American Troops are Murderous Animals

[Curiosity]

Thomaska

Ditto what Sassy said - Marines Rock!!!

Thank you for your service.

WC

 

[Sassylassie]

Finder wrote: Yeah but he would be stuck with a dishonourable discharge for the rest of his life. This way by making it political he has a chance that a Democratic lead government would clear him. I doubt the Democrats would do that but there's a chance. Also taking the political road it is easyier to explain it to people and well.... makes him look better in some peoples eyes

Yep now he's a paid "Hero" for the Pacifist or Bush haters. He could of resigned couldn't he???

 

[I think not]

So "I think not" you think the United Nations effort was in vain and a communist Korea would be better then the situation we have now? Never knew you were a supporter of North Korea's goals. My hats off to you, never knew you were a Ultra Stalinist too.

I see you haven't changed much, your spin qualifies you for a politician. The UN's role, I attempted to point out, was allegedly, according to you, to stop the war. My point is, it didn't stop the war, all they have is an armistice agreement. They have no "peacekeepers" within a 1000 miles of the DMZ. No peace treaty. Instead, us idiots pay to protect South Korea. So I ask you again, how did the UN stop the war and what the hell has it been doing for 60 years since?

The United nations efforts in Korea prevented the fall of the South Korean state, if the United Nations had not entered the war there would be no South korea only the DPRK! Of course your hatred for the United Nations seems to over power this whole anti-terrorist, anti-islamo-fascist thing of yours it would seem.

Let's get something straight. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were identical in terms of reasons. Not to allow communism to expand. But nations became wary of Vietnam, it was a war that cannot be won. They were right, it wasn't won. Communism prevailed. And the UN did what again? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

[Finder]

Re: RE: American Troops are Murderous Animals

Finder wrote: Yeah but he would be stuck with a dishonourable discharge for the rest of his life. This way by making it political he has a chance that a Democratic lead government would clear him. I doubt the Democrats would do that but there's a chance. Also taking the political road it is easyier to explain it to people and well.... makes him look better in some peoples eyes

Yep now he's a paid "Hero" for the Pacifist or Bush haters. He could of resigned couldn't he???

Hey I didn't say it was the right thing to do. But it is political and some people may respect it more then acting up in your unit to get discharged. Your right he shouldn't had joined in the first place if he wasn't ready to go to war.

 

[Finder]

So "I think not" you think the United Nations effort was in vain and a communist Korea would be better then the situation we have now? Never knew you were a supporter of North Korea's goals. My hats off to you, never knew you were a Ultra Stalinist too.

I see you haven't changed much, your spin qualifies you for a politician. The UN's role, I attempted to point out, was allegedly, according to you, to stop the war. My point is, it didn't stop the war, all they have is an armistice agreement. They have no "peacekeepers" within a 1000 miles of the DMZ. No peace treaty. Instead, us idiots pay to protect South Korea. So I ask you again, how did the UN stop the war and what the hell has it been doing for 60 years since?

The United nations efforts in Korea prevented the fall of the South Korean state, if the United Nations had not entered the war there would be no South korea only the DPRK! Of course your hatred for the United Nations seems to over power this whole anti-terrorist, anti-islamo-fascist thing of yours it would seem.

Let's get something straight. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were identical in terms of reasons. Not to allow communism to expand. But nations became wary of Vietnam, it was a war that cannot be won. They were right, it wasn't won. Communism prevailed. And the UN did what again? Your guess is as good as mine.

Wrong. The Vietnamess war was as you said to stop the so called "Domino effect" and this was a war of aggression set forth by the USA and not the United Nations. In which we know of the outcome. For today there is no South Vietnam.

