Take a Break from Pope-Special Report:Army Reservist Witnesses War Crimes

[chlamor]

Special Report

Army reservist witnesses war crimes
New revelations about racism in the military

By Paul Rockwell
Online Journal Contributing Writer

April 1, 2005—Aiden Delgado, an Army Reservist in the 320th Military Police Company, served in Iraq from April 1, 2003 through April 1, 2004. After spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, he spent six months helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. The handsome 23-year-old mechanic was a witness to widespread, almost daily, U.S. war crimes in Iraq. His story contains new revelations about ongoing brutality at Abu Ghraib, information yet to be reported in national media.

I first met Delgado in a classroom at Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, where he presented a slide show on the atrocities that he himself observed in Southern and Northern Iraq. Delgado acknowledged that the U.S. military did some good things in Iraq. "We deposed Saddam, built some schools and hospitals," he said. But he focused his testimony on the breakdown of moral order within the U.S. military, a pattern of violence and terror that exceeds the bounds of what is legally and morally permissible in time of war.

Delgado says he observed mutilation of the dead, trophy photos of dead Iraqis, mass roundups of innocent noncombatants, positioning of prisoners in the line of fire—all violations of the Geneva conventions. His own buddies—decent, Christian men, as he describes them—shot unarmed prisoners.

In one government class for seniors, Delgado presented graphic images, his own photos of a soldier playing with a skull, the charred remains of children, kids riddled with bullets, a soldier from his unit scooping out the brains of a prisoner.

 http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/040105Rockwell/040105rockwell.html

[babylonsister]

1. And no one will ever know, because no one cares today?nt

[Beam Me Up]

2. Recommending it would help. (LINK TO ARTICLE)

If you want threads to be seen by more folks, recommend them. If you find them particularly salient, send a link to the thread in a private message to people on your buddy list, etc.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/040105Rockwell/040105rockwell.html

[babylonsister]

5. Already done, but thanks. nt

[seemslikeadream]

3. Send them to the Hague!

:hi:
Check your link chlamor

[chlamor]

7. Thanks-Link Fixed

Copy of your pic will be perched in much larger size and splendor in auto window. Thanx.
Copies to be passed around.

This is serious folks. Pope has zero relevance to our lives.
Food first-Stop the military madness-Health Care for all.

Turn off the bread and circus and get in the way of the machine.

:toast:

[MountainLaurel]

4. Calling Sy Hersh!

Or another real journalist who is willing to forego lunches with power players to tell THE TRUTH about what is happening in Iraq.

Oh yeah, and support the troops my ass.

[babylonsister]

6. Aiden Delgado was one of the troops, and I'll

just bet there are more.

[chlamor]

8. "I knew that I could never again..."

By Rev. Martin Luther King

"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

[LibertyorDeath]

9. We need an MLK now

We all have to speak out against this madness or it will only get worse.

[chlamor]

13. "A Nation That Continues Year After Year to spend more on military..."

37th anniversary of MLKs assassinated, April 4th.

Approaching Spiritual Death 

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” 

Gary G. Kohls, MD 

03/29/05 "ICH" - - Those were the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous speech 38 years ago, April 4, 1967, (Listen to full speech here) one year to the day of his1968 assassination in Memphis, TN. The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Viet Nam War. Some also saw that King was signing his own death warrant by exposing so forcefully the perpetrators of what was known as “the overwhelming atrocity that was Viet Nam.” 

King was speaking out from his deeply felt sense of outrage and anguish over the horrible suffering of millions of innocent and unarmed Vietnamese civilians. King knew that women and children were the main victims of a whole host of highly lethal US weapons, including one of the US Air Force’s favorites, napalm, which burned the flesh off of whatever part of the body that the flaming, jellied gasoline splashed on. 

King knew of the atrocities that our GIs were ordered to commit in the name of “anti-communism.” He saw the connections between the killing of dispensable “gooks” on the battlefields of Southeast Asia and the oppression, impoverishment, imprisoning and lynching of “dispensable blacks” in America. 


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8405.htm

[BuyingThyme]

10. The EVIL of religion in a nutshell:

"Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up and gunned them all down."

Fuck you!

Fuck every one of you fucking evil morons who uses religion as a get out of hell card.

Fuck you!

[northamericancitizen]

11. "War promotes killers and racists"

"War forms its own culture. It distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it. . . . War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. Even as war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists." Chris Hedges

linking again http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/040105Rockwell/040105rockwell.html

[Swamp Rat]

12. The buck stops at Bush's desk... the guilt flows down from there.

[lonestarnot]

14. This sounds like a John Kerry report... hope the kid doesn't intend to

run for President.

[oxbow]

15. The story is hard to believe

Many would like to think that this kind of stuff doen't happen anymore, that this kind of overt racism was wiped out in America 30 years ago. It will be hard to get the press to go after this story IMO.

Have you guys seen the story below, though?


U.S. forces may have beaten Iraqi general
FORT CARSON, Colo. — Previously secret court testimony indicates an Iraqi general imprisoned by U.S. forces was badly bruised and may have been severely beaten two days before he died of suffocation during interrogation. (more)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-04-02-iraqi-general-beaten_x.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno

I think the difference is that this one has gone to court already, so it is less controversial to cover it.

[guinivere]

16. kick n/t