Some Casualties From Iraq Can’t Be Bandaged

Thank you for your report on the devastating mental health problems suffered by the Marines who have returned from Iraq (Dec. 15). News stories tend to report on “deaths” and “casualties” without clarifying the nature of the injuries, especially psychiatric traumas. The presence of delusions indicates that these injuries are of psychotic proportions and are severe.

You should note that these injuries would not have occurred if our leaders in the White House and the Pentagon had not been politically delusional.

Repeating “Mission Accomplished” and telling us that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were allied in the terrorist attacks on the United States does not make it so. It is these delusions that have caused needless bloodshed, death and psychic trauma to our soldiers and the people of Iraq.

Saul J. Faerstein MD

Clinical Prof. of Psychiatry

UCLA School of Medicine

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So we have yet another story detailing Iraqi prisoner “abuse” by our military, this one both before and after Abu Ghraib (“Details of Marines Mistreating Prisoners in Iraq Are Revealed,” Dec. 15).

This aspect of the brutality of war is seldom computed into the true cost of war-making: the dehumanizing not only of defenseless prisoners but of our own soldiers who engage in the torture, who will be scarred for the rest of their lives by what they have done. And can any of us here at home not feel dirtied and shamed by these atrocities?

Add this new revelation to the others that keep coming out from Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and it becomes irrefutable that the permissive climate created for this situation comes right from the top: namely the secretary of Defense, and from Alberto Gonzales, chief counsel to the president and his nominee for the next attorney general. The latter created the legal wording for avoiding the prohibition on inhumane treatment of prisoners detailed by the Geneva Convention. Every clergy member in the land -- Christian, Jew, Muslim -- should be in the pulpit, calling our leaders, and all of us, to repentance for allowing this brutality to continue to be perpetrated in our name. And the best way, maybe the only way, to stop it is to get out of Iraq now.

The Rev. Canon

Dick Gillett

Minister for Social Justice

Episcopal Diocese of L.A.

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The dual revelations of widespread abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Marines and the prevalence of mental illness among returning Marines discredit the “few bad apples” theory and points to the rotten tree theory, namely, the policy that landed those hapless soldiers in that Godforsaken hellhole is morally bankrupt and has produced a climate that permits such outrages. Look to the root, not the branch, for the cause of the problem, and the root in this case is a Bush.

John De Simio

Los Angeles