Soldiers in Chowkay Valley, Afghanistan

Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre—that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters—ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military in Iraq when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April.

“What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire—a “wall of steel,” in Army parlance—even if it put civilians at risk,” report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine.

Former Army Specialist Josh Stieber said that newly arrived soldiers in Baghdad were asked if they would fire back at an attacker if they knew unarmed civilians might get hurt in the process. Those who did not respond affirmatively, or who hesitated, were “knocked around” until they realized what was expected of them, added former Army Specialist Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.

A third former Army specialist, Ethan McCord, said his battalion commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after attacks by improvised explosive devices. “Anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED…you kill every motherfucker in the street,” McCord quotes him as saying.

Corcoles told the reporters he purposely turned his gun away from people. “You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you. It’s just insanity to just start shooting people.”

“From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region,” say McCord and Stieber in an open letter to the Iraqis who were injured in the July attack. Together with Corcoles, they have decided to go public about the true nature of the war.

McCord was shown in the video rushing the wounded children from a van. For this humanitarian act, he was “threatened and mocked by his commanding officer,” say The Nation reporters, and his platoon leader also yelled at him “to quit worrying about those ‘motherfucking kids’.”

McCord told the reporters of “multiple instances in which soldiers abused detainees or beat people up in their houses. In one case, he says, someone was taken from his house, beaten up and then left on the side of the road, bloodied and still handcuffed,” Lazare and Harvey write.

The veterans say they support the release of the video and otber documents by WikiLeaks because it confronts people globally “with the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the video to WikiLeaks, is facing Espionage Act charges and has been transferred to Kuwait for a military trial, Lazare and Harvey note. The government is also probing where WikiLeaks got the 90,000 secret U.S. military documents from Afghanistan it released late last month. These reports, according to The Nation, detailed the role of U.S. assassination teams, widespread civilian casualties resulting from U.S. attacks and staggering Afghan government incompetence and corruption.”

The totalitarian mantle of secrecy by which the Pentagon shrouds its war crimes makes the disclosures by intelligence analyst Manning appear all the more courageous. As long as the Pentagon keeps him behind bars every American who believes in the Biblical injunction that “the truth shall make ye free” is also a prisoner of the same tyranny. And the three former Army specialists who told their story to The Nation have given us a good idea of what it is the Pentagon doesn’t want the American people to know.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant for worthy causes who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a columnist for several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

[Via:BLN]

So far, 5,000 men and women gave their lives while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are nearly 1,000 thousand more soldiers who are coming home with devastating injuries. Amputations, skin grafts and plastic surgeries are the painful battles these wounded warriors face on the home front. Now, science has a way to re-grow body parts, turning what was once science fiction into fact.

They are forever changed by war.

“An IED went off underneath our vehicle,” Scott Blaine, who was wounded while serving in Afghanistan, recalled to Ivanhoe. “Next thing you know, we’re on fire.”

“They found me 20 feet away from the truck engulfed in flames,” Joseph Paulk, also wounded in Afghanistan, said. “My family was informed they had to come to Germany to basically come say goodbye.”

Before Afghanistan, Paulk looked like the boy next door. When he came home, he learned his battle against the mirror was only beginning.

“Forty percent burns to the face, the shoulder down to my hands, and my hip down to my ankles, then amputations to all 10 fingers because of how severe the burns were,” he said.

Soon, amputations could be a thing of the past as doctors grow new body parts.

“We obviously have the potential to create a whole human in nine months,” Steve Badylak, M.D., D.V.M., Ph.D., director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, Penn., declared.
At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers are using powder made from a pig’s bladder to re-grow fingers. In soldiers with more serious injuries, the goal is to at least create fingertips.

“Stimulating the growth of 10 to 11 mm of length allows them to make change at a grocery store, turn the key in the car, hold a fork,” Dr. Badylak said.

Other researchers are working to reconstruct faces damaged by war. Joseph Vacanti, M.D., a pediatric surgeon at Mass General Hospital for Children, is engineering ears in his lab.

“Ideally, it would be indistinguishable from a normal ear,” Dr. Vacanti said.

