Damned Welfare Moochers

Grow a Conscience, Get a Court Martial

A Navy nurse who refused to force-feed hunger strikers at Guantánamo has been sent back to the United States with no resolution of his case.

The nurse has never been identified. Last month, a lawyer for a cleared, force-fed hunger striker told the story of the Navy lieutenant, a nurse, who refused to take part in the feedings — and the military confirmed it.

Guantánamo detainee Abu Wael Dhiab described him as perhaps 40 years old and Latino, an officer who at first willingly administered tube feedings to detainees, but over time became a conscientious objector.

[...]

Army Col. Greg Julian at the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison, said Friday: “He was administratively separated from the JTF and he’s pending court martial.”

  Miami Herald

Ft. Hood Assessment

Fort Hood shooter Ivan Lopez's rampage followed an argument over the denial of his request for leave and did not appear to be due to some ongoing mental problem, an Army official said Monday.

  Fox

Seriously? Snapping and killing people over a denied leave request  doesn’t indicate some ongoing mental problem?

Although he had reportedly been treated for mental issues including depression, military officials had expressed skepticism that his four-month tour in Iraq as that war wound down could have caused PTSD.

Whatever you say.

Casualties of War

An Iraq War veteran being treated for mental health issues opened fire at Fort Hood military base on Wednesday, killing three people and wounding 16 others before committing suicide. The attack took place on the same Texas site where more than a dozen people were slain in 2009, authorities said.

[...]

Wednesday's shooting was the third rampage at U.S. military base in just over six months, with memories still fresh from shootings at the Washington Navy Yard in September and late last month at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

[...]

Lopez had served for four months in Iraq in 2011. He was not physically wounded in action, but self-reported a traumatic brain injury before returning to the U.S., the Associated Press reported.

  

A traumatic brain injury is not a physical wound?  Or did he just report one when he didn't have one?

Lopez arrived at Fort Hood in February from another base in Texas. He was taking medication and receiving psychiatric help for deprrssion and anxiety, officials said.

[...]

[He] had been undergoing an assessment before the attack to determine if he had post-traumatic stress disorder, Milley said.

Case closed.

Justin Raimondo Would Like Some Attention

I was going to defend Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host whose pre-Memorial Day comments [wondering if the word hero when used to describe our troops is really an attempt to justify our foreign policy] provoked the wingnut-osphere into one of its frequent paroxysms of hate.

[...]

I was going to defend him, but he apologized so quickly after the chickenhawk brigade started squawking that he’s taken the fun out of the whole project.

[...]

I’ll defend Hayes anyway, in spite of himself: no doubt his corporate masters at MSNBC forced him to issue his (unconvincing) retraction. And I’ll go him one better: it isn’t just that our troops aren’t heroes, it’s that a good number of them are monsters. Yes, you heard me: monsters.

  Justin Raimondo

Sadly for Justin, he won't get the high profile blowback Chris Hayes encountered, because he's not a TV personality, or even a mainstream media blogger, but he will get some hate mail.  His normal quota, no doubt.

Let’s take an emblematic example: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who killed 17 Afghan civilians, most of them women and children, in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province. In the early morning hours of March 11, 14-year-old Rafiullah – a mere slip of a boy – woke to the sound of gunfire. He looked outside and saw an American soldier walking to a shed that housed the family’s prized cow: the soldier opened fire, killing the animal, and then approached the house.

[...]

“Terror unfolded in the crowded space, the frightened faces of women and children illuminated only by a light that Rafiullah said appeared to be affixed to an assault rifle. The shooter drove everyone before him, herding and hunting his victims like animals.”

[...]

Bales’ rampage is just the latest in a long series of atrocities carried out by our “heroic” centurions. Remember the “Stryker” gang that went around shooting helpless civilians and collecting fragments of bones as “souvenirs”? Should we give those “heroes” a medal?

[...]

There is growing evidence the [Bales] massacre wasn’t just an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern of “no knock” retaliatory raids conducted by US troops in Afghanistan. Those who are now coming up with exculpatory rationales for Bales’ murderous rampage – and even those who think Bales is monster – take refuge in the argument that his behavior is the exception, and that most of our soldiers are upstanding examples of All That is Good and True. Yet what Bales did is what is occurring on a nationwide scale in Afghanistan: a “special operations” campaign to sow terror among the Afghan populace so that fear outweighs their natural hatred of an occupying army.

[...]

Instead of defending the United States from attack, military recruits in the 21st century are joining a global Praetorian Guard whose mission is to fight wars of conquest. Rather than standing guard at the border, as they should be, they are busy pushing back the frontiers of the Empire. While not each and every one of them is a war criminal, the conduct of US foreign policy has now reached the point where they are all willing aggressors to some degree or other.

You can read Justin's post for an update on the case of Sgt. Robert Bales, because otherwise, it's being kept very quiet, and move on, there's nothing to see here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Get Back in Line, Soldier

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called on US troops to tighten up discipline and display “integrity” after a series of public relations disasters that he said could play into the hands of America’s enemies.

Panetta, echoing a message from Army and Marine Corps leaders, on Friday said the misconduct related only to a small percentage of the force but that digital technology magnified any incident, posing a threat to the military’s image.

“These days, it takes only seconds, seconds, for a picture, a photo to suddenly become an international headline,” he told hundreds of troops at Fort Benning, Georgia.

