Thursday, November 10, 2011
American Free Press
By Peter Papaherakles -
For the second year in a row, more U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide than died in battle, according to recent statistics released by the Pentagon. This is an unprecedented trend that has the military’s top brass as well as the White House looking for answers.
“If you know the one thing that causes people to commit suicide, please let us know, because we don’t know,” Gen. Peter Chiarelli told Army Times.
Specifically, 468 soldiers have taken their own lives this year versus 462 who were killed in combat.
The problem is, many soldiers coming home from war suffer a variety of psychological problems caused by multiple tours of duty in the Middle East. They have been diagnosed with deep depression, substance abuse, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder.
To this cornucopia of psychological afflictions, several causes have been attributed.
There is the trauma of seeing a friend blown to pieces in front of your eyes or being forced to kill innocent people that have done absolutely nothing to you.
There is also an increasing number of violent street-gang members, criminals and homosexuals enlisting in the military as recruiters continue to lower their standards in what has become the biggest “growth industry” in today’s economy.
The government has always depended on propaganda in order to give troops the incentive to kill the enemy. That job is rendered easier when foreign nations attack one’s own country. The objectives are much clearer when troops believe they are fighting to defend their country and family from invaders or a foreign oppressor. Suicide among the troops wasn’t a problem in the War of Independence or the War of 1812. During WWII, few suicides were reported, due to the perception that foreign enemies had attacked us first at Pearl Harbor (hardly anyone realized, at the time, that the Japanese had deliberately been set up by FDR).
Selling the war became harder in Vietnam where our soldiers were asked to kill “the yellow man” simply for an ideology.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the problem is much bigger because both wars are based on multiple, blatant lies. More and more Americans today reject the lies told about 9-11 and are seeing it as an inside/Mossad job. In Afghanistan, the enigmatic Osama bin Laden—the supposed culprit whose capture was said to be the objective of our invasion—has already “died” at least twice, but months or years later the U.S. military continues to fight in that country for no clear reason. The U.S. invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, while thousands of our own boys died, under the pretense that weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States.
Even the least philosophical soldier has to wonder why his best friends were killed in a never-ending, meaningless, illegal and no-win war.
Instead of chasing psychobabble phantoms in therapy sessions with traumatized GIs, the top brass should be looking for ways to bring the troops home immediately. That could solve the growing suicide problem.
——
Peter Papaherakles, a U.S. citizen for more than 35 years, was born in Greece. He is AFP’s outreach director. If you would like to see AFP speakers at your rally, contact Pete at 202-544-5977.
Labels: American Free Press, military, suicide
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Increase in U.S. Army National Guard and Reserves Suicides
An increase in suicides among National Guard soldiers largely in states across the Midwest — such as Missouri and Wisconsin — is responsible for a 24% increase in Army suicides last year, the service reported Wednesday.
Missouri and Texas each reported seven suicides among their National Guard troops in 2010, Wisconsin had six, and there were five each in the National Guard units of Minnesota, Ohio, Arizona, California and North Carolina...
[Full Article]Hood, Army suicides hit record mark
...The Fort Hood mark is a new record for the post and contributed to the Army’s worst year for suicides. There was, however, a sign of hope in the grim tally. Slightly fewer active-duty soldiers died by their own hand compared with 2009. But there was bad news, too: The number of suicides in the National Guard and Army Reserve rose sharply.
The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told the San Antonio Express-News that suicides at or near Fort Hood have increased as more soldiers have returned from combat.
Fort Hood’s 22 confirmed suicides, meanwhile, doubled its 2009 mark and was eight more than Fort Bragg, N.C., which had the second-largest tally...
[Full Article]Labels: suicide, U.S. Army, US Army
Monday, October 18, 2010
Labels: clinic, Dignitas, suicide, Switzerland
Thursday, September 30, 2010
(CNN) -- Four soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas died over the week. In all four cases, it appears the soldiers, all decorated veterans from the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, took their own lives, according to Christopher Haug, a Fort Hood spokesman.
If confirmed as suicides, it would be on top of 14 other suicides on the base this year. Base officials called a news conference for Wednesday afternoon to discuss the problem of suicides at the huge base in central Texas...
