U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

[Rajiv]

U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

raq vet exposes how he was trained to round up Americans in martial law exercise, asked if he would kill his own friends and family

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, February 4th, 2008

U.S. troops are being trained to conduct round-ups, confiscate guns and shoot American citizens, including their own friends and family members, as part of a long-standing program to prepare for the declaration of martial law, according to a soldier who recently returned from Iraq.

We received an e mail from "Scott", a member of a pipefitters union that runs an apprenticeship program called Helmets To Hard Hats, which according to its website, "Is a national program that connects National Guard, Reserve and transitioning active-duty military members with quality career training and employment opportunities within the construction industry."

Scott writes that his company hired a soldier who had recently returned from Iraq, who told him that U.S. troops were being quizzed on whether or not they would be prepared to shoot their own friends and family members during a national state of emergency in America.

"I have become very close to this young man and have gained his respect and trust," writes Scott. "I want you to know that he informed me about one particular training exercise his superiors made them perform. It was concerning the rounding up of American citizens that disobey any type of martial law or in other words any type of infringement on our freedoms."

"He was asked if he could shoot his friends or family members if ordered to do so. At the time he said he could," writes Scott.

Scott says that the soldier later "had time to clear his head" and realize the truth, recanting his vow to kill his own countrymen if ordered to do so.

The issue of whether U.S. troops would be prepared to round-up, disarm and if necessary shoot Americans who disobeyed orders during a state of martial law is a question that military chiefs have been attempting to answer for at least 15 years.

Its known origins can be traced back to an October 1994 Marine questionnaire out of the Twentynine Palms Marine Base in California. Recruits were asked 46 questions, including whether they would kill U.S. citizens who refused to surrender their firearms.

Documentary film maker Alex Jones brought to light similar training programs that were taking place across the country in the late 90's which revolved around U.S. Marines being trained to arrest American citizens and take them to internment camps.

During one such program in Oakland California, dubbed "Operation Urban Warrior," Marines refused to answer if they would target American citizens for gun confiscation if ordered to do so.

[FRED]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Ah, Prison Planet. That bastion of credible and sane journalism.

[GRG55]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Ah, Prison Planet. That bastion of credible and sane journalism.

I am not familiar with and don't read that particular site FRED, but even though I am not a US citizen (and therefore it could be argued these things shouldn't matter to me), I am old enough to remember Kent State.

[Rajiv]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

I think Fred or Freds should read some of Col. David Grossman's work On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.


Perhaps some of his articles would serve to enlighten

"Teaching Kids to Kill."

"Trained to Kill: Are We Conditioning Our Children to Commit Murder?"

"On Killing II: The psychological cost of learning to kill."

Trained To Kill

Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of posturing. Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to daunt the enemy. There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles were nothing more than great shoving matches. It was not until one side turned and ran that most of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back. All of the ancient military historians report that the vast majority of killing happened in pursuit when one side was fleeing.

In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.

In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And so he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent.

The methods in this madness: Desensitization

How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.

Brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.

Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.

When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what the media are doing to them.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three- to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually." The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov's dogs you learned about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell without salivating.

The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly) teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A Clockwork Orange. In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.

We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.

After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.

The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call AVIDS--Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed anybody. It destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn't kill you become fatal. Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence. And once you are at close range with another human being, and it's time for you to pull that trigger, Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain resistance.

Operant conditioning

The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is wetting his seat cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.

When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do. In fire drills, children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion. One day there is a real fire, and they are frightened out of their wits; but they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do, and it saves their lives.

The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern battlefield. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response--soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.

Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.

I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed .38 pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes--which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range--and killed this father of two. Afterward, we asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill the guy--it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, "I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen."

In the military and law-enforcement worlds, the right option is often not to shoot. But you never, never put your quarter in that video machine with the intention of not shooting. There is always some stimulus that sets you off. And when he was excited, and his heart rate went up, and vasoconstriction closed his forebrain down, this young man did exactly what he was conditioned to do: he reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately just like all those times he played video games.

This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever more homemade pseudosociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to kill and learning to like it; and then we have the audacity to say, "Oh my goodness, what's wrong?"

[Guest]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Rajiv -

I think that's an excellent post. I have also seen instances of kids acting shockingly indifferent to the misery of the destitute (and one suspects equally so the spectre of death).

A few years ago here in San Diego, on a day trip down to Tijuana, I saw some 18 year old American GI's on a drunken binge with their girlfriends - "slumming it" down in TJ. They were grouped around a girl, about the same age, seemed just barely into her teens, with what looked like a 2 year old tot, who was crawling around on all fours, shoeless and barely clothed, on the filthy sidewalk peeling a scrap of bread off the pavement. The girl was begging, clothed in shocking rags, and looked in bad shape.