“And those headlines can impact the mission that we’re engaged in, they can put your fellow service members at risk, they can hurt morale, they can damage our standing in the world and they can cost lives.”

  

And worst of all, they can prove to the world how we're really conducting the “War on Terror”.

So stop taking pictures of what you're doing.

And speaking of troops getting out of line....

Two F-22 pilots say they have stopped flying the US Air Force’s most advanced fighter jet because of safety fears over the aircraft’s oxygen system, according to a CBS television “60 Minutes” report.

The F-22 Raptor was grounded last year after a spate of incidents with pilots suffering dizzy spells and blackouts in the air. The plane was cleared for flying in September 2011 but engineers are still trying to solve what appears to be a problem with the jet’s oxygen supply.

The pilots, Major Jeremy Gordon and Captain Josh Wilson, told the “60 Minutes” program they stopped flying in January, citing safety concerns over a lack of oxygen.

  Raw Story

So I'm sure these guys are in the brig for failing to follow orders. No?

The two pilots, who both served in the Iraq war, have sought legal protection as “whistleblowers” from a Republican lawmaker from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger.

They went to a Republican. A few years ago, that would have been astonishing, but considering the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers, it's completely understandable.

Just Another Isolated Event

Further to More Pictures:

The soldiers allegedly involved in the incident served in a unit plagued by leadership problems, according to media reports.

The commander of the brigade was cited for allowing a poor command climate, and a battalion leader and senior enlisted officer were relieved of their posts after showing racist and sexist slides in PowerPoint briefings, the Army Times reported.

[...]

Senior US officials insisted the incident did not signal any wider discipline problem, and NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the photos did not represent the values of the alliance’s mission.

“These events took place apparently a couple of years ago and I consider them an isolated event,” he said.

  Raw Story

Not at all like the Abu Ghraib photos or the soldiers urinating on corpses photos, or the many, many incidents of soldiers abusing Afghan citizens while they're still alive or murdering them in night raids and regular patrols. Isolated event. A couple of years old.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the photos were “reprehensible” but also said President Barack Obama’s administration was “very disappointed” that the paper had published them.

Yes, I bet he is.

More Pictures

Graphic photos [taken in 2010] published in an American newspaper show US soldiers posing with the mangled bodies of suspected Afghan suicide bombers.

Senior US and NATO officials moved quickly to condemn the pictures even before they were published on Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times, which received the photos from another soldier.

At a meeting of NATO allies in Brussels, Belgium, Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, apologised for the photographs.

[...]

Panetta said: "My apology is on behalf of the department of defence and the US government ... Again, that behaviour is unacceptable."

He also said he regretted the decision of the Los Angeles Times to publish some of the photos, which he said might trigger retaliatory violence against foreign soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.

  

I think we are way beyond that. Our still being there is triggering retaliatory violence.

Such incidents have complicated US efforts to negotiate a strategic partnership agreement to define its presence once most foreign combat troops pull out by the end of 2014.

[...]

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary-general, condemned the behaviour depicted by the images, saying they "don't in any way represent the principles and values that are the basis for our mission in Afghanistan".

Earlier, General John Allen, the most senior commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement that an investigation into the incident was under way.

"The actions of the individuals photographed do not represent the policies of International Security Assistance Force or the US army," he said.

  al Jazeera

But they do depict the policy of US soldiers, it seems. This isn't the first time “embarrassing” photos have been published.

Either the military has completely lost control of its soldiers – or this IS representative of US Army policy. They haven't thought to take away the soldiers' camera phones, anyway.

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington DC, said the US military "didn’t want [the images] published. They asked the LA Times to not put them into the public domain". He said the US soldier who leaked the images did so because they showed "a breakdown in authority and discipline of soldiers serving in Afghanistan".

The Los Angeles Times defended the distribution of the photos in an article accompanying the photos.

"After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan," Davan Maharaj, the newspaper's editor, said.

  

But Julian Assange is a wanted man.


Go figger.

"Davan Maharaj"  ??   Oh, I think we can find a cell for him.

Brilliant

The US Marine Corps says it will investigate a video posted on the internet which appears to show US soldiers in Afghanistan urinating on corpses.

In a statement issued on Wednesday after the footage came to light, the corps said the matter would be fully investigated.

[...]

The video, which was first posted on the Live Leak website, shows four men in military uniforms urinating on three bloodied bodies on the ground, apparently aware that they were being filmed.

One of them jokes: "Have a nice day, buddy." The other makes a lewd joke about a shower.

[...]

"While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the marines in our corps," the statement said.

  alJazeera

Yeah. Video proof is no indication.

And guess who isn’t disturbed by the video? That’s right…the Taliban.

"American soldiers are trained to spread horror and this is one of the examples," the Taliban said.

However, the group's statement added that the incident would not affect negotiations with the US after US officials said Washington would send an envoy to Afghanistan to prepare the ground for direct peace talks.

Apparently, the perpetrators are no longer serving in Afghanistan. And in the meantime, while you run your “investigation”, I suggest you get ALL Americans, including soldiers, out of there.

Jesus Christ on a bicycle. They will no doubt hate us for our freedoms now.

No, it wasn’t Wikileaks, but I suspect somebody’s going to be Assanged. And if not, why not?