You're either with us or the terrorists Froomkin.

Do you want Islamofascists here in the Homeland digging bullets out of murdered Homeland-American women?

Why don't you get yourself a Kate Smith 'God Bless America' record and listen to it until you reflexively salute the flag and start crying red, white and blue tears.

Now drop and give me 20!

"I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit."

Oh, they do. Believe me, they do.

If they ever get their hands on the real culprits, the ones who made the evidence available to the public, that is, you can be certain that their retribution will be swift and sure.

"I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit."

Don't hold your breath.

Why do Americans cling to the myth that all members of the armed forces are "HEROES", risking their lives to defend our "FREEDOMS". I was in the military and the truth is that service men and women are no more heroic, courageous or righteous than the average kid on the street. True heroes are the people who put their lives and careers on the line by doing their best to stop outrages such as the two illegal wars currently being waged. A surprising number of these people are in the military but their heroism is rarely reported by the MSM, who refuse to report on the widespread practice of "sandbagging" or outright disobedience of orders issued by "lifers" who care not for the lives of civilians or the soldiers they so callously order into battle while remaining safely out of the fray.

Murka (the Good Guys) can't be wrong... can't be wrong,

We Can't Be Wrong...

We Can't Be Wrong...

Join with our leaders, join with our corporate media, and repeat as necessary until all doubts are repressed.

United We [can't] Stand [confronting our gravest mistakes]; Up the Ante; Let's bet our childrens' futures on the premise that our violence is above accountability. Let's escalate further, and expend still more lives and treasure at the next provocation.

-----OR-----

Voice your concerns about the national-interest implications of criminal and inflammatory foreign policies to your associates and to your political representatives. If you are a citizen who still cares about the USA, do not participate as a silent accomplice in national insanity and criminality. This vicious cycle of terrorism is going to continue, until citizens (not the special interests thriving on it) break it. The cycle of terrorist provocation and superpower misdirection and over-reach is not under control at present- we're poised for the next round, and ready to make the similarly calamitous mistakes again.

If citizens of the USA continue to delay demanding accountability for national violence until the next cycle of terrorist attacks and national rampage, our insecurities and difficulties are sure to multiply. As a nation, we've learned very little from the 9-11 experience about focused, measured, legal, and effective national response to spectacular terrorist provocations. If we cannot restore a respectable standard of accountability in the USA, then the anguish and hatred that our most reckless and heartless policies are inflaming around the world will continue to invite more of the same, with dire and unpredictable consequences in the future.

Obviously, commiseration in web comments won't be sufficient to break the vicious cycle that still threatens our national viability. If we understand the threat and if we still value our country, then we have a duty to make a difference in national consciousness -while we still can- at every conceivable point of interface with our communities, media, and government. Get up! Stand up!

The invasion was predicted upon a lie. There was no WMD, no nukes, no chemical weapons.

So the illegal war has been supported by a people in the USA who are hysterical about being attacked by an enemy without a nation.

It boggles my mind that the people of the USA are so very thoughtless and afraid of an illusion.

I predict that the USA will politically collapse within two years. Why?

Our elections are a fraud: we don't know for sure if the vote count in truthful. The Congress is controlled by the corporate interests.

Profit trumps climate change, mass transit, education, health care, and housing.

Dan Froomkin has it exactly right. Where is the outrage from our leaders? When John Kerry testified before Congress in the early 1970s when he was an activist, he famously inquired: "Who will be the last man to die for a mistake [in Vietnam]?". At that time Kerry was expressing empathy for U.S. soldiers who were needlessly dying in Vietnam. But as Froomkin points out, where is that elusive word empathy when it comes to people who are being slaughtered by American firepower? The motto of the U.S. military would seem to be: shoot first and ask questions later.

Also, any accountability for U.S. war crimes becomes nonexistent as one can go back to the My Lai massacre when Calley was found guilty of that atrocity but was simply placed under house arrest and then eventually pardoned by an American president. The scales of justice are supposed to be impartial but as this article notes the fix is apparently in as the last thing it would seem that our politicians desire is for justice to be served. In an ideal world the person or persons who leaked that video would be considered heroic while those who unjustifiably shot those civilians are the ones who should end up being condemned. But in the United States just the opposite seems to be taking place. This again is reminiscent of My Lai when Calley was basically absolved of his crime while the true heroes of My Lai [and those would be Hugh Thompson and his crew who intervened and made sure that no more innocent Vietnamese would be slaughtered by the Americans], ended up being hounded and harassed [especially Thompson] the rest of their lives because they had the audacity to do the right thing by challenging and going up against, successfully, the U.S. military.

