‘Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
…and you can do the same thing if you choose.
— Johnny Mandel, (M*A*S*H lyrics)

(Illustration found here).

The suicide rate for the US military is staggering.
From CBS News last Friday:

The Army’s suicide rate is now double the national average.
There were 162 suicides in Army ranks in 2009 — a record.
Fort Hood has had a record 20 confirmed or suspected suicides this year, four in just one week in September.

And to make matters worse, military authorities are overlooking some deaths.
From Time:

So that’s what makes page 190 of the Army’s latest report into its suicide prevention efforts so startling: “Research has shown that in 1998-99, for all branches of the military, there were likely 17% more suicides from among the equivocal deaths determined as either accidental or undetermined,” it says.
“The same research showed an additional 4% of deaths were suspicious for suicide, suggesting that reporting and classification problems may conservatively account for 21% additional suicides in the military.”
In other words, a lot more troops may be killing themselves than we thought.
…
“This study suggests that reporting and classification errors conservatively accounts for an additional 21% of suicides in the military,” it concludes.
“The purpose of this investigation is not to second-guess the casualty reports,” it adds, but “to provide a better estimate of the true incidence of suicide in the military.”

And to tackle this self-induced carnage, the the US Army announced at the end of last month a $17 million Military Suicide Research Consortium, an attempt to try and figure out “why the rate of suicide in the military has outpaced the rate among civilians in the past five years.”

Frigging, DUH!

A decade of warfare without an end in sight and two nasty war zones: And not enough US GIs to populate them creating multiple tours of duty, even using a ‘back-door draft’ in a so-called stop-loss method of keeping troops in the field beyond any kind of discharge date.
Although this bullshit is scheduled to end next March, the damage has apparently already been done.

And to make all this killing even more shitty — the lies from George Jr. and The Dick.
Apparently there has been no official presented/public evidence al-Qaeda was behind the attacks of Sept.11, 2001, although every living soul in the US, and most of the world believe it to be true.
From Wired magazine in late September 2001 on the FBI’s most-wanted list:

Bin Laden is listed, but only for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
There is no mention of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000, both of which he is widely believed to have orchestrated.
And forget about Sept. 11.
The reason?
Fugitives on the list must be formally charged with a crime, and bin Laden is still only a suspect in the recent attacks in New York City and Washington.
“There’s going to be a considerable amount of time before anyone associated with the attacks is actually charged,” said Rex Tomb, who is head of the FBI’s chief fugitive publicity unit and helps decide which fugitives appear on the list.
“To be charged with a crime, this means we have found evidence to confirm our suspicions, and a prosecutor has said we will pursue this case in court.”

Nothing has come up in the last nine years.
Just last week, Noam Chomsky brought up the subject in an interview with Press TV:

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.
“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”
The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.
“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”
Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, “a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban… That was later turned into the official justification for the war.”
“All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal,” Chomsky said.

Read more at Zero Hedge.

What a frickin’ mess — there’s no way out.