Programmed to Kill

©SpokesmanReview

Killing machine.

Having returned from Afghanistan in March of 2002, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves fatally shoots his wife then himself. Eighteen days later, on June 29, Master Sgt. William Wright, having returned the month before, strangles his wife to death. On July 9, Sgt. Cedric Griffin (who had yet to be deployed) stabs his wife to death. Ten days later, Sgt. 1st Class Brandon S. Floyd and his wife, Andrea, are found shot to death; another murder-suicide. All were stationed at Fort Bragg.

In July of the next year, at Fort Benning, Pvt. Jacob Burgoyne, whom base records had listed as "homicidal/suicidal" and diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), shoots Spc. Richard Davis to death. After seeing Noah P. Gamez stealing an ice chest from his Jeep, Spc. Kyle Edward Williams, 21, fires six shots into the man before also killing himself.

In early 2004, a US paratrooper who had raped a woman in Italy is given a light sentence because "the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others." James Kevin Pitts, after returning from Iraq in March, drowns his girlfriend. In April, Andrew Hallet, after serving a 6 month term in Iraq, is arrested for shooting at a police officer. In May, veteran Matthew James Denni kills his girlfriend and puts her body in the trunk of his car. In the latter half of 2004, a 35-year old Fort Riley, KS Army soldier back from Iraq is charged with 9 felony counts of forcible rape, sodomy, assault and unlawful use of a weapon.

Iraq vet Allen Gregg is sentenced to 21 years for the murder James Fallis. Spc. Pierre M. Cole ("the seventh Fort Riley soldier arrested in connection with a slaying in recent months") fatally shoots James Jung. 19-year-old Marine vet Andres Raya kills two police officers. A 30-year old vet kills his ex-girlfriend and her sister.

Spc. Brandon Bare, having returned in April 2005, kills his wife (stabbing her 71 times), as does Pfc. Stephen S. Sherwood, who then turns his gun on himself. Iraq vet Brandon Craddock, in August 2006, is charged with the attempted murder of his wife. And more recently, Iraq vet Zackary Bowen killed his New Orleans girlfriend, dismembered her, and cooked her flesh before killing himself.

This is just a sampling of the reported cases involving Afghanistan and Iraq war vets charged with murder, rape, child abuse, beatings, and assault, not to mention the hundreds who have committed suicide. What is obvious about many of these cases (and countless others) is the prevalence of PTSD. While 19% of Vietnam vets returned with the disorder, one third of Iraq vets suffer from PTSD.

A new study published by the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that mental health disorders or psychosocial ills have hit a third of the US soldiers that have returned from Afghanistan or Iraq.

The study shows that a third of all US soldiers returning from the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq have received treatments from the Veterans Affairs between 2001 and 2005 for mental illnesses or other psychosocial disorders.

However, many of those suffering are not getting the treatment they require. Thousands of British troops are going AWOL because of this.

Thousands of British soldiers have gone absent without leave since 2003 because the Army is unwilling to accept the gravity of mental problems caused by their tours in Iraq.

The Ministry of Defence estimates there have been 10,000 Awol incidents since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1,100 servicemen are currently "on the run" from the Army. ...

"As the nightmares and the flashbacks got worse, and I felt myself sinking lower, I reported to officers I was having problems dealing with what I'd experienced. Their response was to laugh at me. It's played down. Any serious issue is always laughed off. They think you're taking the mick. They just don't want to have to deal with it.''

Richard Livingston, a soldier who attempted to take his own life, said: "When I got in touch with the medical team, they put me through to a community psychiatric nurse. Once they found out about my suicide attempts and cutting myself they still sat and said, you're fit to go back to the Army as soon as possible."

While PTSD is certainly part of the problem, there are other possible factors contributing to this particular phenomenon. First of all, we do not know for certain which of the murders and murder/suicides were actually committed by the soldiers in question. It is conceivable that some have been framed, or are victims of double homicide. Perhaps the soldiers in question knew something they should not, or in some other way compromised so-called "national security" with their knowledge of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. While this is a very real possibility, given the sheer amount of cases, and their striking similarities, there is probably more to the story.

