From CLG News:
Suicide Is Not Painless By Frank Rich 21 Oct 2007 The $26,788 [Charles D. Riechers, who 'committed suicide' in October] received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit.
So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone...
There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005...
Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money." [A must read]
Showing posts with label political corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political corruption. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Our Tears/American Tears
This is an excerpt from Naomi Wolf's essay, "American Tears":
I read the news in a state of something like walking shock: seven soldiers wrote op-eds critical of the war — in The New York Times; three are dead, one shot in the head. A female soldier who was about to become a whistleblower, possibly about abuses involving taxpayers’ money: shot in the head. Pat Tillman, who was contemplating coming forward in a critique of the war: shot in the head. Donald Vance, a contractor himself, who blew the whistle on irregularities involving arms sales in Iraq — taken hostage FROM the U.S. Embassy BY U.S. soldiers and kept without recourse to a lawyer in a U.S. held-prison, abused and terrified for weeks — and scared to talk once he got home. Another whistleblower in Iraq, as reported in Vanity Fair: held in a trailer all night by armed contractors before being ejected from the country.
Friday was the sixth anniversary of my son's death. He was also shot in the head while lying on the ground. He was executed. Fabrications were fed to the media by the Army and the civilian police which made his death appear justified.
According to written statements by some of his superiors, he had made "at least five IG (whistleblower) complaints" prior to his death.
Not a single complaint is retained in the DoD IG Database. A senior person in that office told me that even unfounded complaints are supposed to remain in the database. However, I did receive his request for information about whistleblower protection, which was retained by the DoD.
Not a single document, investigation report, or verbal bit of information has been freely given out by the Army, Department of Defense, FBI, or civilian police authorities. Only by means of ceaseless effort on my part and money paid to lawyers has anything at all been gleaned.
What reason can there be for such secrecy? What rights to information do next of kin have? This is pretty much the same for all the families of military personnel killed in non-combat incidents. Aren't we citizens of the United States, with full rights to know the circumstances surrounding our children's/spouses'/parents' deaths?
Right now, it is the forensic reports that are being kept away in the giant game of hide the ball. I have a good lead as to where they are and even possibly the investigation code number, but it is very important to someone not to release them.
The pattern of non-combat deaths related to whistleblowing is emerging clearly enough for outside reporters to be commenting on it. I have a feeling that the numbers will be very high.
Sub patterns include death shortly before discharge, including many which occurred the day before going home. Many, many deaths officially listed as suicides were actually murders staged to look like suicides. The implausibility and evidence that they were murders is blatantly ignored. Officials will not do serious, proper investigations that rule out murder and prove suicide.
Isn't individual life precious enough, and taking life serious enough, to do proper investigations? Are military personnel just cogs in the giant Killing Macine we call the Military?
This has gone on long enough. We need public recognition of the problem and support to address it. Otherwise, many more families will be drawn into the culture of tears. America will drown in tears if we don't do something.
Braveheart
I read the news in a state of something like walking shock: seven soldiers wrote op-eds critical of the war — in The New York Times; three are dead, one shot in the head. A female soldier who was about to become a whistleblower, possibly about abuses involving taxpayers’ money: shot in the head. Pat Tillman, who was contemplating coming forward in a critique of the war: shot in the head. Donald Vance, a contractor himself, who blew the whistle on irregularities involving arms sales in Iraq — taken hostage FROM the U.S. Embassy BY U.S. soldiers and kept without recourse to a lawyer in a U.S. held-prison, abused and terrified for weeks — and scared to talk once he got home. Another whistleblower in Iraq, as reported in Vanity Fair: held in a trailer all night by armed contractors before being ejected from the country.
Friday was the sixth anniversary of my son's death. He was also shot in the head while lying on the ground. He was executed. Fabrications were fed to the media by the Army and the civilian police which made his death appear justified.
According to written statements by some of his superiors, he had made "at least five IG (whistleblower) complaints" prior to his death.
Not a single complaint is retained in the DoD IG Database. A senior person in that office told me that even unfounded complaints are supposed to remain in the database. However, I did receive his request for information about whistleblower protection, which was retained by the DoD.
Not a single document, investigation report, or verbal bit of information has been freely given out by the Army, Department of Defense, FBI, or civilian police authorities. Only by means of ceaseless effort on my part and money paid to lawyers has anything at all been gleaned.