Where we had the "Korean Police action" The North Korean government was told by the UN to stop the war right away and to go back to the boarder by the UN. North Korea decided not to listen and the UN resolution for a police action was granted. Many nations took part, from the USA, Greece, to Turkey and many more. Yes some American Generals politized it as stopping Communism, but it was to stop the advance of the North Korean government and not to destory it. Perhaps if the USA had not used the United Nations back then we would have had a united Korea under the Stalinists of North Korea today, much like how the United states going at it with there own alliance in Vietnam and now Iraq seemed like they are domed to fail or make things worse.

You need International legitimacy for these things to work!

 

[I think not]

You need International legitimacy for these things to work!

Really? You mean like the Serbian War, where the UN sat on its ass while Muslims were being massacred? Seems it's doing fine, without "international legitimacy"!

I won't answer the rest of your post, because quite frankly, I won't get anywhere.

However, you still haven't answered my question, Finder.

Why didn't the UN negotiate a cease fire, why have 60 years gone by and not a peep out of the UN. Why should the US taxpayer be required to protect South Korea and not the UN?

Why?

 

[thomaska]

read the full article:


09/16/06 "The Independent" -- -- In the week that George Bush took to fantasising that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty" I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration--from that of "soldier" to that of "warrior"--is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities.




From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black" prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin?





So first, here's the official US Army "Soldier's Creed", originally drawn up to prevent anymore Vietnam atrocities:

"I am an American soldier.

I am a member of the United States Army--a protector of the greatest nation on earth. Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation that it is sworn to guard ...

No matter what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit or my country.




I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions, disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.

I am proud of my country and it's flag.



I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent for I am an American soldier."

Now here's the new version of what is called the "Warrior Ethos":

I am an American soldier.

I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the Unites States and live the Army values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.




I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American soldier.




Like most Europeans--and an awful lot of Americans--I was quite unaware of this ferocious "code" for US armed forces, although it's not hard to see how it fits in with Bush's rantings. I'm tempted to point this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in his words: "The Warrior Creed," he wrote, "allows no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the 'enemy'. It allows no defeat ... and does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of the 'long war'). It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions ...".

Each day now, I come across new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afgha-nistan. Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of an American mobile interrogation team working with US marines, interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now! programme describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: "Every time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by the Force Recon Marines ... One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe of a Humvee ... he had a giant blister, third-degree burns on the back of his leg."

Lagouranis, whose story is powerfully recalled in Goodman's new book, Static, reported this brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the US Judge Advocate General's Office. "But they just wouldn't listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of terrorists apprehended ... so they could brief that to the general."
The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day.






In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when US forces saw babies lying in the road in Fallujah--outrageously, it appears, insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans to halt and face ambush--they were under orders to drive over the children without stopping.

Which is what happens when you always "place the mission first" whenyou are going to "destroy"--rather than defeat--your enemies. As my American vet put it: "the activities in American military prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations--they are part of what the US military, according to the ethos, is intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than the US Army. But those armies don't claim to be the "good guys" ... I think we need... a military composed of soldiers, not warriors."



Winston Churchill understood military honour. "In defeat, defiance," he advised Britons in the Second World War. "In victory, magnanimity." Not any more. According to George W Bush this week "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad" because we are only in the "early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom".

I suppose, in the end, we are supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty in the dungeons of "black" prisons, under the fists of US Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy. Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.

http://www.gawaher.com/index.php?showtopic=33348


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14993.htm

All because of Bush and thinking he and his forces are about International laws and human rights. no wonder they are going to loose in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here's our attitude, or code as you put it, in its most simple form, its a good story, read the whole article....

Leading the fight is Gunnery Sgt Michael Burghardt, known as "Iron Mike" or just "Gunny". He is on his third tour in Iraq. He had become a legend in the bomb disposal world after winning the Bronze Star for disabling 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance during his second tour. Then, on September 19, he got blown up. He had arrived at a chaotic scene after a bomb had killed four US soldiers. He chose not to wear the bulky bomb protection suit. "You can't react to any sniper fire and you get tunnel-vision," he explains. So, protected by just a helmet and standard-issue flak jacket, he began what bomb disposal officers term "the longest walk", stepping gingerly into a 5ft deep and 8ft wide crater. The earth shifted slightly and he saw a Senao base station with a wire leading from it. He cut the wire and used his 7in knife to probe the ground. "I found a piece of red detonating cord between my legs," he says. "That's when I knew I was screwed."

