The US Military is Being Haunted by Pictures Again

Here is a bit from Reuters news agency report about German Der Spiegel article publishing a story with pictures of US soldiers in Afghanistan posing as "trophy hunters" with dead civilians:

Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published photos on Monday of American soldiers posed over the bloodied corpse of an Afghan civilian whose slaying is being prosecuted by the U.S. military as premeditated murder.

...

Morlock and Holmes are among five Stryker Brigade soldiers facing court-martial at Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma, Washington, on charges of premeditated murder stemming from the deaths of three Afghan villagers whose killings were allegedly staged to look like legitimate combat casualties.

It is interesting that one of the killers comes from Wasila, Alaska, the same town as the presidential wannabe and gun-loving Sarah Palin:

One photo shows a soldier identified as Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, of Wasilla, Alaska, broadly smiling in sunglasses as he crouches beside the bloodied, prone body of a man whose head he is holding up for the camera by the hair.

The pictures can be seen at Der Spiegel's site.

The sad fact is that war brutalizes people. I've always been struck by the fact that going back to America's civil war when records were first kept, something like one-third of the soldiers never fired their weapon at "the enemy" because it was just so repugnant. This despite the fact that they were being fired upon. The training in military "boot camp" is to break you of your inhibitions by desensitizing you and building up your "loyalty" to your buddies so that in a combat situation you will do anything to defend your "buddies" against the dehumanized "enemy".