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Stan Goff comments: “The ‘tell’ is in the audio. When the pilot asks permission to fire, he reports a large number of people? not armed people. People. And permission is granted instantly. This is an indication that the mission guidance is to shoot anyone who is in the street. This is a clear war crime, and one that begins with the commander?s stated intent in the operations order. The pilot?s exclamation of satisfaction, ‘Aw dude!’, at the end just underlines how this casual sadism comes to dominate the psyches of those who are part of a military occupation force, and how the ground reality becomes ‘race war.'”
Stan Goff retired as a Master Sergeant from the US Army in 1996, his last assignment being 3rd Special Forces Group. He entered military service January, 1970, and his first assignment was as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam. His service took him to seven more conflict areas after Vietnam, including Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti. His assignments included 2nd Ranger Battalion, 1st Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 7th Special Forces, the Jungle Operations Training Center, and the US Military Academy at West Point, where he taught military science.
He is the former Organizing Director for Democracy South and is currently a freelance writer, speaker, and consultant. He is on the coordinating committee of Bring Them Home Now, a campaign of Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out, both of which he is a member. He is the author of two books, one about the 1994 US military intervention in Haiti, called Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000), and one about the Bush Doctrine and the military called Full Spectrum Disorder — The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press, 2004).
