Military target from the nation’s top Navy SEAL training facility in Virginia. (Photo: Hyunsoo Leo Kim/Virginian-Pilot)
Until last week the “crown jewel of America’s military bases” used cardboard cutouts of veiled Muslim women for target practice in a training facility known as the “kill house.” The Virginian-Pilot reported the Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story training facility in Virginia Beach installed the images in a Navy SEAL close combating training facility:
The 26,500-square-foot building contains 52 interconnected spaces, including mock-ups of markets, a hospital, schools, a bank, a bus depot and two mosques. It will allow small groups of SEALs to practice enemy engagement at close range.
Many of the details were taken from actual raids over the past decade.
The massive $11.5 million mock combat zone was designed by a company that specializes in building movie sets. Up to four military units can practice shooting Muslim women in dynamic settings:
In one section, nine chairs painted in primary hues sit behind desks in an elementary school classroom. Other rooms are more sinister, like a torture chamber accessed through a bus station wall.
But the images of women were removed after the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) pressured the Pentagon. “This is a welcome first step, but a serious and comprehensive review is needed to deal with the issue of Islamophobia in military training,” said CAIR’s National executive director Nihad Awad.
The elimination of the offensive targets comes after another recent CAIR watchdog victory to curtail violent Islamophobia in the U.S. military’s educational system. After Wired published a curriculum that called to drop nuclear bombs on Mecca and Medina in a “total war” against Islam, CAIR spearheaded a campaign that caused the suspension of the instructor, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley. The course, which had been offered for two years, espoused, “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”
Very disturbing.
Hard to believe someone could make a statement like this and actually believe themselves. Who wrote this, GI Joe?
You tell me who the barbarians are:
Madeleine Albright – 60 Minutes
And, who is self-destructing…
Chairman JCOS General Dempsey has had all this stuff pulled. Your link is wrong, BTW.
The Stripes reports the same story but doesn’t show this picture. It says this: “The walls are made of half-inch steel plates covered with a layer of rubber and a few inches of Styrofoam. The steel and rubber trap bullets and keep them from ricocheting. The decorative Styrofoam layer, created by a California company that used to design Hollywood sets, creates the vibe of a third-world country.”
Wonder why they didn’t identify the company.
“Mecca and Medina destroyed, Islam reduced to cult status”
What planet are these people on? Islam has seen many empires fall and the US is just another one. Hubris and entropy get them all in the end.
Here is more on the first bit
link to wired.com
Planet Pamela Geller. She wants to nuke Mecca and Medina, also Pakistan and even Europe, as revenge for the jewish part of the holocaust.
Like the Sunnis ran Auschwitz.
“Like the Sunnis ran Auschwitz.”
Actually seafoid, Zionists have tried telling me that (more specifically that Palestinians ran Auschwitz). Apparently for some people the Grand Mufti’s efforts to protect his homeland equates to masterminding the Final Solution. For some reason they always forget to mention that the Zionists also collaborated with the Nazis.
Ziocaine induces funny hallucinations.
Ziocaine leads to historical Alzheimers as well as drowsiness
““Mecca and Medina destroyed, Islam reduced to cult status”
What planet are these people on?
It’s pretty obvious, really.
They’re on Planet Hitler. Obviously, the sentiment needs to be masked a bit, but not all that much. Can you imagine the slaughter implied in ‘reducing Islam to cult status’?
So often, comparisons to Naziism are overwrought. Lately though, so often they are not.
And I’ll reiterate something else. It’s ten years after 9/11 — but this stuff seems to be springing up, not dying down. We’re dumping our civil liberties, openly ranting about bombing Iran…and looking at powerpoint presentations about reducing a major religion ‘to cult status.’
I could see all this occurring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — but why now? What is going on?
Reducing Islam to cult status is a joke. Islam is what gets hundreds of millions of people through the day.
Typical American-military psychopath bullshit. Time to cut the defense budget by 85%.
“This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated.”
Very logical. What we need is a single, correct barbaric ideology, and the competition shall be eliminated.
We’re actually killing all kinds of muslims, in their homes far, far away from the US and its “kill houses” – but we’re talking about islamophobia in the training? The killing is what, “pro-islam”? CAIR worries about the pictures on the pop-ups that troops shoot at? They’re gonna go shoot people for real!! This is such a waste of time. Ive seen pop-ups of child soldiers and women before – the point is to ready your mind for seeing a woman or a child (armed in the picture above, this goes unmentioned?!?!) firing a weapon at you. Its part of the drill. “ahh, you didnt see ol granma with the machine gun, your team is dead”.
I mean, the US has been at war in the middle east for a decade – makes sense to me that the kill house motif is middle eastern. I feel like allen iverson, “we’re talking about practice?”
And I thought Deger was a feminist – whats the story? Why cant women be combatants (as the one above clearly is)? Is shooting an armed woman worse than shooting an armed man?