Realizing he had been sucked into a trap, Sgt Burghardt, 35, yelled at everyone to stay back. At that moment, an insurgent, probably watching through binoculars, pressed a button on his mobile phone to detonate the secondary device below the sergeant's feet. "A chill went up the back of my neck and then the bomb exploded," he recalls. "As I was in the air I remember thinking, 'I don't believe they got me.' I was just ticked off they were able to do it. Then I was lying on the road, not able to feel anything from the waist down."

His colleagues cut off his trousers to see how badly he was hurt. None could believe his legs were still there. "My dad's a Vietnam vet who's paralyzed from the waist down," says Sgt Burghardt. "I was lying there thinking I didn't want to be in a wheelchair next to my dad and for him to see me like that. They started to cut away my pants and I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down. Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, 'Good, I'm in business.' As a stretcher was brought over, adrenaline and anger kicked in. "I decided to walk to the helicopter. I wasn't going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher." He stood and gave the insurgents who had blown him up a one-fingered salute. "I flipped them one. It was like, 'OK, I lost that round but I'll be back next week'."

Copies of a photograph depicting his defiance, taken by Jeff Bundy for the Omaha World-Herald, adorn the walls of homes across America and that of Col John Gronski, the brigade commander in Ramadi, who has hailed the image as an exemplar of the warrior spirit. Sgt Burghardt's injuries — burns and wounds to his legs and buttocks — kept him off duty for nearly a month and could have earned him a ticket home. But, like his father — who was awarded a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for being wounded in action in Vietnam — he stayed in Ramadi to engage in the battle against insurgents who are forever coming up with more ingenious ways of killing Americans.

 

[Curiosity]

Thomaska

Good story - thank you.

I wonder if "United Nations" has ever walked in your shoes or the shoes of others sent to a bloody battle with stomach churning, wondering if you will ever backtrack out of there in those same shoes.

None of us can know Thomaska unless we have been there.

Now we must listen to your story, what you know, what you have learned, and understand - not insult, nor denigrate, nor busily point out all the "wrongs" because we ourselves our cowards and seek only to use our fear by spouting rhetoric about which we know nothing.

And perhaps through your knowledge and shared experience, we never have to repeat this again.

We should not rely on politicians, nor generals who have never sweated a day in the sand or the swamp of a jungle, or to drown offloading at Normandy, nor "military stragetists" who roll dice from afar, nor hysterical media designed to curry interest through fear, to call the shots.

We should be asking the people who we commit to the deed of visiting hell for us.

And listen and understand and learn.

 

[Sassylassie]

Thank you Thomaska for sharing that story. I wonder why United Nation hasn't come back for further dialog. Troll perhaps, another Merican hater.

 

[gopher]

Rampant torture in Iraq:


http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1745861.htm


Thursday, September 21, 2006. 11:45am (AEST)
Torture rampant in Iraqi detention centres, UN says

Torture is rampant in Iraqi detention centres and in the widespread sectarian killings seen across the country, the United Nations (UN) has reported.

"Detainees' bodies show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns," the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq said in a new report.

Bodies found in the Baghdad morgue "often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones [of the] back, hands and legs, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails," the report said.

The signs of widespread torture have been confirmed by reports from surviving eyewitnesses, the rights office says. One individual, for example, said members of a Sunni extremist group beat him with electrical cables and iron bars to make him disclose the Muslim sect he belonged to.

"The body of another man kidnapped by Shiite militias bore signs of facial mutilation, had fingers missing from his hands and had a significant perforation, presumably from a power drill, below his left shoulder," the report said.

The report says rights groups have alleged torture takes place in prisons run by the US-led multinational force, as well as by the interior and defence ministries and militias.

