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Full details on my tech blog.

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Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones says he is tormented by two memories of Nov. 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq.

The first is of the body of his best friend and fellow Marine blown apart just after dawn by a roadside bomb. The second is of the lifeless form of a small Iraqi girl, one of two dozen unarmed civilians allegedly killed by members of his Camp Pendleton unit — Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.

He’s at home now, suffering from PTSD, says he was not one of those being investigated., helped in the cleanup and took photos with his cell camera.

When he came back he said he dropped his Olympus 3.2 megapixel camera by the unmanned Sparta base command operations center. When he returned a few hours later he said it looked like the camera had been moved so he assumed someone had downloaded the pictures and he erased them all.

But whether the photos ever reached authorities, who also have pictures from an intelligence investigation team and another source, is not clear.

I find that part odd. The camera contained evidence. Yet there was no check-in procedure for it, and he just assumed the photos had been downloaded and took the camera back?

What happened at Haditha, friends and family say, made him crazy, and 36 hours after returning home, he stole a truck, crashed it drunk, left the scene, resisted arrest, and is now out on $35,000 bail.

[His mother] said she is angry at what she described as the Marines’ failure to adequately “decompress” him and other Marines when they come home from combat. She said she was writing a book to help other families avoid what she and her son are going through.

“I used to be one of those Marines who said that post-traumatic stress is a bunch of bull,” said Ryan Briones, who has prescriptions for anti-depressants and sleeping pills. “But all this stuff that keeps going through my head is eating me up. I need immediate help.”

Briones, of course, is responsible for his own actions. However, as Sue says, no one ever recovers from war - most especially not from atrocities like Haditha.

Someone I know who was caught in a war zone overnight a few years returned to the States, couldn’t sleep, was anxious. He went to his M.D., who said you have PTSD and recommended a therapy group. He went, it was mostly Vietnam vets, and they accepted him completely. He’s fine now. His PTSD was ‘minor’ compared to what Briones (and thousands of other Iraq War vets) must be going through. Well, it wasn’t minor to him, but still, he didn’t have to see toddlers and moms who had been executed in cold blood.

The psychological damage from this war will haunt us for decades to come. It reminds of the Steve Earle line about a Vietnam Vet, “and I wake up screaming like I’m back over there.”

How many more?

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Witnesses said American soldiers fired on Afghans throwing stones at them after the crash, though the United States military said only that warning shots had been fired in the air.
…
It became clear the American military and the Afghan police and army had used their weapons to try to disperse the crowds. Scores of people were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds.

If you’re being attacked by a furious mob that is throwing stones at you, most would say you have the right to shoot in self-defense. So why doesn’t the Pentagon just say that, rather than have the truth seep out later anyway and be caught yet again in lies.

Also, what was the nature of the “mechanical failure” that led to the crash? No report on that anywhere yet.

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When cities hire firms to run utilities, they seek quality at lower cost. They may get ethics scandals, violations and irate consumers.

In some places, private-sector management helped trim bureaucracies and replace decaying infrastructure, local officials say. But in Indianapolis, New Orleans, Atlanta and other cities, privatization has been accompanied by corruption scandals, environmental violations and a torrent of customer complaints.

In Atlanta, residents began complaining of brown, brackish drinking water soon after the French company Suez and a subsidiary began running the water system under a $428-million, 20-year contract.

In New Orleans, officials blamed a subsidiary of Veolia Environnement, another French company, for illegally discharging sewage into the Mississippi River on dozens of occasions.

In Milwaukee, a Suez subsidiary caused 107 million gallons of untreated sewage to be discharged into streams and Lake Michigan, a 2002 state audit found.

The article details many more such instances. Water is too precious and too basic a human right to be turned over the private industry, whose primary goal is maximizing profit for themselves and shareholders. Water should stay public.

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