By Rollie Williams
While the emotional repercussions of war aren’t easy to measure, the before, during, and after pictures of soldiers who have seen combat tell a veryy disturbing story. There’s something mesmerizing about these photographs, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
http://www.upworthy.com/mesmerizing-photographs-of-soldiers-faces-before-and-after-a-war?c=upw10
Note: These photo’s should be shown to anybody considering joining the military.
Please join me in signing this petition to voice your concerns about using lethal sonar and explosives adopted by the Navy for testing and training purposes. My understanding is that 1000 whales and marine mammals killed is a VERY conservative number, when I first heard of these operations in 2011 the estimated number was well over 10 million in a five year period! Regardless, with dwindling populations even one lost cetacean or marine mammal, is one too many. Let’s help get this petition signed, share freely…Mahalo!
The Navy is prepared to kill more than 1,000 whales and other marine mammals during the next five years of testing and training with dangerous sonar and explosives.
Tell Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to direct the Navy to adopt common-sense safeguards right away that will protect marine mammals during routine training without sacrificing our national security!
May 2, 2013
Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in Patristics from the University of Oxford and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science and “strange stuff.” He is the author of many books in the field of alternative research. In the first hour we begin on the Boston Marathon bombings and what appears to an internal Gladio Operation with a huge geopolitical agenda, which could be spun in a variety of ways. Then, we’ll discuss Putin’s clash with the world government agenda. Later, Joseph talks about hidden conflicts and the creation of a breakaway civilization by the Nazis. He discusses the advanced technology that they took with them at the end of the war and psychological war that they waged for decades on America and NATO. He’ll talk about how our system is based on stolen gold. Farrell explains why he thinks technology has moved into an entirely new ball game. In the second hour, we’ll speak more on the economic events in the Eurozone and we’ll discuss the BRIC nation’s grievances against the financial oligarchs of the west. Joseph talks about the importance of the political center as there is no real party of opposition. He tells why he thinks the internet will be playing a bigger role in the future. The hour ends on the military assessment of the ET threat. Joseph explains why he believes they may be right.
Note: The timing on this sudden grab for gold that coincided with the Boston bombings is quite interesting when you factor in the SwissIndo offer (based on gold) to restore the wealth to the One People of the world, made on behalf of the Indonesia-Javanese Royal family. The offer also came out at the same time in mid-April as the release of the Sirius documentary, which was quickly followed by the Citizens Hearings on Disclosure.
All of it happened in the same time period, when the bombings were subsequently followed by Martial Law in Boston. To a very large degree both events effectively served to overshadow and distract the public and the media, while the foundations of the elites systems of power, wealth and of secrecy began the process of disintegrating.
It just goes to show nothing is ever as it seems in the game of Smoke and Mirrors, in the interview Henrick states it brilliantly when he says “When happening over here, I always look in the other direction to see what’s really happening over there” (paraphrased)…
The elites have long been aware that the eye is distracted by shiny objects, that way they can pick your pocket while you’re looking the other way. Fortunately we’re catching on, for myself the moment I read the headline for the bombings I knew without a doubt it was a false flag…
US special forces stand guard as Blackhawk helicopter land in Afghanistan’s Marjah region, on February 24, 2010. A NATO helicopter strike has killed two children in southern Afghanistan, officials said, in the latest civilian casualties to beset the coali
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”
After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power. He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world… for future forms of blowback.”
Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.” In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged. It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.
Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for… well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of… any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”
With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally. After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.
Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar. Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter. His name is Jeremy Scahill. In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spies, rent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.
In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart — that we Americans can’t see our world as it is. And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows. As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making. In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.
In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state — and no one else. Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end. It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name. As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written. Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.
Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC. In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military. In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.
In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone. Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots — Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan — that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s spreading secret wars.
As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.” That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter — a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.
In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes oncivilians in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan — and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)
Dirty Wars is also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields — and therein lies a tale of tales.
Preparing the Battlefield
A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten. Having spent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily “empty.” In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on — her term — an empty battlefield.
As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book. As you may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big. Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to “drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale. They were reportedly planning to target 60to 80 countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet. In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren’t kidding. They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces — secret and at their command alone — that could fight anywhere on the sly.
As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and secret), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to Johnson’s. They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”). That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly hubristic. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”
Here’s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term, remarkably, eerily empty. There was hardly anyone there. Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousandjihadis scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet. If “preparing the battlefield” turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn’t exactly a descriptively accurate one. More on the mark might have been: “creating the battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”
The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreams: if you prepare it, they will come. The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror. Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine. Dirty Wars catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower, with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American presidents now never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.
