NYT Report: 121 Veterans Linked to Killings

Source: Associated Press

Report: 121 veterans linked to killings
47 minutes ago

NEW YORK - At least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have committed a killing or been charged in one in the United States after returning from combat, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The newspaper said it also logged 349 homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans in the six years since military action began in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. That represents an 89-percent increase over the previous six-year period, the newspaper said.

About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report.

The newspaper said its research involved searching local news reports, examining police, court and military records and interviewing defendants, their lawyers and families, victims' families and military and law enforcement officials. Defense Department representatives did not immediately respond to a telephone message early Sunday. The Times said the military agency declined to comment, saying it could not reproduce the paper's research.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080113/ap_on_re_us/killings_after_combat

Yours is a thoughtful one liner.

This is an extremely lengthy (NINE pages) and detailed article and provides further links. If you really care about this topic, take the time to read the whole thing before posting some glib one line comment. Then provide a substantive commment or further quote which is worth reading, rather than turning this OP into a mega thread with the dozens of repetitive one-liner replies. Recommending this thread is one way to show your concern for this topic.

"Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways, with crumbling marriages, mounting debt, deepening alcohol dependence or more-minor tangles with the law.

But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.

Thirteen of these veterans took their own lives after the killings, and two more were fatally shot by the police. Several more attempted suicide or expressed a death wish, like Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, who told a judge in Montana in 2006, “To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq.”

In some of the cases involving veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that the suspect went to war bears no apparent relationship to the crime committed or to the prosecution and punishment. But in many of the cases, the deployment of the service member invariably becomes a factor of some sort as the legal system, families and communities grapple to make sense of the crimes."

About a third of the victims were girlfriends or relatives, including a 2-year-old girl slain by her 20-year-old father while he was recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq.

A quarter of the victims were military personnel. One was stabbed and set afire by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

soldiers that stabbed and set afire and the victim.

Our soldiers need more mental health care when they return from combat.

What kind of person would want to go to Iraq?

Will most likely NOT blame Bush for what he has done to the US military! I can't WAIT to see how the O'Reillys & Coulters spin this!

pnorman

how dare anyone connect b clinton's blow job with the immorality of the iraq war? there is no comparison!!! you are either a hillary hater or a repubic trying to throw any shit against democrats. not only that how could your mind sink from this tragedy to bill clinton!!!! sick,sick, go home!!!

I think the poster you were flaming agrees with you. Read it again.

"typical MSM hatred of our military and our Commander in Chief in a time of war." Makes me vomit.

Quote:
committed a killing end quote.

The word is homicide.
It isn't a matter of squashing flies or getting rid of rats.

Quote:
About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report. end quote.

Where are the real statisticians?

Quote:
A quarter of the victims were military personnel. One was stabbed and set afire by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq. end quote.

The wise words of a few punks come to mind:
No future for you.

Is the ratio of veterans that commit homicide, to the total number of veterans, higher than the ratio of non-veterans who commit homicide to the total number of non-veterans? If yes, then being a veteran might be a relevant factor.

We train men and women to kill. You place them in hell where they survive by hating and killing..and then this foolish society of ours ignores them and expects them to be sheep herders when they come home.

We get what we deserve. Many are mentally unstable psychotic killers when they return. We have a high price we are going to pay for this war, and it isn't just to China.

Are we paying attention and seeking an effective 'un-conditioning' process for returning soldiers?

In other words, how do you put the genie back in the bottle?

So what if they kill a few Americans. We have to fight them there AND here!

to make us laugh? Amuse us? Have us judge the person you're humiliating, or is this spelling class and you're the professor?
Save it - I will not respond to any reply from you.

... I laughed at India3's post.
:P

Maybe I simply saw it as something to lighten up the depressing subject
rather than an attempt to "humiliate" anyone? Or maybe you need to lighten
up a bit instead and stopping pretending to be "humour monitor"?
:shrug:

No one counts the Iraqis they may have killed.

I haven't read your entire article, but neither have I read that Laurean was ever deployed. It would seem the obvious question, as his case may be highly relevant to this article.

I believe all war to be sin, following the dictum of Alexander Mack. It's not starry-eyed idealism, it's a flinty realism based on actual experience. While warmongers and media toadies swoon over pretty pictures of night sky explosions, and jock-sniffers cream their jeans over sexy fighter jets and their jockeys, there are people, real people, under those bombs. People who are unaware they're being targeted, who can't defend themselves and can't get away.

Behind the rifles and the gunsights and the push-buttons that dispense the bombs are people, real people. The military does its level best, through training, intimidation, humiliation, and even pharmaceuticals, to suppress or extinguish the humanity of the people we send out to kill. But it's an inexact science, and not 100% effective. Out of the thousands of men and women sent out, it's pretty obvious that hundreds, at least, will come back broken by what they've seen and done (thousands more will develop other coping mechanisms, weaving and limping to the sweet release of the grave). All the rah-rah jingoism in the world, all the undying proclamations of faith in the myth of redemptive violence, all the parades, and all the medals aren't always sufficient to break the connection between a person's experiences and their psyche.

The military doesn't comment on the ticking time bombs returned to civilian society. They claim it's because they can't reproduce research. As if they can't count news, police, court and military reports for themselves. No, the military doesn't want to know about it, and they surely don't mention any of it in their recruiting pitch to impressionable 17- and 18-year-olds, immersed as those young persons are in a society that reveres the power of violence as much as our society does. And when those young people return after three or four tours in a combat zone, and don't lay down the lessons so assiduously instilled in them by their military experience, we turn our heads or close our eyes and back away. We don't want to know. Don't bother us with details, just lock 'im up. Poor guy couldn't adjust to civilian life, but it's not the military's fault. It's not our fault. It's his fault, and his alone. He just sort of appeared, killed, and now he'll disappear. There were no antecedents, nothing that could have signaled his appearance beforehand, and even though it happens every time we send men and women off to war, there's no causality, and we refuse to look at or even consider the possibility. The implications are just too monstrous.

And the next time the war drums start to sound, and the killjoys speak up about what happens when we go to war, everyone must say that they are appeasers and starry-eyed idealists who'd rather die or sing kumbaya than confront a mortal and existential danger. Young men love the thrill of combat and old men love that in young men. And so war waits for another spasm to possess our society and be used again by its greatest practitioners.

nt

The military knows the data. As usual it's convenient for them to state that they can't comment. They are so full of shit.

great analysis

The business of the military is, ultimately, the killing of other human beings. Why should anyone be surprised when someone who has been trained to kill can't control the impulse?

Excellent post.

I have to admire your work. Sure could not have been easy. Thank you for helping.

Shouldn't they be on top of this research? I guess they had no further use for them.

"Support the troops", but only if your the opposition.