If Congress has an ounce of integrity, they would call Jerome Starkey as its witness so Starkey can report about how U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of the bodies of those Afghan pregnant women. A congressional investigation should also be launched so that those helicopter pilots who fired and ripped apart those Iraqi civilians can be grilled as to their behavior and their actions. After wards, they should then be prosecuted for what they did to those people.

"The world is drenched in mutual slaughter... Held to be a crime when committed by individuals, homicide is called a virtue when committed by the state."-Saint Cyprian [3rd century], Carthaginian bishop and early Christian writer

There is outrage.The image of the US fighting man,the military,the US govt. and decision makers is irretrievably lost.Every time there is a US military engagement,it is the Wikileaks video that will colour the judgement of people around the world.Even in those few instances when they were absolutely innocent,this video will damn them.
There is a payback.

I'll not vote for any of the thugs on capital hill again. As for the Pentagram General in charge of coverups - what will he do next? Run for Pope?

Our entire military presence in the Middle East has been, and remains, IMMORAL!!!!

If our corrupt leaders start giving a shit about this video that means they might have to give a shit about how and why we're still in Iraq, and why we're still in Afghanistan. They might have to start giving a shit about all the lives lost and treasure wasted in these futile imperialist wars of sheer aggression that don't make sense from any perspective except that of the Bush-Cheney oil cabal. If they seriously give a shit about the murders from the Apache helicopter thugs, they'll have to ask the same questions and confront the same evidence that THEY have been prosecuting and supporting a thoroughly criminal war since 2002, the longest in our history, and since 2003 in the case of Iraq.

They simply can't afford to give a shit. It would spell their own political death and flush them out into the open as the war criminals they totally are, and they can't have THAT. Good luck, Dan. No one on Capitol Hill or in the White House is going to respond.

In the apples and oranges department, I see a fundamental difference between the Apache helicopter video massacre in Iraq and the most recent shooting of four Afghan civilians who came too close to the military convoy, compared to the "botched" nighttime special ops raid in Afghanistan last February that killed the men and women gathered for a family baby shower.

In the first two instances, the rules of engagement themselves caused the war crimes to occur. If you put all that hi tech firepower at the disposal of edgy occupation forces in an urban environment, innocent civilians will inevitably be killed. I'm repulsed by the cavalier attitude of the gunship audio comments too, but those guys were going by the book and doing what they were trained and told to do. It is the rules of engagement themselves that created the war crimes. That wasn't a good Samaritan van, it was a terrorist getaway car. We flashed our lights and fired warning shots, but you kept coming so we lit the hostile vehicle up.

In contrast, the special ops forces who dug the bullets out of the bodies and concocted a false cover story that the pregnant Afghan women had been found already dead, tied up, and stabbed - apparent victims of some sort of tribal honor killing - those guys knew full well that they were covering up a homicide scene. No rules of engagement defense for that sort of activity, assuming of course that McChrystal's clandestine JSOC death squads operate under any sort of rules of engagement at all.

Froomkin is right. Congress should investigate.

First investigate what's wrong with the rules of engagement in occupied Iraq and occupied Afghanistan. And then next investigate why cold blooded murderers who contaminated a war crime scene got the Pentagon's PR people to help spread a propaganda coverup story that it was all just part of the fog of war.

Bill from Saginaw

might makes right...

King Arthur and his Round Table, among others, attempted to prove otherwise, but, in the end...

to: Bill from Saginaw

Sandbagging is the practice of disobeying orders by pretending to obey them. If a unit is ordered to go house to house and harass the townfolks in an Afghani town, they will hole up somewhere outside the town and report in that they are in fact
kicking down doors etc. In Vietnam, troops would travel a mile or two from their firebase and build a termporary sandbag bunker to wait out the mission rather than searching and destroying.

I came across a viscerally repugnant example of the professional rationalization towards such atrocities yesterday in Scott Horton's "The Law of Armed Conflict: Six Questions for Gary Solis"*

Solis' name doesn't ring a bell with me, but he's excruciatingly dismissive of drawing negative inferences from the justly infamous Apache helicopter massacre video:

"...Based on the circumstances seen on the videotape, and given their context, I believe it unlikely that a neutral and detached investigator would conclude that the helicopter personnel violated the law of armed conflict. Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death. Judgments made in front of a television set are not as easily formed in a combat zone."
____________________________________

Re-reading it just now set my teeth on edge again. He may be correct-- one can't argue with the closing platitudes-- but he's certainly not right. IMO, his own professional detachment is inherently supercilious, and evidences an Eichmannesque meta-fallacy of not seeing the forest for the trees.

It's beyond question that culpability begins, and is closest to absolute, at the top of the Chain of Fools-- er, Chain of Command, that is.

But I find it unsatisfactory and disingenuous to blame the carnage on defective rules of engagement, and to dismiss the attitudes of the killers as superficial artifacts of a coarseness of character programmed into these individuals.