Consider the following from Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology:

When American soldiers returned from North Vietnamese prison camps, many of them proved to have been subjected to indoctrination and other methods of influencing by pathological [i.e. psychopathic] material. A certain degree of transpersonification [i.e. the effect on the mind and personality of persons with certain inherited or acquired psychopathologies] appeared in many of these. In the U.S.A. this was called "programming" and outstanding psychotherapists proceeded to effect therapy for the purpose of deprogramming them. It turned out that they met with opposition and critical commentary concerning their skills, among other things. When I heard about this, I breathed a deep sigh and thought: Dear God, what interesting work that would make for a psychotherapist who understands such matters well.

The pathocratic world, the world of pathological egotism and terror, is so difficult to understand for people raised outside the scope of this phenomenon that they often manifest childlike naiveté, even if they have studied psychopathology and are psychologists by profession. ...

I would here like to remind psychologists that these kinds of experiences and their destructive effects upon the human personality are not unknown to scientific practice and experience. We often meet with patients requiring appropriate assistance: individuals raised under the influence of pathological, especially psychopathic, personalities who were forced with a pathological egotism to accept an abnormal way of thinking. Even an approximate determination of the type of pathological factors which operated on him allow us to pinpoint psychotherapeutic measures. ...

Regardless of the social scale within which human individuals were forcibly reared by pathological persons, whether individual, group, societal, or macrosocial, the principles of psychotherapeutic action will thus be similar, and should be based upon data known to us, and an understanding of the psychological situation. Making a patient aware of the kind of pathological factors which affected him, and jointly understanding the results of such effects, is basic to such therapy. We do not utilize this method if, in an individual case, we have indications that the patient has inherited this factor. However, such limitations should not be consistent with regard to macrosocial phenomena affecting the welfare of entire nations....

Those people [under a psychopathic regime] who initially found the original ideology attractive eventually come to the realization that they are in fact dealing with something else that has taken its place under the old name. The disillusionment experienced by such former ideological adherents is bitter in the extreme. Thus, the pathological minority's attempts to retain power will be threatened by the society of normal people, whose criticism keeps growing.

Therefore, to mitigate the threat to their power, the pathocrats must employ any and all methods of terror and exterminatory policies [including war] against individuals known for their patriotic feelings and military training; other, specific "indoctrination" activities ... are also utilized. Individuals lacking the natural feeling of being linked to normal society become irreplaceable in either of these activities. Again, the foreground of this type of activity is occupied by cases of essential psychopathy, followed by those with similar anomalies, and finally by people alienated from the society in question as a result of racial or national differences.

In other words, in a country run by psychopaths, (whether overtly or covertly), patriotic men and women of conscience must be killed or otherwise neutralized. And there are numerous ways to do so. War thus serves a dual purpose for pathocrats. Not only does it eliminate foreign enemies, it helps eliminate portions of their own population who may pose a threat to their power. Thankfully for those in power, thousands of troops are killed or wounded in combat, and thousands, suffering from PTSD and/or "Gulf War Syndrome", lose the ability to function in society.

[Individuals exposed to certain endogenous toxins and viruses] progressively tend to lose their emotional color and their ability to intuit a psychological situation. They retain their intellectual functions but become praise-craving egocentrics, easily ruled by people who know how to take advantage of this. They become indifferent to other people's feelings and the harm they are inflicting upon them; any criticism of their own person or behavior is repaid with a vengeance. Such a change of character in a person who until recently enjoyed respect on the part of his environment or community, which perseveres in human minds, becomes a pathological phenomenon causing often tragic results.

Consider that endogenous toxins include heavy metals like mercury, pesticides, food additives, and industrial and household chemicals and we begin to see the scope of the problem: a small minority of psychopathic individuals is using every means at its disposal (or at least taking advantage of already existing conditions) to kill our consciences.

Soldiers are not receiving the care they need because they are a success. Those who come home to kill their families and themselves are behaving as planned. They are programmed to kill, and when they do, it only serves the pathocrats' interests: the population becomes more hysterical and more divided.

Similarly, the Iraq war is NOT a failure. It is progressing exactly as planned. Hundreds of thousands are dead and Israel is close to receiving its long-held wish: an Iraq dismembered into three weakened states. There is absolute chaos. And this is the way they want it.

Published on Signs of the Times.