Someone better go stock up the Confederate Yankee’s refrigerator with a few extra cases of Jolt and Mountain Dew, because the honor and integrity of all of our fighting men is once again on the line:
he Marine Corps released a statement today that it is investigating a video that began circulating online yesterday of a uniformed Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff.
Puppy The video is here, but beware, it’s unsettling. Note: Citing a terms-of-use violation, YouTube removed its most-watched version of the video, even after it had been posted for a day and had received worldwide attention and become a legitimate news story.
In the video, a second Marine identifies the first by name;
“That was mean, Motari,” he says, unconvincingly.
Online denizens quickly located the Bebo.com profile of a Marine named David Motari. The Marine Corps press office confirmed that Motari is, or at one time was, in the corps.
I thought after the Beauchamp incident, we all knew for sure that American soldiers never would do anything like this, as all our soldiers are, to a man, perfect angels. This obviously fake video is clearly an attempt to sap our will to fight, so I hope the wingnuttosphere debunks this soon before I have to wear a burkha to work.
In all seriousness, yes, the video is disgusting, and no, it does not surprise me one bit. People do cruel and stupid things in the military, and only the idiots in the right-wing blogosphere want to pretend otherwise. Is this video real? Looks like it, but who knows (and that isn’t because I want it to be real to advance my left-wing narrative). Is it realistic and believable? Sure. And if this jackass did in fact throw the dog off the cliff, it doesn’t mean a damned thing about our troops in general. It just means that David Motari is an asshole and is about to be in a bunch of trouble.
*** Update ***
We will defer all judgements regarding the accuracy of this video to Snopes.
Svensker
Has anyone actually seen Motari and Beauchamp together? Hmmmm.
jnfr
I’m pretty sure Code Pink faked that video.
Cain
I saved a dog after it was hit by a car last week. Will the two cancel out?
cain
Bernie
Spot on analysis John. It continues to amaze me that the wingnuts live in this G.I Joe fantasy world were all soldiers are a mixture of John Wayne/John Rambo/Dudley Doright and are incapable of any bad behavior. If they would just get off their asses and read any number of memiors/diaries from actual soldiers in combat zones (Diary of a Napolonic Foot Soldier, With the Old Breed to name a few) they would no that mixing fear, bordom, stress, and sleep deprivation can lead to some individuals to do some bad things.
The Grand Panjandrum
Great post. And out of the hundreds of guys I served with I knew a couple of assholes myself. The rest of them were just regular guys. Not heroes. Not John Wayne. That’s what makes their service, in my opinion, so special.
Dennis - SGMM
No one could have anticipated that redeploying troops until they were clinically insane would result in their bad behavior.
Tim H.
As long as they don’t start throwing puppies off their roofs to prove the video was faked.
Jake
Hey, where’s the flashing ambulance light?
And I’m sure he’s the only person with that last name who has evar served in the Marines and the 101st Flighty Kneepadists won’t leave flecks of bright orange spittle all over the counters of people who are minding their own dang business.*
Oh wait. They’ll just say that this poor deluded man was corrupted by the writings of Scott Liar Liar Pants on Fire Beauchamp.
Never mind. But I still want the flashing ambulance light.
*This is not to imply that guys who do toss puppies off cliffs deserve to have the Malkintents crouching in his bushes. No one deserves that.
Dug Jay
I’m not sure why you singled Owens out on this. Here’s part of what he said:
Nylund
On Fox News last week a libertarian claimed that dogs were property, and therefore the owner had the right to smash their heads into walls if he felt so inclined.
Accordingly, if you’ve been drinking the kool-aid, you could claim that this marine was merely excersizing his free rights over his property (assuming the dog was his), and thus, personally demonstrating the very freedom our soldiers valiantly fight for.
If one cannot throw their puppies of a cliff, then surely the terrorists have one.
capelza
I peaked over there…his response was, yeah that was (maybe) bad, but there are so many more act of terror and inhumaity and anyone interested in something so trivial is a PINKO!
