American Rage

Here's another very disturbing occurrence that gets very little media exposure. In the last decade or so, there have been a number of incidents in which U.S. military personnel have killed their fellow soldiers either in Afghanistan and Iraq or at American bases at home. The reason these incidents are not widely reported, I believe, is two-fold. One, because, frequently, the culprit is someone who has been deployed more than once to those war zones. When they reach the breaking point and go on a killing spree against their own, it's embarrassing, to say the least, to have to admit that that person was most likely driven to the criminal act by the abnormal stress to which he was subject by the abusive deployment. Two, because Americans killing Americans in the military is "an inconvenient truth" that runs counter to the official propaganda that portrays U.S. soldiers as "boys next door", the epitome of clean living, victims of Arab or Muslim fanatics.

Thus the Army sergeant that today pleaded guilty to killing five of his comrades in Iraq "out of rage", in a way, is worse than the young man who bombed the Boston Marathon, full of strangers who meant nothing to him personally. But, to the American media, it's much more comfortable to cover the Boston bombing endlessly than to devote some time to the killings in Iraq.

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