Tag Archives: Snipers

Coming soon to an airbase near you

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Time to revisit this leaked C-130 targeting video of a US Afghan turkey shoot. With the Creech AFB remote Reapers, American snipers working electronically can now sit stateside, with YOU AS THEIR HUMAN SHIELD.

(The control room chatter remind me of an auction house, where spotters call out the hits in case the auctioneer is too busy to see them.)

What am I thinking, we could outsource this function to the lowest unprincipled bidder. If telecommunications can permit Pakistanis to sort US mail or take our fast food drive-through orders, why not let them do the killing on our video game consoles?

Scorched journalist policy

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Shall we speculate as to who is killing journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan? (141 to date in Iraq.) Well, the who is documented, much of it labeled “friendly fire.” Shall we speculate about the why? Forgive me if it feels like I am connecting the dots with a crayon.
 
A recent documentary interviewed some Iraqi journalists about their inconsistent use of flack jackets. The journalists said they choose not to wear protection around fellow Iraqis because they don’t want to be mistaken for working for the occupiers. But walking beside American soldiers the journalists do wear flack jackets because they are fearful of being shot …by the Americans.

Witness to a crime
We’ve all seen it in the movies: the protagonist is accidental witness to a crime and becomes targeted by the perpetrator lest he live to testify. Or the victim begging for life, vowing in exchange not to go to the police. Both victim and criminal know it’s an offer the villain cannot risk.

Massacres usually intend to leave no survivors because the dead tell no tales. Countless war movies have depicted the war correspondent happening upon a war crime in progress, recognizing immediately that a “stray bullet” will be eminent.

Kill Boxes
We’ve learned over the course of two Gulf Wars that our military employs such tactics as “Kill Boxes” and “Free Fire Zones.” Both describe a similar US M.O.. The first is Air Force lingo for an area bounded by given coordinates inside of which everything is considered a target. The airmen are tasked with killing everybody in that box. They have the discretion not to shoot something, but they will be held responsible for whatever they leave, authorized as they were to annihilate all.

Photo shown across the world except in the USA renowned Kill Box in 1990 was the Highway of Death, where thousands of Iraqi soldiers fleeing from Kuwait were incinerated in their vehicles. (American viewers were spared the graphic images.)

The Hague Conventions forbid firing upon soldiers who are no longer attacking you. Even cowboys know you don’t shoot somebody in the back. Both the Hague and Geneva Conventions outlaw the indiscriminate killing of civilians and other non-combatants.

Free Fire Zones
Kill Boxes violate all international conventions. They are as illegal as the US Army’s Free Fire Zone in which soldiers are ordered to fire freely at “anything that moves.” Civilians are expected to know beforehand to get out of the way. They figure it out when our snipers begin popping their family members’ heads off in their gardens. IED detonations now trigger automatic Free Fire Zones around the radius of the blast. An American reputation for ruthless overkill now precedes us. As a result, when IEDs explode, Iraqis have learned to run for their lives. Our soldiers lie to themselves that the escaping figures must be responsible for the IED, and are thus combatants. American Humvees carry extra shovels to plant on the bodies of the slain civilians to paint them as bomb laying insurgents.

The US has deliberately shot civilians since the Korean War, though this has only recently been revealed. In No Gun Ri, entire masses of refuges were machine-gunned to prevent fighters from passing amongst them. This policy continued in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre being unique only for having been uncovered. In war, Collateral Damage has always been a tragic unintended consequence, but by no stretch of a JAG’s imagination can it be a sanctioned consequence.

Secret and Confidential
Let’s speculate here… If military manuals exist with instructions for Kill Boxes and Free Fire Zones which explicitly require the killing of civilians and non-combatants, how do you suppose the instructions read for dealing with uninvited members of the press? The US military seems quite preoccupied with how its actions appear in news broadcasts. How might US soldiers be instructed to deal with journalists who stumble upon the bodies and capture the unbecoming bloodshed with their cameras? We’ll find out someday when a witness survives.

Religious Bigotry, Nationalism, and Racism

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Religious Bigotry, Nationalism, and Racism are the core ingredients of patriotism worldwide. Oh, I know, some will say that Peace is Patriotic, and other such liberal claptrap. But we all know what Patriotism really means; it means my religion before all others, my country before all others, my race before all others.

