"Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our ***es. We ******* kill people."

Want the dead checking to stop?

Tell the Sunnis to kick our their foreign-jihadists-beheading-torturing-child-killiing car bombing murderers (now there's some dead-checking for you), put down their arms, and register to vote.

 

Common practice. If you have bayonets fixed you can use those instead of your boot. War is hell.

Maybe next time they'll focus on the Army instead of the junior varsity.

 

When I hear an outcry from military personnell with combat experience over the "dead-checking", then I'll get worried about it.

And before you ask, yes, there WAS absolute outrage from servicemen over My Lai (at least once all the facts came out).

The media is doing all it can to turn Iraq into another Vietnam...first they tried (to my disgust, fairly successfully) to turn Abu Ghraib into My Lai (mental torture and forcing a few dozen people to pose in humiliating pictures was a horrible PR move, but it hardly ranks up there with the massacre of several hundred people, most of whom were innocent women and children). Now they're trying to turn the Fallujah shooting into another ARVN-Officer-Shooting-A-Captured-Blindfolded-VC-In-Point-Blank-On-Camera incident. What would be particularly laughable about that to me, if it weren't so sad that the media is trying to undermine our military efforts in Iraq, is that we still don't even know that the Iraqi was unarmed (look at the tape again...you still can't see half of his body, and all the media reports refer to the guy as "possibly" or "apparently" unarmed, etc).

 

Is Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw doing this? I don't get where you're going w/this statement. Give me SPECIFICS or shutup

 

Agreed.

But what they have to resort to as a result-I mean the boy w/the stick and the little girl w/her legs chopped off as extreme examples-I would think is hard for the Marines to deal with.

 

True dat. The aggression we use when "dead-checking" is inspired by the a-holes who play dead or strap bombs to themselves.

If the enemy had the means to drop 5,000 pound bombs on one of our cities, like we've done in Iraq, I'm sure they'd rather do that instead of one of the aforementioned acts of cowardice. "Oops, sorry I leveled an entire neighborhood and killed over 50 civilians. I heard there was a warlord there. My bad. But at least I didn't have to blow myself up to make my point."

 

I don't distinctly remember the networks or major papers drawing direct similarities between My Lai and Abu Ghraib, but I think that we can agree Abu Ghraib was really crappy regardless of any comparisons.

Come on, Alex, get real for a minute. Could you tell from the mass media coverage that November has the second-highest number of US casualties since the war started? If the media was really trying to undermine the US military there, every dead soldier's funeral would be broadcast live on CNN. They're not. Instead, all of the news from Iraq deals with one of two issues -- the suicide bombings, which they cannot ignore, and the US military brass saying that soldiers had routed another insurgent group. We're in "mop-up" mode in Fallujah, according to the US media. Things are getting better country-wide, according to the US media. Elections are on schedule, according to the US media. We don't get the roadside bomb stories anymore. We don't get the kidnapping stories anymore, unless they're of Western women. We have never seen or heard the day-in, day-out stuff in an occupation like this, but the sad and pathetic fact is that American soldier deaths have now become just another part of that day-in, day-out stuff.

If you really, truly think that the mass media is undermining the US' efforts in Iraq, then I strongly suggest you put down the American Spectator and read something, anything else. Doesn't have to be the Globe or NY Times, either -- read the front page "What's News" column of today's WS Journal. We've got problems there, huge problems, and they're not going to go away by blaming the liberal media elite.

What's interesting is that you've put together an excuse for what happened that not even the Pentagon has tried to put out there.

 

Liar; your former Secretary of State, as an Army officer, contributed to the cover-up, and when you talk about all the facts coming out, well, that was Ron Ridenhour who pieced that together, piercing through the fog of Powell's 1968 obfuscations, and getting to the knowable truth. Powell, among many senior staff of the Vietnam era, still do not, and will not, admit that not only was My Lai wrong, but that My Lai represents the one time folks were CAUGHT, and that that sh!t went on REGULARLY.

And to this day you will find all KINDS of servicemen who find nothing inherently wrong with what happened in My Lai, and even more civilians. Look at ********ing Keller, for goodness' sake; an armchair murderer and lover and prime beneificary (or so he thinks) of empire, laying back, rock-concert sytle on the uplifted hands of the third world. ******** you, and ******** him, ******** your analysis, and ******** this way of being in the world.

