Soldiers in Colorado slayings tell of Iraq horrors - Yahoo! News

Another reason to hate wars.. They create monsters of our children.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said.

The Gazette based its report on months of interviews with soldiers and their families, medical and military records, court documents and photographs.

Several soldiers said unit discipline deteriorated while in Iraq.

"Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated," said Daniel Freeman. "You came too close, we lit you up. You didn't stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley," an armored fighting vehicle.

With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions "and just light the whole area up," said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. "If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked 'em."

Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.

"You didn't get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong," he said

Soldiers interviewed by The Gazette cited lengthy deployments, being sent back into battle after surviving war injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts, and engaging in some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq. The soldiers describing those experiences were part of the 3,500-soldier unit now called the 4th Infantry Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team.

Since 2005, some brigade soldiers also have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.

The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq's Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded — about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It's currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.

Marquez was the first in his brigade to kill someone after an Iraq tour. In 2006, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., in a dispute over a marijuana sale, then shot and killed him.

Marquez's mother, Teresa Hernandez, warned Marquez's sergeant at Fort Carson her son was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills and carrying a gun. "I told them he was a walking time bomb," she said.

Hernandez said the sergeant later taunted Marquez about her phone call.

"If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot," Marquez told The Gazette in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving a 30-year prison term. "But after Iraq, it was just natural."

The Army trains soldiers to be that way, said Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving 10 years for accessory to murder.

"The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody," he said. "And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off."

Both soldiers were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence — and the unit had to bag the bodies.

"Guys with drill bits in their eyes," Eastridge said. "Guys with nails in their heads."

Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.

While most unit soldiers coped post-deployment, a handful went on to kill back home in Colorado.

Many returning soldiers did seek counseling.

"We're used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We're trained to deal with that," said Davida Hoffman, director of the privately operated First Choice Counseling Center in Colorado Springs. "But these soldiers were depressed and saying, 'I've got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.' We weren't accustomed to that."

At Fort Carson, Eastridge and other soldiers said they lied during an army screening about their deployment that was designed to detect potential behavioral problems.

Sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers get PTSD help or taunted them, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America.

Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General's Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason.

Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man's body to his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims' brains.

The Army's criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers and said it couldn't substantiate the allegations.

The Army has declared soldiers' mental health a top priority.

"When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here," said Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, Fort Carson's commander. "There is a culture and a stigma that needs to change."

Fort Carson officers are trained to help troops showing stress signs, and the base has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors. Soldiers seeing an Army doctor for any reason undergo a mental health evaluation.

Soldiers in Colorado slayings tell of Iraq horrors - Yahoo! News

YouTube - Obama On Healthcare Concerns

Eric Cantor's Cant

Virginia congressman Eric Cantor may be a GOP rising star, but he sure is a hypocrite. How else to describe someone who's a leading critic of President Obama's Recovery Act and joins his congressional colleagues to urge Virginia's Department of Transportation to apply for stimulus money for high-speed rail? If that isn't two-faced, what is ?

He's also a demagogue: "Millions of jobs will be crushed by the Administration's policies." Say what? The stimulus may have been too small and overemphasized tax cuts, but it's helped states, including his own, with longer unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps and subsidies for people who've lost jobs to extend their health insurance. It's also kept teachers in the classroom, cops on the street and got workers rehired. Hours after Cantor delivered the GOP's weekly radio address blasting the stimulus, Vice-President Biden announced that $1.5 million of the bill's money would go to the Richmond Police Department to retain officers. And $20 million is going to Chesterfield County, a suburb of Richmond, to help 275 teachers from being fired. Virginia's working men and women should remember that Cantor fought hard to cut a provision in the stimulus bill that was designed to help low-income workers.

As Obama marks his sixth month in office, his Presidency will be judged by its laser-like focus on creating jobs, good jobs, and many of them. Double-digit unemployment is a ticking time bomb and his economic team needs to work quickly to defuse it. But Cantor & crew don't care about creating jobs. They want to spin the debate about the economy so their party, which has absolutely nothing to offer working people, games the 2010 midterm elections.

