Censored 2012 (7 page)
Authors: Mickey Huff
Student Researchers:
Karen Kniel, Josh Crockett, Ana Elliott, and Amy Ortiz (Sonoma State University); Joan Pedro and Luis Luján (Complutense University of Madrid)
Faculty Evaluators:
Peter Phillips, Heather Flynn, and Jim Preston (Sonoma State University); Dr. Ana I. Segovia (Complutense University of Madrid)
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or the second year in a row, the year ending 2010, more US soldiers killed themselves (468) than died in combat, reported Cord Jefferson on January 27, 2011. Excluding accidents and illness, 462 soldiers died in combat, while 468 committed suicide. Veterans who, after serving, suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also at high risk. The study showed that 47 percent of veterans with PTSD had thoughts of suicide before they found help. The internal anguish a soldier experiences after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can be far more severe than that experienced during live external combat.
More than two million troops have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Those who do return often suffer from physical, psychological, and cognitive trauma. More than 40 per 100,000 men from the ages of 20 to 24 take their lives each year. Some deaths, which are not counted in these statistics, are due to driving while under the influence of alcohol consumed due to depression. In 2008, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were 75 percent more likely to die in a car accident and 148 percent more likely to die in a motorcycle accident. By making the calculations of 40 per 100,000 per year, the numbers of veteran suicides reaches into the tens of thousands nationwide since the beginning of the 9/11 wars.
In 2009, there were 381 military personnel suicides, a number that also exceeded the number of combat deaths. While the military has acknowledged an increase in suicides for some years, the corporate media tends to downplay the seriousness of these deaths by pointing to improvements and blaming the victims themselves.
USA Today
reporter Gregg Zoroya wrote on July 29, 2010, “After nine years of war, the Army attracts recruits ready for combat but inclined toward risky personal behavior. It’s a volatile mix that led to more deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and drinking and driving than from warfare, an Army review concludes.”
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Zoroya followed up half a year later: “The Marine Corps reported a decline in suicides from 52 in 2009 to 37 confirmed or suspected cases in 2010. Among active-duty Army soldiers, there were 156 potential suicides in 2010, down slightly from 162 in 2009.”
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In his
Truthdig
article “Death and After in Iraq,” Chris Hedges quoted former mortuary unit marine Jess Goodell: “War is disgusting and horrific.… It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.”
Goodell also described how the Marines have exploited young people, “Every single Marine I know goes to Iraq to help,” she said. “While I was there that is what I thought. That is why I volunteered. I thought I was going to help the Iraqis. I know better now. We did the dirty work. We were used by the government. The military knows that young, single men are dangerous. We breed it in Marines. We push the testosterone. We don’t want them to be educated.… We cannot question anyone. We do what we are told.”
In corporate media, coverage of suicide rates among the troops, a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the war and occupations itself, is absent, though there has been basic acknowledgment that “the Army and the Marine Corps, which have borne the heaviest burden in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been hit the hardest, reporting a record number of suicides in 2008. This year (2009), the toll is on pace to climb even higher. When combined, the figures paint a stark portrait of loss. More than 2,100 members of the armed forces have taken their own lives since 2001, nearly triple the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan and almost half of all US fatalities in Iraq.”
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Post-traumatic stress disorder is also widely covered in the corporate media with the focus on the soldiers themselves and not on the US government’s position in these wars and occupations. Corporate media’s framing of the impact on soldiers never questions the US policy of maintaining a military empire of occupations and wars worldwide.
A bipartisan group of senators is asking President Barack Obama to change the current “insensitive” policy of not sending condolence letters to families of service members who commit suicide. A letter
signed and sent May 25 by eleven senators—ten Democrats and one Republican—urged the president to “take immediate steps to reverse the long-standing policy of withholding presidential letters of condolence” to families of troops who killed themselves.
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In the January 2011 issue of
American Psychologist
, the American Psychology Association (APA) dedicated thirteen articles to detailing and celebrating a $117 million collaboration with the US Army, “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” (CSF), marketed as resilience training to reduce, if not prevent, adverse psychological consequences to soldiers who endure combat. Because of the CSF emphasis on “positive psychology,” advocates call it a holistic approach to warrior training.