As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “kill list” of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups. And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others. Often enough, they were innocent civilians – and in quantity. People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced. And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands. The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.
A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet
As Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc of instability.” The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that “arc” by using America’s overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana in the region. They were, in other words, fundamentalists and the U.S. military was their born-again religion. They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.
In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today — from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali — you’ll know what instability is really all about. Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.
In reality, they should have known better from the start. After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington’s failed war in Vietnam. The phrase that went with it back then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.”
The idea was simple enough. The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North. At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory. We know just where that led — to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.
And here’s the ironic thing. Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically of having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam. Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in “signature” groups if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s increasingly clear that it never will. Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be more incisive on the subject.
Dirty Wars is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing. Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results – they came! — as a field of nightmares.
What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet. Just follow the spread of drone bases and of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened. The process is now well underway in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.
Reread Blowback 13 years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything. Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill’s book, too, may seem as fresh as last night’s news. He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.
Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars. Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years. None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.
So let’s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished! The world may not have been a battlefield then. But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in that direction now.
Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home. Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings. The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history. In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield. An 87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown. It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.
The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s shutdown). In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured — and celebrations of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media. But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy. After all, we’re already in Scahill’s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.
After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase into the American lexicon. While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an “enemy noncombatant” (à la Guantanamo), he wrote, “The homeland is the battlefield.” That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars.
Above all else, there’s this: while the world burned and melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books). In June, a film of the same title directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters. I’ve seen it in preview. Its focus differs from the book’s. Scahill is its narrator. It’s deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus. It could be the documentary of the year.
Published on Apr 2, 2013
CONTINUE WATCHING: http://ur1.ca/d8xcy
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=7211
When faced with the overwhelming evidence of the widespread, systemic conspiracies that take place at the very highest levels of government, the general public has been pre-programmed to respond with the all-too-familiar retort: “But someone would have talked.”
This reasoning is sufficient for most people to return to their day-to-day lives. No matter how much documented information is presented to someone in such a mindset, they can satisfy themselves that there are no whistleblowers who question the official narrative of 9/11, or the actions of the NSA, or the involvement of government agencies in drug running, or any of the other well-documented examples of conspiracies involving the upper echelons of politics and the intelligence apparatus of the government. To these people, the mere uttering of the words themselves are enough to dismiss any mountain of evidence: “But someone would have talked.”
Join us this week on The Eyeopener as we begin a new series highlighting the whistleblowers who have been ignored and attacked for trying to bring important information to the public’s attention.
Brussels:
The same Common Law Court that tried and sentenced his predecessor and other church and state officials has today issued an Arrest Warrant against the first Jesuit Pope in history, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
A signed and sealed copy of the Warrant is attached, and the text follows.
The Argentinian prelate assumed criminal liability and became subject to immediate arrest by occupying the Papal seat in the wake of the conviction of the Vatican as a criminal organization on February 25, 2013.
Bergoglio’s role in the death of Argentinian citizens during that country’s “Dirty War” and in the trafficking of the children of political prisoners also compelled the International Common Law Court of Justice to issue the Warrant today, which is one year in duration.
Italian and Argentinian citizens, and any man or woman, are authorized by the Warrant to be involved in Bergoglio’s public detaining.
“The Pope is the head of a predatory power that is waging an undeclared, centuries-old war against the entire non-Catholic world” commented ITCCS Field Secretary Kevin Annett today in Vancouver, where he delivered a copy of the Arrest Warrant to the Catholic Archdiocese office.
“Since we and our children are being assaulted by a corporation that is a law unto itself, we have the right to defend ourselves and detain or stop altogether those responsible, as in any war”.
A Public Proclamation is being read out in twenty eight countries this week by ITCCS members, publicly banning those church and state officials who cannot be immediately arrested under these Warrants.
Citizens are encouraged to download and use the attached Warrant.
Issued by ITCCS Central Office
15 March, 2013
Brussels
What is happening world wide with the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State is important to me as the faithkeeper of the Land of Peace, and to the world. It is an action that supercedes federal law and crumbles the corporate governemt, the corporate agenda and the bottom line. My efforts and support is whole-heartedly behind the actions of Rev. Kevin Annett and the men and women working as one around the world getting results where the judiciary, government and the legal system who are in collusion, will be forced again to police each other. This action of ITCCS by all legal definitions supercedes federal law and finally we have an authority with clout acting on behalf of a hurt and suffering people that can barely defend themselves.