These american teenagers were out of uniform but obviously from Camp Pendleton, and were openly sniggering at the two year old crawling in the filth. I totally lost my cool. I called them the worst American slime I had come across in 20 years, and told them they were a flaming embarassment to our country. These kids stood around, drunk, and smirking to impress their equally vapid teen girlfriends, and did not understand a thing.

The image of that scene is etched into my memory in complete detail and has somehow never faded.

But here's the thing Rajiv. In order to be truly universal in your disgust for such traits, you have to truly, actively condemn them everywhere - not just here in the US. Please keep in mind that children are being indoctrinated to kill in many different parts of the world - some much more overtly than here in North America. Here is another instance, and it's arguably even worse.

I don't know how to embed video here - could you please embed this video - as the posted link will expire in a few days probably?

Web page here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7231829.stm

Live link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/c...1&bbwm=1&asb=1

[Rajiv]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

But here's the thing Rajiv. In order to be truly universal in your disgust for such traits, you have to truly, actively condemn them everywhere - not just here in the US. Please keep in mind that children are being indoctrinated to kill in many different parts of the world - some much more overtly than here in North America. Here is another instance, and it's arguably even worse.

Lukester I toatally agree with you here. To me the US is important -- because I live here, and care immensely for the people who are my fellow travellers here. I am embedding the video you linked to.

[MEDIA]mms://a678.v422983.c42298.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/678/42298/1.0/clipdownloads.bbc.co.uk/windowsmedia-acl/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/102000/bb/102540_16x9_bb.wmv[/MEDIA]

[santafe2]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Ah, Prison Planet. That bastion of credible and sane journalism.

Thank you. Alex Jones and Prison Planet have never met a rumor or a well turned conspiracy tale they didn't take for hard science. As with this story, the anecdotal re-telling of a campfire story is standard fare.

[sigalarm]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

I read this site when I can, and have normally thought it to be quite insightful and well informed. This thread has me wondering at the moment.

First off, the prison planet kooks concoct their fabrications up to out do each other half the time. Second of all, as a member of the US military, I can tell you right now that I have never participated in such training, nor has anyone I can round up and talk to at the moment. It is a complete load of BS.

This kind of garbage tends to come from people who have not served in the military, or have not been around the military enough to know that they are far more loyal to the people of the US than they are to the government.

The Marines I have served with would rather kill themselves than intentionally harm anyone on US soil.

[ASH]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

I served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve from June 2003 to June 2007; presently I am a Corporal in the Individual Ready Reserve (which just means my name is on a list to call up if World War III breaks out).

I'm rather disappointed to see this post on iTulip. It belongs in the far fringe of paranoid conspiracy. iTulip is a place for sober analysis. In case it needs to be said, the Marines -- and the US military in general -- are people just like you, with spouses and families and friends. They treasure American liberties just as much as you do, and have the same familiar motivations. They are not extras in a X-files episode; they would not blindly allow themselves to be used to destroy constitutional government in America for the simple reason that they treasure the same things about America that you do.

I have read Grossman's book with pleasure. Actually, I read it before I went to boot camp, and I recognized many of the techniques from social psychology that Grossman writes of. I believe that Grossman establishes that different levels of empathy are appropriate for peaceful existence in civil society versus military combat operations. In short, it is necessary to reduce the empathy of combat infantrymen to their enemy if they are to emotionally survive killing the enemy. To the degree that this is accomplished with specificity (i.e. no empathy for someone who is presently shooting at you) and on a temporary basis, it is probably a good thing if it enables you to kill without emotional damage. Unfortunately, our training techniques are unequal to a task of that specificity, and our brains are seldom capable of such fine distinctions. The training is a problem, because it can encourage a general lack of empathy for non-Americans. Our inability to make fine emotional distinctions is a particular problem in guerilla warfare, because when American soldiers can't distinguish between insurgents and civilians, they come to lack empathy for all the inhabitants of a foreign country. The circumstances are less than ideal.

As for the sad spectacle that Lukester describes, I can only remark that understanding something is different from condoning it, and that the combination of youth, alcohol, macho posturing, and the occupational necessity of reduced empathy are sufficient to explain it. That said, I have known a lot of young Marines, and college is recent enough that I can still remember what drunk undergrad men are like, and make a comparison. I submit to you that the ugly behavior you witnessed is primarily a product of alcohol, youth, and testosterone -- and less to do with the military.


