WAR!

Quote
ddt
Uncertainty is far worse, and more dangerous, even than knowing of something bad going on.

Quote

There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it's OK to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not OK to urinate on a dead one.

When the war on terror started, the marines in that video were probably nine or 10 years old. As children they heard adults - and political leaders - talk about their enemies in the most inhuman terms. The internet and the media are filled with self-important men and women referring to enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries such as Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions, achieved through torture, will not stand up in court.

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting US wars. The video doesn't surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad; not just for them, but also for us. We will prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is OK to torture the living.

I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don't have the faintest idea