Got to thinking about this while writing the last commentaries about that certain racist Colorado Springs State rep dissing Hispanics, and the blown away Fort Carson trained snipers coming back in bags from Iraq.

Got to thinking about this at the last city council meeting, where all assembled are forced into prayer and a pledge of allegiance before the city council meeting can be allowed to begin. It is a loyalty oath where it is demanded of one that we show our patriotism. But I’m not a patriot, and proud of that, too, and do not think that I will participate in standing up next time I go to this government function. I will opt out instead. Instead, I don’t think that the home team is special, nor that the home religion is special, nor that the White race of European background is better than others. I don’t like patriots. I’m not one myself, and with good reason.

3 Fort Carson snipers die, no reason to cry

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Probably one of the most disgusting lines of work the Pentagon arranges for ‘our troops’ to do, is the role of sniper. And three of these Fort Carson trained assassins just got blown up yesterday in Iraq, according to The Gazette headline today. The article had sort of a tearful quality to it, and this is part of the neo-con rehab for the reputation of snipers, torturers, and thugs of all stripes and varieities.
 
Cybersniper.com will give you even a musical rendition of this sniper rehab propaganda, and another sniper.com site had a collection going to help out US military snipers to get better equipment to shoot down Arabs with. Kind of a Toy for Tots thing, Bless their damned souls. But when most Americans think of snipers, they generally still think of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Whitman, who shot down close to 50 people from the University Tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Let’s hope that people also remember that both got their training in the US Marine Corp, but they might not, I guess?

These three soldiers who just died in Iraq all trained as snipers at Fort Carson, but their dead bodies will head back to their hometowns, where no doubt the local press will talk about how proud their families are of them, how proud their local communities are of them, and how proud America is that they gave their lives in service to Bush and Cheney and the oil companies they represent. Hahaha, that last part is just untrue. The local press won’t mention that part of their ‘sevice’ for sure. My bad. They will be called hereoes, ‘sniper heroes’ even! Tears will wash ashore in remembrance of what fine men they were to choose this fine line of endeavour.

But the time to cry was when they joined the military and began to have the aspiration to train as long distance killers. They threw their lives away THEN, plain and simple. No reason to cry now. RIP, you three made the wrong turn in life. I’m crying for the orphan children of Iraq instead.

Child-proof Iraq

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US sniper perched on highAn American sniper at work.
 
Fallujah is often declared a Free-Fire Zone, which means soldiers are to shoot anything that moves.

I just watched a newly released documentary about OPERATION PHANTOM FURY, our military’s swoop into Fallujah. The documentary was called Caught in the Crossfire: The Untold Story of Fallujah.

I was already aware of the atrocities such as our use of chemical weapons, but I hadn’t considered the no-less-sensational: the plight of those who survived.

They were evacuated from Fallujah, a city the size of Cincinnati, without anywhere to go, step this way please, to the desert. There they subsisted without refugee camps mostly at the outskirts of their city.

After the fighting, they were asked to return to their homes, to find that there was little to which to return. Almost all the businesses were destroyed or damaged.

The footage gathered for this documentary was amazing, there were the mass graves into which the survivors were obliged to bury the bodies of their relations and friends. These were enormous trenches the size of boxcars into which everyone shoveled dirt after each layer of bodies. We’ve seen footage like that before. It was black and white and those forced to do the shoveling were German citizens held responsible for the piles of concentration camp dead.

There was footage of the checkpoints, where lines of people waited out in the cold for days, the men were separated from the women and in any part of this zone, brutal force was permitted and often used.

The most poignant image for me however was a simple domestic scene of a family returned to its home. In one shot a small boy was guiding his younger sibling down the stairs, navigating hand in hand around the rubble on the steps.

I thought about how American parents worry that their child might encounter an unprotected wall socket.

Putting aside the fears that Iraqi parents have that their child will venture outside and into view of American snipers, or into the path of an oncoming American convoy which has orders not to stop under any circumstance, or that their child might be attracted to a brightly colored unexploded cluster bomblet and pick it up; I hadn’t thought of the not child-proof rubble on the step.