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Body armor choice of 'Armor Door'

A disturbing discovery has North Texas police officers concerned. The so-called "scarecrow bandits" arrested yesterday worebody armor. A Garland police officer whose life was saved by a bullet-proofvest says it's scary when criminals wear the same gear designed toprotect the good guys. Police sources confirmed authorities found body armor when theyarrested the suspects known as the "scarecrow bandits." "The suspect saw us coming and closed the Armor Door and startedshooting at us through the closed door," said Garland policeofficer, Dan Colasanto. If anyone knows the value of body armor, it's Colasanto. He wore abullet proof vest yesterday as he did 10 years ago, when he wasshot in the chest by a drug suspect. What worries Colasanto is that the bad guys become much harder totake down when they're in body armour. That's what happened in a 1997 Los Angeles bank heist. The robbers were heavily armed and heavily protected by bodyarmour.

posted by wishnessyly on Jun 6, 2008 11:00 AM | 0 comments
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USA soldiers have long messages to the enemy on thebombs

American soldiers have long scrawled messages to the enemy on thebombs they were about to deliver. In The Making of the Atomic Bomb , Richard Rhodes reminds us, for instance, that "Little Boy," thebomb that would inaugurate a new age over Hiroshima, "was inscribedwith autographs and messages, some of them obscene. 'Greetings tothe Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis ,' one challenged." (The Indianapolis , a cruiser which had transported parts of Little Boy to the islandof Tinian for assembly, had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarineonly a week earlier and most of its crew had died at sea undergruesome circumstances.) Recently, my eye was caught by a report on just such "autographsand messages" from our most recent war. A Washington Post piece discussing the air war over Baghdad and the Hellfiremissiles the U.S. military has been regularly firing into the vastShiite slum, Sadr City, these last months included this passage: "At a sprawling air base on the outskirts of Baghdad, Edens,Katzenberger and their colleagues live in small trailers surroundedby blast walls, play volleyball on sand courts and eat at Armored Security Door  .Many of the pilots are in their 20s. The pilotssometimes scrawl messages on the five-foot-long missiles strappedto their 'birds.' During a recent visit to the base, a reporter sawa missile addressed to 'Haji,' an honorific for people who havemade the pilgrimage to Mecca. Many U.S. soldiers use it to referdismissively to Iraqis and Arabs in general. Someone wrote 'rockthis thang' on another." "To refer dismissively&": This is the Post's polite way of describing the bedrock racism – the demeaningof the enemy (and hardening of the self) – that is essentiallybound to go with any counterinsurgency-cum-neocolonial war likethose in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few know this better than PulitzerPrize-winning former war reporter Chris Hedges who, along withLaila al-Arian, has produced a remarkable new book, Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (officially published on this very day). Based on hundreds ofhours of interviews with veterans of the Iraq war and occupation,it lays out graphically indeed and in their own words the Americansystem of patrols, convoys, home raids, detentions, and militarycheckpoints that became a living nightmare for civilians in Iraq.Think of their book as a two-person version of the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier Investigation , this time for a war in which Americans have seemed especiallyuneager to know much about what their troops, many thousands ofmiles from home, are really doing to the "hajis." Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza orVietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations." Beingsurrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as goingto a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stresspush troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. Thehostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive,shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadsidebomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that iseasily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen tosupport the insurgents. Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops,merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact withsoldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraqnameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate.They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychologicalleap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing –the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm –to murder – the deadly assault against someone who cannot harmyou. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very littlekilling. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearingapart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports havejust informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007.This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, asthey did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraughtveterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cottonwool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality ofwhat they did to innocents in Iraq American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity.The killing project is not described in these terms to a distantpublic. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory,honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, inlofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who killlarge numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaignto rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of thisrhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself willvanish. The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. Thereality and the ideal tragically clash when soldiers and Marinesreturn home. These combat veterans are often alienated from theworld around them, a world that still believes in the myth of warand the virtues of the nation. They confront the grave, existentialcrisis of all who go through combat and understand that we have nomonopoly on virtue, that in war we become as barbaric and savage asthose we oppose. This is a profound crisis of faith. It shatters the myths, nationaland religious, that these young men and women were fed before theyleft for Iraq. In short, they uncover the lie they have been told.Their relationship with the nation will never be the same. Theseveterans give us a true narrative of the war – one thatexposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed inIraq. They expose the lie. War as Betrayal "This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-oldkid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun,"remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quickand he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber,and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds inless than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, afather, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter wasaged three. "And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and theybriefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it tohim. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff andsays, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn'thappen.'" Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans suffer not onlydelayed reactions to stress but this crisis of faith. The God theyknew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or thesynagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving Godand country, did not prepare them for the awful betrayal of thiscivic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity,for the stories of heroism used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal: betrayal of the young by the old, ofidealists by cynics, and of troops by politicians. This bitterknowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of America's IraqWar veterans. It has unleashed a new wave of disillusioned veteransnot seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us tobegin, again, to see war's death mask and understand our complicityin evil. "And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of, 'What the f--- are wedoing, that I felt that way in Iraq,'" said Sgt. Ben Flanders, whoestimated that he ran hundreds of military convoys in Iraq. "It'sthe sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, Ithink war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormousreduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound upmattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybodyelse be damned, whether you are an Iraqi – I'm sorry, I'msorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, andI'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, armyvehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and allthis stuff." The Hobbesian world of Iraq described by Flanders is one where theethic is kill or be killed. All nuance and distinction vanished forhim. He fell, like most of the occupation troops, into a binaryworld of us and them, the good and the bad, those worthy of lifeand those unworthy of life. The vast majority of Iraqi civilians,caught in the middle of the clash among militias, death squads,criminal gangs, foreign fighters, kidnapping rings, terrorists, andheavily armed occupation troops, were just one more impedimentthat, if they happened to get in the way, had to be eradicated.These Iraqis were no longer human. They were abstractions in humanform. "The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait,and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffel bag in eachhand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You'vegot a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired.You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then you'rescared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you'renot in the States anymore... So fear sets in, too. And they sit youinto this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how,you know, you can't trust any of these f---ing hajis, because allthese f – -king hajis are going to kill you. And 'haji' isalways used as a term of disrespect and usually with the F-word infront of it." The press coverage of the war in Iraq rarely exposes the twistedpathology of this war. We see the war from the perspective of thetroops or from the equally skewed perspective of the foreignreporters, holed up in hotels, hemmed in by drivers and translatorsand official security and military escorts. There are moments whenwar's face appears to these voyeurs and professional killers,perhaps from the back seat of a car where a small child, her brainsoozing out of her head, lies dying, but mostly it remains hidden.And all our knowledge of the war in Iraq has to be viewed aslacking the sweep and depth that will come one day, perhaps yearsfrom now, when a small Iraqi boy reaches adulthood and unfolds forus the sad and tragic story of the invasion and bloody occupationof his nation. As the war sours, as it no longer fits into the mythical narrativeof us as liberators and victors, it fades from view. The cable newsshows that packaged and sold us the war have stopped covering it,trading the awful carnage of bomb blasts in Baghdad for thesoap-opera sagas of Roger Clemens, Miley Cyrus, and Britney Spearsin her eternal meltdown. Average monthly coverage of the war inIraq on the ABC, NBC, and CBS newscasts combined has been cut inhalf, falling from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in2005. And newspapers, including papers like the Boston Globe , have shut down their Baghdad bureaus. Deprived of a clear, heroicnarrative, restricted and hemmed in by security concerns, they havewalked away. Most reporters know that the invasion and the occupation have beena catastrophe. They know the Iraqis do not want us. They know aboutthe cooked intelligence, spoon-fed to a compliant press by theOffice of Special Plans and Lewis Libby's White House Iraq Group.They know about Curveball, the forged documents out of Niger, theouted CIA operatives, and the bogus British intelligence dossiersthat were taken from old magazine articles. They know the weaponsof mass destruction were destroyed long before we arrived. Theyknow that our military as well as our National Guard and reserveunits are being degraded and decimated. They know this war is notabout bringing democracy to Iraq, that all the clich

posted by wishnessyly on Jun 6, 2008 10:59 AM | 0 comments
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