None Dare Call It Polo

Up for more American atrocities, are we?

Why, certainly. Let's discuss Bush's War and the Genghis Khan-ization of America. You can't call it polo, because there weren't any horses, but you sure can call it sick.

So sick it makes the pro-torture lobby's shriekiest argument fall flat on its--well, face. You know, the old "they behead people so that makes it ok for us to torture them."

Oh, but we're the beheaders now.

An excerpt from Peter Laufer's new book, here, via AlterNet.

We was going along the Euphrates River," says Joshua Key, a 27-year-old former U.S. soldier from Oklahoma, detailing a recurring nightmare -- a scene he stumbled on shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"It's a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a real sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies.

The heads laying over here and the bodies over here and U.S. troops in between them. I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What's caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?'

We get out and somebody was screaming, 'We fucking lost it here!' I'm thinking, 'Oh, yes, somebody definitely lost it here.'"

Joshua says he was ordered to look around for evidence of a firefight, for something to rationalize the beheaded Iraqis.

"I look around just for a few seconds and I don't see anything." But then he noticed the sight that now triggers his nightmares.

"I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like a soccer ball. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and it was like, I can't be no part of this. This is crazy.

I came here to fight and be prepared for war but this is outrageous. Why did it happen? That's just my question: Why did that happen?"

He's convinced there was no firefight that led to the beheading orgy -- there were no spent shells to indicate a battle.

"A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells, except for what we shot.

I'm thinking, Okay, so they just did that because they wanted to do it. They got trigger happy and they did it.

That's what made me mad in Iraq. You can take human lives at a fast rate and all you have to say is, say, 'Oh, I thought they threw a grenade. I thought I seen this, I thought I seen that.' You could mow down 20 people each time and nobody's going to ask you, 'Are you sure?' They're going to give you a high five and tell you that you was doing a good job."

This is what Bush's war has done to our young men and women, who will now come home and live among us.

Happily ever after?


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