Both arguments, especially the former, reduce the heinous and purely EVIL wrongdoing to a seeming abstraction-- a design flaw.

There is a little-known but superb book about teaching in public school called "How to Survive in Your Native Land", published in the late Sixties. In one chapter, author James Herndon begins by describing fellow teachers in the faculty lounge moaning and groaning about so many of their students getting "D"s.

This won't do Herndon justice, since it sounds supercilious out of context, but he goes on to say that the reason all those rotten kids got "D"s is because the teacher took out his or her pen and wrote the letter "D" in the grade book.

He goes on to offer a lot of constructive insight not relevant here, but his point is that these teachers genuinely perceived the bad grades as the inevitable effect, and bad students the cause. The low grade is not only an abstraction-- it's an outcome of an equation in which the teacher has no part EXCEPT as a detached "grader".

In short, Herndon is commenting on the tendency to not only SAY, but unreflectively THINK that "the student(s) GOT those lousy 'D's, the bums" and thus insidiously avoid or ignore the complementary truth that "I GAVE students those lousy 'D's, so those lousy 'D's might say something about ME, too!"

I agree that our Elected Misrepresentatives SHOULD pursue this micro-atrocity in a campaign of atrocities, but I expect at best a Solis-like exculpation that "mistakes were made"-- but in "combat" lots of kids end up getting "D"s.

Here, "D" is for "dead".

* http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/04/hbc-90006912

"I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit." Good luck with that, Mr. Froomkin.

Upon reading this article, and having been very upset over this video and over General McChrystal's remark concerning the "amazing number of people" killed who posed no threat, I called Senator Carl Levin's office and spoke with Maggie.

I asked her if Senator Levin's silence concerning the video and General McChrystal's comments indicated that he thought these "rules of engagement" were acceptable. Maggie was clearly irritated, even offended, and twice informed me that my question was "ridiculous," although she did acknowledge that Sen. Levin had made no formal statement concerning this matter. She also advised me to call my own representatives, and to address my concerns in writing to Senator Levin.

I have written to Senator Levin before concerning the deployment and conduct of our armed forces, and may as well have been whispering into a hurricane. There was not even an automatic, standardized acknowledgement of my message. I told Maggie this, and she could offer me no further guidance.

I had previously believed that silence and inaction indicated acquiescence, or at least indifference, but I was apparently mistaken, and ridiculously so, according to Maggie.

The person responsible for us being in Afghanistan is Obama. It is his war. The Democrats bear some responsibility too. If they were as much behind him with health care reform and trying to help those suffering from unemployment and bank foreclosures, we would have a different country right now, the one that was promised to us when we (some of us) voted for Obama.

What would happen if a foreign power sent helicopters and tanks over here and treated us the way we are treating the people in Afghanistan? Would we be grieving if our wives, mothers, and children were being slaughtered? Would it make us mad? Would we try to retaliate? And if we did, would it make any difference to us if they called us terrorists? Don't use terms like rules of engagement. We are talking about murder, pure and simple. Those responsible for this war should be proud that they are making murderers out of our sons and daughters. We can look foreword to another fucked up generation. The oligarchy is secure.

All these problems with nonsense "rules of engagement" and other euphemisms for "shoot first ask questions later -or not" will disappear it the USA were to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq and stop invading countries under patently false pretexts.

Americani ite domum. Write it out 100 times.

It further occurs to me that were the USA to be distilled down into just a single person, that individual would be called a serial killer.

It is plain to see that those men KNEW the helicopter was circling around them and they did NOT pay attention to it. They were NOT trying to hide from it!

We certainly live in different times. For a brief time, the media would have paid attention. If it were 1970 Walter Chronkite would have made it a top story.

Imagine what would have happened if Daniel Ellsberg carried his Pentagon papers to the NYT nowadays.... silence, except for a shuffling sound as Daniel is dragged to a secret prison.

Like Obedient Servant, I have read Scott Horton's interview with Gary Solis. Horton could have probed more deeply. At one point, Solis argued that the laws of war try to restrict violence to "the State's" armed forces, making civilians "unprivileged belligerents". He continued that the US armed forces had faced such unprivileged belligerents as Chinese Boxers, Philippine Moros, Somali warlords, Viet Cong fighters and the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Those we saw killed in the Wikileaks video were also unprivileged belligerents. It's a pity that Horton didn't ask about the Nazi occupation of France (or other countries) and the Resistance it provoked. Did the laws of war justify Nazis killing any armed, civilian maquisards they found engaged in resisting? Admittedly, the Security Council was not there to legitimise the Nazi occupation, but then it wasn't around at the time of the Boxer rebellion in China either.