“I wanted to be that soldier, that hero. So I went, and realized…that there was no enemy. The only terrorists when I was in Iraq was us.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnF5X7xF8zc&list=LLMrtmlGa8nBac2MrmDMtugw&feature=player_detailpage#t=2672s

Another part of the video, with the close-up photos of the wounded children in the van that was shot up in the “Collateral Murder” video, was also heart-wrenching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnF5X7xF8zc&feature=player_detailpage&list=LLMrtmlGa8nBac2MrmDMtugw#t=2252s

According to McCord, he had seen far worse incidents of the slaughter of children than this, along with unfathomable callousness on the part of some of his fellow soldiers in regards to the children. In the end, McCord and two other soldiers featured in the video couldn’t take it any longer. For anyone with a scintilla of compassion, empathy, and conscience, these incidents, along with the heartlessness of some of their fellow soldiers (like the Sergeant Shirfield who McCord describes), just eats them up alive from the inside.

McCord’s statement about having witnessed far worse incidents than that recorded in the “Collateral Murder” video is consistent with Manning’s testimony to the court-martial court. Manning’s testimony was recorded and released to the press illegally, because the judge conducting the tribunal had ordered Manning’s testimony to remian secret. Manning testified that he gave Wikileaks another video that showed an incident even more disturbing than the “Collateral Murder” video from Iraq. Of the Iraqi “Collateral Murder” video, Manning said he was alarmed by the pilots’ “delightful blood lust” in the video as they conducted an air strike that killed 12 innocent Iraquis and wounded two children. Afterwards, Manning said in his testimony to the court, the pilots congratulated each other on their ability to kill and maim people so effortlessly.

Manning testified the other video showed an airstrike in the Garani Village in Farah Province, northwestern Afghanistan. In it between 100 and 150 civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered by a US aerial weapons team. He said that the incident was similar to that shown in the “Collateral Murder” video, but it was “even more disturbing” than the Iraqi event.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/12/daniel_ellsberg_in_hearing_bradley_manning

We seem to have come full circle back to the Vietnam era. As Martin Luther King put it: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

“There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press,” King continues, “that will praise you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There’s something wrong with that press!”