Rev.Joshua JD Lemmens
The Rainbow Warrior Speaks
” ITCCS Citizens Arrest Warrant for Peter Montague” The Rainbow Warrior Speaks from Hope Studios on Vimeo.
Published on Mar 4, 2013
Wide Awake News/Interview with Karen Quinn-Tostado (and later joined by Charlie McGrath) about navigating with your ‘Moral Compass’ through Fukushima, propaganda, lies, death, destruction, the medical field hookers (yes, really) and sensory consciousness…and dealing with it on a daily basis. Things seem very messed up but there is a huge opportunity for something wonderful to happen…
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”
One of my favorite interviews. Thank you Karen 
Karen hosts Wide Awake News every Friday Night on Rense Radio.
Published on Feb 28, 2013
SHOW NOTES AND AUDIO MP3: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=6996
After four hours of intense conversation on Gladio B, this week James and Sibel take a step back to consolidate some of the information and answer listener questions. In this interview we discuss specific characters and events as well as the broad scope of geopolitics and the great game of British imperialism and Zionist manipulations.
This video is a response to Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B – Part 4
A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former U.S. Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer – and he carries the guilt every day.
“I can’t forgive myself,” he says. “And the people who can forgive me are dead.”
With American troops at war for more than a decade, there’s been an unprecedented number of studies into war zone psychology and an evolving understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinicians suspect some troops are suffering from what they call “moral injuries” – wounds from having done something, or failed to stop something, that violates their moral code.
Though there may be some overlap in symptoms, moral injuries aren’t what most people think of as PTSD, the nightmares and flashbacks of terrifying, life-threatening combat events. A moral injury tortures the conscience; symptoms include deep shame, guilt and rage. It’s not a medical problem, and it’s unclear how to treat it, says retired Col. Elspeth Ritchie, former psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.
“The concept … is more an existentialist one,” she says.
The Marines, who prefer to call moral injuries “inner conflict,” started a few years ago teaching unit leaders to identify the problem. And the Defense Department has approved funding for a study among Marines at California’s Camp Pendleton to test a therapy that doctors hope will ease guilt.
But a solution could be a long time off.
“PTSD is a complex issue,” says Navy Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Killing in war is the issue for some troops who believe they have a moral injury, but Ritchie says it also can come from a range of experiences, such as guarding prisoners or watching Iraqis kill Iraqis as they did during the sectarian violence in 2006-07.
“You may not have actually done something wrong by the law of war, but by your own humanity you feel that it’s wrong,” says Ritchie, now chief clinical officer at the District of Columbia’s Department of Mental Health.
Kudo’s remorse stems in part from the 2010 accidental killing of two Afghan teenagers on a motorcycle. His unit was fighting insurgents when the pair approached from a distance and appeared to be shooting as well.
Kudo says what Marines mistook for guns were actually “sticks and bindles, like you’d seen in old cartoons with hobos.” What Marines thought were muzzle flashes were likely glints of light bouncing off the motorcycle’s chrome.
“There’s no day – whether it’s in the shower or whether it’s walking down the street … that I don’t think about things that happened over there,” says Kudo, now a graduate student at New York University.
“Human beings aren’t just turn-on, turn-off switches,” Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis says, noting that moral injury is just a different name for a familiar military problem. “You’re raised ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but you do it for self-preservation or for your buddies.”
Kudo never personally shot anyone. But he feels responsible for the deaths of the teens on the motorcycle. Like other officers who’ve spoken about moral injuries, he also feels responsible for deaths that resulted from orders he gave in other missions. The hardest part, Kudo says, is that “nobody talks about it.”
As executive officer of a Marine company, Kudo also felt inadequate when he had to comfort a subordinate grieving over the death of another Marine.
Dr. Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, sees moral injury, the loss of comrades and the terror associated with PTSD as a “three-legged stool” of troop suffering. Though there’s little data on moral injury, he says a study asked soldiers seeking counseling for PTSD in Texas what their main problem was; it broke down to “roughly a third, a third and a third” among those with fear, those with loss issues and those with moral injury.
The raw number of people who have moral injuries also isn’t known. It’s not an official diagnosis for purposes of getting veteran benefits, though it’s believed by some doctors that many vets with moral injuries are getting care on a diagnosis of PTSD – care that wouldn’t specifically fit their problem.
Like PTSD, which could affect an estimated 20 percent of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, moral injury is not experienced by all troops.
“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” says retired Navy Capt. William Nash, a psychiatrist who headed Marine Corps combat stress programs and has partnered with Litz on research. The vast majority of ground combat fighters may be able to pull the trigger without feeling they did something wrong, he says.