What reason can there be for such secrecy? What rights to information do next of kin have? This is pretty much the same for all the families of military personnel killed in non-combat incidents. Aren't we citizens of the United States, with full rights to know the circumstances surrounding our children's/spouses'/parents' deaths?
Right now, it is the forensic reports that are being kept away in the giant game of hide the ball. I have a good lead as to where they are and even possibly the investigation code number, but it is very important to someone not to release them.
The pattern of non-combat deaths related to whistleblowing is emerging clearly enough for outside reporters to be commenting on it. I have a feeling that the numbers will be very high.
Sub patterns include death shortly before discharge, including many which occurred the day before going home. Many, many deaths officially listed as suicides were actually murders staged to look like suicides. The implausibility and evidence that they were murders is blatantly ignored. Officials will not do serious, proper investigations that rule out murder and prove suicide.
Isn't individual life precious enough, and taking life serious enough, to do proper investigations? Are military personnel just cogs in the giant Killing Macine we call the Military?
This has gone on long enough. We need public recognition of the problem and support to address it. Otherwise, many more families will be drawn into the culture of tears. America will drown in tears if we don't do something.
Braveheart
Thursday, August 02, 2007
From the New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?
Three and a half hours, a few four-color charts and a couple of lost tempers later, the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, solemnly admitted that he had gotten almost nowhere.
“You’ve all admitted that the system failed; none of you feel personally responsible,” Mr. Waxman said, addressing Mr. Rumsfeld, who resigned as defense secretary last fall, as well as one currently serving general and two retired ones who also testified under oath Wednesday.
“Somebody should be responsible.”
The hearing, held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s first return to Capitol Hill since President Bush asked him to resign after the Democratic victories in midterm elections. And although the bitter exchanges between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Democrats who now control Congress focused on the case involving Corporal Tillman, they exposed veins of anger over what the Democrats regard as a lack of accountability for broad missteps in Iraq.
Still, for most of the hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld, who sometimes sounded frailer and more gravel-voiced than he did while leading the Pentagon for nearly six years, offered few specific facts and recollections. He interjected only one exasperated “Oh, goodness!” despite numerous verbal provocations from committee members and stuck to his prepared answers and upbraided Democratic committee members when he felt they had their facts wrong.
“I don’t recall precisely how I learned that he was killed,” Mr. Rumsfeld said of Corporal Tillman early in the hearing. “It could have been internally; it could have been through the press.” He said he was also unsure when he learned the death was most likely from American fire, he added, although it was probably around May 20, 2004, about three weeks after the three generals seated beside him at Wednesday’s hearing had learned of it.
Testifying not in their familiar uniforms rich with medals but in ordinary business suits, two retired generals, Richard B. Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the American forces in the Middle East, each acknowledged that the Tillman matter was a “screw-up,” but not their fault.
General Abizaid said he received a classified message on April 29, 2004, saying Corporal Tillman, a professional football player who quit after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an Army Ranger, may have been killed by American fire in April 2004, and not in combat, as the Army had publicly stated.
General Myers said he could not recall how or when he learned of it, and even if he could, he said, “I don’t think there’s any regulation that would require me to do anything, actually.”
General Myers also said that if he knew that Army officials had suspected friendly fire — or what the military calls a “blue on blue” attack — in Corporal Tillman’s death, he would have informed Mr. Rumsfeld, his boss at the time, but added, “I cannot recall whether or not I did that.”
Several Democrats used the hearing to engage Mr. Rumsfeld in unrelated but longstanding grievances, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Pentagon’s policy of banning news media coverage of flag-draped military coffins returning from overseas.
At one point, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat who is running for president, averred that Mr. Rumsfeld had “covered up” the Tillman matter as well as prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
“That’s just false,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected. “You have nothing to base that on. You have not a scrap of evidence or a piece of paper or a witness that would attest to that. I have not been involved in any cover-up whatsoever.”
Stewing quietly throughout the hearing, and eventually lashing out at a lawmaker who approached to offer condolences, were several members of Corporal Tillman’s family, including his brother Kevin and his father, Pat Tillman Sr. The family has been assertive in calling attention to the Army’s mishandling of Corporal Tillman’s death, and has been critical of Republican members of Congress who have sought to minimize the significance of the case.
Near the end of the hearing, Pat Tillman Sr. told Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, in a low but furious voice, “Get away from me.”
