The Distant Ocean

Democrats: so different from Republicans

Not surprisingly, Clinton administration alumni Ashton Carter and William Perry have called on the Bush administration to strike at North Korea's missile if the North Koreans go ahead with their plans to launch.  Mixed in with the rest of the madness was this criticism:

The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma.

So Carter and Perry don't oppose the idea of preemptive strikes--they just don't like that the Bush administration has been so unsubtle about them.  And in this they precisely mirror statements by their Clinton co-conspirator Madeleine Albright in a 2003 article in Foreign Affairs:

When the administration published its 2002 National Security Strategy last September, it took this process even further, transforming anticipatory self-defense -- a tool every president has quietly held in reserve -- into the centerpiece of its national security policy. This step, however, was dangerously easy to misconstrue. (Do we really want a world in which every country feels entitled to attack any other that might someday threaten it?)

No, of course not--clearly this right must be reserved for the US.  We can't have just anyone thinking they can do it.  And Albright goes on to echo (or presage) Ashton and Perry's feelings about the Bush administration's distressingly vulgar tendency to just state outright their contempt for all norms of international law:

It would be helpful now if the doctrine of preemption were to disappear quietly from the U.S. national security lexicon and be returned to reserve status.

Note carefully: it's not that the doctrine should disappear; it's that the doctrine should disappear from the lexicon, and go back to its status as the unspoken, exclusive right of the most powerful nation on the planet.

This is precisely why I believed in 2004--and still believe now, more than ever--that a Democratic loss was the best hope for the long-term health of the world.  As Ashton, Perry, and Albright so clearly demonstrate in this instance, it is not the actual policies that are different under Democratic administrations but merely their presentation to the world. By asserting (and acting upon) these uniquely American "rights" with such unvarnished arrogance and disdain, the Bush administration is revealing the true face of American foreign policy--a face that never changes, but which is rarely displayed with such clarity.

Israel doing what it does best, part 3

It was inevitable:

While three major British newspapers published reports contradicting Israel's claims that its military was not responsible for the murder of seven members of the Ghalia family on a Gaza beach over a week ago, a German newspaper casts doubt on the authenticity of pictures taken soon after the bloody incident.

German daily Sued Deutsche, said pictures taken by Zakaria Abu Irbad, 36, a cameramen with the Palestinian independent news agency Ramattan, contradict Palestinian claims that an IDF shell killed the Ghalia family and point to the possibility that the event was staged to hold Israel responsible.

(Though the story was originally published in a German newspaper, this republished account comes from Yedioth Ahronoth--Israel's largest-circulation daily newspaper.)

So there you have it.  The Ghalia family is no more than a PA fiction.  Huda Ghalia was probably just some PA official's daughter recruited for her acting skills.  It's no more than another propaganda ploy designed to smear upstanding, moral, faultless Israel--like the so-called "killing" of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy who never actually existed.

It would be comforting to think that this is just some fringe position, but as I observed before, if you look up Mohammed al-Dura on Google the first two pages of results are almost all Israel supporters questioning the event or trying to remove any tinge of blame from Israel.  And this is no different.  Don't believe me?  Read "Hurray for Pallywood--At Gaza Beach" on Israpundit, or just read the concluding sentence:

But does anyone doubt that the Palestinian myth of what happened that day will follow in the footsteps of the the myth of Mohamed Al Dura?

Or read this, from the discussion forum on a UK news site ("Pallywood" again--they obviously read from the same play sheet):

Looks like another pallywood propaganda movie that has backfired.....

You won't have trouble finding more examples if you want to look for yourself, but you'll need a strong stomach.

I've often thought that one of the worst things about Israel is the corrosive effect it has on those who claim to support it (both Jewish and otherwise).  It exerts an irresistible magnetic pull on the moral compass of those who embrace its self-aggrandizing mythology, rendering them capable of depths of ethical blindness or outright malevolence that are all the more repellent for the self-righteousness in which they're so typically couched. 