Respectfully,
Andrew Huntington

[Guest]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Andrew, and Sigalarm -

I don't know how long you've been reading around on this website, but if you've been around here six months or more you'll know that as far as US military is concerned, and the ethics of the average Marine or Armed Forces person is concerned, I've been a consistent proponent that a very large part of the mud that one reads slung at them is unwarranted.

I won't go into it, but it's part of very many of my posts to do with the US, with Geo-politics, and with the wars of recent years. My posts are in fact considered by many here to err too far on the side of such sympathies, specifically with regard to my view that the corrosion of democracy in the US is yet as dire as many here have tried to educate me to better understand.

I take this opportunity to extend my respect to the many very decent and scrupulous Americans who serve or have served. And I'll go further, I would observe to you, that this is a very unfashionable topic on these pages, where widespread condemnation of the US involvement in the entire ME theatre has evidenced an inability to distinguish between compromised decisions at the highest levels in Washington, and the overwhelmingly scrupulous carrying out of those decisions by the professional military. To be quite clear - I have for a long time been a proponent of the view that these issue have a great deal more complexity than can allow for a simple blanket condemnation.

Morality and conversely immorality have many faces. For instance morality was a sorry-ass creature in the ten year long embargo of Saddam - while the UN turned a blind eye to the most widespread corruption and bribe mongering among many western nations for lucrative deals with him, at the expense of the entire people in that country carved up by critical no-fly zones like a pizza. You won't find more than a handful of people who will frankly acknowledge that western complacency during this ten year period at the plight of Iraqis was 'immoral'. So defining morality is a quagmire.

The really thorny issues regarding ethics and scruple are at the interface between the very highest ranks of the military, where it must co-habit and devise coherent strategy with the intelligence services and the White House. This is where arguably their collective efforts have so markedly failed to provide clear and wise intelligence to the administration - actually allow me to correct that - perhaps we may observe the administration received all this (admittedly shoddy data) and systematically further blew what could have been a far wiser synthesis of the possible consequent moves. Many other administrations would have been a good deal more cautious in their ventures - and there is no doubt about that.

So it should be said even here, the Armed Forces were predominantly urging caution (under Powell's and the Joint Chief's more prudent influence) and it was the Secretaries of Executive Branch (Sec-Def!) who were making the more rash or over-ambitious decisions. This should be noted clearly.

I will go further in reference to our context in this community: despite the considerable scruple and very hard work which the Armed Forces have expended to stabilize Iraq, and the very large degree of popular press misunderstanding of the depth and integrity of that effort, be aware that there are many people on this website who make little distinction between compromised decisions at the highest levels of government, and the overwhelmingly scrupulous efforts of a large majority of servicemen.

For many people here, all the above are lumped together in an attribute of collective folly and unscrupulousness, for having ventured into these recent conflicts in the Middle East.

I am not one of those for whom such distinctions were ever lost, or obscured. My excoriation of those young servicemen who were sniggering about a homeless girl with an infant on a street in Tijuana, was in fact fully informed by the knowledge that such behavior contradicts the best traditions of the services. So please don't look at me with disgust for my comments here.

Here is one thread where a lot of the implications of a US careening away from Democracy were hashed out, and I spelled out a lot of views regarding the extreme complexity behind US involvement in various international situations, and the domestic US reaction to those complexities. Be advised, that as far as I could tell, these views were not popular around this website.

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...20839#poststop

Having said all of this, I must also say that although sometimes Rajiv's selection of certain articles runs contrary to my own views, he is one of the smartest people on this website, and his views are absolutely not to be cartooned or stereotyped. This guy is all over the map on myriad issues.

We have a very broad spectrum of political views on these pages. I'm actually more conservative than a lot of people here, but I cut right across the spectrum in the other direction on a variety of issues. I refuse to be put in a shoebox in that regard. Rajiv may appear much more on the liberal side, but even though I come from a quite different direction, I've learned he's got a tremendous amount to offer, and a great deal of sophistication beyond these narrow issues, and the cited source here you repudiate so clearly.

[santafe2]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

I'm rather disappointed to see this post on iTulip. It belongs in the far fringe of paranoid conspiracy. iTulip is a place for sober analysis. In case it needs to be said, the Marines -- and the US military in general -- are people just like you, with spouses and families and friends.

Ash - Thanks for taking the time to put this out to the iTulip community. I've also served in the armed forces know exactly what you mean. I was also disappointed that something like this was posted here from a source I know to be highly suspect. That anyone who has agreed to lay their life on the line has to defend themselves from this sort of hearsay is shameful.