The only active duty witness at the hearing was Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the former commander of the United States Special Operations Command. Each of the four witnesses said he was either not the proper person, did not know enough or was not in the proper position to correct the public record on the Tillman killing or alert the Tillman family to the suspicions of friendly fire.
The Army told Corporal Tillman’s parents that he had been killed by fellow troops almost five weeks after his death, long after his nationally televised memorial service and posthumous Silver Star award.
“It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this thing up,” General Abizaid said, “but we screwed this thing up.”
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?
Three and a half hours, a few four-color charts and a couple of lost tempers later, the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, solemnly admitted that he had gotten almost nowhere.
“You’ve all admitted that the system failed; none of you feel personally responsible,” Mr. Waxman said, addressing Mr. Rumsfeld, who resigned as defense secretary last fall, as well as one currently serving general and two retired ones who also testified under oath Wednesday.
“Somebody should be responsible.”
The hearing, held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s first return to Capitol Hill since President Bush asked him to resign after the Democratic victories in midterm elections. And although the bitter exchanges between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Democrats who now control Congress focused on the case involving Corporal Tillman, they exposed veins of anger over what the Democrats regard as a lack of accountability for broad missteps in Iraq.
Still, for most of the hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld, who sometimes sounded frailer and more gravel-voiced than he did while leading the Pentagon for nearly six years, offered few specific facts and recollections. He interjected only one exasperated “Oh, goodness!” despite numerous verbal provocations from committee members and stuck to his prepared answers and upbraided Democratic committee members when he felt they had their facts wrong.
“I don’t recall precisely how I learned that he was killed,” Mr. Rumsfeld said of Corporal Tillman early in the hearing. “It could have been internally; it could have been through the press.” He said he was also unsure when he learned the death was most likely from American fire, he added, although it was probably around May 20, 2004, about three weeks after the three generals seated beside him at Wednesday’s hearing had learned of it.
Testifying not in their familiar uniforms rich with medals but in ordinary business suits, two retired generals, Richard B. Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the American forces in the Middle East, each acknowledged that the Tillman matter was a “screw-up,” but not their fault.
General Abizaid said he received a classified message on April 29, 2004, saying Corporal Tillman, a professional football player who quit after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an Army Ranger, may have been killed by American fire in April 2004, and not in combat, as the Army had publicly stated.
General Myers said he could not recall how or when he learned of it, and even if he could, he said, “I don’t think there’s any regulation that would require me to do anything, actually.”
General Myers also said that if he knew that Army officials had suspected friendly fire — or what the military calls a “blue on blue” attack — in Corporal Tillman’s death, he would have informed Mr. Rumsfeld, his boss at the time, but added, “I cannot recall whether or not I did that.”
Several Democrats used the hearing to engage Mr. Rumsfeld in unrelated but longstanding grievances, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Pentagon’s policy of banning news media coverage of flag-draped military coffins returning from overseas.
At one point, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat who is running for president, averred that Mr. Rumsfeld had “covered up” the Tillman matter as well as prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
“That’s just false,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected. “You have nothing to base that on. You have not a scrap of evidence or a piece of paper or a witness that would attest to that. I have not been involved in any cover-up whatsoever.”
Stewing quietly throughout the hearing, and eventually lashing out at a lawmaker who approached to offer condolences, were several members of Corporal Tillman’s family, including his brother Kevin and his father, Pat Tillman Sr. The family has been assertive in calling attention to the Army’s mishandling of Corporal Tillman’s death, and has been critical of Republican members of Congress who have sought to minimize the significance of the case.
Near the end of the hearing, Pat Tillman Sr. told Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, in a low but furious voice, “Get away from me.”
The only active duty witness at the hearing was Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the former commander of the United States Special Operations Command. Each of the four witnesses said he was either not the proper person, did not know enough or was not in the proper position to correct the public record on the Tillman killing or alert the Tillman family to the suspicions of friendly fire.
The Army told Corporal Tillman’s parents that he had been killed by fellow troops almost five weeks after his death, long after his nationally televised memorial service and posthumous Silver Star award.
“It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this thing up,” General Abizaid said, “but we screwed this thing up.”
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Rumsfeld defends himself on Tillman
01 August, 2007
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military‘s bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.
