According to Great Leader Bush, "Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."
Yet a Michigan legal team that went on a fact finding mission in Iraq found that, "... there's tons of acts of torture, abuse, rape" going on in some 25 U.S.-run detention centers in Iraq.
So..., I think we can attribute the "breakdown of morality" in U.S. troops to the combination of a naturally occuring misguided sense of Patriotism "expertly blended" with sheer befuddlement at the utter nonexistence of morality at the highest levels--as much as it being due to a "climate of fear and violence."
One, two, three, four--what are we fighting for...????? History repeats itself...!!!!!

Thanks, Brad; I hadn't realized you were blogging over here as well as at your own site, somehow.

As you may have noticed, I included links to my prior Haditha posts in the one you linked; I expect to go on covering it fairly closely (though not necessarily daily) for some time to come, along with NSA/"Program" stuff, and the rest of my usual mix of coverage of politics, weird science, history, science fiction, technology, and whatever strikes my whim.

Feel free to add me to the blogroll here, if you like (no expectation or obligation, of course). :-) Thanks again for the link.

all the talk of this is greatly disturbing to me. imo, the persons who should be held responsible are george bush and donald rumsfeld. does anyone actually think that these marines would have acted like this had they not been put in this position? i am a former marine and the mother of a marine now serving in iraq. i have always been opposed to the war because it was all based on a lie. now with all of these things happening, abu ghraib, gitmo, falluja and now this, people are starting to think the war was not a good idea. duh! what took you so long. now these kids because they either were following orders from their commanders on the ground or were caught up in the mob mentality and lost it are going to be punished and will have to live with this for the rest of their lives. with the number of troops receiveing post traumatic stress disorder counseling for what they have seen and/or done, they will also be casualties of bush's war. bush and his cabal are ultimately responsible for war crimes even if they were not directly involved. they sent these troops there after they convinced gullible people that saddam was a threat. this is a fake war that thousands of our children will have to suffer real consequences for. itmfa

Oh, I have a feeling the pendulum will come a' swingin' back the other way and those two will get their day to answer for what they've done...