Thank goodness I don't live in Canada

I just made an appointment for a physical with my HMO.  It took four phone calls to do it, and required changing my physician with them (my physician? isn't the whole point of an HMO that I can use any doctor?).  When I was done with all the preliminaries, I was told that the earliest appointment would be at the end of August--over two months from now.

Thank goodness I don't live in Canada and have to wait forever and wade through waist-deep levels of bureaucratic red tape just to get health care!

Israel doing what it does best, part 2

There's yet more debunking here (and here) of the Israeli alibi that the Ghalia family in Gaza was wiped out by a Hamas mine rather than an Israeli artillery shell, this time focusing on Israeli claims that the times shown on surveillance tapes prove that it couldn't have been Israel's shelling of the beach that killed the family.  One key point in the Israeli version of events is that the first ambulance didn't arrive at the beach until 5:15pm--but reality again rears its ugly head:

The written hospital admission registration book at Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, where the dead and some of the most seriously wounded victims of the explosion were taken, times the arrival of the first eight victims as being at 5.05pm, 10 minutes earlier than when the army said last week the first ambulances arrived at the scene.

An ambulance driver based at the hospital, Khaled Abu Sada, who said he was the second to arrive at the scene, said he received mobile telephone confirmation of an emergency from a colleague working for the Palestinian Red Crescent at 4.45pm or 4.46pm, set off at 4.50pm, arrived at the scene at around 5pm and returned to the hospital after picking up one dead child and three women, two of whom were close to death, at 5.10pm.

So unless the Palestinians have managed to invent time travel, another pillar of the Israeli lie has just crumbled.  I found the argument over the surveillance tape timestamps amusing for another reason: as any good computer geek knows, most clocks will go horribly awry unless they're synchronized through some mechanism like the network time protocol, and I doubt that would be the case with these surveillance cameras.  So even accepting that Israel didn't misrepresent or doctor those timings, they're unlikely to be reliable anyway.

But my favorite part of the article is this quote from IDF spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal: "I have never known a more detailed and thorough investigation than this."  This in reference to an investigation that took, oh, about two days to complete.  Then again, I'm sure he's right--that probably is as detailed and thorough an investigation as the IDF has ever done when it was just some dead Palestinians involved (or is likely to do in the future).

Of course, the very fact that the discussion of this event is now focusing on such minutiae as hospital timestamps, rather than the tragedy of a destroyed family, represents a real victory for Israel's (consistent, standard, oft-repeated, morally bankrupt) strategy.

Israel doing what it does best

Israel has decided it's taken enough PR damage over its obliteration of an entire Palestinian family at the beach on Friday, and so it's now chosen to do what it does best: lie.  The Israeli government is now claiming that the Ghalia family was not killed by the Israeli military's (admitted) shelling of the beach, but was instead killed by a mine--which they of course claim was placed there by Hamas.

This is familiar territory for the Israelis.  When Israeli soldiers gunned down Mohammed al-Dura as his father tried vainly to shield him, Israel immediately claimed that he'd actually been killed by Palestinian gunfire.

When an Israeli soldier shot Tom Hurndall in cold blood as he was trying to protect children, the Israeli military initially made the stunningly absurd claim that Tom had been wearing "tiger fatigues" and was shooting at the Israelis--despite readily available photos of him both before and after the shooting, wearing the bright orange vest that was intended to warn the Israeli military of his presence.

So the Israelis are just reading from their standard script again.  As usual, though, the problem is reality:

Numerous onlookers said that the fatal shell was the third in a series of about five, the first two landing just north of the picnic site and prompting the Ghalia family and other bathers to begin packing up.

The Times found two other identical fresh craters nearby, roughly where the witnesses indicated. After carrying out an independent inspection, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with Human Rights Watch, said yesterday that he was “quite certain” that the Israeli findings were wrong.

Mr Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and specialist in battle damage assessment, produced shrapnel that he recovered from the beach marked “55MM”.

“It is highly likely that it was an artillery-delivered 155mm shell,” he said. Mines tended to cause lower body injuries, whereas most of the victims suffered head and upper torso wounds, he added.

