Army Report on Stress and Murder

The online magazine, Salon, continues its Coming Home series finding an "Army report [that] seems to confirm a Salon investigation linking battle stress to murder. But the Army begs to differ."

Funny how Salon -- that has animatedly opposed the Iraq War -- steps up for veterans. Where the hell are the neocons?

Talking to veterans, many report that troops in the rear or those patrolling areas with erratic insurgencies have a worse time of it than those troops who fight more-or-less straight-up against their enemy.

But the bottom line is, we don't know and we can't guess and we shouldn't subject troops asking for DVA benefits to humiliation and bullshit.

From Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin:

Read excerpts from the Army's report on homicides at Fort Carson here or download the full study here. Read Salon's Coming Home series about preventable deaths at Fort Carson here.

July 16, 2009
FORT CARSON, Colo. -- The harsh combat in Iraq, including potential war crimes that were witnessed by soldiers, contributed to a series of brutal murders by soldiers based at this Army post near Colorado Springs after they returned home, according to a hard-hitting Army study released Wednesday. Many of the findings in the study, which was announced by senior Army brass at a press conference on the post, mirror those in Salon's Coming Home series, which identified a pattern of preventable homicides and suicides at Fort Carson among soldiers who served in Iraq with combat stress and failed to receive proper medical treatment.

Bush Used Torture to Support Iraq Lies

Update: Mark Benjamin: Bush officials said they only tortured terrorists after they wouldn't talk. New evidence shows they planned torture soon after 9/11 -- and used it to find links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Mike Madden: Rumsfeld: Architect of torture The secretary of defense began laying the groundwork for detainee abuse years before Abu Ghraib.

Bush and Cheney approved torture to get false information to support their lies to the American people to invade Iraq.

From Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist

Screwing Veterans

From Salon:

"I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD"
A secret recording reveals the Army may be pushing its medical staff not to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder. The Army and Senate have ignored the implications
-by Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin

Salon: Army's Fatal Neglect

Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna have the first in a series this week on the failure of the U.S. Army to care for returning troops.

See Death in the USA: The Army's fatal neglect
Returning U.S. combat soldiers are committing suicide and murder in alarming numbers. In a special series, Salon uncovers the habitual mistreatment behind the preventable deaths

The U.S. Torture Squads: Inhuman and Illegal

A Salon exclusive by Mark Benjamin chronicles the plight of an innocent Yemeni man tortured and brutalized for 19 months.

This is why Republicans block bills in Congress outlawing torture, bills which would make U.S. law on torture clearly in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual and international law. Because Republicans under Bush do torture and need protection from the investigations of the civilized world.

Writes Benjamin:

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die. ...

"This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program," said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. "It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared."

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