Zifnab25
You missed the new Wingnut narative, then. Yankee doesn’t give a crap about the video’s legitness. What bothers him is the fact that the soldier was “outed” and has no received numerous angry and hateful messages.
Basically, “what the soldier did was wrong but liberal war-haters are worse”. Then he goes on for a few paragraphs rehashing the most recent offenses by hateful liberals against the brave islamo-fighting troops whom he would gladly join if he didn’t, you know, have a day job or kids or a really really popular blog to maintain.
capelza
Hit submit too soon.
Of course throwing a puppy over a cliff is believable to him (though he’s hedging his bet with the stuffed toy puppy), but running one over in a Bradley is IMPOSSIBLE and a much BIGGER DEAL..IMPORTANT TO DEBUNK!!!!!!!
SpotWeld
Doesn’t it make more sense to leave this sorta thing up to the folks over at snopes.com? (Who seem to know more about it anyway.)
afferent input
I’m in the middle of a long-standing back-and-forth with a couple wingnuts over what purpose the occupation of Iraq serves. They keep suggesting that Islamic culture is “diseased” and it’s our job to rub the diseased parts out.
I conceded to them that parts of the islamic world, especially those tied up in fundamentalism, are incompatible with modern ideals of justice, civility, and liberty. But that our occupation force of teens and twenty-somethings, increasingly made up of former criminals, drug addicts, and high school dropouts, is counterproductive in shifting Mideastern culture from it’s worst cultural inclinations.
In retort, they accuse me of hating America and the troops. They swallow this troops = angels thing, hook, line, and sinker. And besides, it’s all Beauchamp lies from troop-hating hippies.
I think I may be wasting my time arguing with knuckleheads with a selective view of reality.
L Boom
After extensive dumpster-diving and counter-top reconnaissance, Malkin and Ed will discover that Motari is a liberal, and part of a fifth column of secular humanist Marines who secretly hate America. All those copies of the National Review they’ll find in his house are just decoys to make people throw people off the scent.
libarbarian
I don’t think they well go “its a fake” on this one. I predict another angle:
[Wingnut Mode Activated]
As John said, one act of cruelty by one soldier doesn’t really indict the whole military, but does anyone really doubt that whomever posted the video was some radical leftwinger who thought that it did?
Yeah, we smart conservatives all know that one isolated act of cruelty doesn’t prove all military people suck, but thats exactly the kind of conclusion that would appeal to a leftwinger. Isn’t that just the kind of subtle trick that a leftwinger would try to pull – posting a video of an isolated incident in a deliberate, if naive and clumsy, attempt to slander all our men in uniform?
A real patriotic American would clearly have known that this was an isolated act by a rogue nut and would not have considered it worthy of posting on YouTube. The only reason anyone could have for posting this is to slander all the troops by implication.
The real scandal isn’t the casual cruelty to animals on display in the video – its the combination of troop-hatred and poor grasp of logic displayed by the leftwinger who posted it online.
[Wingnut Mode Deactivated]
Dennis - SGMM
I blame this on the Democrats’ reluctance to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan.
Tim F.
There’s no way the Marine would have done that if Scott Beauchamp had not lowered his morale. I bet that skull fucking kittens has gone up eighty percent.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
It’s fun watching people that have never been in the military defend it (or accuse it) of being some pure archetype of human behavior.
Of course, the Right wants the military to be perfect Men of God, because they don’t want it in the news cycle that all wars are destructive, hellish nightmares that are the last remaining resort when civilization is on its last breath.
Of course, this goes right back to how sub-human neocons are, for thinking that war is an acceptable tool for foreign relations.
These cretins still know that child-rape is still wrong, yes? Because I have a feeling that might change given their inability to interface with reality.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
No, the HOWTO: Cranially Molest and Penetrate Kittens article came right after one of the Beauchamp pieces.
jnfr
The terrorists have a puppy??? A cute, innocent little puppy??
I think we have to invade Iran now.
