Story of Inventing Insurgents Creates Allergic Reaction in the Press

[bemildred]

"Carpet blog". I like it.

The stark but informative site Cryptome.org is carrying a story with photos of how a Marine unit gathered the bodies of teenage boys from a soccer field, and rounded up nearby living teenaged boys, and posed them all with weapons that the Marines already had.

Before I riff a bit on this, let me suggest we cluster-blog these stories, or carpet-blog, whichever Air Force metaphor most suits you. Maximum distribution by linking and re-posting for those special stories that tear the mask off the real character of this war.

Those of us who spent time ‘humpin’ the boonies’ in Vietnam remember this practice very well. Inflating body counts, and transforming all the dead into enemy or “suspected” enemy. Anyone with an ounce of critical capacity and a gram of skepticism has figured this out about Iraq for a while now, but these stories that provide graphic evidence serve to overcome the more stubborn forms of denial and to open up the unwelcome discussion.

For those unschooled and inexperienced in war, and who have been exposed to a lifetime of television and film where “bad guys” always have poor marksmanship and “good guys” are Buffalo-fucking-Bill sharpshooters, where no one is ever stumbling under 50 pounds of LCE, tripping over rubble, falling into ditches, wheezing to catch their breath, firing suppressive fire around corners or over the lip of erosion ditches with no regard for bystanders, or “returning” fire in a general direction when they haven’t identified where shots came from (usually people fire wherever the first person who guesses out loud where the shots came from), and shooting each other in the confusion… people who have no experience of this plain, dumb, human confusion and fallibility in combat, they can be fooled by their own internalized images from those films where soldiers and cops are all highly-skilled, competent, atheletic, impervious to pain, and even well-read.

StanGoff.com

[TahitiNut]

1. (Nominated.) Let's look at the sleazy side of war ...

... and how to give the desk-jockey command what they demand. Show some initiative, soldier! Innovate!

[Oversea Visitor]

2. >

:kick: