Infinite Unknown

US military’s most prolific sniper wrote bestselling memoir on his four tours in Iraq and was known for helping veterans with PTSD

Chris Kyle and fellow war veteran Chad Littlefield were killed Saturday afternoon. Photograph: Paul Moseley/AP

- Former Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle shot dead at Texas gun range (Guardian, Feb 3, 2013):

A former Navy Seal who went on to write a bestselling book chronicling his life as the US’s most prolific marksman has been shot dead at a gun range in Texas.

Police said Sunday that the body of Chris Kyle was found by officers responding to an incident at the Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose the previous evening. Chad Littlefield, a 35-year-old friend of the war veteran and author, was also killed at the scene.

In a statement, Sergeant Lonny Haschel said Eddie Ray Routh, 25, of Lancaster, had been charged with two counts of murder in relation to the double shooting. The alleged gunman was found at his home just hours after the shooting, having earlier fled the gun range in a pick-up truck, it is claimed.

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Tags: Chad Littlefield, Chris Kyle, Crime, Government, Jesse Ventura, Military, Navy Seals, PTSD, Society, Special Forces, U.S., Veterans

- ‘Super soldiers’: The quest for the ultimate human killing machine (Independent, Nov. 17, 2011):

Guilt, tiredness, stress, shock – can specialised drugs help to mute the qualities that make soldiers human, asks Michael Hanlon?

The ancient Spartans believed that battlefield training began at birth. Those who failed the first round of selection, which took place at the ripe old age of 48 hours, were left at the foot of a mountain to die. The survivors would, in years to come, often wonder if these rejects were the lucky ones. Because to harden them up, putative Spartan warriors were subjected to a vigorous regime involving unending physical violence, severe cold, a lack of sleep and constant sexual abuse.

As with the English public schools, which used similar tactics to produce the warriors who carved out the British Empire, the Spartan regime worked; the alumni were the most feared soldiers in the eastern Mediterranean. And ever since then, military chiefs have wondered whether it may be possible to short-cut the long and demanding Spartan regime to produce a soldier who kills without care or remorse, shows no fear, can fight battle after battle without fatigue and generally behave more like a machine than a man.

In the post-war era, the future of fighting was thought to be about tanks and missiles, large impersonal machines that would fight huge battles over the open terrain of Northern Europe. The soldiers would be pressing buttons in a command centre. But despite the advent of drone aircraft, much of 21st-century warfare is turning out to be a drawn-out, messy business, fought on a human scale in the mud and dust of Afghanistan. And fought against a mercurial army of irregulars who melt away into the fields and farms once the skirmish is over. Modern soldiers are not the cannon fodder of before. Highly trained and super fit, each one represents a huge investment by the nation that sends them into battle. A soldier who is too tired to fight effectively, who has gone mad or who is suffering from severe stress is like a broken-down tank, no use to anybody. What if soldiers could be made that did not break down?

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Tags: Alumni, Coca leaves, Drugs, Global News, Government, Health, Military, Mind-Control, Modafinil, Neuroscience, Politics, PTSD, Science, Society, Sparta, Technology, TMS, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, U.S., War

First fluoridate the drinking water like the Nazis and the Russians did in the concentration camps and gulags to make the prisoners docile and infertile and give the people antidepressants with fluoride as main ingredient like Prozac, then further chemically lobotomize them with even more drugs and vaccines and all is (Or)well in 1984.

More information on fluoride below the following article.

(NaturalNews) Drug researchers are working on a mind-altering chemical that could erase your memories. It’s all being pursued under the umbrella of “mental health” with claims that this could help victims of emotional trauma. The idea that you can “heal” a patient by chemically lobotomizing them is, of course, entirely consistent with the core mythology of modern medicine: If something’s wrong, you should poison it, burn it, irradiate it or cut it out… and then pronounce the patient “healed!”