It may be, as some argue, that the politics of getting a second stimulus through a Congress filled with GOP obstructionists and conservative Democrats is too tough at this time -- especially with the battle for healthcare reform in full gear. If that's the case, what's needed instead is a simple and comprehensive package that focuses on job creation. In their must-read Nation article, "A Jobless Recovery" (July 13), Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo Gerard lay out a set of common-sense proposals for a job-led recovery. "We can either focus our economic recovery efforts on creating full employment for the 150 million workers who are not part of the top 0.2 percent and on rebuilding the country's manufacturing base. Or, as we have been doing for nearly three decades, we can concentrate on policies that mostly just benefit the incomes of the wealthiest 300,000."

The economic spin battle underway -- disconnected from the real economy and working Americans' lives -- is filled with demagogic and alarmist rhetoric about out-of-control government spending and federal debt. But in the absence of consumer spending and with banks failing to lend -- even while they report record profits and hand out huge bonuses -- government is the last resort. It must spend in order to avert a deeper recession.

But Eric Cantor and his crew just don't get it. Instead of laying out job creation policies, they whine. And they whine. The question is, why are we still listening to people who broke the back of the middle class, engineered the largest redistribution of wealth upwards to the very rich, and now dare to attack fairly modest government-led efforts to help working families weather this economic crisis?

Eric Cantor's Cant

Facebook | Cindy Sheehan's Photos - Profile Pictures

Facebook | Cindy Sheehan's Photos - Profile Pictures

Dennis Kucinich Schools Canadian Health Profiteer

Facebook | Paul Jamiol's Photos - 071409

Facebook | Paul Jamiol's Photos - 071409

Key Findings

 

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.

Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)

 

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.

Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)

 

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.

Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)

 

4. Climate change will stress water resources.

Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)

 

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.

Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)

 

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.

Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)

 

7. Threats to human health will increase.

Health impacts of climate change are related to heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)

 

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.

Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)

 

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.

There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)

 

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.

The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

Key Findings

What elitist entitlement looks like

Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Scary, scary stuff for any of us that don't like the idea of our government being run by creepy, extremist, right wing Christain fundamentalists.

Sharlet also wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on Sam Brownback which is well worth the read back in 2006 titled God's Senator: Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback.

Maddow: As part of the research for the book, Jeff lived among the family and saw many of its actions first hand. [...] What is C-Street? I know it's a house on C Street in Washington. How is it part of the family?

Sharlet: Well, the C-Street house is actually a former convent and now it's registered as a church and it's run by The Family and used by them to provide housing for six to eight congressmen at any given time, and to provide spiritual counseling for these congressmen.

Which all sounds fine so far, but what makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations, two things, you said that it's secretive. Indeed the leader of the group describes, he says, the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have. And the other things is the nature of the influence they want to have.

I got to sit in on one of these spiritual counseling sessions between the leader of the family and Congressman Todd Tiahrt when I visited the C-Street House, I actually met Sen. Ensign there. As the leader of The Family was counseling Congressman Tiahrt, he had this very standard issue, bill of issues related to the Christian right. He said you've got to have a bigger vision of what we're talking about here. He called it Jesus plus nothing.

He said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave as examples men who he believed understood the way power should be wielded. He actually gave as examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.

Maddow: Wow. When I read your book, The Family, when it first came out in hardback, my notes on um, I write notes in the flyleaf about what I was thinking about. And my notes about it, I went back and looked, were that it was essentially to promote, it saw its role as promoting American power, world wide, unfettered capitalism with no unions, no programs to help poor people, all with this idea that godly powerful rich men should get as many resources as possible personally, and they should just privately help everyone else. That is the impression that I was left with. Was I close?

Sharlet: That's dead on the money. The family began, it's the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington and it goes back seventy years. And the founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

Maddow: Well do you see a connection between that large sort of power theology and the fact that neither John Ensign or Mark Sanford for that matter, who's also affiliated with the group, aren't quitting despite these scandals. Is there something about this type of theology that tells these guys, hey don't worry about the affair, you know, big picture, you're good, stay where you are, it's important for you to stay in power?

