Tortured War

December 12, 2014

539179_370Rain continues, but on this early Friday California’s north coast keeps on floating.

Does anyone anywhere seem concerned about this?
Between April and June 2014:

There were 70 suicides among service members in the active component, 14 suicides among service members in the reserves, and 20 suicides among service members in the National Guard.’

Although authorities claim this is a decline, the numbers are way-still, way-shitty: ‘In 2013, 132 members of the U.S. military died in combat; incredibly, 475 killed themselves.’
See what I’m saying?

Perpetual war has its perpetual, and sometimes permanent costs.
Last April via USAToday:

Rates of suicide in the military were slightly worse during the war years than what the Pentagon previously reported, according to new calculations released by Defense Department officials Friday.
The new arithmetic shows that from 2006 forward — during the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan — the true suicide rate across the U.S. military was actually several tenths of a percent to 1 percent or more higher than what was being reported.

Yet wars so fucking unnecessary. One sidetrack off this week’s release of the now-infamous ‘CIA Torture Report’ is the upchucking of ‘Iraq.’ Of all the horrors inflicted upon this country by George Jr. and his bunch, most-likely the worse, the 2003 invasion of Iraq — the boy and his merry men, The Dick, Rummy, ‘Wolfman’ Wolfowitz, Dick Perle, and the whole maniacal mob, created a debacle from scratch, an event even worse than the late-great Gen. William Odom’s description as the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history,” but instead Iraq may go forward as one of the terrible pivotal blunders in world history.

One small example — the most-dreaded ISIS, the barbaric, horror-horde causing great grief in Iraq, Syria, all-the-fuck-over, was born and raised only due to the US invasion of Iraq. Germinated and incubated inside hated US-run prisons scattered about the war-blasted country — the invasion unlocked insanity.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported already the world was fucked. Fred Kaplan at Slate in July 2007:

Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less “a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida.”
(Some of Wolfowitz’s erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn’t grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.)

And the US young people shoved into a nightmare without preparation are killing themselves. Not in an Army ready for it, as in the heartless infamous words of one asshole-in-charge: ‘“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

So within the context of the ‘CIA Torture Report,’ and Director John Brennan — as I noted yesterday (via McClatchy), Sen. Carl Levin released extracts from a CIA cable that refutes one of George Jr. and The Dick’s biggest lies — the Saddam and al-Qaeda link.
From International Business Times:

Speaking on the Senate floor, Levin brought up a 2003 CIA cable that warned the former president and his officials not to make references to allegations that Mohammad Atta — the Egyptian hijacker who led the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer named Ahmad al-Ani in Prague before 9/11, which killed 2,996 people and cost the U.S. at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage.
Levin accused the Bush administration of using the report of the unconfirmed meeting to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“That campaign succeeded.
“According to public polls in the week before the Iraq war, half or more of Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks,” Levin said, in a statement released Thursday.
“Americans who believed in a link between Iraq and 9/11 overwhelmingly supported the idea of invading Iraq.
Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al Qaeda were fiction.”

Maybe from any direction — torture, lying into war, etc. — some of these assholes might see the inside of a jail cell, even if it’s just a holding tank.
Just some accountability, pleze!

(Illustration above found here).

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