Massacre at Ft. Hood
AbdulM...@yahoo.com
profession. It's really a very depressing job, to listen to other
people's problems, all day, every day, day after day, to no end.
Psychiatrists themselves need psychiatric care from time to time.
Myself, I'm a trained counselor and used to volunteer at a suicide
prevention hotline, many years ago. And talking about suicide is a
very touchy subject, you can't really even talk about it. Because,
for some reason, just talking about suicide tends to lead to a rise in
the suicide rate. In other words, just mentioning the subject of
suicide tends to give the listeners ideas of committing suicide
themselves. This is a subject that's very rarely, if ever, discussed,
and this is the reason why.
There's a colloquial term for what the Army Psychiatrist who had gone
berserk did at Ft. Hood, it's called "Suicide By Cop". That's when a
person is too cowardly to kill their own self by themself, so they
will instead wave a gun at the Police, hoping to have the Police do
the suicide for them. This is what I think the guy did.
In war time, our soldiers need good counseling. But let's not forget
the people who counsel the soldiers, they need good counseling too,
perhaps even more so than the soldiers who fight the wars themselves.
It's a very sad situation, and I hope what happened does not reflect
badly on Arab Americans, who have all served so well and so
patriotically, as translators, soldiers and what have you.
Full disclosure, I, myself have worked in the civilian police units of
such large military bases, and I can attest to the fact that there are
many guns and weapons and ammunitions, all over the place. It's not
easy to keep weapons out of the hands of the people there who live,
breath and dream of war and the weapons of war. This is how life has
to be for some people, in order to protect the freedoms that we all
take for granted. Somebody has to take all the risks that these
heroes have to take.
A little snippet on Ft. Hood, it sprawls across 339 square miles, and
is the world's largest military installation. It is the largest single
employer in Texas. The base is home to nearly 70,000 people.
Unfortunately, there have been more suicides there than any other Army
post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the result, I think, of
long and repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And
furthermore, it is terrifying to think that the one who we put in
charge of making sure everyone was sane and OK there was himself
insane and not OK.
There's a silver lining in all this, and that would be the genuine
American hero that Sgt. Kimberly Munley proved herself to be last
Thursday. She's the civilian Police Officer, an advanced firearms
instructor and member of Ft. Hood's "special reaction team", who
arrived on the scene only four minutes after the first 911 call was
made, catching the Psychiatrist gone berserk just as he was fleeing
the building, where she fired twice at him. At that point, he turned
around and fired back at her, charged at her, shot her in both thighs
and one wrist, and then later he began to fumble the gun as he tried
to reload it, that's when she took advantage of the situation and
continued to shoot at him several times, even while she was wounded,
hitting him at least 4 times. After he passed out, she passed out too
and was taken to Metroplex Hospital, several miles away, where doctors
say she lost so much blood that they feared she would not make it, but
Munley proved to be as tough in the operating room as she was while
confronting the insane Psychiatrist in their close-range shootout.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/fort-hood-hero-sgt-kimberly-munleys-asked-died/Story?id=9022438&page=2
hal
>Did you know?...Psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate of any
>profession. It's really a very depressing job, to listen to other
>people's problems, all day, every day, day after day, to no end.
>Psychiatrists themselves need psychiatric care from time to time.
My theory is most mental health professionals have their own profound
issues, and go into mental health to learn how to deal with their own
sickness. Or at least had mental illness in their family and
understand the genetic component therefore their propensity for the
disease.
AbdulM...@yahoo.com
It's definitely a stressful job, with people's lives in the balance.
I was told by one Doctor (in the military field) that he could never
get a good night's rest, because he was constantly being called and
disturbed so he can treat other patients who keep getting sick. But
I'm convinced they all get into that line of work because they care
about people. The question here, that many people have, which I might
as well address, is whether Major Hasan got that way because of job
stress or because of his religious and political idealogy. I am,
myself a Muslim, with many friends and relatives who are now and have
in the past proudly served in the military. I strongly believe that
our military's integration is a good thing, it's what makes America a
unique country, that our diversity is actually our strength, and we
should not tamper with that.
From what I've been reading, though, Major Hasan had extremist views
and was a Wahhabi Muslim, that is a particularly strict, unbending
version of Islam that is practiced mainly in Saudi Arabia. Religious
extremism, regardless of religion, contradicts the very point and
purpose of faith and faithful communities. I am constantly reminded
that more people have been killed in the name of God than for any
other reason. But that's not because there's anything wrong with
religion, per se, what is wrong is that certain people will distort
and use religion to manipulate simple minded people. As an example,
abortion and health care for illegals has absolutely nothing to do
with the proposed health care reforms currently being voted by
Congress. But the religious subject of abortion has been bandied
about anyways, just to try to get well-intentioned religious people to
oppose health care reform. It's not just Islam, but other religions
are also manipulated, just to get the simple minded to do what they
would not ordinarily do.