He told a House committee hearing that he‘d always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Unanswered questions about the bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan reach into the highest ranks of the Pentagon and beyond, a key Democrat charged Wednesday.
"The concealment of Corp. Tillman‘s fratricide caused millions of Americans to question the integrity of our government, yet no one will tell us when and how the White House learned the truth," said Waxman, D-Calif.
Both joined him at the witness table.
"Are you not ashamed?" one said. Rumsfeld didn‘t react.
Tillman‘s mother Mary and other family members watched from the last row in the committee room.
The Army censured Kensinger for "a failure of leadership" and accused him of lying to investigators probing the aftermath of Tillman‘s death. For five weeks the Army knew Tillman was cut down by his fellow Army Rangers, but told the public and Tillman‘s own family that he died in a fire fight with enemy militia.
"I have no knowledge of any evidence to that end," Geren told a Pentagon briefing Tuesday after announcing Kensinger‘s censure.
That wasn‘t good enough for Democrats, who along with Tillman‘s family suspect a cover-up that goes all the way to the White House.
The punishments "do nothing to lift the appearance of cover-up that continues to envelop the Pat Tillman story," said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., who represents Tillman‘s hometown of San Jose.
"It is inconceivable that numerous top-ranking generals ... were aware of the true circumstances of Pat‘s death, but did not inform their civilian superiors — President Bush and then-Secretary Rumsfeld," said Honda, promising to "hold these commanders‘ feet to the fire" at Wednesday‘s hearing.
Waxman wanted to hear from Kensinger, and the committee issued a subpoena Monday for his testimony. As the hearing began U.S. marshals still hadn‘t been able to deliver it.
Kensinger‘s attorney, Charles W. Gittins, said Tuesday night that Kensinger was away on business travel.
"He declined the committee invitation to testify two weeks ago, so it was no surprise to the committee that he had no intent to participate in a hearing that is all about show and no substance," Gittins said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press.
Gittins said his client "had no reason to lie" and had told investigators "everything he knows" about the case. In May, in a rebuttal letter to the general who reviewed the matter, Kensinger firmly rejected all accusations that he had lied.
Gittins also dismissed accusations that Kensinger should have told the Tillman family about the possibility of friendly fire, saying the retired general "was not the release authority for the information." That "release authority," Gittins said, was Gen. John Abizaid, then the head of the U.S. Central Command.
Tillman‘s death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League‘s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11.
Among possible evidence of White House knowledge, lawmakers have cited a memo written by a top general seven days after Tillman‘s death warning it was "highly possible" the Army Ranger was killed by his own comrades and making clear his warning should be conveyed to the president.
President Bush made no reference to the way Tillman died in a speech delivered two days after the memo was written.
A White House spokesman has said there‘s no indication Bush received the warning in the memo written April 29, 2004, by then-Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Abizaid.
Abizaid was on the witness list for Wednesday‘s hearing.
McChrystal was spared punishment in the investigation report released Tuesday. The investigation concluded McChrystal behaved reasonably in assuming the supporting material for Tillman‘s Silver Star recommendation was accurate, and in conveying the message about the likelihood of friendly fire in Tillman‘s death.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner in Washington and Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this report.
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military‘s bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.
He told a House committee hearing that he‘d always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Unanswered questions about the bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan reach into the highest ranks of the Pentagon and beyond, a key Democrat charged Wednesday.
"The concealment of Corp. Tillman‘s fratricide caused millions of Americans to question the integrity of our government, yet no one will tell us when and how the White House learned the truth," said Waxman, D-Calif.
Both joined him at the witness table.
"Are you not ashamed?" one said. Rumsfeld didn‘t react.
Tillman‘s mother Mary and other family members watched from the last row in the committee room.
The Army censured Kensinger for "a failure of leadership" and accused him of lying to investigators probing the aftermath of Tillman‘s death. For five weeks the Army knew Tillman was cut down by his fellow Army Rangers, but told the public and Tillman‘s own family that he died in a fire fight with enemy militia.
"I have no knowledge of any evidence to that end," Geren told a Pentagon briefing Tuesday after announcing Kensinger‘s censure.
That wasn‘t good enough for Democrats, who along with Tillman‘s family suspect a cover-up that goes all the way to the White House.
The punishments "do nothing to lift the appearance of cover-up that continues to envelop the Pat Tillman story," said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., who represents Tillman‘s hometown of San Jose.