Reports of torture in detention facilities were typically linked to interrogations, the report says.

The bodies that regularly turn up dumped in the ditches and streets of Baghdad and elsewhere across the country as a result of sectarian violence "bear signs indicating that the victims have been brutally tortured before their extra-judicial execution," it added.

The UN rights unit has called on the Iraqi Government to invite Manfred Nowak, the UN human rights investigator on torture, to look into the allegations.

The report says the Government's failure to crackdown on such horrid human rights violations is "challenging the very fabric of the country" by driving victims to exact revenge on their own, thus fuelling further violence.

The phenomenon risks further polarising Iraqi society and leading to "a self-reinforcing pattern of of sectarian confrontation," the report said.

- Reuters

 

[feronia]

I've been in the Marines for 12 years and have still managed to not torutre rape or murder anyone. So I guess your subject line is wrong, big surprise there...

Here's our Prayer:

The Marines Prayer

Almighty Father, whose command is over all and whose love never fails, make me aware of Thy
presence and obedient to Thy will. Keep me true to my best self, guarding me against dishonesty in purpose in deed and helping me to live so that I can face my fellow Marines, my loved ones and Thee without shame or fear. Protect my family. Give me the will to do the work of a Marine and to accept my share of responsibilities with vigor and enthusiasm. Grant me the courage to be proficient in my daily performance. Keep me loyal and faithful to my superiors and to the duties my country and the Marine Corps have entrusted to me. Make me considerate of those committed to my leadership. Help me to wear my uniform with dignity, and let it remind me daily of the traditions which I must uphold.
If I am inclined to doubt; steady my faith; if I am tempted, make me strong to resist; if I should miss the mark, give me courage to try again. Guide me with the light of truth and grant me wisdom by which I may understand the answer to my prayer. Amen.

But I prefer this myself...

This is my rifle.

There are many like it, but this one is MINE.

My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.

I must master it as I must master my life.

My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.

I must fire my rifle true.

I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.

I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will...

My rifle and myself know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire,

the noise of our bursts, nor the smoke we make.

We know it is the hits that count. We will hit...

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life.

Thus, I will learn it as a brother.

I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories,
its sights, and its barrel.

I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage.

I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.

We will become part of each other. We will...

Before God I swear this creed.

My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country.

We are the masters of our enemy.

We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until there is no enemy, but PEACE.

-- Maj Gen WH Rupertus

It takes that kind of commitment to ensure that you armchair politicians and generals out there continue to have the right and ability to call us Murderous Animals. Don't for one second think the enemy doesnt come to your lands and heap violence on you because of peaceful protests, or media coverage showing how everyone hates Bush. The enemy is at the gates, and they are staying outside of the gates because of men and women who are ready to do violence back on them.

Marines will always have a soft spot in my heart. All military men who fight a war with honor should have the worlds backing. My personal belief is the higher ups should be accountable and tried for horrendous acts on all sides. If the world held leaders accountable for acts of atrocities then perhaps wars wouldn’t happen at all. If Bush was held accountable for the troops actions just maybe Mr. Bush wouldn’t be so quick to jump into world affairs. Just my opinion.

 

[Doryman]

That doesnt matter, probably the thoughest job on the planet, but that doesnt justified their behavior, nothing justified that, they are what they are.

And what they are are people fighting to fix a problem, rightly or wrongly.. What are you doing, other than bitching on the internet and picking up extra shifts at Starbucks. I sure wish I could save the world from Mommy's Basement...

 

[Hotshot]

They're in a hornets nest and their jobs aren't to win a congeniality contest. They do what they're trained to do.

Like torturing and degrading prisoners??? Give me a break!

 

[Doryman]

Like torturing and degrading prisoners??? Give me a break!

Like killing the enemy and breaking their will to fight, yes. Sorry to shock you sir, but this is a war. It's like a university debate, only without the pony-tails and apologists