Already successful in mice, Dr. Vacanti says he plans to implant the first ear on a human within a year.
“We can now envision that some day we can give somebody back their own face,” Dr. Vacanti said.

At Brown university, scientists are working to bring feeling back to injured bodies.

“We’re trying to help nerves that are injured grow back in a directed way,” Diane Hoffman-Kim, Ph.D., Associate Professor Medical Science and Engineering at Brown, told Ivanhoe.

Researchers pour liquid plastic over surrounding cells. The hope is to form a mold that guides severed nerves back together.

“Those live nerves will follow exactly along the tracks where the plastic is that looks just like cells,” Dr. Hoffman-Kim explained.

From growing new feeling to new faces, other doctors focus on eliminating the need for skin grafts. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., takes a piece of skin from a soldier and cooks it in an oven-like device.

“This is basically the same conditions as our body in a box,” said Dr. Atala.

Racks stretch the skin until it covers the size of the wound.

From civilians out of options, to soldiers whose sacrifice is measured in scars, science is growing new possibilities for healing the body and the human spirit.

“You don’t want to be looked at for your loss,” Scott Blaine said. “You want to be just like any other person around.”

The Department of Defense is providing Wake Forest, the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic $85 million over the next five years to perfect organ and tissue-growing techniques.

In this video a group of three insurgents in Iraq are observed from the air planting an IED (Improvised Explosive Device)
After these three stooges are done with their mission they start heading home while still on the FLIR scope of an AC-130 Gun ship and are prodigiously smoked out of existence from an explosive air launched munition.

CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq — A new weapon has recently been unleashed on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, apparently this new threat has been dubbed the “Lob Bomb”
It’s not as if it is new technology, it is just using existing tech together to make a kind of roadside IED into a rocket assisted IED

Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, called the weapon “the greatest threat right now that we face,” and he compared the stealthy group behind it to the American military’s elite Delta Force.

The weapon is of particular concern because it is designed to cause severe damage and cannot be stopped once it has been fired.

An individual was detained on Thursday who Hammond said could provide valuable insights into the group behind the bomb making. “We think we have defined the network,” he said. He would not elaborate, although other American officers said in interviews that the group is Shiite and may have links to Iran.

“We think we might have picked up a guy that could expose the militant perpetrators,” Hammond said.

there are suspicions that this group may be related to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who’s Mahdi Army once held sway in the Sadr City section of Baghdad until U.S. and Iraqi forces gained control after seven weeks of fighting that ended in May.

Arguing against a link to such an al-Sadr initiative is the fact that the group that Hammond described has been operating since at least late 2007, although it has become more active in recent months.

The 107 mm rockets that are used in the improvised bombs, which some call an airborne version of the roadside IED’s that through the course of the war have been the top cause of casualties of U.S. troops are manufactured in Iran, officials said. It should however be cautioned to assume Iran is involved directly .

The weapons are launched from small trucks and are fired in multiples of four to nine rockets at a time. The detonation is sometimes triggered by a signal from a cell phone, other times by a washing machine timer.

Brig. Gen. Will Grimsley, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in a separate AP interview on Thursday that for lack of a better term he refers to the group as “the evil militia.” He said it is small and exhibits a high degree of technical skill in assembling the weapons and executing attacks.

The military calls the weapon an “improvised rocket-assisted mortar,” or IRAM.
Hammond said the perpetrators are so skilled that he has likened their organization to the U.S. military’s secretive and elite Delta Force. He said they have demonstrated an unusual degree of military skill and cunning.

“They don’t leave a forensic trail, and that just means we’re going to have to work a little bit longer” to eliminate them, he said. “Of everything we’ve had to deal with here, this is a tough one. They’re sort of the Delta Force of this enemy we face out there. They are very good” at covering their tracks, picking out targets and preserving secrecy about their membership and movements.

Apparently this is a video that shows optical camouflage, which is essentially invisibility technology being used by the US Military in Iraq, in the last few moments of this video you can see a transparent figure running from the right side of the screen and then climbs up into the tank itself