What Nidal Hasan, Timothy McVeigh, and the Beltway Sniper Have in Common?

[laststeamtrain]

What Nidal Hasan, Timothy McVeigh, and the Beltway Sniper Have in Common: All Were Scarred by Pointless U.S. Wars
By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet
Posted on November 25, 2009, Printed on November 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144093/

The media were so busy linking alleged Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan to international Islamic terrorism the last few weeks that they hardly noted the execution of the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammad, on November 10th. Seven years ago, Muhammad was at the top of conservative commentators' Islamofascists-with-Links-to-Al Qaeda lists, Now, like then, the search for foreign links is proving fruitless, distracting us from abundant evidence of a causal connection between such murders and service in the U.S. military.

Consider the case of John Allen Muhammad, (formerly John Allen Williams). In her recently published memoir, Scared Silent, Mildred Muhammad, the later of his two ex-wives, writes that her husband, a sergeant with the Army's 84th Engineer Company, went to the 1991 Gulf War a "happy," "focused, and "intelligent" man, who returned home "depressed," "totally confused," and "violent," making her fear for her life. On appeal, Muhammad's lawyers stressed that his "severe mental illness" never came up at trial, where he was allowed to represent himself despite his obvious mental incompetence. His attorneys' brief included psychiatric reports diagnosing Schizophrenia and brain scans documenting profound malformations consistent with psychotic disease.

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And then there's the case of Timothy McVeigh. We have no scans of his brain, but we have ample reports of his mental state before and after Desert Storm, and evidence that the war changed him profoundly. In their biography, American Terrorist, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck paint a vivid picture of McVeigh's days in the ground war. The enthusiastic young marksman, at first, happily followed orders and shot an Iraqi soldier manning a machine gun over a mile away. When a bloody mist replaced the soldier's head in his viewfinder, McVeigh was disturbed and discharged the rest of his round into empty desert sand. Later, after Saddam had agreed to a UN and Soviet brokered ceasefire, McVeigh was further shocked and shaken by orders to kill defeated Iraqi soldiers traveling home on the highway from Kuwait to Iraq (come to be known as the "Highway of Death" for the thousands that U.S. Forces corralled and massacred on the night of Feb 26, 1991). He watched the road in horror as dogs chewed on human limbs, and as human bodies without arms or legs tried to crawl away.

<snip>

The fire power expended on Iraq in the six-war was greater than that used in all wars in history combined, exceeded only by today's continuing sequel. The savage murder of civilians, though not on the radar of most producers and consumers of American media, smolders in the minds of many troops and veterans of all backgrounds serving in all three recent wars in the region. Troops on U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the local citizens, suffer the fumes from open burn pits the depth of city blocks and the length of small towns; blast injuries from IEDs continue to damage the interiors of bodies and brains, often with no external breakage or bleeding, causing, eminent neurologists say, a new kind of brain injury not seen before in the chronicles of war. Chemical fumes, powders, and liquids from military and industrial facilities bombed in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to contaminate earth, water, and air. Were today's wars to end tomorrow, the consequences of our invasions would not. For decades and perhaps centuries, Iraqis and Afghans will suffer disease and deprivation, and invading and occupying troops will carry the war back home, as soldiers always do, but with brains, bodies, and minds shattered as never before.

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[murielm99]

1. So many of these mass murderers are trying to stake their

claim to fame, to have their names remembered in history.

That may work, to an extent. But we have such short attention spans these days that quite a few of them are forgotten soon after atrocities are committed.

If I ever get my fifteen minutes, I want it to be for something silly, or something good.

[murielm99]

2. I am not trying to be dismissive of what war does to some

people.

My son's close friend committed suicide after two tours in Iraq.

[Demeter]

3. Americans Have a Gift for Ignoring the Obvious

as an aid in the search of someone else to blame.