War is hell. Humans, some of them, MAKE war happen. Those humans are "of Hell," demonic. Others stand by. Those others are promoters of Hell, also demonic. We don't need Ann Rice's Memhoch to sweep into our lives, look at Powell, at Keller, at you. There's no difference between our imagined demons and you folks, except for the reality of dead bodies littering our globe from your tiny-penis fear-laden greedmongering demonic expression of what you've deluded yourselves to think power means. All work in their own way for Hell, for the worst that is, and the worst that will be. None are Christ-like, and I'd guess that many are damned, spiritually. How can the deathbed begging for forgiveness notable in "Christianity" override a lifetime of demonic, Hellish murder and support thereof?

Not my God. My God sends you, and all those just LIKE you, back as a two-year old Iraqi kids with their blessed mothers in a civilian market just before it's bombed by Rumsfeld, taking that child's spirit out and unto Heaven while switching souls with folks like that, folks like you.

Enjoy.

BTW, I get the odd, comforting feeling that this is the last, grasping expression of power before the Universe swings back in a societal political expression of Newton's Third Law. If we can escape an infantile nuclear attempt to trump Natural Law by the first and the last of the Neocon Age - the Neocon Moment - we might find that this is the worst it will get.

Then again, Hell, and the Hellish, are nothing if not persistent.

 

Abu Ghraib = rape and murder. Just to be clear on this.

 

That's bullsh!t too, but, oddly, I don't lump the soldiers in with the demonic; I find launchers of war, and those that promote war as policy (like Bush and Keller and alex) demonic. But I don't really leap to that place with those who are described in the article. Maybe an inconsistency with me, as they are doing the actual killing, and are in fact responsible for what they do, but for me I see the entirety of a society taken in a certain direction on their shoulders, pulling that trigger, not just them. I feel like they are in many ways the endpoint of a spear that's been shoved in the gut of the globe by others well before they pierced the flesh.

 

I take it you're a veteran. Which branch?

If I missed the obvious, I apologize, but who is "they", and what do you mean by "junior varsity"?

 

I just want to point out that the real heroes aren't over in Iraq doing the fighting - the real heroes are here on this thread, people like Karl Keller and Axis Alex and bostonsoccer, courageous men who stand up and shout in the face of balanced posts and genuine debate: "Not in my America!"

This country - indeed, this world! - owes you three a debt of gratitude.

 

I love the smell of unproven allegations in the morning.

None that I've ever met. I've never heard anyone (military or civilian, no matter how right-wing) defend My Lai; most people who served in Vietnam regard Calley as a vicious murderer who did great harm to the American cause.

What the flying blue fvck are you talking about?

By Americans? Has this ever been confirmed? I know that those kind of allegations surfaced, but I thought the only confirmed ones were leveled against (allied) Iraqi soldiers.

Even if a half-dozen or so prisoners at Abu Ghraib were murdered (IIRC that was roughly the number that was alleged), which given the modern media I won't believe to be true until it's proven (yeah, I'm willing to give American Marines and soldiers much, much, MUCH more of a benefit of doubt than I am Iraqi terrorists, or for that matter any "embedded reporters" who have never served in the military--fvcking sue me), it doesn't hold a candle to My Lai. 250 or so dead, the vast majority of whom were innocent (a few weren't), mainly women, children, and elderly; vs. a half-dozen or so military-aged males who most likely were not innocent...no comparison.

 

LOL@ "If the enemy had the means".

Our enemies have already demonstrated the lengths to which they will go to intentionally kill civilians. They would just as happily use a nuclear bomb as a "5,000 pound" bomb.

Speaking of which, what "5,000 pound" bombing of the alleged warlord -- "killing over 50 civilians" -- are we discussing?

 

Ah, I see.

 

I'm sure this has been asked a million times but I'm curious........

Are any family members of the ones who said we need to go to war in Iraq over in Iraq? You know, family members Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, some congressmen, etc.......

 

You know, Alex, the US Army should use your argument on promotional bumper stickers or something:

Abu Ghraib: It Ain't Anything Like My Lai

Because there's nothing like lowering the bar as low as physically possible before trying to surpass it. You know, like Lyndie England's Not As Bad As Saddam, Damnit or Bush's Debate Skills Rival A Four-Year-Old Child's.