I’m a fervent anti-racist. Im not denying islamophobia at all, islamophobia is RAMPANT in our culture, all the way through – so, I think its up to those who really want to fight it to look a little closer to home. I’m not trying to defend the military, but lets be honest – in liberal circles, bashing the military is easy; criticizing your friends, the people you generally sympathize with, thats hard. But that is what is needed. We can be MSNBC or we can be like my main man Glenn Greenwald. You know where I stand.
So unpolitically correct Dan.
How can you even suggest that Muslim women can bear arms and even use them
once in a awhile.
On the other hand the sexism displayed by the author is also quite
amusing.
What weighs more in the PC discourse ?
Apparently condemning islamophobia outweighs feminism notions
about equality of sexes.
Well, first, this article links two separate phenomena: the SEALs’ use of female target cutouts, and Dooley’s rantings. The SEALs were not implementing Dooley’s rantings, and their training was not necessarily part of some genocidal scheme. I don’t see any legitimate connection. Rightly or wrongly (as it happens, I think wrongly) we are involved in a confrontation with Islamic groups of various kinds. Given that, the SEALs should train for the kind of operations that are likely to occur, and it looks to me like that’s what they were doing. One may argue that a house should not be painted at all, but if it going to be painted, it’s a bit irrational to fault the painters for putting on painters’ whites.
Second, if one is going to grant that the SEALs might be used against Muslim fundamentalists at all, then they do need to be prepared to use lethal force against whomever they might encounter. It seems to me to be perfectly advisable to ensure they don’t suffer from some outdated, male chauvanist pang of conscience and hesitate to shoot a threat because of her gender.
Finally, this takes us to the third point — the blatant ideological inconsistency involved in presumably advocating completely equal treatment for women and yet finding it especially upsetting that SEAL’s would contemplate shooting them. Is that worse than SEAL’s shooting male jihadis, and if so, how?
It gets worse — and I don’t mean the SEALs. Deger omitted this rather relevant point from the original article:
“…Many of the details were taken from actual raids over the past decade, Capt. Tim Szymanski, the commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, said during a tour of the facility Monday.
Szymanski said SEALs must differentiate in a split second between civilian bystanders and potential enemies, and noted other cardboard cut-outs on the range would show people holding animals, not weapons…”
Would it be going too far to say that the SEALs are actually being trained to avoid the kind of indiscriminate killing that would be inarguably wrong?
This gets back to distinguishing between the question of whether these missions should occur at all, and that of if they are going to occur, how should they be conducted.
The SEALs don’t get to decide they’re going to go after al Qaeda cells rather than JDL ones — others really do make that decision. And if they are going to carry out these missions, shouldn’t they be trained to shoot only enemy combatants? And isn’t that precisely the purpose this range seems to have had? It wasn’t about whether to stage a home invasion — it was about given that there is going to be a home invasion, wasting only armed combatants rather than the little girl with the kitten.
If we are going to wage war against Muslim fundamentalists, of course the targets we are going to attack are going to be Muslim fundamentalists. That really does follow. Given that, isn’t it best that the SEALs be able to quickly and correctly distinguish between actual threats and just random people that happen to be in the house?
I think people are sending their letters to the wrong address here. I see the ‘war against terror’ as utterly misconceived. However, that has nothing to do with how the SEALs prepare to wage it. It’s going to get waged: if you want to change that, the SEALs aren’t the group to go after.
Colin I think you miss the point of this post. Before my specific comment aren’t you the colin that frequently posted at Haaretz. I often tried to post there but only about 1 in 10 survived moderation. How did you manage? I was usually in complete agreement with your views.
Now to my critique of your criticism of Allison’s post. I do not believe the primary objective is to criticize the Seals training practices. The bigger picture is that this incident illustrates what the US military is expected to do, based on policies that are approved by higher civilian leaders with the backing of the American electorate.
That is our military is now being trained to engage in total war against people’s insurrections against American occupations of their country. During WWI, WWII and the Korean war the enemy was male and they wore identifiable uniforms. This changed in the Viet Nam war. The Viet Cong did not wear uniforms and they also employed women as combatants. We learned during that war that our troops had to kill men and women regardless of their attire. This, of course led to some excesses of which My Lai was the most conspicuous example. Damn troops got carried away and ended up shooting infants and children. Very bad publicity to be sure.
The Israelis have certainly learned this lesson of combating a people’s insurrection against colonial oppression. They know that not just men but also woman and children are necessary targets in their efforts to suppress the Palestinian people.
The point of Allison’s post is that it illustrates that the US military is now incorporating tactics that Israel finds necessary to suppress the Palestinians. In future ME wars, the US military will be expected to engage a hostile population, not wearing military uniforms and consisting of both men and women. This will obviously lead to the killing of children. Israel did it in Gaza and Lebanon. We have been doing it in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Seals are being trained to do it in future wars against Muslim nations.
I thing it is critically important that this fact be publicized widely with the American people. Of course, the Seals are not responsible for this policy but this happens to be the evidence we have of our governments intentions in future wars. The story should be circulated widely.
This is the second most disturbing thing that I have seen for a long time. The absolute worse being the introduction of torture. The USA is training its elite soldiers to kill women? This is simply evil.