Mr Furious
I hope that “trouble” involves him suddenly discovering himself fifty feet above the ground.
Fucking asshole is right. So is sociopath.
Mr Furious
And if the rest of his unit didn’t kick his fucking ass for that, toss the rest of them over the same cliff. Jesus fucking Christ. Who tapes that shit and yuks it up afterward?
Tsulagi
Yep.
I await CY to construct sandboxes with scale model cliffs to prove no harm could have come to the puppy.
Dennis - SGMM
Toward the end of my stint in the Delta I woke up one morning feeling preternaturally lucid: I knew how to end the war immediately. The answer was simple; just kill every man, woman, child and animal in the country. When I shared my insight with others they gave me a boatload of Thorazine and sent me away for three days to a town where there was far less shooting. Luckily, that was enough to return me to a semblance of rationality. For years afterward, I lived in terror that I would once again wake up a crazy person. I finally sought help and a psychiatrist explained to me that I’d suffered a Psychotic Break, probably caused by a combination of sleeplessness, close range violence, and PTSD. He told me that it was likely a once in a lifetime event caused by a unique combination of circumstances.
That was one tour for me. Some of these troops have done four.
YellowJournalism
I didn’t watch the video (just can’t), but the fact that the other soldier merely described the act as “mean” makes me almost as angry as the act itself. I’m sure I’m not the only person who would have had much stronger words for Motari after witnessing that.
Martin
Watch snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/throwpuppy.asp
I’m leaning fake, personally, and will restrain my outrage and judgement rendering until the verdict is in.
The Other Steve
This is clearly Bill Clinton’s fault.
Snappy
What the hell is wrong with people?
Mr Furious
Yeah, but did the Clinton campaign make the puppy look “more black?”
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I was leaning towards fake until I watched the video.
Cassidy
True and disgusting
Par for the course of gallows humor. You’d be amazed at how funny these things are situationally.
Now this is an assumption on my part, but I’ll go with and please correct me if I’m wrong….you’re speaking from the perspective of a (somewhat) liberal, humanistic civilian. That’s apples and tuna. If we’re trained to dehumanize people, how do you think we look at animals? Noew that’s peacetime. If we’re trained to dehumanize humans and then we really embrace as a coping mechanism against all the horrid shit we’ve seen, how do you think we look at animals?
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
It’s worthy to recklessly speculate that PETA threw the Times Square bomb this morning _because_ of the puppy throwing.
Why? Because PETA is due many swift kicks to the junk.
Mr Furious
Bullshit. If this was a video of a sniper shooting stray dogs from 100 yards out, I’d entertain that—it would still appall me—but at least there’d be some detachment.
Anyone who can hold a puppy by the scruff of the neck and kill it barehanded is suffering from more than battle fatigue. And anybody that stands by and tapes it or laughs is no better.
Mr Furious
I was about to speculate that homeless dogs bombed the recruiting station…
Cassidy
I was referring to the background guy saying it was “mean”. Sure he knows it’s mean, but I’m guessing he doesn’t really feel it.
Z
At least out red-blooded Amerrikan soldier wasn’t videotaping puppy be-headings! Them Mooslims are savages! Savages!
Jake
This came up during the Damn You Scott Beauchamp dust up but just a reminder: In any group of people, a certain percent will be complete assholes. Also, you don’t need to find guys in uniform to find guys who will:
1. Toss a dog off a cliff.
2. Not throw the dog tosser off the cliff.
3. Not express outrage of any sort.
4. Laugh at the Puppy Gravity Check.
Krista
Gotta disagree with you there. But I’ve got a real soft spot for dogs, (I’m not even going to watch the video, as I know it’ll give me nightmares). If I’d been there and had a weapon on me, I think I would have been very likely to threaten to shoot the guy if he didn’t get his psychopathic mitts off of that puppy. And I would have meant it.
I can’t put too much thought into how incredibly cruel we human beings are to each other and to lesser beings. I’d wind up in the fetal position in a corner somewhere.
