UPDATE 2: Afghan officials retract an earlier claim that there are eyewitness villager accounts of several soldiers involved in the massacre: The evidence collected from the villagers was not enough to confirm that there was more than one shooter. Accounts of multiple gunmen were based on hearsay.

UPDATE 1: Did Staff Sergeant Robert Bales kill and wound all of the victims, or did other troops in his unit participate as well? Consider, for example, this troubling information:

Residents of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on US forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that US troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

Consider also that witnesses have told an Afghan investigative team that a substantial number of troops were involved in the massacre:

Between 15 and 20 American soldiers were involved in the March 11 massacre of civilians in Kandahar Province, according to a parliamentary probe of the killings, not merely one sergeant as has been widely reported for the past week. An investigative team of parliament members spent two days in the province, interviewing members of the victims' families and tribal elders and gathering evidence related to last Sunday's murders in which 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, were killed and their bodies set on fire. The attacks lasted one hour Sunday morning and were carried out by two groups of U.S. soldiers, the leader of the investigative team told Pajhwok Afghan News.

The villages are one and a half kilometre from the American military base, Hamidzai Lali said. We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups. The investigation indicates 15 to 20 soldiers took part in the killings, said Lali, who has asked the Afghan government, the United Nations and the international community to ensure the perpetrators are punished in Afghanistan. He expressed anger that the one soldier arrested by the U.S. military in connection with the murders had been flown from Afghanistan to Kuwait. People interviewed by the lawmakers warned that if the killers were not punished, they would launch a movement against the Afghan authorities who had agreed to the presence of foreign troops in the country in 2001, Lali said.

Meanwhile, Bales' defense attorney is suggesting that he had nothing to do with the massacre because he purportedly doesn't remember anything. His attorney has also stated that, to date, the Pentagon has not provided him with any information connecting Bales to it. Implausible? Probably, but, then again, the mainstream media has been recycling Pentagon press releases about the incident without requiring any actual proof to the point of incredulity.

INITIAL POST: Qais Azimy identifies the anonymous victims of the Afghan massacre:

The dead:
Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah
Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

As emphasized here in the days after the massacre, Azimy contrasts the anonymity of the victims with the obsessive interest in the details of the accused perpetrator's life: We even know where his wife wanted to go for vacation, or what she said on her personal blog.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

UPDATE: Publicly, at least, the Pentagon has already figured it out:

A similar line came from the Pentagon, where a spokesman described the killings as a deplorable but isolated incident and said that the indications were that they were perpetrated by a single individual acting on his own.

Of course, there are a lot of important questions to ask. Did the perpetrator tell anyone else in the unit of his plans? Did anyone notice him departing the base in full gear and night goggles by himself? Did he really act alone, or did anyone provide him with assistance? If so, what did they do? Did he display any behavior in the days and weeks prior to the killings that alarmed anyone? If so, did they act upon what they observed? The Pentagon will probably ask all of these questions, and more, but don't expect it to tell us the answers because they would contradict the specious humanist explanation for the occupation.

INITIAL POST: A witness recounts how the soldier went about killing his victims:

One survivor recounted how the US soldier, reportedly a father himself, had hunted down an Afghan family like military targets through their modest home, set among vineyards and pomegranate orchards just south of the US base.

He was walking around taking up positions in the house in two or three places like he was searching, said 26-year-old Muhammad Zahir, who from a hiding place in another room recognised the man's Nato uniform but was unable to see his face.

He was on his knees when he shot my father, Zahir said. His father had been carrying only a cup of tea when he came out of his room to meet the shooter; he was wounded in the thigh, but survived.

After the gunman left, Zahir said he heard gunshots near the house again. He stayed in hiding for a few minutes to make sure the killer was gone.

Some of the bodies had single, execution-style bullet wounds in their heads, and those from a home where he killed 11 people were charred and wrapped in burned coverings, although Dastagiri and villagers were unsure whether they had been set deliberately on fire or a blaze had been started by munitions.

And, another, similar account:

In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base on Sunday counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the head, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. All the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned, said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. We put out the fire.

Relatives said the bodies of two women showed stab wounds and that some of the women were shot as they ran from room to room to try to avoid the gunman. Among the dead at the base, a man aged about 50 had a single gunshot wound to his chest.

