Wikileaks released evidence that in 2006 US soldiers executed four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger. All were handcuffed.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
Piece of Mindful 
I thought Assange was up for rape…
Why the anti-military boner? You seem quick to believe a staged Iraqi scene, but are skeptical of other announcements you don’t like.
If our guys are mowing down so many civilians, why don’t your guys prosecute them? Most such prosecutions have fallen apart under scrutiny. But I suppose it is more of the conspiracy at work.
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One, we don’t have any guys. It’s an empire, you’re in or you’re out.
Two, you didn’t know about the massacre ten minutes ago, and now you know it is staged? Impressive!
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You’ve got your buddy Eric Holder in there, who made a big push to prosecute the military. He scored a few. I thought that would make you happy.
Just applying a little skepticism to the linked article: The picture looked a little too “stagy”, a little too convenient. No direct evidence of American involvement.
You are a little too anxious to believe the worst.
Here’s a post from the comments:
Captain Lee (12 posts) Thu Sep-01-11 09:56 AM
Response to Original message
44. I call bullshit
48 months in Iraq, from 03 to 09. Never saw anything like this. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened. We had the typical rapes and murders that occure in any large herd of humans, but something like this takes a particularly twisted group of individuals to accomplish. I just don’t see how a unit, and this would be at least a squad (7-9 guys) doing something like this who ALL keep their mouths shut and cooperate in a conspiracy of silence. Sorry, not buying that. Iraq is FAR from what Vietnam was like. Guys aren’t under the same level of stress and depravation. We have Taco Bell on FOBs for fuck’s sake. Every patrol I was on was an ‘out and back’, at most 3-4 days outside the wire. The professional Army of today is not the drafty mob the Army was is Vietnam. Comparisonss to My Lai is unsupportable without MUCH more evidence.
Far more likely is this is inter-religious violence or Arab/Kurd ethnic cleansing.
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Well, understand that you offer here is anecdotal, even though he tries to make it sound like his experience covers a wide swath. Here’s what’s wrong:
It is a large herd, and by definition he sees only a little of it.
It doesn’t take a group to commit the crime, only to cover it up. The crime could have been done by one or the individuals.
It is a command structure and a cya structure where cover up is the first instinct.
If it did not happen an investigation on would reveal that, but it was not investigated.
They are very good at keeping secrets as they have leverage over people they want to shut up.
The UN guy wants ti investigate and is stonewalled.
It’s a counterinsurgency where the primary job of front line soldiers is house-to-house raids, doing thousands every day. They are trained to be brutal and efficient, to scare people into cooperation. It’s an invitation for sociopaths to have a picnic.
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I suspect you don’t interact much with military people that have been in Iraq, so you are left feeding your darker thoughts with what you read on the internet.
I realize bad stuff happens, but our military guys know they are being watched and recorded more than in any other time in history.
This story doesn’t pass the smell test for me. People handcuffed and shot in the head? If you are going out with intent on such, it is easier to fake a firefight and just shoot the people. This seems more likely to be an intra-Iraq thing, from what I know.
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I don’t have much faith in military personnel, as they are indoctrinated and compartmentalized. So you’re right that I don’t talk to them. Chris Hedges made it a point to select fifty at random on return stateside to get their impressions. More as I say than you say.
It’s “counterinsurgency.” The enemy is hidden among the people and needs to be rooted out. Americans and Brits perform early morning raids on civilian homes. That is the primary function, and they have done hundreds of thousands of such raids. They are looking for young men to arrest. If there is resistance they are locked and loaded. No one can be trusted. If some innocent bystander is killed, the response is to kill witnesses too, and destroy evidence. If children are left without parents they too need to be killed. Anything bad that happens creates a publicity storm if exposed, and so is quickly covered up.
If Wikileaks exposed this story but the perpetrators were Saddam Hussein’s secret police instead of Americans, you’d easily accept it. Counterinrsurgency is ugly business, the tactics first made known by the Gestapo. The death toll in Iraq is probably in the one million range with two million fleeing the country. They were running from Americans.
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So you’re right that I don’t talk to them.
??? Weird coming from someone who claims to be Mr. Knowledge and research, able to face it all.
I suppose I’m one of the Warrior class, so I tend to stick up for my own. I get different feedback than you.
You seem too eager to embrace a darkness in the soul. I read your anger toward Wulgar et al and I’m kind of glad you don’t conceal carry.
The Left in general paints a skewed picture of the Warrior class, with cops anxious to be racist, soldiers anxious to kill babies. Seems like a bit more projection than they will admit.
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Let’s just say that I don’t consider them a good source of information because they are, as I said, compartmentalized and indoctrinated. But you overstate the case.
