Obama Administration waives ban on arming Syrian terrorist groups

[kentonio]

I really don't understand kentonio's intolerance for the Brotherhood's faith-based cuisine. Where's your heart, kentonio? Heartless, heartless attitude.

A) You're not funny. Really, you're terrible at comedy and should leave it to other people.

B) The incident you're referring to was a single rebel leader who had joined the rebellion early, watched multiple family members get slaughtered and who is very clearly suffering from some terrible mental trauma as a result of the fighting. The 'heart eating' incident was actually a badly thought out act of savage machismo, and didn't involve eating a heart, just pretending to bite into it to fire his men up into savagery. I assume you were also quick to share lots of jokes when America soldiers went temporarily insane and did things like shooting up villages in Iraq or taking trophies from dead Afghans?

Oh and an interesting fact about the heart incident, the Syrian soldier whose heart was cut out had just been found with a phone in his pocket on which he'd recorded him and his buddies raping a couple of local women and then murdering them afterwards.

[Zevico]

Such compassion for savagery! The Brotherhood could really use a man with a heart like yours. And such a big heart it is too!

[Zevico]

Before biting into the organs of his foe, the cannibalistic jihadi declares, “I swear to Allah, soldiers of Bashar, you dogs—we will eat your heart and livers! Allahu Akbar!”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/syrias-graphic-beheading-videos/

See also:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/14/world/meast/syria-eaten-heart

[kentonio]

In a handy coincidence, just spotted an article on mental health issues on the American side. Perhaps you might want to think a little about how much worse the consequences of this might be for soldiers who don't have a home to return to, whose families are being killed around them and who are fighting on a side that doesn't have the might of the worlds only superpower behind them.

When Your Job In War Is To Save Soldiers' Lives, You Never Really Come Home

Guys still fly across the country to show up at Travis Landchild's door in Vancouver, Wash., and he waves them right on into his garage for marathon counseling sessions. These are the soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team. They've never quite come home from that 2007 combat tour in Iraq, and Landchild, who deployed with them as a mental health specialist, is still providing therapy.

"It's tough here now, I still hear from guys," said Landchild, 32, who now runs a food cart across the river in Portland, Ore. "They're my guys, they're my brothers. They'll come once a year, and that's their counseling. I've done so much trauma counseling, I can see it, I can understand, no matter how horrendous it is."

But the burden on military health care providers like Landchild is crushing.

"I still have nightmares that are not mine," he said. "Plenty of nightmares where I'm going in, busting down the door, killing kids. That's not what happened to me; that's something that was told to me."

Landchild said PTSD is just a medical way of trying to describe a condition that isn't medical -- it's spiritual.

"War changes you for the rest of your life," he said. "For warriors, the rest of your life is a path of healing. One of the most important aspects of that path of healing is a new role in society. As combat veterans, we don't have a position in our society that we fall into, and therefore we can't heal."

Landchild, an Eagle scout, enlisted in the Army after 9/11. "I wanted to do something I could do," he said. "It was not, 'I'm gonna go over there and kill 'em.' It was, 'I'm gonna help.''' Trained as a mental health specialist, he later deployed to Iraq with a psychiatrist, Capt. Peter Linnerooth, and with Brock McNabb, a soldier whose personality made him a natural mental health worker.

Arriving at Baghdad's sprawling Victory Base Complex in the summer of 2006, Landchild said the three found themselves responsible for the some 20,000 soldiers based there -- the battalions of the 1st Infantry Division, and those attached to them. "We get there," Landchild said. "And they're like, ‘You're it.'

"And that's the whole freakin’ psychological world in the military," Landchild said. "The military has to show that they're trying to take care of their soldiers, but they do the bare minimum necessary, just to make it look like they're taking care of people."

Given the comical scarcity of resources, and the team taking on responsibility for an entire division, Linnerooth effectively upgraded the trio, dubbing them "the division of mental health."

Landchild had trained at the in-patient psych ward at Madigan Army Medical Center outside Tacoma, Wash. "We were getting a lot of psychotic breaks, guys two months out from the desert," Landchild said. "So they come in, they've been heavily medicated for transport. So we give 'em some more, so they can sleep, let the meds wear off. They have another psychotic episode. So we fill them with drugs again, let them taper off, because 90 percent of the time they're going through withdrawal.

"If someone is going really freaking crazy, you'll take turns to tie them. It's, 'I'll take the coffee, you take that guy down.'"

In Iraq, there was pressure to treat soldiers quickly and get them back to the war.

"We just rock-and-rolled that deployment," Landchild said. "We started running Iraq."

Linnerooth had the team start conducting Behavioral Health Needs Assessment surveys
to arm themselves with numbers against higher-ranking obstruction. Landchild became the stats guy. It helped when you could go to commanders and say, 22 percent of your guys are suicidal. When you knew there were roughly 170 suicidal talk-downs, 27 psychotic breaks. When you'd given some 370 mental health debriefs -- three-day sessions after a service member was killed or wounded in action.