The villagers also brought some of the burned blankets on motorbikes to display at the base, Camp Belambay, in Kandahar, and show that the bodies had been set alight. Soon, more than 300 people had gathered outside to protest.

Meanwhile, the process of personalizing the perpetrator while preserving the anonymity of the victims has already begun:

An official told ABC News that the soldier has suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News. But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.

For more background as to how this humanization, this selective individualization, serves the purpose of rationalizing the killings of civilians by US troops, please consider reading my post from August 2008, People in White. Consistent with this, John Glaser enumerates numerous incidents in which US troops killed Afghan and Iraqi civilians and received minimal or no punishment. I wonder whether investigators will look into whether there were any warning signs that should have been recognized. I also wonder whether the other troops in the unit will adopt the well known code of silence utilized by the police when investigated for misconduct. The military has a strong motivation to characterize the killings as something that happened in isolation. The personalization of the perpetrator assists in the attainment of this objective as well.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

UPDATE 2: Afghan witnesses say that multiple soldiers were involved.

UPDATE 1: Laura King of the Los Angeles Times seeks to downplay the killings:

Civilian casualties -- almost always accidentally inflicted when they come at the hands of the Western military -- have long been a sore point in the West’s dealings with Karzai.

Apparently, she hasn't read the reports that the US acknowledges a 50% error rate in targeting perceived enemies during night raids and drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even assuming that one is willing to accept the US narrative as to the purpose of these attacks, given that the US has continued to launch these attacks with full knowledge that they kill large numbers of civilians, it is not possible to characterize the resulting deaths as accidental.

INITIAL POST: From the Guardian:

A US soldier has killed more than a dozen Afghan civilians, many of them women and children, in a night-time shooting spree in southern Afghanistan.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned the shootings as intentional murders and demanded an explanation from the US.

The victims of the shootings, which left up to 16 civilians dead, included nine children and three women, Karzai's office said in a statement.

This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven, Karzai said. He said he has repeatedly demanded the US stop killing Afghan civilians.

The White House said it was deeply concerned by initial reports of the incident and was monitoring the situation closely.

General John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, issued a statement pledging a rapid and thorough investigation into the shooting spree, and said the soldier will remain in US custody.

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has always been about retribution for 9/11, at least as far as many of the troops are concerned. Of course, the Afghans had nothing to do with it, except for that small number of people who helped shelter Bin Laden and others involved in al-Qaeda. But the US keeps telling the troops that Afghanistan is a central theatre in the war on terror, despite the lack of any quantifiable al-Qaeda presence in the country, and when faced with predictable resistance from the Afghan populace, horrifying incidents of this kind are inevitable.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, Sadomasochism

You may have seen this elsewhere already, but I think it is important to acknowledge these atrocities. From Mark Boal's article in Rolling Stone, The Kill Team:

The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit's leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer's supervision.

Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. He seemed friendly, Winfield recalled. He didn't seem to have any sort of animosity toward us.

Gibbs turned to his men. You guys want to wax this guy or what? he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.

Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. To be honest, Morlock later told investigators, me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, 'cause we were so fucking close.

With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. All right, dude, wax this guy! he shouted. Kill this guy, kill this guy!

As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.

Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!

The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man's hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man's head, shattering the jaw.

Later, when the scene had calmed down – after soldiers had pushed away the dead man's wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups – Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse's left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man's mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.

No wonder the US tried to prevent Malalai Joya from entering the country. As I observed when the allegations about the kill team were first publicized: If anything, the conduct of these troops, if substantiated, brings to mind attacks upon homeless people by young males. But Boal goes beyond the brutality of the kill team members, as grotesque as it is, and exposes the unwillingness of higher ranking officers to stop them.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Sadomasochism

From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

A judge sentenced ex-BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle to the minimum term of two years in prison Friday for fatally shooting unarmed train rider Oscar Grant, saying he believed the former officer's testimony that he had confused his pistol for a Taser.

Mehserle, 28, faced as many as 14 years in prison after he was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter and a separate charge of intentionally firing a gun at Grant at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland early Jan. 1, 2009. But Judge Robert Perry threw out the firearm conviction before sentencing Mehserle in Los Angeles County Superior Court, saying there was no evidence to support it.