In the case of memory-erasing drugs, scientists are reportedly working on a drug that would remove certain proteins from the brain’s “fear center.” This is based on the ludicrous idea, by the way, that memories are recorded solely by physical proteins in the brain — an idea that’s obviously based on an entirely outmoded mechanistic model of the human mind and brain.

Then again, modern medical science seems to be hopelessly stuck in the Dark Ages, believing that there must be a chemical cure for everything. Hence the ongoing waste of billions of dollars searching for a cancer cure as if it were some sort of acquired infection.

“Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” said Kate Farinholt, executive director of the mental health support and information group NAMI Maryland, in a Baltimore Sun story (http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/…). But even she can see this approach could be fraught with danger: “Completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences?”

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Tags: Antidepressants, Brain, Drugs, Global News, Health, Memory, Neuroscience, PTSD, Science, Society

Ecstasy destroys the liver and the brain!

A pair of psychiatric experts think they’ve got the answer to the soaring number of troops coming back from war with PTSD: have them undergo intensive psychotherapy – while they’re rolling on ecstasy.

Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Anne Mithoefer, a psychiatric nurse, are the South Carolina pair who’ve been spearheading research into ecstasy, known clinically as MDMA, since 2000. After one successful study on 21 PTSD patients between 2004 and 2008, they’ve now received the final okay from FDA and DEA officials to start a study entirely devoted to former military service members.

“My sense is that, especially after we published the results of the first study, these institutions are more open to the idea,” Dr. Michael Mithoefer tells Danger Room. “Obviously, this is still new and experimental, and it can take time to get through to big institutions.”

With $500,000 in funding from MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), the two are recruiting 16 veterans – they’re hoping for a 50-50 split between men and women, and want most of the participants to have been diagnosed within the last 10 years.

“These will mostly be veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan, because longer duration of PTSD means more complicating factors,” Dr. Mithoefer says, adding that he does anticipate enrolling 4 vets from earlier wars and is still accepting applications.

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Tags: DEA, Drugs, Ecstasy, FDA, Global News, Government, Health, Medicine, Military, PTSD, Science, Soldiers, U.S.

What a wonderful world!

The development of a drug that controls a chemical used to form memories sparked heady scientific and philosophical speculation this week.

Granted, the drug has only been tested in rats, but other memory-blunting drugs are being tried in soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now.

Some think this represents an opportunity to eliminate the crippling psychic effects of past trauma. Others see an ill-advised chemical intrusion into an essential human facility that threatens to replace our ability to understand and cope with life’s inevitabilities.

Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg spoke with Wired.com about the future of memory-editing drugs. In some ways, said Sandberg, our memories are already being altered. We just don’t realize it.

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Tags: Brain, Drugs, Health, Military, Neuroscience, New World Order, PTSD, Science

(NaturalNews) The post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) coordinator for a Texas veterans hospital sent an email to facility staff suggesting that they stop diagnosing returning Afghanistan and Iraq veterans with PTSD.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” wrote psychologist Norma J. Perez in an email to the staff of the Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Texas.

Saying that Veterans Affairs (VA) staffers “really don’t … have the time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez suggested that they should instead “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

Veterans diagnosed with Adjustment Disorder receive significantly less in the way of disability and health care benefits than those diagnosed with PTSD. An estimated 300,000 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans are currently suffering from either PTSD or severe depression, according to a recent report by the Rand Corp.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Health, Iraq, Military, Politics, PTSD, U.S., Veterans

“…the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all wars.” Source: Military suicide rate increased again

“Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 took psychotropic drugs — overwhelmingly, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft.”
Source: America’s Medicated Army

Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, 26, from Mt. Sinai, N.Y., carries a young Iraqi boy who was injured during a heavy battle between the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment and Iraqi forces in this March 25, 2003 file photo near Al Faysaliyah, Iraq. Dwyer died of an accidental overdose after struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for almost five years.

WASHINGTON – More than 22,000 veterans have sought help from a special suicide hot line in its first year, and 1,221 suicides have been averted, the government says.

