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?