Reminiscent of the absurdity of a San Francisco jury finding Dan White guilty of manslaughter for the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk because he ate too many twinkies, Judge Perry ruled that Mehserle was involuntary acting upon muscle memory when he killed Grant:

Perry's remarks suggested that, had the prosecution won the murder conviction it sought, he would have overturned it because he found no intent to kill.

Mehserle's muscle memory took over in this moment of great danger and stress, the judge said. No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun."

Meanwhile, in regard to killings by the US miltary on the other side of the world:

In another top case, eight Marines were initially charged with murder or failure to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis that occurred after a roadside bombing that killed a Marine. Six have had charges dropped or dismissed, and one was acquitted.

Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad leader, is scheduled to go to trial Sept. 13 on reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter in nine of the 24 deaths and other crimes in the November 2005 shootings in the town of Haditha.

Last year, a Marine accused of killing an unarmed Iraqi detainee during a 2004 battle to recapture the city of Fallujah pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty after the government dropped a murder charge as part of a plea agreement.

The other two defendants were acquitted, one by a military jury and the other by a civilian court after he completed his military obligations and was beyond the reach of a court-martial.

Any explanation by police officers or US troops is apparently sufficient.

Labels: "Support the Troops", BART Killing, California, Iraqi Deaths, Police, Racism, US Military

Through the Wolf Brigade, the US carried out its policy of intensifying sectarian violence in Iraq in 2005 and 2006:

A visit from the unit to any neighbourhood was sure to bring trouble – as it it did for Omar Salem Shehab on 25 June that year.

We were at home that night, Shehab recalled this week. We were three brothers sleeping above my ice-cream shop. We were woken by soldiers entering our house by force. They came with Americans. They said we were wanted and produced a document. The Americans took our pictures, then the soldiers we now knew were the Wolf Brigade took us to the Seventh Division camp [of the Iraqi army].

Shehab and his brothers lived in Dora, in Baghdad's south, a lethal enclave of the city that was rapidly deteriorating into chaos. Like most of Dora's residents, they are Sunni Muslims.

The trio were at the army camp for a day, then transferred to Baghdad's main prison, known as Tsferrat.

We were tortured all the time, he said. We were never investigated, just tortured. The commander of the Wolf Brigade, Abu al-Walid was one of the torturers. My brother had a kidney problem and they continued to torture him without giving him medicine.

He died after a month and the doctor wrote 'kidney failure' as a cause of death, despite his body being covered with torture marks. When he died, they let me and my other brother out. I later learned that another man we had met in prison, Khalid Hussein, had also died.

Torture and death seemed synonymous with the almost exclusively Shia unit, which was tasked with rooting out Sunni insurgents from post-Saddam Iraq. As security unravelled across the country, they were often seen alongside US forces, particularly in Baghdad and Mosul.

As a consequence of the WikiLeaks document release, US support for Iraqi death squads is finally being exposed to the light of day.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Neoliberalism, Occupation of Iraq, US Military

Perhaps, you've already read about this subject in relation to the WikiLeaks release of material associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Even if you have, please bear with me, starting with the following from The Guardian:

A frago is a fragmentary order which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ.

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

Hundreds of the leaked war logs reflect the fertile imagination of the torturer faced with the entirely helpless victim – bound, gagged, blindfolded and isolated – who is whipped by men in uniforms using wire cables, metal rods, rubber hoses, wooden stakes, TV antennae, plastic water pipes, engine fan belts or chains. At the torturer's whim, the logs reveal, the victim can be hung by his wrists or by his ankles; knotted up in stress positions; sexually molested or raped; tormented with hot peppers, cigarettes, acid, pliers or boiling water – and always with little fear of retribution since, far more often than not, if the Iraqi official is assaulting an Iraqi civilian, no further investigation will be required.

Beyond allowing the US and the other participants in the coalition to outsource the brutalization of detainees, Frago 242 created opportunities for a perverse voyeurism, whereby US troops were permitted to watch the most gruesome abuse of people without any obligation to do anything about it.

If there was any question that the US was complicit in much of this abuse, Justin Raimondo helpfully directs our attention to another article in the The Guardian that eliminates any remaining doubt:

Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for further questioning. Typical entries read: All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning (from 29 November 2004) and The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films: US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing, while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.

