‘Deranged, Crazy Person’
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Mitt Romney gave his most-rich thoughts yesterday on the massacre of Afghan civilians over the weekend: Asked whether he agrees with conservative commentators who say the U.S. should accelerate the pullout, Romney said Monday that he “wouldn’t jump to a new policy” because of a “deranged, crazy person.”
Crazed, of course.
The US Army staff sergeant who perpetrated the slaughter was indeed carrying a shitload of mental baggage, but the incident way-underscores the horror in a decade’s worth of killing children in far off lands which has created a legion of deranged, crazy people.
(Illustration — Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Self-portrait With Fried Bacon‘ — found here).
First and foremost:
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.
Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
This the June 2008 findings of the US Senate Intelligence Committee , which under sane, rational rules would have sent a shitload of high-in-the-government assholes to the jailhouse.
However, just as with all those banksters that brought the world’s financial house down that same year, not one of those responsible has spent even a second behind bars — talk about crazed and what’s-up-with-that-shit.
One wonders at that staff sergeant’s state of mind when he seemingly methodically killed 16 people, including nine children and an entire family, all 11 members, in a total nutcase of an incident.
A clinical psychiatrist told HuffPost the guy might have gone ‘berserk‘ and lost all mental capacity as berserkers “have this curious quality of icy and flaming rage; all they want to do is destroy, they want nothing to get in the way of their unmediated destruction and killing, and they are truly insensitive to pain. They are totally beyond the society of their own military forces and disconnected from them.”
The sergeant’s entire life will soon be an open book, but we may never know what happened to snap his brain.
Three tours of the nightmare inferno of Iraq might be a clue, but there’s been so much of this ‘berserk‘ shit in the last few years, vets are afraid of the backlash.
From military.com:
“It’s a huge concern,” said Matt Gallagher, an Iraq War vet and senior fellow at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“The only thing missing right now is a powerful visual, but I’m sure someone is going to find a creepy photo of the sergeant in question posing with guns, and that will be blasted everywhere.”
That perception affects the “99 percent of veterans who never have committed any crimes or unnecessary violence,” Gallagher said.
“[It affects] not only job searches, but how friends and family interact with them,” he said.
One must, however, remember this from a non-indicted war criminal: Rumsfeld paused, asked Wilson to repeat the question, then finally replied, “You go to war with the army you have.” Besides, he added, “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can be blown up.”
Juan Cole offers his thoughts this morning:
It should be remembered that frequency and duration of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan were substantially increased by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
As a result of the Bush administration’s frenetic pursuit of multiple wars abroad, the small professional military of the US was put under enormous strain.
Deployments were increased from a year to 18 months, and multiple deployments became common.
Because of the prevalence of roadside bombs as an insurgent weapon of choice, brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan sky-rocketed.
The murky military occupations of countries where young US troops had little local knowledge produced paranoia and widespread Islamophobia, sometimes reinforced by evangelical hatemongering among the troops. British officers who served with Americans in Iraq were shocked and appalled at the sheer racism they often encountered among their US colleagues, complaining that Americans viewed locals as Untermenschen, a lesser race as the Nazis would have put it.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome often went untreated.
Used and discarded in other words.
If these dumb-ass wars aren’t terminated and US military veterans treated for all sorts of war trauma, most-likely more of this kinds of delayed horror will happen.
And who’s the deranged, crazy person?
Terminal Death
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Understatement on the crazed shootings yesterday in Afghanistan: It is believed that, some time before the killings, the soldier suffered a nervous breakdown.
In a bad situation getting worse, the incident only makes it near-imperative the US and NATO get the shit out of that country, and like way-now.
US peoples know, but the powers-that-be don’t, or don’t care: Sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, and nearly the same number advocate an early US pullout from the country, a new poll showed.
(Illustration found here).
Although on the surface apparently, the shooting hasn’t yet stirred the ugly pot of unrest, but it might be just building up steam.
From the New York Times this morning:
Early on Monday, with the attacker in the custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed subdued with no immediate sign of protests on the streets.
But social networking sites such as Facebook and Afghan blogs were filled with angry postings, some of them accompanied by graphic photographs of what appeared to be children slain in the attack.
“This is a clear crime and will only add to the people who hate American in Afghanistan,” said one online posting.
“You can’t give their lives back to them with apologies.”
The shooter, an US Army staff sergeant, had from all indications, more than a passing experience in the ways of war:
Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children.
He had served three tours of duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December.
Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years.
War effects everybody and these George Jr.-affiliated conflicts seem to pack a wallow with those actually doing the killing — the shooter yesterday was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, a place in 2010 considered “the most troubled base in the military” by the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Overall, suicide in the US military jumped 80 percent from 2004 to 2008 — four real-bad years for a lot of killing.
Two years ago, four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians, and the military would like to sweep all that bad shit under some kind of happy rug in order to save money.
CBS News:
In the past five years, about 300 patients at Madigan Army Medical Center at the base had their PTSD diagnoses reversed by a forensic psychiatry team, The Seattle Times reported this month.
The Army is reviewing whether those doctors were influenced by how much a PTSD diagnosis can cost, in terms of a pension and other benefits.
At Coffee Strong, a coffee shop near the base that doubles as a resource center for soldiers seeking to leave the Army, executive director Jorge Gonzalez said he was not surprised the shooter was from the base.
“Joint Base Lewis McChord has been bombarded with bad stories,” said Gonzales, who served in the Army in Iraq in 2006.
“We’re not seeing the true costs of war, we’re seeing soldiers committing suicide … murder and domestic violence.”
Richardson said the vast majority of the tens of thousands of soldiers at the base were professionals.
“It’s unfortunate that these things keeping ending up at Joint Base Lewis-McChord,” he said.
“I promise you, not even a percent of those people are like this, but unfortunately it keeps happening.
Things like this will continue until there is no more war.”
The war on terror sucks the terror homeward.
Despite reality, President Obama continued the official line of bullshit: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
Barry, are you out of your mind.
Even as he meets with his UK counterpart today.
This nugget from the Guardian:
Such is the bleak reality facing Barack Obama and David Cameron when they sit down in Washington to discuss Afghanistan on Monday.
The shared narrative they have presented to their nations on how the Afghan war will end has been relentlessly eroded by the death toll among their soldiers and the daily headlines about the Karzai government’s seemingly incorrigible venality, like the Wall Street Journal report over the weekend that the US-funded Afghan air force was using its planes to smuggle narcotics and illegal weapons around the country.
Afghanistan is indeed the ‘graveyard of empires‘ and the US is most-likely at the end of its run as the world’s top dog — what a fitting place to end the American Dream.
Hopefully, not, but yet….
Warmonger Us — ‘A population under stress’
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Pornographic war creates sweet dreams:
“I laughed as I heard a story,” said Ryan Endicott.
“One of the platoons had strapped dead bodies from a gunfight on the hoods of their Humvees and then drove around the city for hours. . . .
One (day) they brought in a car that had just been shot up.
The driver’s fully intact brain was sitting in the back seat of the car.
I walked over to the body bag with the passenger in it.
The bag began twitching and we could hear his body still attempting to breathe.
We laughed as we stomped the bag.”
(Documentary “On The Bridge” via the Chicago Tribune).
(Illustration found here).
History’s most-worse coincidence — Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush alive at the same time.
How the shit did Osama know George Jr. would go nasty-faced, bat-shit crazy after Sept. 11, 2001?
Maybe the late al-Qaeda leader was versatile in gothic writings, i.e., the Project for the New American Century, or maybe he knew about the asshole line-up of warmongers that had been waiting with shark’s breath for a spark the World Trade Center conveniently provided at no expense.
Catch the rapid on-going financial expense of this useless, but perpetual war here.
A reminder from Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
And real death and misery.
Another study, another finger in the eye:
The study, an analysis of data from the Army Behavioral Health Integrated Data Environment, shows a striking 80 percent increase in suicides among Army personnel between 2004 and 2008.
The rise parallels increasing rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions in soldiers, the study said.
The high number of suicides are “unprecedented in over 30 years of U.S. Army records,” according to the authors of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Injury Prevention.
Based on the data and the timing of the increase in suicide rates, the authors calculated that about 40 percent of the Army’s suicides in 2008 could be associated with the U.S. military escalation in Iraq.
“This study does not show that U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan cause suicide,” said Dr. Michelle Chervak, one of the study’s authors, a senior epidemiologist at the U.S. Army Public Health Command.
“This study does suggest that an Army engaged in prolonged combat operations is a population under stress, and that mental health conditions and suicide can be expected to increase under these circumstances.”
Dr. Amir Afkhami, a professor of psychiatry and global health at George Washington University:
“But the higher number of suicides is a rock-solid indicator that we do have a problem,” he said.
“There’s no question about it.”