“We have to look at all the possibilities, but all the evidence points to a 155mm shell fired by the Israelis as what killed the Palestinians on the beach.”

There's much more in the official press release by Human Rights Watch regarding the incident, including this:

According to readings from a Global Positioning Satellite taken by Human Rights Watch, the crater where the victims were killed was within the vicinity of the other artillery craters created by the IDF's June 9 artillery attack and was the same shape and size. One crater was 100 meters away from the fatal crater, and the rest were 250 to 300 meters away.

Some Israeli officials have suggested the explosion may have been caused by a mine placed by Palestinian militants, rather than one of their artillery shells, despite the fact that they cannot account for the final landing place of one of their six shells.

So the Israelis expect us to believe that although they were in fact shelling the beach, and although they can't account for one of the six shells they fired, and although the blast craters are all identical, the Ghalia family was actually killed by a Hamas mine--which somehow managed not to explode all day long as people were trampling all over it, but by an extraordinary coincidence just happened to go off at the same time and in the same area that the Israelis were shelling the beach.  It's a testament to Israel's power and influence that such a threadbare story is being treated with anything but contempt.

But reality has never posed much of a problem in the past for Israel or its supporters.  The first two pages of Google results for Mohammed al-Dura are all by Israel supporters questioning the event--sometimes going as far as claiming that the boy never existed (which would doubtless come as a big surprise to the widow of the ambulance driver who was killed while trying to save him and his father).  And if you look up Tom Hurndall's name along with "tiger fatigues" you'll find dozens of references to this ludicrous fabrication, but precious few articles noting the fact that the soldier who made the claim later admitted he'd lied about it.  So I have no doubt that this latest Israeli fantasy will be eagerly adopted by its armies of supporters, whose sole purpose when discussing yet another Israeli atrocity is to deflect the blame--whatever the facts may be.

"Prominent progressive leaders", part 2

I wrote before about the abuse of the word "progressive" by mainstream Democrats and liberals.  Now Norman Solomon has an article about an email he received from the Campaign for America's Future regarding their upcoming Take Back America conference, which boasted that "America's most prominent progressive leaders" would be speaking, followed by a list of these speakers that included...Hillary Clinton.  Yes, that Hillary Clinton.

Solomon wrote to CAF to ask about this, and CAF's director replied that although not every speaker at the conference is necessarily a prominent progressive leader, "some people do consider Hillary progressive."  These people he mentions apparently live on Mars or perhaps in deep caves under the ocean floor, completely cut off from any conduit of information.

Other "prominent progressive leaders," based on the conference guest speaker list: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack "the bomber" Obama, and John Kerry.  And in looking through the conference agenda and speaker list, the word "progressive" appears 14 times while the word "liberal" is completely absent.  The entire Democratic Party leadership has apparently skipped right over middle-of-the-road liberalism and gone straight to full-blown progressivism, and all without changing their policies one iota.  It's a miracle!

(In a demonstration of their progressive commitment, the CAF/TBA people had an agreement with Code Pink to avoid any loud protests of Hillary as long as the group could hand out flyers and ask her the first question after her speech.  But according to Medea Benjamin they not only reneged on these promises, but completely suppressed any dissent by Code Pink before or during Hillary's speech.)

The moral calculus of conservatives

To a conservative, the vicious murder of 24 Iraqis (including infants, children, and an old man in a wheelchair) by US marines in Haditha doesn't justify condemnation of the entire US military.  But the fact that a few anti-war activists may have spit on returning Vietnam veterans in the 1970's (emphasis strongly on "may", as you'll see if you check this source) justifies condemnation of the entire anti-war movement--both then and now.

At a protest in San Francisco before the Iraq war I went over to a group of Freepers who were calling for the US to unseat that awful thug Saddam Hussein, and criticizing myself and the other protesters as Saddam lovers.  I asked them what they thought of this photograph (which I'd printed on a small sign):

The response?  "I think he looks great.  Nice hair."  (They meant Rumsfeld, by the way, if it matters.)