Sharlet: Yeah, no, I think actually Gov. Sanford made it very clear when he cited King David as an example of the reason why he wasn't going to be resigning office and that struck a bell with me because I, the King David story, the core teaching of The Family, when I first heard it, I was living with The Family.

One of the leaders of The Family was explaining why King David was important and it's not because he was a good man. It's because he was a bad man. You know, he seduced another man's wife, he actually had the husband murdered and he once explained why this was a model and he said it to one of the men in the group. He said, suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you? And this guy, being a human being says, you would think I was a monster. Well, the leader of The Family says no, not at all because you're chosen. You're chosen by god for leadership, and so the normal rules don't apply.

Maddow: When Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina talked about his relationship to this group, he's also lived at the C-Street House, he described the group to the AP years ago, six years ago by saying "We do have a bible study...somebody'll share a verse or a thought, but mostly it's more of an accountability group to talk about things that are going on in our lives, and how we're dealing with them". And you've written that members of The Family give each other veto power over their lives, which, with these two scandals, I mean looking at the John Ensign scandal, how does a group like that not veto putting the mistress' kids on the Republican party payroll? How does that not get outed by this group?

Sharlet: Well, because the responsibility of the other men in your accountability group, and I would say by the way, you don't have accountability behind closed doors, that's the opposite of accountability, what these other men are doing is they're saying, alright, we're going to look out for you. Sort of self interest by proxy and what they're calling accountability is a man might bring to the group for instance that he is having an affair with another woman, or the fact that he is perhaps corrupt in some way and so on, and these guys are going to deal with it internally.

Maddow: Wow.

Sharlet: Very much behind closed doors, and we as a group actually once said, what we do is, to use this pretentious Latin phrase, beyond the din of the vox populi. What it means is beyond the voice of the people.

Maddow: Jeff Sharlet is an editor at Harper's Magazine. He's also the author of the book The Family, and if you think this has incredible implications for domestic politics and hypocrisy and affairs, wait till you read about third world dictators and how these guys empower them.


The Rachel Maddow Show: Christian Conservatism's Shadowy Secret Society | Video Cafe

Truthdig - Cartoons - Winners

Truthdig - Cartoons - Winners

Rushpublican Hypocrites

They love to spend money on killing but rage at spending to heal. What a bunch of filthy pigs.

You really think Faux News is Fair and Balanced? What a fool.

If FOX Whore News doesn't like you...

...they label you a Democrat.

They get away with this because they know

the other press nor the Dems...

have the balls to call them on it.

Don't ask, don't tell

BartCop's most recent rants - Political Humor and Commentary

BartCop's most recent rants - Political Humor and Commentary

The CIA's Truth Problem

The United States has been trying to run a secret intelligence service in an open democracy for sixty years. It depends on trust between politicians and spies, two professions known to wrestle with truth. Trust has been broken time and again.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent charge that the CIA lied to her about the torture of suspected terrorists under President George W. Bush has started a whirlwind of spin. The big lie--President Bush said the United States didn't torture, though we did--has been lost in the maelstrom. So has a harsh truth: yes, the CIA has stonewalled and deceived Congress in the past, but Congress is stone deaf and derelict in overseeing the CIA.

Pelosi's old Congressional colleague Leon Panetta, who runs the CIA, wants to set things right. "There's been a lot of poison in the well," Panetta said on May 18, and "it hurts this country" when "Congress and the CIA don't feel like they're partners." He said he would commune with his Congressional overseers, hash things out in private, talk with them "in a way in which we can be honest with one another."

Good luck, Leon. Others have gone before you.

Like it or not, the United States needs trustworthy intelligence. But spying is a dirty and dangerous business. The CIA depends on officers who know how to lie, cheat and steal--"to use deception, to use manipulation, to use, frankly, dishonesty," in the words of former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith. But when things go wrong overseas--as they often do--the CIA is called to account in Washington from time to time. That's where things really go wrong.

