US Marine Corps Soul Searching After 'Urinating' Video

From ABC News:

The U.S. Marine Corps is launching an internal investigation into the culture of the Corps in response to a video that purportedly shows troops urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters, a Marine official told ABC News today.

The probe will attempt to answer the question "What happened in the Marine Corps that this happened?" according to the official.

"It'll be a holistic look at everything surrounding this issue," he said.

USMC Commandant Gen. Jim Amos first announced an internal "preliminary" probe Thursday, saying the video showed behavior "wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history."

The video, which surfaced online Wednesday, appears to show four men in uniform looking around before urinating on three dead bodies. At least one of the men chuckles as they do so.

"Have a great day, buddy," one of the men is heard saying, apparently to a dead body.

More here.

A couple of observations.

First, it's looking like the Marine Corps, the DOD, and the government in general are doing the right thing here, condemning this desecration across the board, tracking down the Marines responsible, and trying to figure out how the culture of our military could collapse so profoundly. But I'll tell you, there's really no mystery for that last bit: this is obviously part of the overall erosion in the moral values of our armed forces, begun at the top, and then filtering down through the ranks, during the Bush years. It is not a coincidence that the urinating video looks so much like the sexual humiliation photos coming out of Abu Ghraib back in 2004. That is, such "isolated incidents" have been policy for nearly a decade, and it appears that Obama's people haven't done nearly enough, if anything at all, to reverse this slide into barbarity.

Second, crazy conservative pundits have already come out of the shadows to defend what is morally indefensible: it is apparently desirable to desecrate the corpses of our enemies because...well...because that's what they get for opposing America or something to that effect. As if killing them wasn't enough. Frankly, I don't think these truly evil statements really need much of a rebuttal. If you think it's necessary to piss on the bodies of the people you've just killed in war, then you are morally a lost cause. That is, there is no debate to be had with such heinous people. They're reprehensible scum, and, no surprise here, the same kind of people who have been screaming in support of torturing POWs for years now. Fuck them all.

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