[Full Article]Labels: Army, Fort Hood, suicide, U.S. Army
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Task Force Reports that Prevention Programs Lacked Strategic Planning when Formed; Report Makes 76 Recommendations
(AP) Rushing to stem historically high rates of military suicides, the service branches set up prevention programs that lacked strategic planning and so don't work as well as they could, a report said Tuesday.
The Pentagon should create a new high-level office to set strategy and coordinate prevention programs across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, said a task force report ordered by Congress last year...
[Full Article]
Friday, July 16, 2010
Soldiers killed themselves at the rate of one per day in June making it the worst month on record for Army suicides, the service said Thursday.
There were 32 confirmed or suspected suicides among soldiers in June, including 21 among active-duty troops and 11 among National Guard or Reserve forces, according to Army statistics.
Seven soldiers killed themselves while in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan in June, according to the statistics. Of the total suicides, 22 soldiers had been in combat, including 10 who had deployed two to four times.
"The hypothesis is the same that many have heard me say before: continued stress on the force, said Army Col. Christopher Philbrick, director of the Army Suicide Prevention Task Force. He pointed out that the Army has been fighting for nine years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last year was the Army's worst for suicides with 244 confirmed or suspected cases...
[Full Article]
Thursday, May 27, 2010
SHANGHAI: Protesters have made a traditional Chinese funeral offering to the dead at the headquarters of Foxconn, the makers of Apple's iPad, after the 11th suicide attempt - nine of them successful - at the company's factories so far this year.
Li Hai, a 19-year-old man from Hunan province, fell to his death from the roof of a dormitory building at Foxconn's Longhua factory on Tuesday, leaving the world's largest electronics manufacturer in crisis.
The spate of suicides at Foxconn has highlighted concerns over working conditions inside the giant Longhua factory, where 300,000 workers assemble goods for clients including Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Dell and Nokia. The death comes as Apple, which has not commented, prepares to launch the iPad in Australia...
The massive Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is known for assembling famous electronic goods like Apple's iPhone and iPad. But in recent months it has gained a darker image, as a place where distraught workers regularly throw themselves to their deaths. The latest fatality came on Tuesday morning, when a 19-year-old employee died in a fall in the company's Shenzhen compound, according to the state-run Xinhua news service. He was the ninth worker this year to have died in a fall from factory buildings on Foxconn's properties in Shenzhen; two have survived suicide attempts, according to state-media reports. Another teenager, who the company revealed this month died after jumping from a company building in Hebei province in January, brings the total employee death toll from falls to 10 this year.
The string of deaths has drawn attention to the labor practices of a highly successful Fortune 500 company that has 420,000 workers on its payroll in Shenzhen alone. Two dozen activists protested outside the company's Hong Kong offices on Tuesday, calling on Foxconn to improve working conditions and raise wages. The Taiwan-owned company, which is an arm of the Hon Hai Group, has defended the treatment of its workers. "A lot of things cannot be said at this point, but we are quietly doing our job," CEO Terry Gou told a business forum on Monday. With over 900,000 employees globally in the Hon Hai Group, Gou acknowledged the difficulties of employee management. "But," he said, "we are confident we will get things under control shortly." (See portraits of Chinese workers.)
Working conditions at Foxconn's factories have been under scrutiny for years. The attention was heightened in 2009 when 25-year-old employee Sun Danyong, who had been accused by management of losing an iPhone prototype, jumped to his death from his apartment in Shenzhen. Chinese press reports said Sun, who grew up in a poor village in Yunnan province and attended the top-rated Harbin Institute of Technology, might have been physically abused by company security guards searching for the missing device...
Labels: Foxconn, iPad, iPhone, suicide
Sunday, April 25, 2010
An average of 18 veterans kills themselves each day, according to new statistics from the Department of Veterans Affairs, revealing the serious problem the nation has with caring for those coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.
Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1254619/Baby-girl-survives-shot-chest-parents-global-warming-suicide-pact.html#ixzz0h3GGAEoR
Labels: Argentina, global warming, suicide
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
(CBS/AP) The suicide rate among 18- to 29-year-old men who've left the military has gone up significantly, the government said Monday.
CBS News first revealed that young veterans in their early 20’s were killing themselves at an unusually high rate back in late 2007. Using never-before-seen 2004 and 2005 data, CBS News discovered that the rate of suicide among young veterans was an estimated two to four times higher than any other age group...
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