I encourage everyone to read this entire piece by John Conroy in the Chicago Reader. Here is an Army interrogator telling us about everything. It is the first full account from an actual soldier that I have come across that hasn’t been edited into clips or published in quotes attributed to anonymous sources. Here are some samples:
We were getting prisoners from the navy SEALs who were using a lot of the same techniques we were using, except they were a little more harsh. They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy’s feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn’t walk.
It was bad, in particular the First Recon—they’re sort of like marine special forces, an elite unit [attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, known as 24th MEU]. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just fuck these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones. One guy came with a blister on the back of his leg. It was big, it was horrible, a burn blister. They’d made him sit on the exhaust pipe of a running truck.
Wow, sounds like Vietnam all over again, making up numbers for suit the brass. WTF.
Great find!
Finally some good reporting from Iraq.
Sounds like a quagmire to me.
http://asecondhandconjecture.com/?p=576
Why does everyone want it to fail. I really do not get that.
OK Frodo, I’ll bite. Who wants it to fail?
This is territory we’ve run over again, it seems, whenever frodo reappears…and before the bell rings, understand that in order to remain a believer at this point requires an enormous amount of faith. The most rigidly faithful of any group of people, focusing on one idea, will always produce a sense of us and them, with each passing week/month/year the signs point opposite of the direction faith has forced them to travel.
So it becomes the story of Job, only updated to where it’s not only this one man’s family, livestock and home are destroyed for the sake of settling a bet, but hundreds of thousands of lives. Gambled on an idea, the ones most affected by our occupation, would overwhelmingly decide that the idea itself was shit to begin with.
These factors will never faze a gambler playing with the last bit of credit left in his name, as the citing of how much has been bet into the pot already as justification for throwing what’s left in as well.
A tire fire is what it is. But frodo will attempt to bring the debate to abstract nonsense like the psychology of millions of other people at a specific time. Just like that he can close his eyes and gauge within seconds, the collective level of hope inside the hearts and minds of liberals everywhere that their wish will finally come true, that we lose wars.
He can tell what you are thinking right now. He already knows whether or not you’re hoping the US becomes a third world country.
How else could you deny the obvious reason for disagreeing with someone as faithful as frodo? What it comes down to is a comparison of character, and if you’re not believing the lies on Iraq you hate your country.