Ninerdave
Hillary wants to create puppy internment camps. Wholesale slaughter of puppies I tell ya!!
jenniebee
Yeah, I still find these doggy pics from Iraq more unsettling.
Guess we just found another bad apple…
Wilfred
Anybody willing to get worked up over the death of a puppy after the wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children blown to pieces by American overkill is a fucking jackass chasing a jackalope.
If you really want to bait the wingnuts, why not go after the Marines and soldiers who were let off after confessing to murdering sand nigg -oops! Iraqi and Afghan civilians?
Agreed. The problem is when people get more pissed off about animals getting killed than humans.
pharniel
actually the puppy is a great ot rage generator thanks to a whole host of things. most of them to do with the [small defenceless animal] class, which includes puppys and babies. so basically to really leverage this you imply that the soldier who coudl do this would have no problems doing it to a baby, because puppies are cute and defenceless, like babies, and only evil wants to kill puppies. and babies.
jcricket
Does anyone remember the closing scene of “A Few Good Men” – after Nicholson’s freak-out, after the verdict? The white soldier (defendant) says, basically, “Why are we being kicked out? We didn’t do anything wrong? Our Colonel ordered the code red”. The black soldier (also a defendant) says, “Yes we did. We didn’t protect [our comrade]. That’s what we should have done.”
So it’s that lack of awareness that’s displayed in the video. There will always be nut-jobs in any large group, but it’s the people that enable them, by cheering them on, videotaping things, not saying “Stop it”, not walking away, and not reporting it – they’re the ones I hold a special brand of contempt for. It’s they who allow this kind of thing to seep wider into the military (witness the culture of sexual harassment the female cadets are dealing with at the Air Force Academy). It is they who know better, and yet choose to do nothing.
Krista
What about babies that eat puppies? Cute, or not?
jrg
Har, Har. Listen to all you left-wing PETA supporters whine about a dog, of all things. Only someone on the far left would care about puppies anyway.
jenniebee
Oh, yeah, sure – like the war apologists don’t find a way to shrug off dead kids
Nazgul35
Remember the outrage over the captured video of the puppies being gassed by Al Qaeda?
I saw the video and hope to God it was fake..otherwise, we have a future Militia member on our hand (and how many do we have anyway?)
As for why people are being outraged while hundreds of thousands humans have been killed (the underlying assumption being that the people who are outraged about the dog are not also outraged about the dog…you decide who is being silly here), if it was showing up on video daily with senseless act of violence (naked stacked prisoners anyone?) I can assure you it would.
Cassidy
UNless I’m misunderstanding you, I think you’ve missed the point of the scene. The comrade he was speaking of was the dead marine.
Billy K
It seems rather fake to me. Dog seems quite dead, and the audio seems pasted together. I’m withholding indignant rage.
Cassidy
Sometimes you pick your battles. Sometimes, you just feel another piece of you die inside and you can’t muster up the energy to do anything.
jcricket
My point was that the lack of awareness being displayed in the video is the awareness that what they’re doing (puppy tossing) is wrong, and the ones not doing the tossing (i.e. the one standing around, the one videotaping) don’t seem to be doing anything to stop it.
Yeah, I know why this stuff happens (not like I’ve never gone along with any bad stuff before in my life, knowing it was wrong all along). But the military needs to hold itself to a higher standard, because of the special authority they wield.
Zifnab
PETA is responsible for nudity of many of America’s premier hot babes, so you can shut up your face.
Krista
Understandable, and yet another reason why sending your troops on second, third and fourth tours is inexcusable and is going to result in a lot of severely fucked-up individuals and strained families.
Dennis - SGMM
You go to the cliff with the puppies you have – not the puppies you wish you had.
Cassidy
We’re human and we break to. Honestly, It isn’t that easy to get worked up over a dead animal after you’ve seen bodies on fire, etc.