(ABC News)
And it just keeps keeping on.
President Obama ain’t much difference than George Jr. when it comes to killing people.
Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California law professor, on the US and its not-only perpetual, but permanent state of war.
Via Raw Story:
“The idea of wartime is doing a lot of work in American politics,” she said.
“The way we think about history is history passes through two different kinds of time, from wartime to peacetime to wartime et cetera.”
“That’s the way we learn about it in school, that’s the way that we imagine it.
When we use to concept of wartime, we assume that wartime is by definition temporary.”
But Dudziak noted that over the past 100 years, there had been few times when the United States was not engaged in a some sort of military conflict.
“And let me just tell you the Obama version of this,” she added.
“Obama comes into office having campaigned on ending two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then it morphs into a war on terror.
He says we are at war with al Qaeda.
We have lost the limitation of countries and it is now formulated as a war without end.”
One day it will all end, but I really don’t want to be anywhere in the area.
Hustle Up
Filed Under Cloud gazing, history, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
We can all sleep better now that Mitt Romney is once again the top GOP dog — slipping past the field in Arizona, and especially in the land of his birth, Michigan: ” … We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough and that’s all that counts.”
Yes, winning is all that counts, but the problem Mitt doesn’t care about, or even think about, is the US is a loser.
In the horror aftermath of the Ohio school shooting — the US leads the world in these kinds of things: Kids with guns kill kids at school.
US history leads the way as the very second European peoples stepped off the boat 300 years ago they started hustling up wealth and whatever got in the way was killed, a kind of death-cycle dodge ball where native peoples/animals/plant life were eliminated.
(Illustration found here).
This sincere give-or-be-killed attitude is awfully on display via the horror of Afghanistan, where US hustling has drawn up a nub — after nearly 11 years, the conflict there is coming apart at the seams even as US generals cry the luminosity of the “fundamental strategy” despite it all.
Not necessarily, at least for Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has served as a consultant for the Pentagon: “It has been a truly grim week and one where these events raise questions about U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war,” Cordesman wrote Monday in an online commentary. “The reality, however, is that the strategy . . . has been dying for a long time.”
No shit, sherlock.
The big problem with the Afghan theater is the US hustle.
Tomdispatch writes:
Sensitivity, in case you hadn’t noticed at this late date, has not been an American strong suit there.
In the headlines in the last year, for instance, were revelations about the 12-soldier “kill team” that “hunted” Afghan civilians “for sport,” murdered them, and posed for demeaning photos with their corpses.
There were the four wisecracking U.S. Marines who videotaped themselves urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans — whether civilians or Taliban guerrillas is unknown — with commentary (“Have a good day, buddy… Golden — like a shower”).
There was also that sniper unit proudly sporting a Nazi SS banner in another photographed incident and the U.S. combat outpost named “Aryan.”
And not to leave out the allies, there were the British soldiers who were filmed “abusing” children.
And the powers that be really don’t give a shit.
Even the Stars and Stripes pitched in with a anti-hustle nod:
“There is a lack of cultural understanding with the U.S. soldiers that should have been addressed by now,” said Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank.
“With their constant rotations — the new units coming in every year — knowledge does not get passed on.”
This bottom line to the whole Afghan bullshit: “The U.S. public has trouble understanding why the United States continues to sink blood and treasure into Afghanistan when the people we are trying to help are killing us,” Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, told the Los Angeles Times.
US peoples have had a long, hard time trying to understand — history pushes back.
One interesting explanation comes in a review of the new book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (John Wiley, 2012), by Morris Berman, an US academic humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.
Berman says the problem with America is its very character.
From the examination of the book by Thomas H. Naylor at Counterpunch:
According to Berman the seeds of the Empire’s destruction were sewn in the sixteenth century by the early European settlers who were, above all, into “hustling” — looking out for number one.
Ever since then, “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others” have provided the dominant theme of the American culture.
He or she who dies with the most toys wins the game.
Enough never seems to be quite enough.
The hustler’s credo is “Teach me how to be a moneymaking, moneyspending machine.”
Most hustlers are obsessed with having — owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.
Through having they try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.
Their compulsive desire to have leads straight to technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.
…
As a nation we are so obsessed with hustling that we have lost our ability to be human beings.
Our happiness depends mostly on our superiority over others, our power, and our ability to manipulate others.
Capitalist America may be the most efficient and productive nation in the world, but it extracts a high human cost.
