Thread: G.I.’s in Legal Trouble

Web Sites Rally Support for G.I.’s in Legal Trouble



Conservative Christians and military veterans are part an emerging group of Americans who say they are upset by the recent prosecutions of soldiers and marines based in Iraq on war crimes charges, and are coming to their defense with words, Web sites and money.

In the past year, more than a dozen Web sites have been developed to solicit donations to hire private lawyers for service members who have been charged with violent crimes for actions taken in the confusion of combat or counterinsurgency operations. They have raised more than $600,000, organizers say, from grandparents, business executives and college students, among others. The average donation is for $25 to $50.

Virtually all donations come with handwritten or e-mail messages full of encouragement for the troops in Iraq and laced with frustration at the government and the news media.

“I wonder if you are supposed to check out each enemy to see if they have a gun or wait for them to shoot first,â€

"This just came out today to me via email from A guy over in the mess
I will find out what paper the stuff came from but most of his emails come from the UK"...
Caution:I removed some of the comments Even theseThese comments are offensive Attention this stuff is not met to offend anyone although it might I edited it to share a common non offensive light ..But even the thought that some one who is representing our county would say the things that I removed is enough for me to say that guy has no business with a gun in his hand.[


We must listen to the truth when we hear it from the soldiers themselves, says matthew carr

Governments always wax sentimental about the soldiers they send to kill and die on their behalf. American and British politicians have consistently hailed their armed forces in Iraq as 'our finest men and women', despite a consistent flow of evidence to the contrary.

There is Haditha and Abu Ghraib. There is the YouTube video showing British soldiers gleefully beating up Iraqi prisoners. There are the photographs of hideously destroyed Iraqi corpses posted by US soldiers on a porn site, accompanied by joking comments. There are testimonies from US veterans describing how military patrols routinely carry 'throwaway' AK47s and shovels to plant on unarmed civilians they shoot.

This week, the American journal The Nation publishes the most comprehensive series of interviews with US Iraq war veterans carried out to date. Conducted by war correspondent

War veterans describe the routine killing and terrorising of Iraqi civilians
Chris Hedges and Palestinian-American journalist Laila al-Arian, the interviews are full of dark insights into the attitudes and behaviour of the US military in Iraq.

These veterans describe the routine killing and terrorising of Iraqi civilians. They tell of futile nocturnal weapons searches, convoys running over children, trigger-happy soldiers blasting entire families to pieces at checkpoints, the desecration of Iraqi corpses.

The war that emerges from these interviews is a brutal and dehumanising neo-colonial occupation, characterised by fear, confusion and a callous indifference towards Iraqi civilians regarded only as 'hajis', 'camel jockeys' and 'Jihad Johnnies'.

The interviews are not celebratory. Some veterans are clearly appalled by the behaviour of their former comrades and angry at the disparity between the presentation of the war and its brutal reality.

Such disparity is not new. During the 1954-62 Algerian war, the French government described its military as a civilised army fighting a uniquely barbaric and savage



enemy. When French soldiers began to write war memoirs describing how they had cut the throats of civilians, disembowelled pregnant women and committed numerous other atrocities, the French public generally refused to acknowledge that its soldiers were capable of sinking to the same level as the natives. To this day, the actions of the French army during the Algeria 'war without a name' remain concealed by successive amnesties and a culture of silence.

A similar silence hovers over the behaviour of the British Army during the 'Mau Mau' emergency in Kenya and the many atrocities
of the Vietnam war. In all these cases, brutality stemmed partly from the brutalising logic of counter-insurgency warfare.

When uniformed soldiers fight a clandestine enemy supported by a civilian population, the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant easily disappear and the Geneva Convention is often discarded, particularly when the enemy population is considered racially or culturally inferior.

The war described in The Nation interviews follows this grim pattern. Train young men for violence and send them to carry out an illegal and unwanted occupation and they will slip into illegality and immorality. Give such men power over people they do not understand and frequently despise, and they will abuse that power, particularly when such abuses are not properly investigated.

All this is a long way from the bloodless war spectacles broadcast by embedded journalists and starry-eyed advocates of 'humanitarian intervention'. Operation Iraqi Freedom was partly made possible by these fantasies of war and occupation. Those who instigated this travesty of liberation will no doubt continue to eulogise their soldiers, the better to conceal their own responsibility.

The rest of us should not. We should listen to the truth about war, especially when we hear it from the soldiers themselves. We should remember that colonial occupations are never benevolent and that even our 'finest men and women' can behave like brutes. As one veteran observes, "It's not individual atrocity. It's the fact the entire war is an atrocity." Exactly.
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Caution:I removed some of the comments Even theseThese comments are offensive Attention this stuff is not met to offend anyone although it might I edited it to share a common non offensive light ..But even the thought that some one who is representing our county would say the things that I removed is enough for me to say that guy has no business with a gun in his hand.[-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few of the comments from the American soldiers who aired their grievances to The Nation [/b]
You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs, specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and group them together - Sgt John Bruhns


You don't want to shoot kids, I mean, no one does, but I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK47 and just decides he's going to start shooting. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds - Sgt Patrick Campbell



You can't tell the difference between these people at all. They all look Arab. They all have beards, facial hair - Sgt Matt Mardan
As an American, you just put your hand up
with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky. That means stop to most Americans, and that's a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop... That's a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, 'Hello, come here'. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they're saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they're saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you're shooting pregnant women - 1st Sgt Perry Jefferies
In Iraq a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want - Spc Josh Middleton
I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi - Spc Jeff Englehart

It came from
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php
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Gregs thoughts
I believe that every soldier that signs up in any service knows what is expected of them . It is made quite in the highest degree, or to the fullest extent clear before the sign on.

As an American Christian man None of the war makes since to me .
non of the non deffesive killing make any sense to me.
As a human being …if i was me I would have never sign on for any job that kills people. But if it was me or the enemy we all know I would stand and fight.

Its war… and I don’t think any rules are being followed by the other side.
but the Americans are doing the best they can to follow all the rules.
its got to be hard..

How do you put rules on killing. ???


confusion of combat
or counterinsurgency operations.


If that was as far as it goes i could stomach this better, But that’s not what most of the war crimes are talking about it much worse then that.
but just like at home in America.
Men are stupid and give them a inch they take a mile and just like a crime at home the people that break the rules should pay for the crimes .