This guy clearly lost his mind. Perhaps his religion helped him to
deal with his issues for months while he lived in DC and could attend
his local parish or mosque, and when he went to Texas, the
disconnection from the tenants of his faith left him ungrounded,
without community, without support and he cracked.
Topaz
Support the Iraqi resistance!
By James Petras
Falluja, Baghdad, Ramadi, Nasiriya - an entire people has risen to
confront the colonial occupation army, its mercenaries, clients, and
collaborators. First in massive peaceful protests, they were massacred
by US, British, Spanish and Polish troops: Bare hands against tanks
and machineguns. The armed resistance, in the beginning a minority now
indisputably the most popular force, backed by millions. The colonial
armies, fearful of every Iraqi, shoot wildly into crowds and retreat;
they encircle whole cities, fire missiles into crowded working class
neighborhoods, helicopters pour machinegun fire into homes, factories,
mosques...
In the eyes of the colonial soldiers, the enemy is everywhere. For
once they are right. The resistance resists, every block, every house,
every store rings out with gunfire, the resistance is everywhere.
Every house takes hits, the resistance fight on. The people aid the
wounded fighters, wash their wounds. They provide water to the thirsty
to quench their parched throats and cool their hands - the automatic
weapons are hot.
And where are the western mercenaries? The $1,000 dollar a day hired
guns with their flak vests, dark glasses, --their swagger and
insolence have disappeared. They too have seen the charred bodies of
their ex-partners of death.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed, thousands have been injured, many
more will die but after each funeral tens of thousands more, the
peaceful, apolitical, "wait and see" ones have taken up the gun.
'It's a civil war', brays the bourgeois press. This is wishful
thinking. Shia and Sunni are in this together, brothers in arms, each
covering their comrades' backs as they confront the tanks. And the
resistance is winning. Never mind the "proportions" - five or ten or
twenty Iraqis for each colonial soldier. The Iraqi Resistance has won
politically: No appointed official has any future : They exist as long
as the US military remains but they will flee from the rooftops of
their bunkers as the US withdraws.
Militarily, the US and the mercenaries are taking thousands of
casualties - scores of deaths and wounded everyday. In Washington, the
civilian militarists, the architects of the destruction of Iraq are
panicking. "Send more troops!" say Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the
would-be president Kerry. From his Texas ranch, Bush proclaims the
resistance leader Moqtada Sadr a "killer". Far from the fire, the
mayhem, the massacres, his television doesn't show the child with the
mangled face. Bush once again is far from the killing fields - Vietnam
and now Iraq. Now he can claim a draft deferment - he is nominally the
President who unilaterally declared the end of the war in May 2003.
Now, April 2004 there are more than 600 dead US soldiers as the Iraqi
resistance rose to meet Bush's challenge "Bring them on" and took the
streets from the colonial army, then they came on and conquered the
cities and with sheer courage and absolute determination they hold
their ground.
The "Arabs" resist, while the overstuffed cabbage Sharon is silent.
His once loquacious agents, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and their
underlings are strangely silent. Are they worried that there might be
a mass backlash against those who cooked the data to get the US into a
war in which thousands of US soldiers will die and be maimed - in
order to "protect" Israel's undisputed claim to dominance in the
Middle East?
In the early spring of 2004, in April to be exact, the dreams of a new
colonial empire came crashing down on the masterminds of the New World
Order, an undisputed, unilateral Empire. The end of the
Sharon-Wolfowitz-Blair-Chaney "Greater Mid-East Co-Prosperity Sphere".
The Iraqi resistance has turned the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz dream of a
series of wars against Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea into a
nightmare of bloody street battles on every block in Fallujah and Sadr
City, Baghdad.
The heroism, the valor, the inspiration, the mass resistance is all
the more so as the Iraqi people draw on their resources, their own
solidarity, their own history, their belief that they will be free or
take down every colonial soldier as they fight to the death. The
phrase "Patria o Muerte" takes on a special and very specific meaning
in Iraq: It is not a slogan of a leader, a vanguard, to arouse and
inspire the people - it is the living practice of a whole people.
Patria or Muerte comes out of the mouths of teenage street fighters as
well as street venders and widows with black scarves. The "Iraqi April
Days" are a lesson to for the whole Third World and other would-be
imperial colonialists: Mass armed resistance cannot be politically or
militarily defeated. The heroism of the Iraqi resistance stands in
stark contrast to the cowardly self-styled Arab leaders: The Jordanian
and Saudi monarchs, the garrulous corrupt "President for Life". Not
one has moved a finger to aid the Iraqi national liberation struggle.
They fear the example of the successful Iraqi resistance will light a
fire under their ample buttocks..
http://www.ihr.org/ www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
http://www.natvan.com http://www.nsm88.org
http://heretical.com/ http://immigration-globalization.blogspot.com/