Quick anecdote: A certain CO used to dry fire his pistol at the Company dog. All the time…all the freakin’ time. Yes, he was a jackass, FWIW. So one day, he’s dry-firing (you can see where this is going)…and BAM! Blows the dog’s head off…right in the lap of the guy holding him and petting him. The guy jumps up, almost launching himself at the CO, forcibly restrained from giving him his well-deserved ass-whupping. What was the big deal? The negligent discharge. The dog was replaced.
Cassidy
Do me a favor and call your Congressman. I’ll go back if I have to, but I really don’t want to.
Zifnab
Firstly, it’s worth quoting Stalin about one death being a tragedy and ten million a statistic. Hearing about “another 50 people dying in a Bagdad bombing” is one thing. Seeing a puppy thrown off a cliff while a soldier laughs is entirely different. If we got to see video footage of street bombings in the city, people would most likely be acting more aggressively.
Secondly, we rarely – if ever – get to see pictures of naked stacked prisoners or street bombings or puppy throwings because they are bad for the morale of the nation. If we had to watch all the carnage that happens on a daily basis in Iraq, we wouldn’t be crying our eyes out over nipple-slips at the Super Bowl or throwing hissy fits about the use of vulgarity on TV. So when someone finally gets around to posting this sort of YouTube, the reactions tend to be very fresh and naive. Lots of shock. Lots of irrational behavior. Lots of conspiracy theorizing and claims of “photoshop!” and video doctoring. If we got to see this every day, the public would be inoculated against impulse reactions.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
:)
srv
I’d be really curious to know what an Iraqi makes of all this.
Badtux
Couple of things I picked up from a couple of war blogs:
1. Our soldiers are under orders to kill all dogs (puppies, whatever) that they encounter. Dogs bark and give away the location of our troops (same reason Midwestern farmers keep dogs around, as a four-footed alarm that something’s up), and there’s a lot of stray dogs around due to their masters being killed or forced to flee to Syria or Jordan that form packs and can be dangerous if encountered. So this puppy is dead either way.
2. Soldiers are “cruel”? (Clears throat). Dear naive people, the job of a soldier is to kill, maim, destroy, utterly devastate an enemy of America in order to terminate the threat once and forever. As one noted wussy liberal noted, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it … You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable.” But then, what did that wussy liberal William Tecumseh Sherman know about war?
In any event, the job of a soldier is cruelty, murder on a mass scale, to destroy this nation’s enemies with whatever means are necessary, and our soldiers are good at their job. To accuse a soldier of brutality is similar to accusing water of being wet, or snow of being cold. There are no “knights in shining armor” in war and there never were, outside of propaganda tomes. Remember, the “knights in shining armor” of the 1st Crusade broke into the synagogues of Jerusalem upon conquering it and, after raping the Jewish women and killing the Jewish men and making the streets of Jerusalem flow with Jewish blood, they then sold the survivors into slavery. That’s what “knights in shining armor” have been like throughout known human history, and you might as well whine about water being wet or snow being cold as to complain about it.
3. That said, I doubt that this is a Pentagon-approved method for disposal of unwanted dogs. My suspicion is that this video is actually a protest of the Pentagon’s policy calling for the killing of all dogs — including puppies. Whether the puppy is killed via a bullet to his brain or via being thrown off a cliff, he’s just as dead. It’s just that being thrown off a cliff makes it clear that this policy is offensive to animal lovers. Which isn’t going to change the policy, since it is operationally necessary (war is cruelty by its very nature, after all), but perhaps the notion is that, once civilians learn about the policy, the decision makers will come up with some way to at least deal with the puppies in a more humane manner.
Note that I’m not saying that it is right to throw puppies off of cliffs. What I’m saying is that there’s more to the story than a “cruel Marine throws puppy off cliff” summary might lead you to believe.
— Badtux the Military Penguin
rawshark
I think that was one of the points made during the Beauchamp fiasco. Its not that hard to believe soldiers or marines would run a dog over for no reason.
Cassidy
Anecdotal evidence regarding the severe psychological dichotomy we experience…most puppies we encountered became platoon mascots and lived fat and happy. You’d be amazed at how many troops are also dog lovers.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Because of the UCMJ clear guidelines about being cruel to cute furry animals?
