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[Sooke]

Newsweek - Some troops are going on patrol totally stoned

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13126262/site/newsweek /

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In December, NEWSWEEK interviewed some Army soldiers going home as conscientious objectors. To fight boredom and disgust, said Clif Hicks, who had left a tank squadron at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, soldiers popped Benzhexol, five pills at time. Normally used to treat Parkinson's disease, the drug is a strong hallucinogenic when abused. "People were taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking. They'd go on raids and patrols totally stoned." Hicks, who volunteered at the age of 17, said, "We're killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by accident. One guy in my squadron ran over a family with his tank."

Hicks's own revulsion peaked while he was on patrol in January 2004. He came upon a bloody scene in a Baghdad housing project, where some soldiers had mistaken celebratory shots fired at a wedding for an attack, returning heavy fire and killing a young girl. "I looked in the door and she was dead, shot through the neck, Mom there, Grandma there, all losing it. Then I started thinking, this is really f---ed up, this is horribly wrong." Hicks stopped taking his malaria pills, hoping he'd get sick and shipped out. He says that infantry soldiers sometimes stick their legs out of the Humvee under sniper fire, hoping to get a nonlethal wound.

Hicks claims that "there's a lot of guys who steal from the Iraqis. Money, family heirlooms, and then they brag about it. Guys would crap into MRE bags and throw them to old men begging for food."

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Though no one is talking openly at Camp Pendleton, Marines and their families are buzzing about what might have gone wrong inside Kilo Company. The wife of a staff sergeant in the 3/1 battalion, who declined to be identified because she doesn't want to get her husband in trouble, told NEWSWEEK that there was "a total breakdown" in discipline and morale after Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani took over as battalion commander when the unit returned from Fallujah at the start of 2005. (Chessani's friends in his Colorado hometown defended him as a dedicated, patriotic, religious Marine.) "There were problems in Kilo Company with drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it," said the woman. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."
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But Lucian Read, a freelance photographer who spent seven months with Kilo Company, both in Fallujah and Haditha, did not see warning signs. "Their morale wasn't bad, it was more fatalistic; this is the grunts-get-screwed-every-time," he said. "They were not happy, not pleased, but not angry, either," Read said. "Nothing they ever did or said even hinted at this kind of event. I never saw it coming. No one saw it coming."

[Gopher]

[deleted]

[Interested]

The following is a relevant article from a British Broadsheet

The bloody iceberg's tip

Haditha is in the spotlight. But such an atrocity is unexceptional in occupied Iraq

Sami Ramadani
Wednesday June 7, 2006
The Guardian

The killing of 24 people, including children, inside their homes in the Iraqi town of Haditha is at last receiving widespread media attention in the US and Britain. But it is thanks to coincidence that the story ever came to light.

News of the November 2005 massacre would have been buried alongside many other stories of occupation atrocities had it not been for the presence of mind of an Iraqi journalist, who photographed the horrific scenes before the bodies were buried, and the perseverance of an Iraqi lawyer. For US military crimes to be exposed takes overwhelming evidence, massive perseverance and a good deal of luck. On the other hand, mere speculation from occupation and pro-occupation Iraqi sources is routinely reported as an accurate reflection of events.

Take the report of the killing of three members of the same family in Samarra, which first appeared in Iraq a few weeks back and resurfaced following the publicity around the Haditha massacre. According to the Iraqi news network, US forces killed the three in a raid on the family home: Zaidan Khalaf confirmed that the soldiers had killed his 60-year-old wife Khairiya, son Khalid and daughter Ina'am. I have come across scores of stories in the Iraqi press of unarmed civilians killed by US-led occupation forces, some backed up by video footage. But few make it into the western media. In this context, Haditha is made to seem exceptional, and is always diminished by the obligatory, nauseating ministerial comment that things were worse under Saddam. (Take note Joo!)

Why we should welcome an inquiry led by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon is a mystery, given its determination to avoid investigating the involvement of senior officers in the torture and killing of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The culture of indiscriminate violence that Iraqis have long insisted permeates the US-led occupation forces is in any case gradually being exposed by the testimony of US soldiers.

One such soldier, Specialist Jody Casey, a scout sniper in Baquba who witnessed civilians being killed by soldiers, said recently bombs "go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you". Soldiers were told to carry shovels in vehicles so they could plant them on civilian victims, he said, to make it look like they were digging to set up roadside bombs. Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion.

Meanwhile, we are inundated with stories about Sunnis killing Shias, Shias killing Sunnis, killing Kurds, killing Turkomans, while regular anti-sectarian demonstrations are ignored: 10 days ago, for example, there was a large rally in the predominantly Shia town of Balad in solidarity with the nearby Sunni town of Dhullu'iya, under siege by US forces. The reality is that the occupation is detested by most Iraqis. US-led forces are surrounded by popular hostility, and are operating completely outside Iraqi "sovereign" jurisdiction. No Pentagon courses in the ethics of how and how not to kill Iraqis will change this.

What the occupation forces experience on the ground is a consequence of what their political masters decide in Washington and London. The indiscriminate harming of Iraqis has, in practice, been the modus operandi of US-led policy towards Iraq since 1990. There is a continuity between this bloody occupation and the indiscriminate 13 years of US-led sanctions that preceded it - which also killed thousands of Iraqis.

When will the point come for the media and parliament to declare that the occupation of Iraq is a colossal and unacceptable brutality that must be immediately brought to an end?

� Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam's regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University
Email: [email protected]

[ddeubel]

[Gopher]

[deleted]

[khyber]

Interested posts a link that suggests that the killing of civilians is UNDER reported by American journalists in Iraq. An Iraqi Journalist breaks a story of the killing of civilians. In fact, civilian casualties are virtually UNreported by American news. Yet Iraqi news seems to have dozens of stories.

I fail to see where the surprise is in all of this

[Gopher]

[deleted]

[Sooke]