When in a 15-month deployment, a team of three would see a total of roughly 8,700 service members.

"How did we do it?" Landchild said. "You just do it cause you do."

Each team member had their own style, but they all broke the "etiquette of psychology," Landchild said.

"We broke all kinds of rules -– it's war," he said. "Joking about suicide all the time, it was beyond gallows humor. That wasn't healthy, but it was what kept us stable. The whole situation wasn't healthy. And it was less about mental health, and more about killing people efficiently. It was, 'How do I get this guy mentally stable in one hour or less.'"

They all built off a "masculinity base," Landchild said. "You can freakin’ do this, you can handle anything, you are hard-core, card-carrying, red-blooded infantry, hoo-ah!" he grunted.

One time, he said, he told a surviving soldier who came to see him, "'You're gonna get out there and kill some mother****ers for him.' Then you go to their commander, and you tell them, give em clearance to use .50 [caliber ammunition]. Just do it. They need to."

They could also make recommendations to change soldiers' job positions, which command generally respected, Landchild explained, because, "basically we said, 'You need to do this. Otherwise, if he kills himself, it's on you.'"

McNabb, the natural, did "epic pep talks," Landchild said. "He genuinely cared, and he worked with that. He'd talk to someone like he would a good friend and he'd help them get through it."

Linnerooth would encourage something therapeutic. "He'd have 'em write a letter to their fallen comrade's kid," Landchild described. "Something to do about it, the helplessness of that situation."

Landchild's specialty? "It was a lot of providing hope. That's a big chunk of dealing with nothing but helplessness, hopelessness, trauma. You give hope. You let them know there were some resources available," he said. "It was a lot of reminding them of their capabilities, having them talk about things they've accomplished, that they've done well, things they like in life. I'd tell em, 'Well, that doesn't sound like you're depressed! Just there's a bunch of **** you like in life.'"

In the midst a 15-month period that was one of the most violent spans in the Iraq War, they only evacuated some 27 people on mental health grounds, Landchild said.

One of the last was Linnerooth.

"We called ourselves the broken tripod because there was always a leg broken, it rotated between us," Landchild said. "There was plenty of times, we ran over, thinking Brock might be blowing his brains out. Plenty of times they'd check on me, or Brock and me would check on Pete.

"We would just hit a wall of 'We're so ready to be done.' And we kept breaking past more and more walls of 'I can't take any more.' Just this wall of 'I can't take it any more,' right in front of me, and we'd break through it."

Linnerooth got to a wall he couldn't break through.

"We had to get him out of there to keep him alive," Landchild said. "To me, I think we just prolonged his death. It is the demons of war that finally got to Peter later on."

Fifteen months. When they got back, they got out. Linnerooth retired. Brock's time was up.

While McNabb and Linnerooth continued work in mental health in the Veterans Affairs system for a time, Landchild said he couldn't, "because I don't know any other way than what we did in war, jumping into somebody else's cesspool with them while you're trying not to drown, too."

So now he has a food truck in Portland, and is trying to raise enough money for his family –- his wife, Angela, son, Asher, and six-week-old daughter, Valkyrie -– "so that we can do what we want to do."

"I feel like I'm just starting at the place all my friends (my pre-army friends) were at 10 years ago," Angela, who just turned 30, wrote in an email.

Angel, as most know her, had a scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study Latin and Greek. But she dropped out, and later enlisted, on an impulse. Her test scores screamed military intelligence. She wanted to be a medic.

In February 2004, the former specialist deployed to Iraq, the first time. By September, she worked her first mass casualty trauma. "We spent 37 hours stopping bleeds, putting in chest tubes, medevacking the worst, and then digging shrapnel out of the rest of the boys and stitching them back up," she said. "They started calling me 'Doc' after that. Not many female medics earn that, so, I’m pretty proud."

She also earned her Combat Medic badge, for treating patients while being shot at. Later, she increasingly served as a liaison between the medics and brass. Of one boss, she said: "He'd pull me aside after talking to them and say, 'Wild child, what the **** did he just say? Is that the head bone or the leg bone?'”

She got divorced. She became a victim of military sexual assault. The ensuing investigation got her caught up in a "stop loss" order in 2004, forcing her, like some other service members, to stay beyond her contracted term. She transferred units, and had deployed again to Baghdad when she met Landchild, in Kuwait.

Another medic was friends with the mental health guys and dragged her along, "despite many protests on my part," she said.

"They were all having a mustache-growing competition (cuz what else are you going to do in the sandbox?)," she wrote of their three-man crew. "So when I met Travis, he was this scrawny, geeky, kid with a horrible military haircut and a mustache that should have belonged to a 1970s philosopher/pedophile."

"And he HATED me," she said. "Probably because I was a sullen, bitter chick with a shaved head, who had just moved to brigade because of drama, and he figured I’d probably be his patient one day."

She finished her time in April 2008. He got out in August. He said they moved to Vancouver, a few miles south of where Travis grew up, because he loves the culture of the Northwest.

