Truth and Other Casualties

[RBHam]

Retracted News Stories, Hidden Body Bags, and a Deaf Ear for Experienced Soldiers: No Wonder Morale is Down in Iraq

by Monika Jensen-Stevenson

The week began with horrific reports that two American soldiers had been murdered in Mosul, Northern Iraq, their throats slit and their bodies mutilated. Across North America, the reaction was outrage. "IRAQI INGRATES CURSE US, Show no sympathy for butchered GIs," said the New York Post. Days later, U.S. military officials retracted the story. The two in fact died of gunshot wounds during a robbery. They were not mutilated.

For many U.S. vets, the entire incident deepened their malaise. It roused not only memories of atrocities against the bodies of U.S. soldiers in Somalia (those stories had been true), it also increased current doubts, when it comes to Iraq, about what and who to believe.

Ron Ray, U.S. Marine Corps colonel (ret.), and a former assistant secretary of defense, says he sees the latest retraction as part of a pattern of misinformation that started long before the hyped-up rescue of Jessica Lynch and the revelation that soldiers had never sent 11 identical upbeat letters home. A combat veteran of Vietnam, now a prominent constitutional lawyer, Mr. Ray warned last year, before the U.S.-led war began, of the need for "hard evidence that war in Iraq is required to maintain the security of the United States." As a young lieutenant, he had believed that North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. "That's why Congress voted to go to war in 1965," he says now. "I survived that war and was studying law when the senior senator from Kentucky, Thruston Morton, told me there had been no attack -- 58,000 dead for a lie."

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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1127-06.htm

[maddezmom]

1. good read

wish he had read his own father's book.

[DUreader]

2. kick