Conspicuous consumption is no longer a sign of our success, but rather of our spiritual vacuum.
America has lost its soul.
…
Berman devotes an entire chapter to what he calls the “illusion of progress” and the relationship between technology and progress.
He views technology as a kind of “hidden religion” linked to the notion of “unlimited progress” and the “perfectibility of man.”
It supplies the “social glue” which hustling alone is unable to provide.
…
Most books about the decline of the American Empire conclude with a “happy chapter” explaining how some idea such as campaign finance reform, banning corporate personhood, or a return to the Constitution will guarantee eternal bliss.
Berman makes it very clear that his book has no “happy chapter” because the endgame is not going to be very pretty.
Berman describes life in the United States as vapid, utterly meaningless, and without heart.
“The United States has run out of steam.”
An ugly, inconvenient truth — hard to swallow, but if you can’t get it down, you choke to death.
One idea: Gird thy loins, or hustle up a strong-ass jock strap.
Silent Screaming
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Irony is today’s word.
Just as ‘The Artist,’ an ode to silence, won Best Picture at last night’s Oscars, the organization known for anti-silence, WikiLeaks, dumped another load of classified files onto the public — this batch emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, supposedly depicting the company’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
Thus to become more than a quiet riot.
(Illustration found here).
From WikiLeaks:
The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff.
It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”.
Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division.
Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability.
Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias,” yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad — including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.
An example of Stratfor’s use of so-called ‘methods:’
“[Y]ou have to take control of him.
Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase”
– CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.
What a noisy mess.
Even worse, contrary to public disclosures, maybe bordering on near-sarcasm:
Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :
“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ?
This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing.
And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information…
In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”
These files will be pored over in the coming days and a lot of disturbing, and most-likely illegal stuff will surface, and will once again display how ugly Americans can be when they think their shit doesn’t stink, or worse, they have no shit.
And it’s this American attitude that’s fueling the chaos in Afghanistan right now — seven US servicemen were injured this weekend in not-quiet-at-all riots over the supposed burning by American personnel of the Islam holy book, the Qur’an.
Although President Obama has publicly apologized for the Qur’an burnings, the GOP presidential nit-twits jumped Obama hard on it — Rick Santorum slobbering the move “shows weakness;” Newt Gingrich proclaiming the apology is akin to “surrender;” and Mitt Romney called it an “enormous error.”
Between them there’s not even a bird-sized shit for brains.
And there’s always more to a story that smacks the ears.
From the New York Times, though buried way down in the story:
Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said.
“They burn our Koran and then they apologize.
You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”
Sorry.
Glenn Greenwald adds this kicker-thought on the subject:
Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump.
Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them?
Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?
Indeed again.
And the shooting on Saturday of two US military officers in a supposedly secure Afghan government ministry has also displayed US compassion — NOT!
Juan Cole this morning enlightens a bit:
Two US military advisers to the Ministry of the Interior were shot dead on Saturday by an Afghan security man.
It turns out, according to recovered security tapes, that they were watching footage of the protests and cursing out the protesters, then speaking badly of the Qur’an.
The Afghan argued with them that they should be more respectful, and when the argument escalated, he drew on them and shot them both dead.
If this story is true, it distills the arrogance and bigotry of some US personnel in Afghanistan (they are in someone else’s country).
They didn’t deserve to meet that end, but cursing the Qur’an in a Muslim country in front of a local Muslim is about the most foolhardy act I can imagine.
The strong evangelical element in some parts of the US military makes it particularly unsuited to more or less running a largely illiterate Muslim nation that is deeply religious.
Evangelicals are the American group that has the highest disapproval of Islam.
Is the GOP listening, or in a cone of don’t-give-shit silence.
And what makes the whole Afghan situation even worse is the horrible horse shit heaved up by hard-case military assholes.
In this instance, Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who called the shooting of the two officers as “outrageous,” without any background on it.
And claimed in his air of authority, the incident reveals the “shallow impact [the United States] has on this primitive society.”
A total jerk — one must remember McCaffrey was among those so-called ‘military analysts‘ that bullied the fog-brained US public into supporting the Iraq invasion — the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for exposing the Pentagon Message Machine, on which Barry was a major player.
From the NYT story on the good general: Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Silence as we can see is not golden, though, one has to be an artist of some type in order to keep a lid on, or maintain the DL, of any news that might filter down to the US’ unwashed, near-ignorant masses.
Do we live in a vacuum, and if so, can anyone hear us screaming?