I'm glad I'm not a conservative; I don't think I have the mental capacity to keep up with the complex ethical prioritization scheme and intricate system of moral relativism that seem to be second nature to them.

The inconvenient truth about Al Gore

Over the past few weeks I've been seeing previews for the film An Inconvenient Truth, by one Al Gore.  This guy really seems to understand just what a dire threat global warming represents to the planet, I thought.  If only he could somehow get into a position of power so that he could do something about it!

And then it struck me: this same Al Gore used to be the Vice President of the United States during the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 2001.  So what was the administration--and Al Gore in particular--doing about global warming back then, when he was one of the most powerful people in the world and not just a budding filmmaker?  Let's see what Greenpeace had to say in 1997, just prior to the Kyoto summit:

Greenpeace said recently reported (New York Times 10/10/97 ["Top Aides Urge Clinton to Ease Global Warming Emission Goal"]) White House proposals to delay action on climate change for a generation would both kill global efforts to combat climate change and  hurt the legacy President Clinton and Vice-President Gore.

The Clinton/Gore administration are apparently floating a range of targets  which would stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, at 1990 levels by 2010, 2020 or 2030.

"If this proposal is adopted Clinton and Gore would wipe out any chance to achieve real and meaningful reductions in the gases that cause dangerous global warming," said Kalee Kreider, Director of the Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign. 

Greenpeace said it was stunned at the proposed reversal of  President Clinton's promise before the world community in June to  bring "significant" reduction proposals to the Kyoto Climate Summit.

Greenpeace interpreted the apparent policy shift as driven by Al Gore's Presidential ambitions.

And a few days later the Clinton administration went forward with a policy based on these proposals, prompting Greenpeace to put out another press release stating:

"Five years ago at the Rio Summit, Al Gore and Bill Clinton accused the Bush White House of being the `lone holdout' and an `obstacle to progress' after it refused to support mandatory (as opposed to the non-mandatory agreement ultimately signed) curbs on greenhouse gases. Now, it is Al Gore and Bill Clinton who are the obstacles," concluded Kreider.

Al Gore, obstacle to progress on curbing global warming?  Now that's odd.  But maybe this policy was being made without his knowledge, consent, or participation?  Not according to this BBC report on Gore's visit to the Kyoto summit a few weeks later:

On Monday, the United States vice-president, Al Gore - on a brief visit to Kyoto - said the American team was prepared to offer greater flexibility.

But he failed to shift from the established American position that emissions of the gases blamed for global warming be limited to 1990 levels - a target many countries say is inadequate.

Mr Gore later told a news conference that flexibility would depend on issues like how many gases were being controlled and whether countries' provision for absorbing carbon-dioxide in new forests were included.

So the "flexibility" that Gore mentioned basically boiled down to: "We don't have to cut emissions, because we have so many trees."

Let's skip forward to the year 2000 UN climate summit at the Hague and see what the situation looked like then (using some headlines collected by FAIR):

• "Gas-Guzzling U.S. Under Fire at Global Warming Talks" (Agence France Presse)
• "U.S. Blamed for Climate Treaty Talks Deadlock" (London Daily Telegraph)
• "Climate Talks Fail to Close Rift with U.S." (London Guardian)
• "U.S. Blocks Attempts to Cut Global Warming" (London Independent)
• "Pollution Pact Under Threat as America Is Accused of Con Trick" (London Times)

Hey, FAIR, I can play this game too--here are a few that I found:

• "Climate Talks Stall Over US Proposal for Carbon 'Sinks', Pollution 'Credits'" (Reuters)
• "Activists, Delegates Say Washington Is Seeking Loopholes In Efforts To Cut Global Gas Emissions" (Los Angeles Times)
• "US Berated For Wriggling Out Of Treaty Pledges / EU fury grows as Americans try to exploit loopholes" (London Guardian)
• "US Plays Dirty As Planet Chokes" (London Observer)

And here's a good summary of the controversy (from that last article):

The prime problem is America, the world's greatest emitter of carbon dioxide, which presses, with increasing insistence, that it should be spared from reducing its output and should instead be allowed to create new forests, both in the US and the Third World. These trees and plants, known collectively as carbon sinks, will soak up all that nasty carbon dioxide, say US delegates, and will obviate the need for Americans to abandon their profligacy.