Dennis - SGMM
Article 134—General article
“Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special, or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court.”
Digital Amish
Isn’t it clear that Motari was simply getting that puppy out of the way of a swerving Bradley.
jnfr
Dennis – SGMM posted this:
And I just thought it deserved to be pointed to again.
Sirkowski
On the one hand, wingnuts want their soldier to skrew the Geneva Convention, torture, nevermind the colateral damage. On the other hand, all this must be done by pure little angels?
Dennis - SGMM
Thanks, jnfr. I’m not trying to make excuses for anyone, some people are just naturally callous and cruel. Some become callous and cruel – even psychotic. If the next administration accomplishes anything I hope that it makes damned sure that returning veterans get all of the help they need. Not all of the help they want, but all that they need. I didn’t seek help until my life became unmanageable and by then I’d wasted years.
Krista
If I had such a beast, I’d be happy to call him or her for you.
And Zifnab nails it about the fact that we’re very, very sheltered and very lucky. We’re in a war, and yet we don’t see the gruesome images. Everything is very sanitized before we view it. We don’t see the photos of body parts scattered all over the streets. Part of me thinks that maybe it would be better for our world if we weren’t so sheltered — if we were forced to look at the ugliness that is war. Maybe we’d be a lot less likely to enter into it lightly.
And I suppose that’s why I think that John McCain is an utter sociopath. He’s SEEN that shit. But yet he makes jokes about bombing Iran. I really just don’t get it.
Digital Amish
And oh yes, what Badtux, Zifnab, Cassidy, et al. said. War. Soldiers. Cruelty. Death. War zones have a tendency to increase the declination of moral compasses.
28 Percent
why are you LIEBERALS acting so surprised did you think the puppies would greet us with flowers and candy? how stupid is that?
Zifnab
He saw it – what? – 40 years ago? Memories, even memories like that, fade in time. And besides, he’s the privileged son of a privileged son running for President of the Republican Party of America. And RPAers say he needs to cheer about bombing brown people. So he cheers about bombing brown people because he wants to sit in the Oval Office and big the biggest pumba on earth.
Its really hard to think about sitting in a bamboo cage in Vietnam when you’ve got so much “serious” stuff to consider, like how you can squeeze your sexy lobbyist friend for a few extra grand to cover the next month of campaigning.
Jon H
“I’d be really curious to know what an Iraqi makes of all this.”
If food is scarce, sandwiches out of the late puppy.
Mr Furious
That’s actually what I would have expected…which is why this seems so jarring. How is that puppy not an escape from the hell that soldier supposedly witnesses and is desensitized by?
Anybody back up what BadTux says?
RSA
I’m not a soldier and never have been, but I have to think that this way lies war crimes. I mean, furry pets aside, what can’t be justified by someone who believes this?
Wilfred
No, you wouldn’t. The other side, Arabs and Muslims in this case, are just the gooks, wogs and fuzzie-wuzzies of previous slaughters. You don’t really give a shit about them because if you did, these things wouldn’t happen. It’s as simple as that. Yesterday, I think it was, I linked to a photo of the funeral of a 21 month old Palestinian girl killed by the Israelis. Lots of yuks and snark. Today, angst about a dead puppy.
Reverend Spooner
It’s pretty much the definition of war. I’ve never fought one either, but I’ve studied enough of them to have an inkling of that. War is legitimized mass murder, and the ultimate “war crime” is war itself. The State appropriates unto itself the right to commit the same criminal behaviors for which individuals would be prosecuted in peacetime, and unleashes it in an organized fury for the benefit of the many (i.e., the nation-state). The military is a death-dealing machine, basically dismembering the death-dealing machine of the other state. The cogs of this machine are the individual soldiers, whose lives are expendable for the good of the whole.