First, Kailey sprung a trap on me, and once I realized this understood that he was a sociopath, and so do not treat him kindly. Why he chose me for this trap I don’t know. I didn’t even know him or his real name. But he must have seen me as some kind of threat, as he deliberately attacked me in a highly unethical manner. Say what you will by my attitude about him, please try to understand our history. He was no one to me until that attack.
Second, the “skewed” picture of the warrior class is not so skewed as you think. Most people who enter the military do so because it offers them the best way to make a living. They are regular people with consciences. When they are forced to do things against their conscience, they are deeply affected. It’s called “PTSD.”
Most bullets fired in combat in past wars are shot in the air, as people cannot bear killing other people. To remedy this problem, military leaders over the eons have developed ways of killing people from far away. That way they don’t have to look at the consequences of their action. So bombs, rockets, cannons, and especially aircraft have refined our ability to kill without remorse,.
But it is still there, which is why when something like this happens, it is covered up.
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After posting, I wanted to edit out what I said about you. You are a better man than most when treating others on the internet. I was trying to be a keyboard warrior and launch a personal attack.
Supposedly people in combat arms are there by choice or aptitude. We’ve got a lousy mission with lousy rules of engagement so our politicians can use the military for nation building. Most PTSD comes from wallking around and being shot at with no ability to respond properly.
Most bullets fired in combat in past wars are shot in the air, as people cannot bear killing other people.
Somewhat of a fallacy. Men in groups organized to kill have done so with no compunction throughout history.
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I should open the edit door here, make you a guest poster. That way you could edit your comments when you go overboard. But that’s quite rare for you.
I am not going look this up, and am going on memory, but my statement about shooting over the heads of the enemy came from a study done by General Marshall after WWII. I have the ability to edit comments, so I can fix that when someone sets me straight. But it is one of the problems with conscript armies – these men are not able to kill and are often too easily killed due to a poor warrior makeup.
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Thanks for your extension of good will. Kind of rare on the net.
There was a flawed study, widely quoted, about infantry engagement in WWII: they asked a couple of generals how many men they believed shot at the enemy. Studies in Vietnam put the figure at 80%.
Spool up ideological intensity and group psychology, and men will happily kill in great numbers. Islam seems able to spool this up far above us. I believe a line in one of the beheading videos was, “we enjoy doing this.” How are we going to stand against this with flowers in our hands, fretting over marriage for the transgendered?
Cf. Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda. Quite impressive, as such things go, a million people in 3 months using clubs and machetes.
Germany and Japan in WWII thought their sternness (especially Japan) would prevail over the softer Democracies. Churchill, in private, fretted over the lack of British fighting resolve in Singapore et al. Something not talked about much is that American infantry faired quite poorly against the Germans in Europe. We made up for it with air power and artillery. Especially artillery. Echoes of Stonewall Jackson, Pickett’s charge, etc.
Anyway, today’s Jihaddists brag that their will to power and their demographics are greater than ours. It is discouraging how Europe is rolling over in response to such.l
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Now I gotta go look up the Marshall study.
And you lose me anyway with your evil violent Muslim attitude. That’s projection. Counting 9/11 they have killed maybe 4000 people in acts of terrorism since 1980. Our numbers are in the millions.
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evil violent Muslim attitude
I see you haven’t engaged much with the militant Islam web sites. Raise a few questions about the utility of following the teachings of a weird 7th century dude, and its CUT YOUR HEAD OFF AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECK!!! Spooky stuff.
Our numbers are in the millions.
This is the thumb you suck. I picture you on your haunches in the corner of a darkened room, rocking back and forth, murmuring “we’ve killed millions, we’ve killed millions”. Trash and refuse collects. Rats immigrate. Neighbors complain of funny smells.
Contrary to your claims, sober people have been keeping track of casualties in Iraq. That we even have a wikileaks is a testament to our armed forces tracking these things and trying to implement improvements. Rest assured your heroes that come after us will do a better job of not even generating such info.
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Again, it’s projection. Are you familiar with that? We bundle up all of our own failings and cleanse ourselves of them by laying them on someone else. So Native Americans are savages, Vietnamese are gooks, Germans are baby killers and Muslims are violent irrational terrorists who want to cut off our heads. We are terrorists, baby killers, savages who run about the planet terrorizing and bombing people. Kind of hard to deal with, so we lay it on them.
the problem with dealing with empires is that they have so many paid apologists, and Cordesman is that – highly educated, sophisticated in writing and reasoning, and cautious enough to know that if he says something true, he’ll be unemployed. Never once does he mention Hopkins or ORB, and instead focuses on IBC, whose methodology is flawed in the extreme and who was demonized prior to Hopkins, at which point DOD fell back on them as the “sober” ones.