According to this post by lenin in 2006, the situation in Samarra was not unique:

6,000 bodies in Baghdad's mortuaries since the start of the year, and what's more, no-one believes these are the true figures from the violence in and around Baghdad as many bodies are not taken to the morgue, or are never found.

Here's the thing: the US government can openly announce its intentions. It can even be reported once in a while (albeit with a rather crude apologia bracketing the facts). Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee can die while uncovering the truth behind it. Yet somehow, invariably, it's simply taboo to mention what is richly evident. The BBC did not mention any of this either on television or on the internet. No one mentions that the bulk of these deaths are attributed to the Special Police Commandos, who were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units.

Yasser Salihee found that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios. He died shortly after reporting this at a US checkpoint, with a bullet in the head.

As Patrick Cockburn drily observed: Of particular interest to Iraqis, when WikiLeaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Death Squads, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism, US Military

It pretty much speaks for itself:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret kill team that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.

According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to toss a grenade at someone and kill them.

Invariably, as an occupation faces more and more resistance, the more sadistic the occupying force becomes. Furthermore, it is also important to remember that US troops serve in one of the most technologically advanced militaries while brutalizing people in one of the poorest countries in the world. If anything, the conduct of these troops, if substantiated, brings to mind attacks upon homeless people by young males.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Sadomasochism

In light of the President's speech tonight about the purported cessation of hostilities in Iraq, it might be worthwhile to consider the following:

The great number of Iraqi children affected by post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the saddest, and least known, legacies of the Iraq war.

That a new clinic for their treatment — opened last August in Baghdad — is the first of its kind says a lot about how this problem is being addressed.

Dr. Haider Maliki and his team at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad have treated hundreds of children suffering from PTSD. Hundreds of thousands remain untreated.

Dr. Maliki, who is the only child psychiatrist in the entire country working at a government hospital, hasn’t even been trained as a child psychiatrist. He only took up the position when he saw the tremendous needs for that kind of professional in the country. It is well-known that children are particularly vulnerable to stress, violence and displacement.

Hardly a week still passes by in Iraq without renewed signs of violence that leave both children and adults with permanent mental scars. Dr. Haithi Al Sady, the dean of the Psychological Research Center at Baghdad University, has been studying the effects of PTSD in Iraqi children.

According to him, 28% of Iraqi children suffer some degree of PTSD, and their numbers are steadily rising. It is easy to see children’s psychological status being affected by daily explosions, killings, abductions, threatening noises and turmoil in Iraq’s main cities.

PSTD manifests itself in the following ways:

PTSD can cause many symptoms. These symptoms can be grouped into three categories:

1. Re-experiencing symptoms:

-Flashbacks—reliving the trauma over and over, including physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweating

-Bad dreams

-Frightening thoughts.

Re-experiencing symptoms may cause problems in a person’s everyday routine. They can start from the person’s own thoughts and feelings. Words, objects, or situations that are reminders of the event can also trigger re-experiencing.

2. Avoidance symptoms:

-Staying away from places, events, or objects that are reminders of the experience

-Feeling emotionally numb

-Feeling strong guilt, depression, or worry

-Losing interest in activities that were enjoyable in the past

-Having trouble remembering the dangerous event.

Things that remind a person of the traumatic event can trigger avoidance symptoms. These symptoms may cause a person to change his or her personal routine. For example, after a bad car accident, a person who usually drives may avoid driving or riding in a car.

3. Hyperarousal symptoms:

-Being easily startled

-Feeling tense or on edge

-Having difficulty sleeping, and/or having angry outbursts.

Hyperarousal symptoms are usually constant, instead of being triggered by things that remind one of the traumatic event. They can make the person feel stressed and angry. These symptoms may make it hard to do daily tasks, such as sleeping, eating, or concentrating.

It’s natural to have some of these symptoms after a dangerous event. Sometimes people have very serious symptoms that go away after a few weeks. This is called acute stress disorder, or ASD. When the symptoms last more than a few weeks and become an ongoing problem, they might be PTSD. Some people with PTSD don’t show any symptoms for weeks or months.

Children and teens can exhibit PSTD symptoms in ways different than adults:

Children and teens can have extreme reactions to trauma, but their symptoms may not be the same as adults.