[metalman]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Ash - Thanks for taking the time to put this out to the iTulip community. I've also served in the armed forces know exactly what you mean. I was also disappointed that something like this was posted here from a source I know to be highly suspect. That anyone who has agreed to lay their life on the line has to defend themselves from this sort of hearsay is shameful.

i know this is not a post from itulip and i appreciate that fred jumped in and posted a comment... and i hate censorship but... shit. prison ******* planet? what's a piece of shit conspiracy group like that doing posted here... and by rajiv???

[Guest]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Tell you what - let's put the senior editors on the spot here, where they have to take a hard position, (and some flak from some quarter!).

No fence sitting.

Ask the senior editorial staff to issue a "clear, unequivocal position statement" on the reputability of our military who in overwhelming majority have tried to carry out a policy of suppressing sectarian violence and fostering sufficient stability in the theatres in which the US attempted to intervene - namely Hussein's Iraq and the Taliban's Afghanistan.

Were the US military trying to foster sufficient civil peace so elections could occur in these nations and the US forces could go home with some honor? Yes or no?

Make the call Mr. Janszen. I've heard a heck of a lot of "sophisticated" arguments on this site which equate to a lot of fudging. Let's reiterate them here clearly, so these servicemen can see where iTulip stands without middle terms? Would that be constructive, or do we not comment because "iTulip does not do politics"?

Seems some months ago when I was making some of these same arguments a lot of voices were piping up suggesting to me I was an ingenuous fool? Geez, where are all those voices now, when we have two or three servicemen listening in here, waiting for a clarification?

__________

POSTSCRIPT - Ah yes, I see Fred has moved this "sensitive" topic over to the "rant and rave" pages. We have our answer gentlemen.

[santafe2]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

Tell you what - let's put the senior editors on the spot here, where they have to take a hard position, (and some flak from some quarter!).

No fence sitting.

I'll take you up on that. Tell me which armed forces group you'll be joining...no fence sitting. You obviously despise what the volunteer armed forces have become, are you stepping up to change that or just talking a big game?

[Guest]

Re: U.S. Troops Asked If They Would Shoot American Citizens

I'll take you up on that. Tell me which armed forces group you'll be joining...no fence sitting. You obviously despise what the volunteer armed forces have become, are you stepping up to change that or just talking a big game?

Santafe2 -

In all honesty - I have not got the faintest clue what you are talking about. Who am I supposed to be despising here? I'm not going to give you any further hint of my views. Take your best guess. Who do you imagine I'm busy despising from the idled vantagepoint of my armchair and computer keyboard?

Take a deep breath. Shake the cobwebs out of your head. Re-read what I've posted if necessary, and offer me an intelligent, astute observation.

__________

Santafe2 -

I was looking for some old posts of mine to refer you to - from prior to mid 2007, but everything earlier is no longer in the archives. You showed up here a little later. If you had access to those posts you'd readily see that actually of all the iTulip posters I'm one of the few who has been unwaveringly supportive of the decency of ALL our armed services - and there were very damn few of us. So your imaginary beef with me is seriously misguided. What you are failing to note is the large number of "silent others" around here who do NOT share my views. It's almost comical that you are mixing it up with me, while you ignore this large army of people who's views you'd find distinctly alien.

Reality always seems to have a bumbling, stumbling quality about it. Here you are, a late-comer, mixing it up with one of the very few guys on this website who maintained unwavering respect for your service - yes, the "ready reserve" shares no less a respect in my view than the active forces. Meanwhile you should be offering up some of your hard questions to all the "silent ones" - Sapiens, Bart, Metalman, Uncle Jack, Verrocchio, E.J, Fred, then most notably Spartacus, who openly surmises we are all a nest of Fascists, Orforded, World Traveler, TimM, and dozens of others. Look them up on that "The End of America" thread, and then start a thread asking them what the heck they are talking about. Make it a thread where these armchair idealists have to be accountable to the servicemen who might point out to them where they are fantasizing.

But for Pete's sake Santafe2, until you get your bearings on who took what positions on this issue - stay well clear of my back - because you are mixing it up with one of the few people here who has never compromised themself by offering your kind "faint praise". Do you think you grasp the local issue here now a little better?

Why don't you, and ASH, and Sigalarm ask Eric Janszen to climb off the fence and shed a little light on iTulip's breadth of viewpoint on this "delicate" question? Kind of establish whether the editorial line here has an objective viewpoint on the integrity of the rank and file in the services? Your beef is not with me, it's with the fog and equivocation within the general community on this question. What's the matter - don't have the stomach for asking the hard questions here?