As the military has focused on fear-based PTSD, it hasn’t paid enough attention to loss and moral injury, Litz and others believe. And that has hampered the development of strategies to help troops with those other problems and train them to avoid the problems in the first place, he says.
Lumping people into the PTSD category “renders soldiers automatically into mental patients instead of wounded souls,” writes Iraq vet Tyler Boudreau, a former Marine captain and assistant operations officer to an infantry battalion.
Boudreau resigned his commission after having questions of conscience. He wrote in the Massachusetts Review, a literary magazine, that being diagnosed with PTSD doesn’t account for nontraumatic events that are morally troubling: “It’s far too easy for people at home, particularly those not directly affected by war … to shed a disingenuous tear for the veterans, donate a few bucks and whisk them off to the closest shrink … out of sight and out of mind” and leaving “no incentive in the community or in the household to engage them.”
So what should be done?
“I don’t think we know,” Ritchie says.
Troops who express ethical or spiritual problems have long been told to see the chaplain. Chaplains see troops struggling with moral injury “at the micro level, down in the trenches,” says Lt. Col. Jeffrey L. Voyles, licensed counselor and supervisor at the Army chaplain training program in Fort Benning, Georgia. A soldier wrestling with the right or wrong of a particular war zone event might ask: “Do I need to confess this?” Or, Voyles says, a soldier will say he’s “gone past the point of being redeemed, (the point where) God could forgive him” – and he uses language like this:
“I’m a monster.”
“I let somebody down.”
“I didn’t do as much as I could do.”
Nash says the Marines are using “psychological first aid techniques” to help service members deal with moral injury, loss and other traumatic events. But it’s a young program, not uniformly implemented and just now undergoing outside evaluation for its effectiveness, he says.
At Camp Pendleton, the therapy trial will be tailored to each Marine’s war experiences; troops with fear-based problems might use a standard PTSD approach; those with moral injury may have an imaginary conversation with the lost person.
Forgiveness, more than anything, is key to helping troops who feel they have transgressed, Nash says.
But the issue is so much more complicated that wholesale solutions across the military, if there are any, will likely be some time coming.
Many in the armed forces view PTSD as weakness. Similarly, they feel the term “moral injury” is insulting, implying an ethical failing in a force whose motto stresses honor, duty and country.
At the same time, lawyers don’t like the idea of someone asking troops to incriminate themselves in war crimes – real or imagined.
That leaves a question for troops, doctors, chaplains, lawyers and the military brass: How do you help someone if they don’t feel they can say what’s bothering them?
Source: AP
Check out part 2 of this HIGHLY PROVOCATIVE investigative report on western intelligence agency’s after WWII, why they were installed and how it all leads up to the war on terror. If you’re not familiar with James Corbett, IMO he’s the most professional, thorough, knowledgeable investigative journalist in the Alternative News community. Never a scaremonger, just honest hard news the mass media can’t report on due to conflicting interests with network shareholders and advertisers; most of which are banking, pharmaceutical and energy related industry’s. (ie: GE owns 80% of global mass media).
CIA Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is widely known and respected for her inside contacts, professionalism and integrity in reporting facts on inside CIA covert operations and other nefarious government operations. The interview with Tom Secker is also listed below with a link to the interview.
If staying abreast of global news is important, subscribe to Corbett Report for the best in investigative reporting.
Published on Feb 19, 2013
In this ground-breaking interview, famed FBI whistleblower and Boiling Frogs Post founder Sibel Edmonds lays out the thread connecting NATO’s Gladio operations to Turkish paramilitaries and ultra-nationalists, and how the operation continues through cooperation with terrorists and the Islamization of Central Asia and the Caucasus. From Abdullah Çatlı’s remarkable life (and death) to the rise of Fethullah Gulen’s $25 billion (CIA-supported) Islamic network to the NATO takeover of the Afghan poppy crop in the wake of 9/11, you won’t want to miss a moment of this riveting conversation.
Part 3
Audio MP3: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=6758
Part 4
23 years after it was first revealed to the public in the Italian Parliament, few are today aware of the history of Operation Gladio, the stay-behind operation that was seeded by intelligence agencies in Western Europe at the end of WWII and which was responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and outrages in the ensuing decades. Fewer still are aware of the details of this program, where it originated, who was behind it, and what it teaches us about the nature of such operations. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we talk with Tom Secker of InvestigatingTheTerror.com about this much-neglected piece of false flag history.