In very young children, these symptoms can include:

-Bedwetting, when they’d learned how to use the toilet before

-Forgetting how or being unable to talk

-Acting out the scary event during playtime

-Being unusually clingy with a parent or other adult.

Older children and teens usually show symptoms more like those seen in adults. They may also develop disruptive, disrespectful, or destructive behaviors. Older children and teens may feel guilty for not preventing injury or deaths. They may also have thoughts of revenge.

Beyond this, the experience of trauma resulting in PSTD may also permanently impair a young person's development:

Victor Carrion and other researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, US, studied 15 children from ages 7 to 13 suffering from PTSD, according to the science portal EurekAlert.

This type of developmental trauma often impairs the child's ability to reach social, emotional and academic milestones. The researchers measured the volume of the hippocampus - part of brain important in memory processing and emotions - at the beginning and end of the 12- to 18-month study period.

After correcting for gender and for physiological maturity, they found that children with PSTD and high levels of the stress hormone cortisol were likely to experience a decrease in the size of the hippocampus.

Although similar effects have been seen in animal studies, this is the first time the findings have been replicated in children. The researchers focused on kids in extreme situations to better understand how stress affects brain development.

We're not talking about the stress of doing your homework or fighting with your dad, Carrion said, We're talking about traumatic stress. These kids feel like they're stuck in the middle of a street with a truck barrelling down at them.

And, yet, it has been reported that the President said that the Iraqis should be grateful for the efforts of US troops to pacify the country. If true, it is among the most mendacious statements that he has ever made.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Barack Obama, Occupation of Iraq

As reported in the Guardian:

Survivors of an alleged Nato rocket attack on a small town in Helmand, which the Afghan government says killed 52 civilians, spoke today of their anger at what they claim was a deliberate air strike, despite coalition denials.

The incident is alleged to have taken place last Friday in Regey, in the volatile Sangin district of Helmand. News of it came as a deluge of leaked US army documents about previously unreported civilian killings threatens to ruin Nato's attempts to persuade Afghans that it takes innocent deaths seriously.

Many residents of the town say they believe the strike, which they say was a missile attack on a mud house where people were hiding from nearby fighting, was deliberate. The foreign forces could see us, said Haji Abdul Ghafar, a 38-year-old farmer who had fled to Regey from a nearby village. We were not in any hideouts. The Americans can see tiny things on the ground, but they could not see us. I think they bombed us on purpose.

Ghafar said at first he had not known whether shooting was coming from tanks or from aircraft. But people a bit far from us said that the foreign troops' tank fired a cruise missile. It hit the house and destroyed the front of the house and the left wall.

He was speaking to the Guardian at the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city, where he went with his son, Agha Shereen, who suffered a broken leg and nose, and a seven-year-old nephew, Abdul Jabar.

Abdul was still suffering from severe shock, appearing to believe he was still at home and looking for his sandals to go out and play with other children. In total, Ghafar said, 17 members of his extended family were killed, including three sisters, three daughters and one son.

Hopefully, someone will leak the logs about this incident in the next year or so.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads

UPDATE: It is all a matter of priorities: The Pentagon said it was conducting an investigation into whether information in the logs placed coalition forces or their informants in danger.

INITIAL POST: Click on the link for a useful interactive feature that the Guardian has provided to enable readers to found some of the more interesting reports, such as, for example, this one. Others can be found in an article summarizing civilian casualties inflicted by CIA forces that the US refuses to acknowledge to this day. Some of these incidents, such as the one contained in this article, were already known to many, including readers of this blog, but the release of the sanitized report itself illustrates how many casualties have been concealed. The primary benefit of the release of these reports by wikileaks is that it will tend to confirm what many critics have said about the war in Afghanistan.

Curiously, the release of bureaucratic reports seems to instill a credibililty in terms of the description of past events that didn't previously exist. It is also very damaging to the Obama administration, as it proceeded to order the escalation of the war with full knowledge of what was contained in them. One suspects that the most immediate consequence of the release will be increased pressure within Germany to remove troops from Afghanistan, as the deployment has been very contentious there.