Five months ago, Linnerooth, after decades of saving lives, took his own.

The toll it takes, the depths of deception to just keep soldiers alive, still haunt long after, Landchild said. The demons don't leave his shoulder.

"The evil we were committing," he said. "Our mission was returning them to duty. The most horrible crux of the entire situation? We were the only three people out there that could be human beings, that could help them keep their soul while they still possibly had a chance at it. But we just pushed them to return to the mission."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3830808.html

[kentonio]

Before biting into the organs of his foe, the cannibalistic jihadi declares, “I swear to Allah, soldiers of Bashar, you dogs—we will eat your heart and livers! Allahu Akbar!”

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/14/wo...ia-eaten-heart

Oh yeah 'the cannibilistic jihadi', no kind of pre-bias involved in that 'reporting'. ****ing pathetic.

EDIT: You posted that as a quote, but the CNN article doesn't use that language, please link to what exactly you were quoting from?

[Zevico]

Fixed, kentonio, to the correct link from Raymond Ibrahim.

[DinoDoc]

Oh yeah 'the cannibilistic jihadi', no kind of pre-bias involved in that 'reporting'. ****ing pathetic.

In what way is the description of cannibalistic jihadi inaccurate? The heart was eaten, yes?

[Zevico]

The number of cannibalistic American soldiers currently stands at zero. The number of cannibalistic American soldiers who justify their cannibalisms with calls to God stand at zero. The number of American soldiers who have beheaded their enemies in a fit of fervour and Christian rage stands at zero. The number of American soldiers who have blown themselves up in marketplaces and shopping malls stands at zero. So I don't accept that the Muslim Brotherhood's soldiers and those of the United States stand as moral equals in the battlefield. But thank you for this illuminating conversation.
And if only I had a heart filled with compassion for cannibals, kentonio! But I'm afraid I have to draw my moral boundaries somewhere.

[kentonio]

Fixed, kentonio, to the correct link from Raymond Ibrahim.

Oh gosh, there's a surprise.

In what way is the description of cannibalistic jihadi inaccurate? The heart was eaten, yes?

No, he bit into it as an act of machismo, he didn't 'eat' it. The use of 'jihadi' is also pushing it, unless you use jihad in its real meaning as 'struggle' (in which case American soldiers are also engaging in jihad when they fight for the US). Oh course it wasn't used here for any real reason other than to make the guy seem even more alien and 'other' to the reader. 'Cannibalistic Jihadi'! Quick, everyone hide the women and children from those monsterous Muslims!

[kentonio]

DP

[Dinner]

Graham and McCain have always been hawkish, while the Paulists have always been dovish. Your problem is that you're so blinded by partisan retardation that you think the GOP is monolithic. Both parties are big tent coalitions with internal divisions.

There you go running off at the mouth again about things you obviously know little about. No, the Republican Party most certainly is not a big tent party. Not even remotely. They have literally purged all of the moderates by labeling them "RINOs" and then primarying them until there aren't any left. They are absolutely obsessed with ideological purity and eliminating anyone who shows the slightest hint of not towing the party line and that just isn't conducive to being a "big tent party" where diverse viewpoints are tolerated much less encouraged.

To compare the Democrats seem incapable of ever coming up with unified policies for the whole party because on every issue they have not less than a dozen different, often contradictory, positions. That's what a real big tent party looks like not one where 99% of the party all agree on virtually every issue.

[Zevico]

Praise Allah! He was merely engaged in a cannibalistic struggle! Thank goodness, now I don't have to judge him anymore.

[kentonio]

The number of cannibalistic American soldiers currently stands at zero.

If you believe that, you're an idiot.

One soldier told how a specialist in my unit kept a human finger in his wall locker during his entire tour of duty. The laughing ensued as I heard the story of a soldier in another company eating the charred flesh of an Iraqi civilian, the victim of an IED attack aimed at American forces. I thought about how callous these men had become, and how horrified I was at the idea of disrespecting human life in such a manner.

http://www.historytoday.com/richard-...ing-your-enemy

Cannibalism is a hard one to find evidence of, because no army in their right mind would allow that kind of story to leak out. If you just want evidence of extreme barbarism however, there are countless examples in pretty much every army in the world who have been engaged in a long running intense combat war.

Trying to blame this on his religion reminds me exactly why I have so much disgust and contempt for you. You are scum quite frankly.

[The Mad Monk]

Oh gosh, there's a surprise.



No, he bit into it as an act of machismo, he didn't 'eat' it. The use of 'jihadi' is also pushing it, unless you use jihad in its real meaning as 'struggle' (in which case American soldiers are also engaging in jihad when they fight for the US). Oh course it wasn't used here for any real reason other than to make the guy seem even more alien and 'other' to the reader. 'Cannibalistic Jihadi'! Quick, everyone hide the women and children from those monsterous Muslims!

Because, you know, just biting into somebody's heart is perfectly acceptable. Like beating and executing seven prisoners of war.

[Zevico]

So there's no evidence except for third hand scuttlebutt. Nice!