Criticism arose shortly after the initiative was announced—including ethical questions about whether soldiers should be trained to become desensitized to traumatic events. Psychologist Bruce Levine loudly warned politicians, military brass, and the nation that if soldiers and veterans discover that they have been deceived about the meaningfulness and necessity of their mission, it is only human for them to become more prone to emotional turmoil, which can lead to destructive behaviors for themselves and others.
When asked during a National Public Radio interview whether CSF would be “the largest-ever experiment,” Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, “Well, we’re not describing it as an experiment. We’re describing it as training.”
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“It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not to be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted, randomized, controlled trials—before being rolled out under less controlled conditions,” wrote Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz in
Truthout
.
The Obama administration has quietly put into practice an escalation of policy left over from the Bush II presidency: creating a de facto “presidential international assassination program.” Court documents, evidence offered by Human Rights Watch, and a special United Nations report allege that US citizens suspected of encouraging “terror” had been put on “death lists.” Reports of these death lists show that Obama’s director of national intelligence told a congressional hearing that the program was within the rights of the Executive Branch of the government
and did not need to be revealed. At least two people are known to have been murdered by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives under this program. When the program was challenged in a New York City court, the judge refused to rule, saying, as reported by William Fisher for the Inter Press Service: “There are circumstances in which the executive’s unilateral decision to kill a US citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”
A moral, ethical, and legal analysis of assassinations seems to be significantly lacking inside corporate media. The unquestioned announcement that the Obama administration had authorized assassinations of supposed terrorists, including US citizens, was on the front page of the
Washington Post
on January 27, 2010, by Dana Priest:
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill US citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or US interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to US persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a US citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”
Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three US citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.
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The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are currently challenging this notion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. This lawsuit stems from the killing of Nasser Al-Aulaqi’s son, a US citizen, who was targeted
and killed by the United States government. It is interesting to note that according to CCR staff attorney Pardiss Kabriaei, “the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government’s claim to an unchecked system of global detention, and the district court should similarly reject the administration’s claim here to an unchecked system of global targeted killing.” The ACLU and CCR hope the court will rule that the US government can only kill a US citizen if there is proof of an imminent threat to life.
Focusing on American targets in a February 4 press release, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU National Security Project, emphasized, “It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the US, but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’ ”
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Francis A. Boyle at the University of Illinois College of Law wrote, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of US citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person ‘be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ ”
There has been no correlation drawn by corporate media between the US policy of presidential assassinations and the on-ground troop engagement in outrageous human rights violations, which was made public when the German magazine
Der Spiegel
released images of smiling US soldiers kneeling next to naked children they had just massacred. The soldiers not only took the village children’s lives but also ripped out their teeth and fingertips as keepsakes, and took pictures of themselves holding the dead bodies up by their hair. Jeremy Morlock, one of the soldiers in that group who participated in these incidents, has agreed to negotiate his declaration against his colleagues and superiors, to reduce his sentence for the murders. This group of soldiers referred to themselves as “Team Death.”
Luke Mogelson from the
New York Times
covered the trial of Jeremy Morlock on May 1, 2011:
In a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.
The story that has been told so far—by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan—is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders—parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem.
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While the tragic events of “Team Death” received widespread coverage in world news, most US coverage focused on the individuals as rogue deviants and included official apologies from the US military.
Additionally, Afghan civilian deaths are usually reported in the US corporate media as isolated incidents, and/or mistakes. A comprehensive evaluation of the human and environmental costs of the war in Afghanistan is mostly ignored by the corporate media.
Afghan civilians are facing the deadliest period since the US-led invasion began more than nine years ago. According to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, at least 2,421 civilians were killed in Afghanistan last year, and more than 3,270 civilians were injured in
conflict-related security incidents. This means that, every day, 6–7 noncombatants were killed and 8–9 were wounded in the war. In addition to the casualties, hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes, or deprived of health care, education services, and livelihood opportunities due to war, affected in various ways by the intensified armed violence in 2010.
Armed opposition groups were blamed for 63 percent of the total reported civilian deaths, US/NATO forces for 21 percent, pro-government Afghan forces for 12 percent, and about 4 percent could not be attributed to an identifiable armed group and were labeled “unknown” in the report. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the most lethal tools, which killed more than 690 civilians and wounded more than 1,800. At least 217 noncombatants died in air strikes, and 192 were killed in direct/indirect shooting by US/NATO forces in 2010.