Not surprisingly, the Guardian has covered the extent of civilian casualties extensively, while another recipient of the reports, the New York Times, has emphasized national security concerns, such as the possible association of the Inter-Services Intelligence with Taliban resistance, an article highlighted at the top of its webpage dedicated to the logs. Afghan civilians don't count for much in relation to the Times perspective on the conflict, only becoming a problem when they undermine support for the occupation.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads, Germany, New York Times

An update on the possible consequences of the use of depleted uranium munitions in Fallujah in 2004:

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened.

Tom Eley of the World Socialist Website provides more background:

According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.
The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.

The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.

In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.

In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Strikingly, after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls. But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births. This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after the US atomic attack of 1945.

One suspects that similar, if not more destructive, radiation weapons would be used in an attack upon Iran, with potentially even more severe consequences.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, War with Iran

UPDATE: Sergeant Keith is going to miss his six month old son while killing people in Afghanistan. The propaganda effort in support of this conflict must be going poorly if the Pentagon has to resort to using infants to generate sympathy for the combatants. Apparently, Sergeant Keith wasn't fortunate enough to land an assignment directing drone attacks, which would have enabled him to remain in the US.

INITIAL POST: Next time someone says that you should support the troops, remember this:

Crouched in a field of opium poppies, a young Marine lieutenant pleaded over the radio for an airstrike on a compound where he believed a sniper was firing at his troops. Request denied. Civilians might be inside and the Marines couldn't see a muzzle flash to be absolutely sure the gunman was there.

The lieutenant's frustration, witnessed by an Associated Press journalist in February in Marjah in southern Afghanistan, points to a Catch-22 dilemma facing the NATO force: how to protect troops against an enemy that lives — and fights — among the population without killing civilians and turning the people against the U.S.-led mission.

Those complaints from the ranks are among the issues facing Gen. David Petraeus — along with relations with a weak Afghan government and jittery allies; slow and uncertain progress on the battlefield; and frayed ties to the civilian side of the mission.

But among the most sensitive and important to the troops he commands and to supporters of the military at home will be whether to continue the rules laid down by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that stress saving civilian lives but sometimes leave U.S. forces at greater risk.

Those rules, issued a year ago, helped make McChrystal a hero among many Afghans because they brought down the number of civilian casualties blamed on the NATO-led force. The rules were issued at a time of a rising tide of public anger over Afghan civilians killed by mistake in airstrikes and by heavy weapons such as cannons and mortars.

Down in the ranks, however, the rules are widely perceived as too restrictive, playing into the hands of the Taliban who appear keenly aware of the regulations. Some troops believe the rules cost American lives and force them to give up the advantage of overwhelming firepower to a foe who shoots and melts back into the civilian population.

Of course, despite rank and file troop anger, the rules had limited utility in reducing casualties among the Afghan populace. Drone strikes and night raids continue to kill large number of non-combatants. But the groundswell for liberalizing rules of engagement even further in the wake of McChrystal's departure give us an insight into the blood lust that defines the US mission in Afghanistan. Consistent with historic US practice, US troops have no problem indiscriminately killing the civilian populace in order to attain their objective.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, American Empire, Sadomasochism

The preliminary stages of the anticipated Kandahar offensive:

American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18 and sparking anger in a city where winning over Afghan support is considered pivotal to the war effort.

The American-led military command in Kabul called the killings a “tragic loss of life” and said troops fired not knowing the vehicle was a bus and believing that it posed a threat to a military convoy clearing roadside bombs from a highway.

The killings triggered a vitriolic anti-American demonstration, infuriated officials and appeared likely to harm public opinion on the eve of the most important offensive of the war, in which tens of thousands of American and NATO troops will try to take control of the Kandahar region, the spiritual home of the Taliban, this summer.

Note the subsequent demonstration after the killings is described as vitriolic. You know, those emotional, irrational Afghans just can't avoid overreacting to the excesses of the NATO presence. Given all that US and NATO forces have done for them, can't they at least politely protest with signs like We appreciate your hard work, but please stop killing us? Or, maybe, Don't be so scared of us, we really do like you?

