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Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Literally tens of Americans were shocked this week to discover that the United States military likes to kill people. Unsettling news, yes, particularly for those of us who had assumed in good faith that one million Iraqis had accidentally slipped on a banana peel one morning and fallen into a pile of mislaid cruise missiles, but before we leap to all sorts of unsightly conclusions, calling Our Boys "mass-murderers" just because they happen to enjoy the occasional mass-murder, let's remember that in the fog of war with the eggs and the omelettes and the War Is Hell, who can say what's right and wrong, what's good and evil, who's an unarmed pregnant woman and who's a ticking time bomb threatening to produce future foreigners? Our troops have a job to do, after all - defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country - and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they'd hardly get any killing done at all. Now, is this video disturbing? Of course. Were atrocities committed, innocents slaughtered, corpses desecrated and children maimed? Absolutely. But was it all done according to proper procedure? Ah, now, that's the question. We should all certainly be willing to support a full and complete investigation into the possibility of an official recommendation for preliminary motions toward an investigation, looking into the matter of whether or not the people here were properly murdered in triplicate, signed twice on the goldenrod form, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law. And we shouldn't rest until any guilty parties have been found, and strongly-worded disciplinary Post-Its firmly applied to their personnel files. Apart from that, I don't think we have to spend much time thinking about this sort of thing - this is an isolated incident, just like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this - and one has to accept a certain amount of rape, torture and murder with one's military. After all, if the military wasn't free to rape and torture people, then it certainly wouldn't be free to murder them; and if the military wasn't free to murder people, then it wouldn't be free to slaughter them en masse; and if the military wasn't free to slaughter people en masse, then what would we even have a military for? Labels: everybody loves a winner, warnography
posted by the Medium Lobster at 10:04 AM
The accursed will be advised of the absence of his rights under the Secret Code of Military Toughness and will conduct himself accordingly.
by
 , at April 07, 2010 11:29 AM
O Medium Lobster - you ask
what would we even have a military for? As you know, here in the U.S. of A. the stated purpose of the military is given by the name of the part of the government which operates it: The Department of Defense. Interestingly, this was not its first name. As Wikipedia informs us, "The National Security Act of 1947 (Pub. L. No. 235, 80 Cong., 61 Stat. 496, 50 U.S.C. ch.15) was signed by United States President Harry S. Truman on July 26, 1947, and realigned and reorganized the U.S. Armed Forces, foreign policy, and Intelligence Community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II. The Act merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the National Military Establishment." Acronymically speaking, experience showed that the phrase National Military Establishment had an unfortunate abbreviation, and so an August 1949 amendment changed the "Enemy" to the "Dee-Oh-Dee." Its implicit function within the MICFiC continues to the present day, contributing to the general mission to use, abuse, and confuse the people - to milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple, metaphorically speaking - except that the slaughter is not metaphorical.
Gosh, I used to like this blog. But now, criticizing Our Military and Our President, all those brave boys who bravely brave brave thatyouforyourservice brave brave brave. Oh golly gee whillikers, I guess I'll have to cancel my subscription and stop reading it. And fafblog used to be so funny and interesting, but now it's not and I'll have to leave.
How sad I am. How sad sad sad. I guess I'll sadly cancel my sad subscription and sadly leave now. I'm leaving now. I SAID - I'M LEAVING NOW!!!
by
, at April 07, 2010 1:37 PM
Ah, now, that's the question. We should all certainly be willing to support a full and complete investigation into the possibility of an official recommendation for preliminary motions toward an investigation, looking into the matter of whether or not the people here were properly murdered in triplicate, signed twice on the goldenrod form, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law.
Goldenrod? Massacre Permits must be submitted on CANARY stationary. You must be thinking of Assassination.
by
, at April 07, 2010 2:26 PM
After all, if the military wasn't free to rape and torture people, then it certainly wouldn't be free to murder them; and if the military wasn't free to murder people, then it wouldn't be free to slaughter them en masse; and if the military wasn't free to slaughter people en masse, then what would we even have a military for?
Fan dancing!!
by
, at April 07, 2010 2:29 PM
You must know that you can't make an omelette without indiscriminately killing a bunch of innocent civilians.
Strangely, I've never been able massacre a bunch of civilians without breaking eggs. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
by
, at April 07, 2010 8:48 PM
If that baby shower didn't want to get massacred, they shouldn't have attacked us. Or yelled at us.
Or, um, talked to us all questioney. Maybe they'll forgive us if we convert the babies to Christianity post-mortem.
Oh, and BTW - QFT.
by
, at April 07, 2010 9:50 PM
And, speaking of COIN manuals...
by
, at April 07, 2010 10:27 PM
Ahh, but research shows that if we were sitting behind the trigger, 99% of us would have done the same thing. Just as 99% of those here will detest this behavior. To be human is to fall in step with those around you.
"Ahh, but research shows that if we were sitting behind the trigger, 99% of us would have done the same thing."
"Research" done by super-brain ultra-objective Aliens with no agenda or subliminal propaganda (eg, "Hey, war criminals are only human, after all!") to seed in the minds of the gullible "research"-citing public at times very much like these. Yes, I've read that, too, and also that 97.8% of us would have offed MLK, Malcolm X, Paul Wellstone and the Kennedy's, too, if threatened by electric shocks or ostracism or 100 dollars. Human nature, I guess.
Maybe Jane Elliott (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/) was super-intelligent , and maybe Stanley Milgram was ultra-objective, and maybe Philip Zimbardo was totally Alien. And maybe we should all rally around this atrocity d'jour like it amounts, in the tale of the Iraqi occupation, to more than a mosquito biting a girl who has already been beaten, gang-raped and left shivering in the mud.
Yes, maybe we should. It's far, far simpler to designate some single tragedy as the defining symbol for the whole disaster, and then offer up a few low hanging apples as proof of our own purity. (always, it seems, the bad apples hang lowest on the chain of command) It would just be too difficult to confront the war criminals who engineered the occupation to begin with.
Fallows posted a reader email linking other videos of this kind. It turns out that if you shoot armour-piercing rounds at people with a 30mm cannon it makes them explode into chunks of gore.
But we have to be thankful for their service! At least that's what they keep telling me! And telling me, and telling me, over and over. They say they don't want glory and they don't want money (good thing, as they get darn tootin' little of it for working so hard), they don't want parades for being such good rapist-murderers, they just want to be "thanked." So what are we supposed to say? Especially if we're not feeling especially "thankful" for all their killing, torture, and mass mayhem on our behalf?
Hmmmm. Frankly, I'm sick of having the Glory of Our Boys shoved down my throat. I can't even go to a farakkin' football game without some Tribute to Our Goons that makes everyone in the stadium (except me) stand up a-weepin' and a heart-tuggin'. I've gotten into trouble for grumbling about this so now I just stay seated and keep my mouth shut. Let them figure it out.
by
, at April 16, 2010 10:42 AM
Well, thankfully the authorities acted swiftly to arrest those responsible, and the guy who leaked the video has been nailed to the wall.
Thank GOD his terrorism has been stopped and we can rest untroubled that we'll never see anything like this happen again. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2010/0607/Soldier-arrested-in-WikiLeaks-classified-Iraq-video-case
by
, at June 08, 2010 6:29 PM
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