The CIA is "an organization that thrives on deception," says John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense. "How do you manage an organization like that?" Congress hasn't had the will or the wherewithal to do it.

Congress created the CIA in 1947, and for a generation most of its members did as Senator John Stennis advised: "Make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut your eyes some, and take what is coming." Then a newly anointed president, Gerald Ford, let slip that the CIA had run lethal plots against foreign leaders, which would tarnish every president since Harry Truman.

Ford looked back in some anguish on this; he had been a Congressman when called to serve on the Warren Commission, which looked into the assassination of President Kennedy. Late in life he reflected on the CIA's keeping secrets from the commission--notably its plots against Fidel Castro. It was "unconscionable" that the CIA was "not giving us the full story," Ford said.

But when he was in the White House, Ford feared that the truth about the past would destroy the CIA and damage the United States. That same kind of fear is drowning out calls for a truth commission on the conduct of the "war on terror."

"The question is how to plan to meet the investigation of the CIA," Ford mused at a White House meeting in February 1975. His chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, called for "a damage-limiting operation" to save the secrets from spilling in Congress. The man Ford chose to run the CIA--George H.W. Bush--tried his best. But no one protected former CIA director Richard Helms. He drew a two-year suspended sentence in 1977 on a federal charge of deceiving Congress about his orders from President Nixon to overthrow the government of Chile.

Helms had an obligation to testify truthfully, but he thought he had a higher oath to keep secrets. America's political history turned on which oath mattered more. For the past thirty years, Congress has fought for the right to oversee the CIA. It has failed to fulfill its responsibilities.

Before President Reagan took office, in 1981, Congress created intelligence oversight committees in the Senate and the House. Reagan's CIA chief, William Casey, foiled them for six years. "Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in," said Robert Gates, Casey's number-two man, now defense secretary. Casey obfuscated gleefully before the intelligence committees; his senior officers testified evasively. Among the consequences was the Iran/Contra affair, which blew up in late 1986. The spectacle of the United States caught shipping weapons to Iran, skimming the profits and slipping the money to anticommunists in Central America came close to wrecking Reagan's presidency.

From 1986 to '94, the CIA sent ninety-five highly classified reports on Moscow's military strength to the White House. Senior CIA officials knew some of the data were manipulated by Moscow and designed to deceive the United States. They decided it didn't matter. The discovery of this deception in 1995 was "incredible" and "shocking," said Fred Hitz, then the CIA's inspector general. "What came out of this whole episode was a feeling that the agency couldn't be trusted." The CIA had broken "the sacred trust," said Hitz, "and without that, no espionage agency can do its job."

Starting in 1995, the CIA used the Peruvian air force to shoot down airplanes suspected of carrying cocaine. In April 2001, the operation attacked a plane carrying a family of Michigan missionaries over the Amazon. Veronica Bowers, 35, and her daughter, Charity, seven months old, were killed. CIA inspector general John Helgerson reported that CIA officers had violated presidential orders controlling the operation and hid their misdeeds from Congress, the Justice Department and the National Security Council.

Seven years after the shoot-down, Peter Hoekstra--the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, now running for governor of Michigan--published a few damning paragraphs from the report. He called it evidence that the CIA "operates outside the law and covers up what it does and lies to Congress." That's what Pelosi said about torture.

Now, on orders from President Obama to dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda, the CIA is killing suspected terrorists with remote-controlled missiles fired from drone aircraft above Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA decides if it has hit the right targets and whether civilian deaths are acceptable. Do we want to live in a world where the CIA's clandestine service has the authority to decide who lives and who dies? The idea that the CIA may be killing civilians, sparking an ever wider war, is too hot for Congress to handle.

Oversight is a word with two meanings--to oversee and to oversleep. So is mislead. It means to lie, and it means a lack of leadership. Congress has a responsibility to oversee the CIA that remains largely unfulfilled. It has to ask the right questions, demand full answers and report the facts annually to the American people.

Will the CIA tell Congress the truth? Would Congress listen if it did? If trust remains broken, intelligence will fail again. And when intelligence fails, soldiers and civilians die.

The CIA's Truth Problem