Meanwhile, the anticipated Kandahar offensive looks more and more like a slaughterhouse that will permanently define the US/NATO presence in the country. Afghans will the ability to do so will leave the city for sanctuariers in the countryside, while poorer and incapacitated ones will remain. Upon entering the city, US/NATO forces will blame them for their own deaths and injuries, as US troops did in Fallujah, and as the Israeli Defense Force does in Gaza. To be impoverished and infirm renders one Taliban, whether one likes it or not.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Death Squads, Sadomasochism

On Wednesday, Charlie Davis posted an entry asserting that we shouldn't support the troops for their actions in the Middle East and Central Asia. As long time readers of this blog know, I have expressed similar sentiments for years, some of which can be accessed by clicking on the "Support the Troops" label at the bottom of this one. Most criticisms tend to focus upon the brutalities inflicted upon the populace in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and rightly so. But there is something that often gets ignored.

Liberal peace activists who have pushed the support the troops mantra reduce the people who enlist in the military and perpetuate these occupations into an amorphous, unthinking mass, a reduction that characterized the collectivizaton of the peasantry in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the determination by urban planners like Corbusier that proletarians should be required to live in sterile, strictly controlled environments. In other words, people who enlist in the military lack any free will and historical agency, a perspective easily refuted by the many people who have returned after military service and candidly described what they did.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised. Liberals have adopted a similar perspective with the middle and lower middle class generally, as it purports to speak on their behalf while insisting that they continue to politically support Democrats that implement neoliberal policies to their detriment. There is a vanguardism here, one that appears to be driven primarily by the fear that the people from whom they purport to speak may actually begin to speak for themselves. Hence, the apparent contradiction between their espoused identification with progressive economic beliefs and the actual policies that they support is readily explained. By intensifying the insecurity of the groups for whom they claim to represent, they preserve their monopoly of speech, and all the power that it entails.

Prior to his death, there was a vigorous debate about the support the troops attitude at Steve Gilliard's blog, The News Blog, probably sometime in 2006. Steve took the support the troops line, while I, and a few others, insisted that those who enlist should take responsibility for that decision and their subsequent actions. At one point, I suggested that some troops may actually rebel, and that if that ever happened, we should publicly support any such action. Oh, my goodness! Now, that really terrified the liberals who posted there, because, after all, just think about all the terrible things that could happen if troops started disobeying orders. They might even disobey the President.

As far as many of these liberals were concerned, better that they continue to kill Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis, than refuse to do so. My response to this hysteria was straightforward: the Democratic and Republican parties have taken away far more of my rights in the last 30 years, and remain a threat to take away more, a much greater threat than the people enlisted in the military. The contempt that many of them had for people who served in the military, based upon intellectual and class bias, came out quite clearly. I came away with the impression that while many liberals claim to want to downsize the military, they believe that it perpetuates a necessary system of social control.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Democrats, Liberals

Dahr Jamail has published a harrowing article about the indiscriminate violence that has marked the occupation of Iraq:

Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.

"I remember one woman walking by, said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.

The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot, Washburn's testimony continued, The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.

One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.... One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies.

An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by, he said, This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.

Of course, if you haven't figured it out already, you should read the article in its entirety.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism

Given that the organization that has released this 2007 video, wikileaks, is being described as a threat to national security by the Pentagon, I believe that it is important to disseminate it as broadly as possible.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism

Investigations into the February 12th night raid in Khataba village in Afghanistan are discovering that the truth is worse than we could have imagined:

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men, said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

A senior Afghan official involved in a government investigation told The Times: “I think the special forces lied to McChrystal.”

Why did the special forces collect their bullets from the area? the official said. They washed the area of the injuries with alcohol and brought out the bullets from the dead bodies. The bodies showed there were big holes.

As you might have guessed, US media reported on this raid by credulously accepting the NATO explanation, until Afghan investigators and the London Times forced the truth out into the open. In an excellent article posted at Salon today, Glenn Greenwald places this incident within the larger context of NATO's success in persuading the media to accept its false, propagandistic descriptions of events in Afghanistan. Interestingly, Greenwald documents how an Afghan newspaper published, right after the attack, a more nuanced, more accurate description of it, primarily because the reporter talked to the residents of Khataba as well as NATO press officers.

And therein lies the problem. US newspapers and cable channels, to the extent that they attempt to cover the war in Afghanistan at all, look to official sources for the most accurate information. Conversely, like some American feminists, they consider the accounts of Afghans themselves to be the least credible, and, as noted by Greenwald, don't bother to even inquire about them, much less report them.

