Dana Visalli: America's Global War Against Planet Earth

Atrocities are US: In 2010, a group of five American soldiers murdered a number of Afghan civilians for sport, and collected fingers of their victims as trophies. For them, killing had become normal and banal, since it was what they were trained to do. In March of 2011, two US Army Blackhawk helicopters came upon 10 Afghan children, ages 7 to 13, gathering brush to warm their huts, and attacked them with heavy machine gun fire. When the parents of the children arrived at the scene, they could only collect the body parts of their offspring. For the pilots of the helicopters, killing was part of their job, a normal part of military life. On March 12, 2006, four US soldiers entered the home of a 14-year old girl in the Iraqi city of Mahmudiya, took her mother, father and sister into a bedroom and shot them, and then gang-raped the girl. Afterward, they shot her in the head and attempted to burn her body. Then, they reported the deaths as being the result of an insurgent attack. On March 25, 2003, Marine Sgt. Eric Schrumpf was participating in the US invasion of Iraq, when he spotted an Iraqi soldier in his field of view behind a female Iraqi citizen. Since he couldn't get a clear shot with the woman blocking his line of sight, he shot her to get her out of the line of fire, explaining that "the chick was in the way". Later, he elaborated: "We had a great day - we killed a lot of people." Over the long term, most soldiers committing such murders become victims of their own lack of judgment, unable to live with the profoundly antisocial acts they have committed. One Sergeant can now scarcely function in civilian society, and has attacked people in movie theaters, because he mistakes their cans of Coke for military weapons.