"It is inconceivable that numerous top-ranking generals ... were aware of the true circumstances of Pat‘s death, but did not inform their civilian superiors — President Bush and then-Secretary Rumsfeld," said Honda, promising to "hold these commanders‘ feet to the fire" at Wednesday‘s hearing.
Waxman wanted to hear from Kensinger, and the committee issued a subpoena Monday for his testimony. As the hearing began U.S. marshals still hadn‘t been able to deliver it.
Kensinger‘s attorney, Charles W. Gittins, said Tuesday night that Kensinger was away on business travel.
"He declined the committee invitation to testify two weeks ago, so it was no surprise to the committee that he had no intent to participate in a hearing that is all about show and no substance," Gittins said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press.
Gittins said his client "had no reason to lie" and had told investigators "everything he knows" about the case. In May, in a rebuttal letter to the general who reviewed the matter, Kensinger firmly rejected all accusations that he had lied.
Gittins also dismissed accusations that Kensinger should have told the Tillman family about the possibility of friendly fire, saying the retired general "was not the release authority for the information." That "release authority," Gittins said, was Gen. John Abizaid, then the head of the U.S. Central Command.
Tillman‘s death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League‘s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11.
Among possible evidence of White House knowledge, lawmakers have cited a memo written by a top general seven days after Tillman‘s death warning it was "highly possible" the Army Ranger was killed by his own comrades and making clear his warning should be conveyed to the president.
President Bush made no reference to the way Tillman died in a speech delivered two days after the memo was written.
A White House spokesman has said there‘s no indication Bush received the warning in the memo written April 29, 2004, by then-Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Abizaid.
Abizaid was on the witness list for Wednesday‘s hearing.
McChrystal was spared punishment in the investigation report released Tuesday. The investigation concluded McChrystal behaved reasonably in assuming the supporting material for Tillman‘s Silver Star recommendation was accurate, and in conveying the message about the likelihood of friendly fire in Tillman‘s death.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner in Washington and Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers
By Chris Hedges
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations."
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war -- one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. "This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq," said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffle bag in each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can't trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the 'f' word in front of it."
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction -- and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word -- sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -- objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive."
"It's like you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word "Hadji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese or "rag head" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed "Hadji food," "Hadji homes," and "Hadji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembers, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, "this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment." Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot shit up," a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejia writes, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia's squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they!?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks." This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejia noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white collar family," said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't -- mother fucker -- he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog -- and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals -- and this dog has like these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm like what the fuck are you doing.
"And so, the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but -- and I had tears then, too, -- and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don't know if it's rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one's manliness traits. I don't know. I had a big problem with that.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T."
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58101/
Also at:
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/war_on_terror/accustomed_to_their_own_atrocities_in_iraq,_u.s._soldiers_have
--submitted by Patti Woodard
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations."
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war -- one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. "This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq," said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffle bag in each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can't trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the 'f' word in front of it."
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction -- and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word -- sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -- objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive."
"It's like you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word "Hadji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese or "rag head" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed "Hadji food," "Hadji homes," and "Hadji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembers, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, "this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment." Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot shit up," a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejia writes, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia's squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they!?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks." This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejia noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white collar family," said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't -- mother fucker -- he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog -- and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals -- and this dog has like these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm like what the fuck are you doing.
"And so, the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but -- and I had tears then, too, -- and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don't know if it's rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one's manliness traits. I don't know. I had a big problem with that.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T."
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58101/
Also at:
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/war_on_terror/accustomed_to_their_own_atrocities_in_iraq,_u.s._soldiers_have
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Gen. Petraeus and a High-Profile Suicide in Iraq
Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note -- complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes -- was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. "surge" effort in Iraq. It urged them to "Reevaluate yourselves....You are not what you think you are and I know it."
By Greg Mitchell
(March 14, 2007) -- The scourge of suicides among American troops in Iraq is a serious, and seriously underreported, problem, as this column has observed numerous times in the past three years. One of the few high-profile cases involved a much-admired Army colonel named Ted Westhusing.
A portrait of Westhusing written by T. Christian Miller for the Los Angeles Times in November 2005 (which I covered at the time) revealed that Westhusing, before putting a bullet through his head, had been deeply disturbed by abuses carried out by American contractors in Iraq, including allegations that they had witnessed or even participated in the murder of Iraqis.