According to a recent RAND Corp. study, roughly one in five soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, putting them at a higher risk for suicide. Researchers at Portland State University found that male veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide than men who are not veterans.

This month, a former Army medic, Joseph Dwyer, who was shown in a Military Times photograph running through a battle zone carrying an Iraqi boy, died of an accidental overdose after struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for almost five years.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Government, Gulf War Syndrome, Iraq, Military, PTSD, Soldiers, Suicide, U.S., Veterans, War

At a recent conference for some of the area’s leading neurologists, San Francisco physicist Norbert Schuff captured his colleagues’ attention when he presented colorful brain images of U.S. soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The yellow areas, Schuff explained during his presentation at the city’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, showed where the hippocampus, which plays major roles in short-term memory and emotions, had atrophied. The red swatches marked hyperfusion – increased blood flow – in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for conflict resolution and decision-making. Compared with a soldier without the affliction, the PTSD brain had lost 5 to 10 percent of its gray matter volume, indicating yet more neuron damage.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Brain, Defense Department, DNA, Health, Hippocampus, Insomnia, Iraq, Military, Neuroscience, Nightmares, PTSD, Science, sleep, Soldiers, U.S., Veterans, War

Added: July 18, 2008

Source: YouTube

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Tags: Cancer, Gulf War Syndrome, Iraq, Military, PTSD, U.S., Uranium

There are two kinds of courage in war – physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is very common on the battlefield. Men and women on both sides risk their lives, place their own bodies in harm’s way. Moral courage, however, is quite rare.

According to Chris Hedges, the brilliant New York Times war correspondent who survived wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, “I rarely saw moral courage. Moral courage is harder. It requires the bearer to walk away from the warm embrace of comradeship and denounce the myth of war as a fraud, to name it as an enterprise of death and immorality, to condemn himself, and those around him, as killers. It requires the bearer to become an outcast. There are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation.”

More and more U.S. soldiers and Marines, at great cost to their own careers and reputations, are speaking publicly about U.S. atrocities in Iraq, even about the cowardice of their own commanders, who send youth into atrocity-producing situations only to hide from the consequences of their own orders.

In 2007, two brilliant war memoirs – ROAD FROM AR RAMADI by Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, and THE SUTRAS OF ABU GHRAIB by Army Reservist Aidan Delgado – appeared in print. In March 2008, at the Winter Soldier investigation just outside Washington D.C., hard-core U.S. Iraqi veterans, some shaking at the podium, some in tears, unburdened their souls.

Jon Michael Turner described the horrific incident in which, on April 28, 2008, he shot an Iraqi boy in front of his father. His commanding officer congratulated him for “the kill.” To a stunned audience, Turner presented a photo of the boy’s skull, and said: “I am sorry for the hate and destruction I have inflicted on innocent people.”

The Winter Soldier investigation was followed by the publication of COLLATERAL DAMAGE: AMERICA’S WAR AGAINST IRAQI CIVILIANS, by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. Based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Iraqi combat veterans, this pioneering work on the catastrophe in Iraq includes the largest number of eyewitness accounts from U.S. military personnel on record.

The Courage to Resist

We cannot understand the psychological and moral significance of military resistance unless we recognize the social forces that stifle conscience and human individuality in military life. Gwen Dyer, historian of war, writes that ordinarily, “Men will kill under compulsion. Men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply.” “Only exceptional people resist atrocity,” writes psychiatrist Robert Lifton.

How much easier it is to surrender to the will of superiors, to merge into the anonymity of the group. It takes uncommon courage to resist military powers of intimidation, peer pressure, and the atmosphere of racism and hate that drives all imperial wars.

Silencing the Witnesses to War

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Tags: Abu Ghraib, Government, Gulf War Syndrome, Iraq, Military, PTSD, Soldiers, U.S., Veterans, War, War Crimes