Excerpts from http://collateralmurder.com

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers.

"we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away... Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon... Picking up the wounded? Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!"

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

Excerpt from http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/04/08/the-good-psychopathic-soldier

the behavior displayed by the soldiers is not an aberration, but rather the fruit of careful and deliberate training by the military to dehumanize them (and the enemy).

Almost nobody walks into a war a murderer. They're just some Joe Blow off the street who thinks he's a decent guy. However, once you enter the military, it is the job of the military system to turn the enlisted man into someone capable and willing to kill others. They are taught to follow orders, blindly if necessary.

Not only that, in order to make the killing easier, they are taught that their enemy (and anyone like their enemy - including Iraqi civilians) are little better than pond scum and vermin. The goal is to make them just itching to kill these people.

There is no free debate or free press in the military. Communication is pretty hermetic. Soldiers pretty much see and hear the messages that their superiors want them to see and hear. It's basically all propaganda, all the time - whatever the brass wants. So if the brass wants to dehumanize any group of human beings in order to make them easier to kill, without soliders questioning the morality of their orders, it is very easy for the brass to do so.

Ex-soldiers walking out of a military situation into civilian life often experience a second culture shock - from the culture in which murder was encouraged and praised, back into their old culture where they are reminded that everything they were ordered to do was morally and socially unacceptable. It is not an easy adjustment to make.

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