His widow, asked by a friend what killed this West Point scholar, had replied simply: "Iraq."
Now, a new article reveals -- based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act -- that Westhusing's apparent suicide note included claims that his two commanders tolerated a mission based on "corruption, human right abuses and liars." One of those commanders: the new leader of the "surge" campaign in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.
Westhusing, 44, had been found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport in June 2005, a single gunshot wound to the head. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq. The Army concluded that he committed suicide with his service pistol. Westhusing was an unusual case: “one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor,” Miller explained in his L.A. Times piece.
”So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.
”In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.”
His death followed quickly. "He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," one official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this." After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide.
Now, nearly 18 months after Miller's article, The Texas Observer this month has published a cover story by contributor Robert Bryce titled "I Am Sullied No More." Bryce covers much of the same ground paved by Miller but adds details on the Petraeus angle.
"When he was in Iraq, Westhusing worked for one of the most famous generals in the U.S. military, David Petraeus," Bryce observes. "As the head of counterterrorism and special operations under Petraeus, Westhusing oversaw the single most important task facing the U.S. military in Iraq then and now: training the Iraqi security forces."
Bryce refers to a "two-inch stack of documents, obtained over the past 15 months under the Freedom of Information Act, that provides many details of Westhusing’s suicide. The pile includes interviews with Westhusing’s co-workers, diagrams of his sleeping quarters, interviews with his family members, and partially redacted reports from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and Inspector General.
"The documents echo the story told by Westhusing’s friends. 'Something he saw [in Iraq] drove him to this,' one Army officer who was close to Westhusing said in an interview. 'The sum of what he saw going on drove him' to take his own life. 'It’s because he believed in duty, honor, country that he’s dead.'"
In Iraq, Westhusing worked under two generals: Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, and Petraeus, then a lieutenant general. In a March 2005 e-mail, Petraeus told Westhusing that he had “already exceeded the very lofty expectations that all had for you.”
But Bryce continues: "By late May, Westhusing was becoming despondent over what he was seeing. Steeped in—and totally believing in—the West Point credo that a cadet will 'not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do,' Westhusing found himself surrounded by contractors who had no interest in his ideals. He asked family members to pray for him. In a phone call with his wife, Michelle, who was back at West Point, Westhusing told her he planned to tell Petraeus that he was going to quit. She pleaded with him to just finish his tour and return home."
When his body was found on June, a note was found nearby addressed to Petraeus and Fil. According to Bryce it read:
"Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more.
"Trust is essential—I don’t know who trust anymore. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it."
Twelve days after Westhusing’s body was found, Army investigators talked with his widow, Michelle, who told them: "The one thing I really wish is you guys to go to everyone listed in that letter and speak with them. I think Ted gave his life to let everyone know what was going on. They need to get to the bottom of it, and hope all these bad things get cleaned up.”
Bryce concludes:
"In September 2005, the Army’s inspector general concluded an investigation into allegations raised in the anonymous letter to Westhusing shortly before his death. It found no basis for any of the issues raised. Although the report is redacted in places, it is clear that the investigation was aimed at determining whether Fil or Petraeus had ignored the corruption and human rights abuses allegedly occurring within the training program for Iraqi security personnel. The report, approved by the Army’s vice chief of staff, four-star Gen. Richard Cody, concluded that 'commands and commanders operated in an Iraqi cultural and ethical environment often at odds with Western practices.' It said none of the unit members 'accepted institutional corruption or human rights abuses. Unit members, and specifically [redacted name] and [redacted name] took appropriate action where corruption or abuse was reported.'
"The context, placement and relative size of the redacted names strongly suggest that they refer to Petraeus and Fil.
"Last November, Fil returned to Iraq. He is now the commanding general of the Multinational Division in Baghdad and of the 1st Cavalry Division. On February 12, Petraeus took command of all U.S. forces in Iraq. He now wears four stars."
By Greg Mitchell
(March 14, 2007) -- The scourge of suicides among American troops in Iraq is a serious, and seriously underreported, problem, as this column has observed numerous times in the past three years. One of the few high-profile cases involved a much-admired Army colonel named Ted Westhusing.