The US also believes that by planting crops specially designed to soak up carbon dioxide, it could extend its 'sink' philosophy from the wild to the farmyard, thus strengthening its case for unabated industrial emissions. It was this idea, introduced at the Hague last week, that provoked that outburst of fury by Europe's delegates.

Other US agricultural innovations circulating last week included the wonderful idea of feeding sheep, pigs and cows special anti-flatulence diets to reduce levels of methane, another greenhouse gas. This notion merely induced derisive laughter.

(Laughter?  Have these people no appreciation of the dire danger posed to the planet by livestock farts?  Yeesh.)

Europe and most developing nations, as well as most non-governmental agencies, scorn the idea of carbon sinks. Only the real thing - cuts in emissions - will definitely work, they say.

So sure enough, the "flexibility" Gore was selling at Kyoto was just his way of dressing up the Clinton administration's corporate-inspired stance that the US would not cut emissions in any significant way, but would instead receive credit for its 25% of global emissions on the basis of having so damn many trees.  This and other proposals like "pollution credits," all of which were intended to obviate any real US response to the crisis, put the US in opposition to the rest of the world and sank the Hague summit--deferring action on global warming at a time when delay was simply no longer an option.

And throughout all of this, Vice President Al Gore was right there at the center of the policymaking.  When he had the chance to actually do something about global warming--rather than just putting out self-serving films extolling his commitment to addressing it, that is--he put corporate profits and political expediency before the welfare of the planet.

I'd say that Gore has some inconvenient truths of his own to account for.

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad Gore has made a film that will be seen by many people and may actually open a few minds to the threat of global warming, though I suspect the vast majority of the audience will be those who already recognize the danger.  But it doesn't change his past, and I seriously doubt it portends any change in how he'd handle the issue in the future if he were ever to regain high office (since I suspect that this film is an early Gore campaign commercial for 2008 or 2012 as much as anything else).  Were Gore ever to become president, I have no doubt he'd start talking again just as he did in Kyoto in 1997 about "realistic and achievable" limits and warning that countries should not "promise what we cannot do"--fiddling while the earth burns.

Support the troops?

With the attention being focused on the massacre in Haditha (and now Ishaqi as well), and the utterly predictable efforts by conservatives to downplay  these horrible crimes and to stifle dissent with their endlessly repeated bromide of "support the troops," I thought it would be good to recall some examples from the past few years of just what it is we're being asked to support.

From the New York Times :

"We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people." ...

But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.

"I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."

From Reuters:

Two soldiers picked out two figures on a rooftop and quickly lined up their shot. Thankfully, First Sgt. Eric Engram saw them and also saw their target. “No man, that's a kid and a woman. It's a KID and a WOMAN,” he bellowed, and his soldiers lowered their rifles.

"These guys are young and most just want to get their first confirmed kill, so they're too anxious to get off shots. I hate to say ‘bragging rights’ but they want that kill,” Engram said an hour later.

Can you imagine what kind of mindset makes a person not just happy, not just proud, but eager to brag about killing another human being?  And can you imagine the (military) culture in which bragging about killing another human being is considered a badge of honor?  I can't either.

From the Scotsman (or see also the London Times):

US marine, Corporal Ryan Dupre, surveying the scene by the bridge at An Nasiriyah, said: "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No I won’t get hold of one - I’ll kill him."

From Reuters:

A tracked armored vehicle has crushed two men up the road.

"Killed one, ripped the legs off another," Monty said briskly, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

From Newsday:

"It's like you're fighting a faceless enemy," said Cpl. Jeb Moser, 21, of Ruston, La. "They're all just ragheads to me, the same way they used to call the enemy 'gooks' in Vietnam."