Sound psychotic? Sound criminal? It’s the ugly price of having a world of warring tribes shaking spears at one another since the dawn of time. The only people with any moral consistency on the subject are the pacifist fools and the sociopath warmongers; the rest of us are hypocrites to some extent or other.
Punchy
There’s a lot of puppies currently in sandboxes all across the Deep South as we speak….
bud
Once more, to bring a little reality into the fevered imaginations that run wild here:
“Our soldiers are under orders to kill all dogs (puppies, whatever) that they encounter.”
– Badtux
You got a cite for that? Other than a blog post on DailyKos or whatever.
There are literally thousands of stray dogs in Iraq (and it has nothing to do with their “loving” owners being driven from their homes by the eeeviiil US military). The dog is viewed as an unclean animal in Islamic tradition. Strays are the rule, not the exception. US troops, in general, treat dogs in Iraq a hell of a lot better than the typical Iraqi.
Killing “ALL” dogs they enounter would turn the typical town into a shooting gallery. Again, some of the fevered imaginations here no doubt believe that to be the case, but, beleive it or not, the average soldier, even those who regularly do patrols, may go weeks without firing a single shot.
IOW, I call bullshit.
Dr. Squid
The conservative position is that the puppy had it coming and should be laughed at.
Chris Johnson
I’ll be impressed with the extremity of this sort of thing if I see video of Marines _torturing_ a puppy. WTF do you expect? These guys are trained killers, if you don’t like that stop training them. The Nazi SS were trained by being ordered to raise puppies and care for them and then unexpectedly ordered to kill them, without emotion. It helped create monsters, and our own military is just as good at it.
How much more evidence is necessary before we can move on to the ‘very well, does it HELP us to create monsters and send them out into the world to ravage and destroy’ part?
I’m reminded of the military consultant guy who gave a ‘TED talk’ on his desire to split the military into ‘leviathan’ and ‘sysadmin’ forces. Leviathan we’ve just seen. You send them to absolutely destroy anything. Then you get them the hell out of there and send in the ‘sysadmin’ guys who are older, have families, are more like cops than killers…
For now, we get worst of both worlds. Our soldiers are no good at building healthy societies, but at least they commit atrocities, shock the conscience, and guarantee the rest of the world will fight us however possible. Wait, what?
Cassidy
Like I said, it’s an extreme psychological (psychotic, maybe) dichotomy. On one hand, something as callous as that doesn’t “move” you. It just makes you realize how far removed from your fellow man you’ve become. OTOH, anecdotes like mine tend to be true, as those cute, furry little balls of love can be the only thing that takes you out of hell.
Points 2 and 3 are philosophy. Point 1 I have heardof but never been under orders to do so myself. My understanding is that this was done, to a certain extent, after the invasion for hygiene reasons. Stray dogs, can be a nuisance to public health.
Very true.
Spoken like a true know nothing.
Jake
Well, he was a fighter pilot which might explain part of it. He hasn’t seen that shit. More importantly, look at whose ass he’s kissing. I suspect empathy was never his strong point.
But look, anyone who has worked in a shelter for any sort of abused animal (four legs or two) or reads the news on a regular basis knows chances are this guy wasn’t kind to animals before he joined the army. I wish it were as simple as Teh Army Made Him Crazees, but it isn’t. And really, that attitude makes it harder for soldiers who do develop mental health issues because they’ll have to deal with the Puppy Killer label in addition to whatever else is going on.
rawshark
No I wouldn’t. Its a natural instinct to love dogs. Its why the video is so shocking.
Jeff
I hope that particular soldier suffers in hell for eternity. And yes, I know many will find it odd that I’m so upset about this, and less upset about the human casualties. Put it this way, that behavior is so utterly depraved that it literally means that the soldier would do the same to an Iraqi infant.
Yes, I mean “literally” literally. Remove that sick fuck from uniform and put him in Gitmo, where he might learn some morality from the other inmates there.
srv
People are not naturally desensitized. We are a product of our environment, and those that control our environment make sure that we don’t see those images, and to some extent what we think. The only image we have of a puppy is a cute furry animal, and when one gets thrown off a cliff, that grates on our simple pysche. The image we have of Palestinians is different, largely depending on what we see. In European media, you see kids standing up to tanks. In the US, you see something very different.
