening a “casualty gap” that grew dramatically larger in Korea, again in Vietnam, and yet again in the War on Iraq as the military shifted from conscription to “volunteer.” The authors also cite a survey showing that as Americans become aware of this casualty gap, they become less supportive of wars.
The transition from war primarily by the rich to war primarily by the poor has been a very gradual one and is far from complete. For one thing, those in the highest positions of power in the military are more likely to have come from privileged backgrounds. And regardless of their background, top officers are the least likely to see dangerous combat. Leading the troops into battle is not how it works anymore, except in our imaginations. Both presidents Bush saw their approval ratings soar in public opinion polls when they fought wars — at least at first when the wars were still new and magnificent. Never mind that these presidents fought their wars from the air-conditioned Oval Office. One result of this is that those making the decisions upon which the most lives hang are the least likely to see war death up close, or to have ever seen it.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
The first President Bush had seen World War II from an airplane, already a distance away from the dying, although not as far away as Reagan who had avoided going to war. Just as thinking of enemies as subhuman makes it easier to kill them, bombing them from high in the sky is much easier psychologically than participating in a knife fight or shooting a traitor standing blindfolded beside a wall. Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. avoided the Vietnam War, Clinton through educational privilege, Bush through being the son of his father. President Obama never went to war. Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden, like Clinton and Bush Jr., dodged the draft. Vice President Al Gore went to the Vietnam War briefly, but as an army journalist, not a soldier who saw combat.
Rarely does someone deciding that thousands must die have the experience of having seen it happen. On August 15, 1941, the Nazis had already killed a lot of people. But Heinrich Himmler, one of the top military bigwigs in the country who would oversee the murder of six million Jews, had never seen anyone die. He asked to watch a shooting in Minsk. Jews were told to jump into a ditch where they were shot and covered with dirt. Then more were told to jump in. They were shot and covered. Himmler stood right at the edge watching, until something from someone’s head splashed onto his coat. He turned pale and turned away. The local commander said to him: “Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!”
Himmler told them to do their duty even if it was hard. He returned to doing his from the comfort of a desk.
Shalt Thou Kill or Not?
Killing sounds a lot easier than it is. Throughout history, men have risked their own lives to avoid having to take part in wars:
“Men have fled their homelands, served lengthy prison terms, hacked off limbs, shot off feet or index fingers, feigned illness or insanity, or, if they could afford to, paid surrogates to fight in their stead. ‘Some draw their teeth, some blind themselves, and others maim themselves, on their way to us,’ the governor of Egypt complained of his peasant recruits in the early nineteenth century. So unreliable was the rank and file of the eighteenth-century Prussian army that military manuals forbade camping near a woods or forest. The troops would simply melt away into the trees.”
Although killing non-human animals comes easily to most people, killing one’s fellow human beings is so radically outside the normal focus of one’s life which involves co-existing with people that many cultures have developed rituals to transform a normal person into a warrior, and sometimes back again following a war. The ancient Greeks, Aztecs, Chinese, Yanomamo Indians, and Scythians also used alcohol or other drugs to facilitate killing.
Very few people kill outside of the military, and most of them are extremely disturbed individuals. James Gilligan, in his book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, diagnosed the root cause of murderous or suicidal violence as deep shame and humiliation, a desperate need for respect and status (and, fundamentally love and care) so intense that only killing (oneself and/or others) could ease the pain — or, rather, the lack of feeling.
When a person becomes so ashamed of his needs (and of being ashamed), Gilligan writes, and when he sees no nonviolent solutions, and when he lacks the ability to feel love or guilt or fear, the result can be violence. But what if violence is the start? What if you condition healthy people to kill without thought? Can the result be a mental state resembling that of the person who’s internally driven to kill?
The choice to engage in violence outside of war is not a rational one, and oft en involves magical thinking, as Gilligan explains by analyzing the meaning of crimes in which murderers have mutilated their victims’ bodies or their own. “I am convinced,” he writes,”that violent behavior, even at its most apparently senseless, incomprehensible, and psychotic, is an understandable response to an identifiable, specifiable set of conditions; and that even when it seems motivated by ‘rational’ self-interest, it is the end product of a series of irrational, self-destructive, and unconscious motives that can be studied, identified, and understood.”
The mutilation of bodies, whatever drives it in each case, is a fairly common practice in war, although engaged in mostly by people who were not inclined to murderous violence prior to joining the military. Numerous war trophy photos from the War on Iraq show corpses and body parts mutilated and displayed in close-up, laid out on a platter as if for cannibals. Many of these images were sent by American soldiers to a website that marketed pornography. Presumably, these images were viewed as war pornography. Presumably, they were created by people who had come to love war — not by the Himmlers or the Dick Cheneys who enjoy sending others, but by people who actually enjoyed being there, people who signed up for college money or adventure and were trained as sociopathic killers.
On June 9, 2006, the U.S. military killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, took a photo of his dead head, blew it up to enormous proportions, and displayed it in a frame at a press conference. From the way it was framed, the head could have been connected to a body or not. Presumably this was meant to be not only proof of his death, but a kind of revenge for al-Zarqawi’s beheading of Americans.
Gilligan’s understanding of what motivates violence comes from working in prisons and mental health institutions, not from participating in war, and not from watching the news. He suggests that the obvious explanation for violence is usually wrong:
“Some people think that armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money. And of course, sometimes, that is how they rationalize their behavior. But when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, ‘I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody,’ or, ‘You wouldn’t believe how much respect you get when you have a gun pointed at some dude’s face.’ For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison, or even of dying.”