A portrait of Westhusing written by T. Christian Miller for the Los Angeles Times in November 2005 (which I covered at the time) revealed that Westhusing, before putting a bullet through his head, had been deeply disturbed by abuses carried out by American contractors in Iraq, including allegations that they had witnessed or even participated in the murder of Iraqis.
His widow, asked by a friend what killed this West Point scholar, had replied simply: "Iraq."
Now, a new article reveals -- based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act -- that Westhusing's apparent suicide note included claims that his two commanders tolerated a mission based on "corruption, human right abuses and liars." One of those commanders: the new leader of the "surge" campaign in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.
Westhusing, 44, had been found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport in June 2005, a single gunshot wound to the head. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq. The Army concluded that he committed suicide with his service pistol. Westhusing was an unusual case: “one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor,” Miller explained in his L.A. Times piece.
”So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.
”In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.”
His death followed quickly. "He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," one official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this." After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide.
Now, nearly 18 months after Miller's article, The Texas Observer this month has published a cover story by contributor Robert Bryce titled "I Am Sullied No More." Bryce covers much of the same ground paved by Miller but adds details on the Petraeus angle.
"When he was in Iraq, Westhusing worked for one of the most famous generals in the U.S. military, David Petraeus," Bryce observes. "As the head of counterterrorism and special operations under Petraeus, Westhusing oversaw the single most important task facing the U.S. military in Iraq then and now: training the Iraqi security forces."
Bryce refers to a "two-inch stack of documents, obtained over the past 15 months under the Freedom of Information Act, that provides many details of Westhusing’s suicide. The pile includes interviews with Westhusing’s co-workers, diagrams of his sleeping quarters, interviews with his family members, and partially redacted reports from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and Inspector General.
"The documents echo the story told by Westhusing’s friends. 'Something he saw [in Iraq] drove him to this,' one Army officer who was close to Westhusing said in an interview. 'The sum of what he saw going on drove him' to take his own life. 'It’s because he believed in duty, honor, country that he’s dead.'"
In Iraq, Westhusing worked under two generals: Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, and Petraeus, then a lieutenant general. In a March 2005 e-mail, Petraeus told Westhusing that he had “already exceeded the very lofty expectations that all had for you.”
But Bryce continues: "By late May, Westhusing was becoming despondent over what he was seeing. Steeped in—and totally believing in—the West Point credo that a cadet will 'not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do,' Westhusing found himself surrounded by contractors who had no interest in his ideals. He asked family members to pray for him. In a phone call with his wife, Michelle, who was back at West Point, Westhusing told her he planned to tell Petraeus that he was going to quit. She pleaded with him to just finish his tour and return home."
When his body was found on June, a note was found nearby addressed to Petraeus and Fil. According to Bryce it read:
"Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more.
"Trust is essential—I don’t know who trust anymore. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it."
Twelve days after Westhusing’s body was found, Army investigators talked with his widow, Michelle, who told them: "The one thing I really wish is you guys to go to everyone listed in that letter and speak with them. I think Ted gave his life to let everyone know what was going on. They need to get to the bottom of it, and hope all these bad things get cleaned up.”
Bryce concludes:
"In September 2005, the Army’s inspector general concluded an investigation into allegations raised in the anonymous letter to Westhusing shortly before his death. It found no basis for any of the issues raised. Although the report is redacted in places, it is clear that the investigation was aimed at determining whether Fil or Petraeus had ignored the corruption and human rights abuses allegedly occurring within the training program for Iraqi security personnel. The report, approved by the Army’s vice chief of staff, four-star Gen. Richard Cody, concluded that 'commands and commanders operated in an Iraqi cultural and ethical environment often at odds with Western practices.' It said none of the unit members 'accepted institutional corruption or human rights abuses. Unit members, and specifically [redacted name] and [redacted name] took appropriate action where corruption or abuse was reported.'
"The context, placement and relative size of the redacted names strongly suggest that they refer to Petraeus and Fil.
"Last November, Fil returned to Iraq. He is now the commanding general of the Multinational Division in Baghdad and of the 1st Cavalry Division. On February 12, Petraeus took command of all U.S. forces in Iraq. He now wears four stars."
Monday, March 26, 2007
I Am Sullied No More
March 09, 2007
I am Sullied-No More
Faced with the Iraq war's corruption, Col. Ted Westhusing chose death before dishonor.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
I am Sullied-No More
Faced with the Iraq war's corruption, Col. Ted Westhusing chose death before dishonor.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
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