And then there is mindset, so apparent here. The empire attacks and occupies a country that has committed no sin, and that is all internalized as acceptable. So we debate tactics and dispute numbers, but the only ones allowed to do this are apologists, which is why Cordesman can work for ABC. In his mind, and yours, we are fighting evil. He either believes that, or knows that it is fatal not to believe it. This makes him a third rate man.
Can’t really deal with that. It’s mindset. At high levels, people are paid to have the proper mindset. At our level, we are either tooled into the proper thought system or marginalized. I speak from the margins.
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I speak from the margins
In more ways than one.
Too typical that you impune Cordesman. He is sober and detached more than most, with plenty of criticism of those in power.
How much do the numbers really matter to you? If we killed only one Iraqi, you would still hate the status quo. You gloat over the numbers as if they are so large an archangel is going to finally come down and do what needs to be done as you see it because the numbers have become so large God himself can no longer ignore it and has to do something out of guilt overe the large numbers that currently only you see but someday God and everyone else including the bankers and insurance people in power will see and take action thus validating your feelings.
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I do not have personal feelings for anonymous people when they die unless I see suffering. But numbers matter because we are supposedly on a vendetta for a crime with large numbers … Of Americans.
More later. This is a good discussion to have.
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OK, one: We do not have the right to kill people, no matter how worthy we think our cause. If we enter a war of aggression for deceitful reasons, we are responsible for every loss of life. The very idea that we have certain killing rights based on our just cause is repugnant and totalitarian.
Two: Cordesman is sober, detached, and on the payroll. He gets paid to write that stuff. I suppose it helps if he believes it.
Three: I think he is spinning a fancy lie in a number of ways:
He’s saying they keep track of these things; that their numbers are true and accurate; and that the US has killed X number of people. (Odd that when Lancet and ORB came up with numbers, DOD was silent except to deny.)
Given that, is he telling us only of people they killed by accident? Because the truth is that they decided that certain people, the resistance, were “terrorists”, so that killing them would be just.
There’s a huge divide between what Lancet and ORB tell us and what the Pentagon says, but it could be that the Pentagon, speaking through Cordesman, is just polishing the numbers.
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You talk like this is a courtroom and you are trying to sway a jury, after which you and maybe your client gets a big wad of something.
We do not have the right to kill people…
This is not categorical. There is self defense, and there is killing inherent in human activity, e.g. we build roads where we know some people will die.
If we enter a war of aggression for deceitful reasons, we are responsible for every loss of life.
True enough, I guess, but who decides deceit, and how is it enforced? Sometimes the penalty causes more problems than the crime (I’m thinking of Germany’s punishment after WWI).
Another factor here is Iraqi culpability. If you build a society that raises a leadership that sees fit to head fake building nukes and thus invites intervention from the Unipower, and if you build a society riven by clan conflict that unleashes in deadly ways upon perturbation, then you carry some responsibility. I’m not saying this excuses or forgives our deeds, but let’s keep things in context. The Lancet study said 30% of the deaths were from coalition troop activity, the rest Iraqi’s doing themselves. I suspect this is off by a ways, since nothing makes a good opportunistic kill like pinning it on the convenient foreigner.
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I do write with a hard edge, trying to forcefully make my point. In my new leaf era, I am trying to do this without insulting people, asshole.
OK, that’s humor.
You’re right. There are instances where killing another human is justified, self-defense being one.
Deceit can be objectively determined. We do this by ascertaining whether statements made and facts assembled to justify the invasion were true. They were not, indicating either deceit or stupidity by the Bush people. You decide.
There’s a whole history of how Saddam Hussein and the Baathists came to power, how the Iraqi nuclear program came into bring, how they acquired chemical weaponry that you are apparently unaware of. I j can’t take the time to do that kind of legwork. It’s your job to be well-informed.
Since you do not accept Lancet as legitimate, I question your reference to the 30% number. Nonetheless, I repeat what I said before:
That’s not me. That’s Geneva.
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On the Bush admin., I vote for stupidity.
Deceit is not so easily determined. You angle toward cutting things as black and white, but the world is messier.
I’m aware of the chemical warfare/Saddam/US connection. I think more is made of it to blame us, but I’m not going to deny games are played by our country via bureaucrats/politicians/hangers on of the administration in service to imaginary good. I also don’t think we need to prostrate ourselves and be forever apologizing for such.
I don’t find the “joint and several liability” approach to world affairs that you espouse to be a fruitful way of organizing things.
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Good place to leave it? You made your points well and I can’t answer some of them and don’t know answers to a lot of stuff. I know if I come back in 1000 years and we are still here, that nothing will have changed.
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