"It does [bother me] that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed it."
McCord, Stieber, and Corcales take pains to place a great share of the blame for wartime atrocities on a "system" they say the Army uses to teach soldiers to "dehumanize" those who they are told are "the enemy." McCord tells audiences, "What the Army does, it does very well." He recalls a marching cadence using commonly during basic training:
we went to the market where all the hadji shop,
pulled out our machetes and we began to chop,
we went to the playground where all the hadji play,
pulled out our machine guns and we began to spray,
we went to the mosque where all the hadji pray,
threw in a hand grenade and blew them all away.
McCord first gained notoriety as the soldier seen a Wikileaks video leaked by Private Bradley Manning, now awaiting trial for disseminating classified information. McCord is seen in the grainy video as the soldier running to help two children who had been wounded in an Apache helicopter attack on a van, and on men attempting to evacuate a wounded man. Care of the wounded and protection of those attempting to evacuate them is among the oldest laws of war, dating back to the Geneva Convention of 1864 which states that:
"Members of the armed forces and other persons (...) who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances...Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited"
In the Wikileaks video, the Apache gunner is heard to say "pick up a weapon, just pick up a weapon" at the dying man on the ground who is attempting to crawl away, although no weapons are anywhere visible. In emails to the man who eventually turned him into the authorities, Manning is most concerned with this attack, rather than the one just preceding it, which drew far more news attention. Manning said to Charles Lemos in an email:
"At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter...No big deal ... about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer's directory. So I looked into it."
JAG is the Judge Advocate General, a military prosecutor. Manning is being held incommunicado at Quantico Marine Base in VA. He once wrote to Lemos that his greatest worry if he were caught as the leaker was to "Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out, before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hassan [the Ft. Hood shooter.]"
Col. Kauzlarich's involvement in the Tillman affair runs deep. The 2006 ESPN series said:
Kauzlarich, now 40, was the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan, making him ultimately responsible for the conduct of the fateful operation in which Pat Tillman died. Kauzlarich later played a role in writing the recommendation for the posthumous Silver Star. And finally, with his fingerprints already all over many of the hot-button issues, including the question of who ordered the platoon to be split as it dragged a disabled Humvee through the mountains, Kauzlarich conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman's death.
Later Kauzlarich feigned ignorance over the true circumstances of Tillman's death, and said of his recommendation for the Silver Star, which cannot be awarded in instances of "friendly fire":
"I mean, had the story come out that he had been killed by his own guys, then it probably would have been looked at differently."
However, a timeline of the Tillman incident shows that friendly fire was immediately suspected, and reported the same day Tillman was killed. Capt. Richard Scott was assigned as the investigating officer for a possible fratricide the day after Tillman's death on April 22, 2004. Tillman's Silver Star recommendation was submitted on April 29. It is not known if the investigating officer was assigned by Kauzlarich himself.
As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on at a cost so far of about $30,000 to $40,000 per family, efforts continue to hold the Bush administration accountable for the deceptions used in selling the war in Iraq, even as former administration officials position themselves in ways which seem calculated to deflect blame. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell recently told a Japanese newspaper that he believed that in his famous UN speech when held up a vial of anthrax as proof of Saddam's capability in biological weapons: "I regret that it was wrong but, at the same time, we had every reason to believe it was correct."
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