The Guardian ran a piece on it a couple of hours ago, it can be found here. There's also a longer piece available at HP.

The number of hits for a Google news search of "wikileaks" over the last 24h is rather depressing though. I would have thought that in conjugation with the recently admitted fuck-up in Afghanistan, it would make for an interesting read.

There was an excellent article about US Army EODs in Playboy in 2005. Though some of the information is surely outdated by now (we have made some amazing advances in warfare in the last 6 years) it's still worth a read for anyone interested in this aspect of the war.

Here's a link to a censored, reasonably SFW copy of the article: http://www.brownorigin.com/ArmyEODNews/Armyeodonplayboy1.htm

1) Leave Air to Land bombardment to the US Air Force.

2) Poor sportsmanship on the part of a few US Army guys.

3) Use of a military vehicle for recreational use.

4) Spending the tax-payer's money on something immature. That's right, here's one example of how the US Military spends our $540 billion dollars (2010 figure).

*promote my crappy fucking mood

also, i turned my brother onto tim minchin a while back, he's an ex army intelligence officer turned civilian nerd who works for the army. i hope it makes you as happy as it makes me to know that on a joint reserve base in the middle of texas there are drill sargents singing this song to their company in the morning.
the US army loves tim minchin.

Alright. Let's start with a few facts:

- Israel doesn't have the separation of church and state the US has. We study bible since elementary school, we learn a lot about Jewish history and so on.
- There have always been Rabbi in the IDF. Just like there are priests in the US army, the UK army and so on.
- Some Jews pray every morning (Sha'harit, or prayer of dawn) and every evening (Ar'vit, or prayer of evening). Some will put on a Ta'lit and T'filin during that prayer. Those prayers can be performed alone, but when possible, they would prefer to pray in groups of 10 or more, to have what's called a Min'yan.

Now that the scary Jews wrapped in weird shawls rocking back and forth look less intimidating with the cannons in the background, I'll concede a few points:

- Israel is a racist society. There are many ways this is expressed, but it's usually vs Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, which many Israelis regard as the same group.
- There are many "factions" in Judaism, not unlike the differences between Catholics, Protestants, Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons and any other faith that can still call itself Christian. Some of these factions in Judaism will take the bible very literally.
- The population in the settlements is extremely Jewish. They sort of have to be, to want to move to a place you have to hold by force, with the constant threat of being removed from your home by a government treaty. For those who already forgot, read a bit about the Disengagement plan of 2005, where the Israeli Army forcibly removed residents of Jewish settlements in Gaza.

--------------

Now that that's all out of the way, let's move on to the video at hand.

The video says the army is (or, was) "proudly secular". That's quite simply false. Every soldier who wants to can go to prayer every morning, even if it disrupts the normal schedule. Every base has a Rabbi and a synagogue. It's been that way since the IDF came to existence.

The video then goes on to show Rabbi going through a lecture during an officer training course. The video goes as far as calling them an "elite unit" within the IDF. By that logic, since I went through basic training and fired a rifle on about 5 separate occasions, I'm now a part of an elite commando team trained to fix computers behind enemy lines.
There are many courses at the officer training school (called Bahad 1). These men are going through a standard non-combatant officer training. It is required to get any form of officer rank.

The video loves showing you clips where the guys are either handling their rifle, or where the rifle is very visible. That doesn't mean anything regarding the training they receive. I had a rifle for the entire duration of my army training. I took it home every weekend, had to think of where it was all the time, and my greatest worry was "what if someone steals it". If I ever had to shoot it in a real situation, I'd probably drop the clip, get it jammed and throw it at someone before I actually managed to use it to shoot at them. Even if I had, I wouldn't hit anything.

The story of Masada isn't very proud, as far as I'm concerned. Read about it yourself, and make sure you notice the part where they commit mass suicide at the end. Masada in an army context is usually a site where a training course comes near the end of the training. The climb up from one of the sides is physically challenging, and there's a story of a small bunch of Jews standing up to the Roman army at the top. The ending is usually glossed over.

-------------

Now, Cast Lead. The one-year-old atrocity.
I wasn't in the Army at the time, and I don't know anyone who was called for reserve duty for it, so I can't speak from experience on that one. It is surprising to me that the army Rabbi actually went with the combat units into action, and I find it very hard to believe that it was the case with every combat unit. It would simply disrupt their combat operation too greatly to have someone with that little training there. It seems more likely that they went together during the initial entry to Gaza, which was mostly logistical, with very little resistance, and then stayed behind at the actual fighting. Again, though, this is pure speculation on my part.

As for more and more religious Jews joining the army, that's actually a stated goal, not "something the army is ashamed of and is making headlines in Israel". There's a law in place (known as the Tal law) that gave religious Jews an exemption from the three year mandatory army service. This created a great deal of resentment among the secular population, since they're now "carrying the load" for the religious ones.

-----------

That's basically it. The video gets lots of facts right, but some of the contexts wrong. It starts out with the premise that the army wasn't Jewish before, and is becoming Jewish now, and mixes irrelevant pieces of data to "prove" that. I'm just left wondering where the "Shocking news: Hamas is becoming more Islamic, if that was even possible" video.

Disclaimer: I'm an Atheist Jew living in Israel. I served for 3 years in the IDF as a non-combatant.

>> ^raven:
Or he's just been around the US Army long enough to pick up the vocabulary of its rank and file


Definitely be my guess too

Well being Canadian I'm going to have to disagree.
It's not enough to leave people alone. You can't just sit around and let the Taliban or some other group seize power by force. The population needs protection from other forces that would "cut off the head" of the nation.

However, that's not enough either. If you want to build a nation, a major part of your effort needs to go into building schools. An educated public is a public that religous zealot groups cannot feed off of. That will help a country protect itself more than any paper democracy will.

I'm very proud of the job the Canadian Peacekeepers have done so far, and I'd be happy to see the US army take up the cause. Unfortunately building and protection does not sell billion dollar jets filled with hundred thousand dollar missiles, so I don't think that's where the focus will be when the US returns...

Harumph. I still think violence is underrated amongst both the left and right-wings in American politics. Law is the same thing as violence. You can't have a law unless it's backed up by the violence of law enforcement officials. So laws are already a form of violence upon you. And you always have the choice to defend yourself, violently, against violence. The issue is just whether or not you can stay alive or free afterwards.

If you don't like a law, I don't think you should only use non-violent means to overturn it. If you care about overturning that law enough, never take violence off the table. Presidents never take the option of violence off the table when dealing with issues of policy, neither should you.

I guess it makes sense the left-wing is more into the "non-violent" protest stuff. After all, the number of weapons in the hands of US right-wingers, civilian and military, is probably 10x the number that is in the hands of US left-wingers. Not too many people from liberal regions of America rushing to fill the ranks of the NRA or the US Army.

>> ^rougy:
So...what I'm hearing is...some people think that treating Palistinians more harshly will make them stop strapping bombs to themselves? You know, show them who's boss?
I wonder how many Palestinians were killed by the IDF this month?
Wonder how many Israeli's were killed by Palestinians?
Is it a one-to-one ratio? Probably not.
And the settlers? That really is an issue that has to be addressed. To all the world, it just looks like a racist land grab. I'm sorry to say that, but it's hard to describe it any other way.
Shalom.


My point was, that the treatment was not harsh for harshness' sake. The point is to make it impossible for a suicide bomber to be able to strap on a bomb and get inside an Israeli city. If there were no suicide bombers, there would be no wall...

I happen to be one of the vast majority of Israelis who had a friend die to a suicide attack. This isn't a far-away news story to me. This is real life.

I don't have any numbers for you on the Israeli vs Palestinian deaths this month, but what if I did? Do you really think anyone would be content at a one-to-one ratio? Yes, they only have under-equipped, under-manned squads of guerrilla fighters. Is it conceivable to you that any nation with an army wouldn't use it to defend it's own citizens?
Tell me you honestly believe that if a Mexican drug cartel started suicide-bombing San Diego, the US army would stand by and do nothing...

I'm against the settlers and their entire agenda. To me they're a bunch of religious fanatics that only want to do what they think God told them, and that happens to be "Take back all the parts of Israel that aren't part of Israel any more" at the moment.

We evacuated Gush-Katif once (The settlements in Gaza, some of which were whole towns, with shopping centers and all) and we can evacuate the current ones. Not with this government however, since half of the ministers are settlers themselves...

I sincerely hope Netanyahu keeps going with Obama in this direction, but I can't see it happening with the current government. Ah well. Governments last 2-3 years here, so let's hope Livni gets more votes next time...

Hamas is an armed resistance organization born out of 60 years of Israels stance towards the Palestinian people, its a symptom of the policies that were undertaken not some disease that suddenly sprung up against Israel.

You can fret and make all kinds of allegations you want, but neither ETA, IRA or the Tamil Tigers had to fight a resistance campaign within a walled compound, with constant surveillance and over watch by the IDF with its Merkava tanks, Apache helicopters, and uniformed forces funded by the US army. A better example would be the Algerian resistance campaign.

Am not here to advocate for them but to explain their side. Because all you do is justify Israels unilateral military actions against the Palestinians as a whole. Look the onus is on you to justify the numerous deaths and destruction the IDF has unilaterally applied to all Palestinians. Not on me to explain why Israel policy has forced the existence of groups like Hamas and Hezboallah to take up arms in a guerrilla conflict.

This reminds me of the videos of people who used their shoes to bang on Saddam's pictures and statues when the US army arrived in Baghdad.

There's no real concrete evidence, and its you tube.


Democratic underground points to this man as the soldier int he video.


http://www.videosift.com/video/Soldier-From-The-Recent-Atrocious-US-Army-Soldier-On-Sift

This is no the same guy, in the video here. The accents are different, and the guy in the video here is Caucasian.

It is Unfortunate that these videos seem to be fake. However i cannot find sufficient proof other than Infowars and a handful of other partisan independent news groups.

True. Who is more at fault though? The Iraqis who can't do a jumping jack; or the US army who assumed it would be easy, despite cultural gaps as fundamental as this one, to occupy and win over a country?

Hilarious vid with great replay value... watch each one: they've all got their own version!

10 to 1 odds he didn't go in to enlist.

If he disapproves our next president so much, why is he insinuating that he would be willing to serve under the president in the US Army???

Oh, and the video sucked ass too (not even in a good way).

Headline from Democracy Now!, Sept 22, 2008:

"Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds."