{"id":19949,"date":"2010-08-01T19:00:17","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T23:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=19949"},"modified":"2010-08-01T19:20:37","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T23:20:37","slug":"wikileaks-in-baghdad-trash-dump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=19949","title":{"rendered":"Wikileaks in Baghdad trash dump"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an article in The Nation written by Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey entitled “Wikileaks in Baghdad<\/a>” that has really tested my strength to avoid punching my poor, innocent laptop. The article begins;<\/p>\n

One by one, soldiers just arriving in Baghdad were taken into a room and questioned by their commanding officers. “All questions led up to the big question,” explains former Army Spc. Josh Stieber. “If someone were to pull out a weapon in a marketplace full of unarmed civilians, would you open fire on that person, even if you knew you would hurt a lot of innocent people in the process?”<\/p>\n

It was a trick question. “Not only did you have to say yes, but you had to say yes without hesitating,” explains Stieber. “In refusing to go along with the crowd, it was not irregular for somebody to get beat up,” he adds. “They’ll take you in a room, close the door and knock you around if they didn’t like your answer,” says former Army Spc. Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.<\/p>\n

According to these former soldiers, this was a typical moment of training for Bravo Company 2-16 (2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment), the ground unit involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, which captured global headlines when it was released in April by WikiLeaks….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few points that the least bit of research would have revealed about those first paragraphs; Beating a soldier won’t change his answer to that question. Just by slamming him around in room doesn’t make him react differently in the real situation. Soldiers aren’t dogs and have their own minds.<\/p>\n

Another point; Any “commanding officer” who took the least part in such ineffective conditioning would lose their jobs…and no such incident would go unreported. Give us the names of these “commanding officers” and watch how swiftly justice comes to them. <\/p>\n

A third point; In the video to which they refer, the soldiers of B 2\/16 Infantry didn’t do anything out of line. It’s the actions of two helicopter crewmembers which led to the killing of those insurgents and journalists on the street corner. Those helicopter crew members aren’t on the roster of B 2\/16, so they wouldn’t have had this supposed conditioning that Steiber describes. The soldiers of B 2\/16 are the folks who showed up later and rushed the two children to medical treatment. So even if the above story was true, what could it possibly have to do with the events which unfolded in the video?<\/p>\n

We return to the article;<\/p>\n

Now three former soldiers from this unit have come forward to make the case that the incident is not a matter of a few bad-apple soldiers but rather just one example of US military protocol in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, where excessive acts of violence often stem from the chain of command.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Except that the “excessive violence” came from the helicopter crew members, not members of B 2\/16 – the unit from which those three former soldiers came. And there are about a hundred men in an infantry company – where are the other 97?<\/p>\n

The three go on to make vacuous charges against their leadership and peers without naming names, without providing dates and places. Lazare and Harvey were suckered – but I suspect it doesn’t bother either of them. Lazare writes with Dahr Jamail<\/a>, the lead propagandist of the Left who completely disregards facts that get in his way and constructs mountains from molehills. Lazare also writes and works with Courage to Resist<\/a>, so she’s pretty familiar with using hyperbole as facts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an article in The Nation written by Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey entitled “Wikileaks in … Wikileaks in Baghdad trash dump<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,37,7,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-ivaw","category-terror-war","category-usual-suspects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}