To understand McCain, you have to understand fighter pilots. I once attended an event for active/retired USAF and a few Navy pilots. It was post Gulf I, and my neighbors son and son-in-law were the guests of honor. The son-in-law got up and showed the war from the gun camera of an F-16. Lots of cheering. Then his son got up. He was a SAR (helicopter) medic. He showed slide after slide of all those people on the receiving side. Those hero pilots squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. He really rubbed it in.
McCain never saw what he did, but he did get the crap beat out of him for it.
Badtux
Regarding orders to kill dogs, well, my reference is that notoriously inaccurate liberal web site, The Humane Society of the United States. That order may or may not be still standing, from reading war blogger sites it appears it still is standing. Whether individual units have been issued such orders or not is an issue for their chain of command to hash out, there’s a lot of general orders that are never promulgated down the chain of command either for reasons of plausible deniability, or simply because the officer who gets the order looks at it, says “this is fucking stupid”, and “accidentally” loses it before passing it down to his inferior officers.
If the military worked “by the book” all the time, nothing would ever get done, everybody would be too goddamn busy reading all the bullshit flowing downhill to, well, fight. In that they’re like any other big bureaucratic organization, like the gigantic oil company that a friend works for where if they went by the book, they’d never drill any wells because they’d be too damned busy filling out bullshit paperwork and waiting for circular approvals (where action A must be approved after action B is approved, but action B cannot be approved until action A is approved). That’s just how the real world works sometimes (shrug).
Oh, I don’t read Daily Kos. Watching a circle jerk is, well, BORING.
Nazgul35
Wingnut conspiracy theory #1238563947562392.789
You didn’t see it on the video, but one of the puppies litter mates blew itself up in a hummer and killed 15 of his buddies…
Xanthippas
Badtux,
I’m not sure how any of your points are relevant. Even if there is an order to kill dogs, I doubt the means of killing is to playfully toss one off of a cliff. That is a mark of someone who is disturbed. Whether it’s because of what the war did to them or because they were like that before they ever signed up…well, still, that person is fucked up.
If there’s more to this story, it has to do with whether it actually happened the way the video makes it look like it happened. Cole’s point is merely that soldiers sometimes do really bad things in war (a point you seem to agree with even as you try to rationalize why someone would toss a dog off a cliff) but that it’s terribly threatening to the pro-military America-loving right to imagine that an American soldier could do any cruel act…unless it’s torturing an insurgent, which is ok of course.
Mr Furious
I can understand a standing order, and even a need, to kill/silence dogs during a covert operation, but not as a matter of practice out on patrol.
Badtux
Xan, I don’t think the puppy cares whether he’s tossed off a cliff or killed “humanely”, what with, well, being dead and all, which kinda precludes that whole “caring” thing.
As you point out, the real question is why this video was made, what it is intended to say, whether it actually happened the way the video is edited to make it appear it happened, etc. Is Motari a sick fuck who throws live puppies off of cliffs, or is he simply a goofball who staged the video so he only threw a stuffed puppy off a cliff as a goof? Is the video intended to illustrate the problem of standing orders about killing puppies and dogs and how cruel that standing order is, or is Motari just being cruel for the sake of being cruel? We don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
Asti
That wasn’t mean, it was fucking cruel as hell! Mean is a high school teenager trying to land her best friends boyfriend for a kiss at lunch time on the day her best friend is sick. This goes FAR beyond that.
That was no stuffed dog either.
Jesse
I really, really love animals, but at the same time I find it alarming that people get this much up in arms over the murder of a dog, but just shrug off the killing and/or rape of actual human beings.
Cassidy
Potato, potahto…
Barry
John: “…so I hope the wingnuttosphere debunks this soon before I have to wear a burkha to work.”
Um, John, just what are you wearing to work now?