Washington Navy Yard aerial view 1985
(Image by (From Wikimedia) PH1 DAVID C. MACLEAN, Author: PH1 DAVID C. MACLEAN) Details Source DMCA
Washington Navy Yard aerial view 1985 by Wikipedia
Washington Navy Yard, site of massacre on September 16, 2013
"Rampage" at the Washington Navy Yard was the headline this morning as ex Navy enlisted man Aaron Alexis apparently entered the post legally and then proceeded to shoot and kill some 13 people before he himself was killed in a firefight with police.
No motive for the massacre has yet been determined but speculation will surely run the gamut as these type of incidents usually do from some deep seated hostility toward the Navy to complete surprise from friends and family members.
And of course this writer has no concrete answer as to why someone like Alexis snapped and did what he did.
But one thing is for sure; indiscriminant atrocities against innocents has proliferated in America as well as being committed by Americans in our endless wars.
Nick Turse in his book, "Kill Anything That Moves" showed the Mai Lai massacre committed by Lt. Calley and his men during the Viet Nam war was not some aberration committed by a few deranged soldiers as we came to believe but something that was an everyday occurrence committed by the American military in that long ago war. Turse culled this from actual Department of Defense records he was able to freely obtain but never up till the time of his book had been divulged to the American people, (save for Daniel Ellsberg and the "Pentagon Papers" he revealed in the 1970's).
Now in our latest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as our undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia where atrocities committed by our drones, JSOC raids in the middle of the night, not to mention Sgt. Bales slipping off and killing innocents as they slept in their beds last year in Afghanistan are "occurrences" that our corporate media almost completely ignores or when in the case of Bales does report it describes it as an "aberration", something unusual, not the norm and certainly not something larger and more sinister.
But the reality is America is a violent culture going back to our earliest times with the massacre of the Native American Indian culture, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the lynching of innocents.
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