It is tempting to ascribe this phenomenon solely to nationalistic pressures associated with war coverage, but that would be a mistake. Elite newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have always practiced this method across the board, even before there was a war on terror. Articles invariably follow a pattern: official US sources first, other friendly official sources second, and, if the reporter gets that far, local accounts and concerns. Of course, sources from governments or groups considered hostile by the US are presented last, with an appropriately dismissive tone. The pattern, with minor variations, is followed without fail regardless of whether the subject of the article is a foreign or domestic subject.

And, as we have learned in relation to the invasion of Iraq and a possible attack upon Iran, off the record official US sources are considered more credible than on the record statements from anyone else, even more credible than direct evidence that refutes them. So, what we have here is a style of propagandistic journalism, a style that predates the war on terror and invasion of Iraq, but one that has become more crude and transparent because of the sensitivity of public opinion.

Of course, the New York Times has finally reported that US troops were responsible for the deaths in Khataba, but, naturally, placed the following emphasis upon it:

The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.

The dead Afghans, it seems, are merely a backdrop for those poor US and NATO officials that now have to deal with the unpleasantness of being caught out in a lie, a kind of deceased human scenery, as it were, like mannequins used to display the lastest fashions at Saks Fith Avenue. Or, perhaps, like a multitude of Banquo's ghosts, causing panic attacks among officials and American reporters alike. And that Karzai! Can't someone get him to shut up? Note the use of the verb railed in the characterization of his objections to civilian killings by US and NATO forces, a subtle way of suggesting that he is either hysterical or exaggerating them.

And, then, finally, there are those pro-war feminists again. Maybe, someone can get around to asking them how the war in Afghanistan is for the benefit of the women there, when US troops are shooting and killing pregnant women, and then, afterwards, carving the bullets out of their bodies.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads, Feminism, Mainstream Media, NATO, Sadomasochism

From the London Times:

The two helicopters swooped low over a cluster of mud homes, whirling in the cold night sky before landing in a wheat field on the edge of the small Afghan village.

From his home nearby, 23-year-old Najibullah Omar strained his eyes in the darkness as he made out the faint shapes of armed men pouring from the helicopters’ bellies.

A third helicopter circled menacingly in the moonless sky above the village of Karakhil in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.

Then a loud explosion shook the ground and a plume of smoke rose from his cousin Hamidullah’s house 20 yards away. Its guest room caught fire. Omar heard a burst of gunfire before all went quiet.

The body of his cousin, a 32-year-old construction engineer who had taken a break from his job in a far-off province to visit his family, lay sprawled next to those of his wife and their seven-year-old son. Blood ran in dark pools on the mud floor of the terrace outside their door.

The wife and son had been shot in the head, each with a single bullet. The engineer had died from a shot to the chest. The precision of the killings, coupled with his failure to find any bullet casings after the raid, led Omar to believe that his cousin was murdered either by US special forces or by an intelligence agency.

The sole survivor was the couple’s younger son, aged six, whose upper torso was riddled with puncture wounds from grenade shrapnel.

For years, we have been subjected to statements all across the political spectrum that, regardless of what we think about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Pakistan, that we should all respect the bravery of our troops, and the sacrifices that they make on our behalf.

It's nonsense, propaganda on the level of the old USSR or Nazi Germany, as this article demonstrates. Our troops come from one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. They are transported around combat zones by planes and helicopters, guided by satellite communications and provided with information as to what is transpiring on the ground from surveillance drones. They are equipped with the most modern weapons and protective gear, and able to call in air strikes within minutes if they should come under attack. If wounded, they are rescued by helicopter and evacuated half way across the world to Germany for treatment within hours.

Conversely, the people subjected to their violence are among the poorest in the world. They live in villages and practice subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. Some grow poppies for the global heroin trade, and partake of little of the outsized profits generated from this illicit activity. Most children must forego their education to assist their parents, with a few fortunate enough to become educated as professionals, like one of the victims in this attack. Even so, such a professional still lives a difficult life, with a degree of deprivation unimaginable for similarly situated people in the US and Europe. Needless to say, life spans are short and child mortality rates high. Such are the people for whom our troops must act with such bravery, such ferocity of purpose, in order to prevail.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads, Pakistan, Sadomasochism, US Military