While violence, at least in the civilian world, may be irrational, Gilligan suggests clear ways in which it can be prevented or encouraged. If you wanted to increase violence, he writes, you would take the following steps that the United States has taken: Punish more and more people more and more harshly; ban drugs that inhibit violence and legalize and advertise those that stimulate it; use taxes and economic policies to widen disparities in wealth and income; deny the poor education; perpetuate racism; produce entertainment that glorifies violence; make lethal weapons readily available; maximize the polarization of social roles of men and women; encourage prejudice against homosexuality; use violence to punish children in school and at home; and keep unemployment sufficiently high. And why would you do that or tolerate it? Possibly because most victims of violence are poor, and the poor tend to organize and demand their rights better when they aren’t terrorized by crime.
Gilligan looks at violent crimes, especially murder, and then turns his attention to our system of violent punishment, including the death penalty, prison rape, and solitary confinement. He views retributive punishment as the same sort of irrational violence as the crimes it is punishing. He sees structural violence and poverty as doing the most damage, but he does not address the subject of war. In scattered references Gilligan makes clear that he lumps war into his theory of violence, and yet in one place he opposes ending wars, and nowhere does he explain how his theory can be coherently applied.
Wars are created by governments, just like our criminal justice system. Do they have similar roots? Do soldiers and mercenaries and contractors and bureaucrats feel shame and humiliation? Do war propaganda and military training produce the idea that the enemy has disrespected the warrior who must now kill to recover his honor? Or is the humiliation of the drill sergeant intended to produce a reaction redirected against the enemy? What about the congress members and presidents, the generals and weapons corporation CEOs, and the corporate media — those who actually decide to have a war and make it happen? Don’t they have a high degree of status and respect already, even if they may have gone into politics because of their exceptional desire for such attention? Aren’t there more mundane motivations, like financial profit, campaign financing, and vote winning at work here, even if the writings of the Project for the New American Century have a lot to say about boldness and dominance and control?
And what about the public at large, including all those nonviolent war supporters? Common slogans and bumper stickers include: “These colors don’t run,” “Proud to be an American,” “Never back down,” “Don’t cut and run.” Nothing could be more irrational or symbolic than a war on a tactic or an emotion, as in the “Global War on Terror,” which was launched as revenge, even though the primary people against whom the revenge was desired were already dead. Do people think their pride and self-worth depend on the vengeance to be found in bombing Afghanistan until there’s nobody left resisting U.S. dominance? If so, it will do not a bit of good to explain to them that such actions actually make us less safe. But what if people who crave respect find out that such behavior makes our country despised or a laughingstock, or that the government is playing them for fools, that Europeans have a higher standard of living as a result of not putting all their money into wars, or that a puppet president like Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai has been making off with suitcases of American money?
Regardless, other research finds that only about two percent of people actually enjoy killing, and they are extremely mentally disturbed. The purpose of military training is to make normal people, including normal war supporters, into sociopaths, at least in the context of war, to get them to do in war what would be viewed as the single worst thing they could do at any other time or place. The way people can be predictably trained to kill in war is to simulate killing in training. Recruits who stab dummies to death, chant “Blood makes the grass grow!”, and shoot target practice with human-looking targets, will kill in battle when they’re scared out of their minds. They won’t need their minds. Their reflexes will take over. “The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain,” writes Dave Grossman, “is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.”
About The Author: David Swanson — is the author of the just published book War Is A Lie and Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He blogs at Let’s Try Democracy and War Is a Crime. | War is a Lie (David Swanson, 2010)
Rawstory.com: Nigeria has charged Dick Cheney in $180 million bribery case, and an Interpol arrest warrant has been issued.
The energy services company Dick Cheney ran prior to becoming Vice President of the United States was atop the tongue of liberals each time it was awarded a contract in Iraq. Now the company’s name, Halliburton, is being spoken somewhere else: Nigeria.
According to a story filed last Wednesday, Cheney will be indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal. [ READ MORE ]
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Since the Vietnam War, the United States has dropped all pretense of a military draft equally applied to all. Instead we spend billions of dollars on recruitment, increase military pay, and offer signing bonuses until enough people “voluntarily” join by signing contracts that allow the military to change the terms at will. If more troops are needed, just extend the contracts of the ones you’ve got. Need more still? Federalize the National Guard and send kids off to war who signed up thinking they’d be helping hurricane victims. Still not enough? Hire contractors for transportation, cooking, cleaning, and construction. Let the soldiers be pure soldiers whose only job is to kill, just like the knights of old. Boom, you’ve instantly doubled the size of your force, and nobody’s noticed except the profiteers.
, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen look at the data from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. They found that only in World War II was a fair draft employed, while the other three wars drew disproportionately from poorer and less educated Americans, opening a “casualty gap” that grew dramatically larger in Korea, again in Vietnam, and yet again in the War on Iraq as the military shifted from conscription to “volunteer.” The authors also cite a survey showing that as Americans become aware of this casualty gap, they become less supportive of wars.
, diagnosed the root cause of murderous or suicidal violence as deep shame and humiliation, a desperate need for respect and status (and, fundamentally love and care) so intense that only killing (oneself and/or others) could ease the pain — or, rather, the lack of feeling.