"Raghead, raghead, can't you see? This old war ain't -- to me," sang Lance Cpl. Christopher Akins, 21, of Louisville, Ky., sweat running down his face in rivulets as he dug a fighting trench one recent afternoon under a blazing sun.

Asked whom he considered a raghead, Akins said: "Anybody who actively opposes the United States of America's way ... If a little kid actively opposes my way of life, I'd call him a raghead, too."

From Editor and Publisher:

"We splashed that bastard," a Western eyewitness quoted one Marine as saying to another after they'd shot an Iraqi dead.

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

The 20-year veteran of the Marine Corps said he found the soldier after dark inside a nearby home with the grenade launcher next to him. Covarrubias said he ordered the man to stop and turn around.

"I went behind him and shot him in the back of the head," Covarrubias said. "Twice."

Did he feel any remorse for executing a man who'd surrendered to him?  No; in fact, he'd taken the man's ID card off of his dead body to keep as a souvenir.

From the Daily Mirror:

"There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger.

"It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."

Describing the scene during combat Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers and leaving them to die. He said: "S***, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the f******.  There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped." Making a shooting sign with his hand he went on: "Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live." And despite there being no link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks Richardson admitted that it gave him his motivation to fight Iraqis.

"There's a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback."

Perhaps if someone in Richardson's family is ever killed, he can go pick someone at random off the street and torture them to death; that would really give the killers their "payback," wouldn't it?

Note also the phrasing: "I don't want to say payback."  Just like "I hate to say 'bragging rights'."  The reticence is telling.  These are the dirty little truths that lie behind all the elevated rhetoric and noble words.  These are the things you're not supposed to admit are lurking in the shadows, so that you won't disrupt the elevated fantasies of the cheerleaders for war.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"I enjoy killing Iraqis," says Staff Sgt. William Deaton, 30, who killed a hostile fighter the night before. Deaton has lost a good friend in Iraq. "I just feel rage, hate when I'm out there. I feel like I carry it all the time. We talk about it. We all feel the same way."

"I enjoy killing Iraqis."  Does that sound horrific to you?  Think it would to any normal human being? Unfortunately, you're wrong; some people liked it so much they made a sticker out of it. Then again, maybe you're right, since anyone who would celebrate such viciousness isn't a normal human being--or at least that's how I like to think of the world.

From the Seattle Times:

"I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday," Hall says. "I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him."

No, it wasn't enough for Hall to watch the blood spurt from his victim's leg; he wants to know the man was dead, and that he was the cause of it.  After all, he wants those bragging rights.

This article does at least contain some notes of humanity.  One man struggles to reconcile what he's become with what he used to be, and what he hopes to be again:

The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast.

"I'm confused about how I should feel about killing," says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. "The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever felt."

Dubois turns back to the road. "We talk about killing all the time," he says. "I never used to talk this way. I'm not proud of it, but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I will be like when I get home."

That's what the culture does: it turns normal, sane people into people who are obsessed with killing other people ("we talk about killing all the time...it's like I can't stop").  Roll that fact around in your mind for a few moments.  All of us should be worried what it will like when they get home, and bring with them these lessons they learned in Iraq.

But I've saved the worst for last.  This is from the East Bay Express, in an article about a web site on which American soldiers can get free access to online pornography by posting their trophy photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis:

Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.

The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, “What every Iraqi should look like.” The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption “bad day for this dude.” One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection “DIE HAJI DIE.”

There's no shred of humanity here at all.  Did the military turn these people into psychopaths, or did it just give them an outlet for what was already inside them?  In the end it doesn't matter; this is an inevitable result of putting people into a system in which killing another human being is treated as a badge of honor, rather than as the debasing, dehumanizing, horrific act that it is.

If you ever find yourself about to say that you "support the troops," I hope you'll remember these quotes--and the lessons they teach--and realize exactly what it is you're supporting.