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osama bin laden
Rising Military Suicides Bring the War on Terror Home
As with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short.
Jul 26, 2024
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.
After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.
As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35%—883 troops—took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
The war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.
Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000—57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans—an estimated 30,177 of them—had killed themselves.
“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”
Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Timesfront-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them—a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.
The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
None of it should, however, have been surprising.
Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.
That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”
Quite obviously, it never happened.
The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.
Studies on the Shelf
Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops.
The New York Timesrecently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental healthcare providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.
The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”
Bin Laden’s Triumph
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” U.S. President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.
Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues.
During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.
Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.
“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans—four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths—has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.
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Bin Laden's Curse: From 9/11 to Jerusalem to Iran and Back Again
Although this week's deadly bombing in Kerman turns out not to implicate Israel, it certainly has a context in Tel Aviv’s reduction of Gaza to rubble and its murder of over 20,000 civilian noncombatants.
Jan 05, 2024
The responsibility for the bombing in Kerman, Iran, on Wednesday that killed at least 84 people and wounded another 284, has been claimed by the ISIL (Daesh, ISIS) terrorist group. The worst terrorist bombing in Iran since the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) blew up the Iranian leadership in 1981 struck at a commemoration of the assassination by Donald Trump of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem Soleimani.
Initially, figures on the Iranian government blamed Israel, and threatened retaliation. Iran opposes the Israeli total war on the civilians of Gaza, and leads a loosely organized Alliance of Resistance (against Israeli militarism) comprising Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and Yemen’s Houthis. The modus operandi of the Kerman bombing, however, with its targeting of civilian crowds in the service of inflaming conflict, better suits ISIL. The ISIL leadership had taken over northern Iraq and eastern Syria 2014-2018 by fomenting Sunni-Shiite civil war.
The Gaza conflict is having the effect of strengthening Iran’s Alliance of Resistance on the one hand, and of raising jealousies among and galvanizing Sunni radicals on the other.
Although the bombing turns out not to implicate Israel, it certainly has a context in Tel Aviv’s reduction of Gaza to rubble and its murder of over 20,000 civilian noncombatants.
Osama Bin Laden gave three reasons for undertaking the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. — the US military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, the excess civilian deaths caused by the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, and the Israel occupation of Jerusalem and the threat it posed to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex (Islam’s third holiest shrine).
The Palestine piece is crucial. I wrote in 2010, “Last winter during the Gaza War, an audio tape attributed to Bin Laden did not neglect to mention the need to recover al-Aqsa Mosque (the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem) for Islam. Before 9/11, in early 2001, Bin Laden was penning odes to the liberation of Jerusalem and reading them at his son’s wedding.”
The US and European press never gave the Palestine issue its due in explaining Muslim radicalism twenty years ago, because facing the truth was too painful.
The longer the Biden administration allows this savage carnage on the part of Israel to continue before the eyes of the world, the more likely it is that the whole Middle East and perhaps the Muslim world more widely will be destabilized.
If ISIL did strike Iran, it may well have done so to take the shine off Iran’s current street cred in the Muslim world over Gaza. As the major Sunni Muslim countries have fallen silent or secretly cooperated with the Israeli onslaught, Iran has vigorously denounced the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Its proxy militias in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly attacked US military personnel at Tanf in Syria and at Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. The Houthis have closed the Red Sea to traffic by international container ship companies.
ISIL hates Shiites and sees them as wretched heretics, and has made attempts to establish itself among Palestinians. It would want credit for resistance to the Israeli campaign to go to Sunni radicals. This strike at Kerman was revenge for the Iranian role in defeating ISIL in Syria, an effort directed by Soleimani.
Indirectly, then, the Gaza conflict is having the effect of strengthening Iran’s Alliance of Resistance on the one hand, and of raising jealousies among and galvanizing Sunni radicals on the other.
The longer the Biden administration allows this savage carnage on the part of Israel to continue before the eyes of the world, the more likely it is that the whole Middle East and perhaps the Muslim world more widely will be destabilized. The US and its allies will not be left untouched by such a development, as the Red Sea debacle already demonstrates. But that interruption of container ship traffic could be a minor consequence of the Israeli genocide against Gaza compared to what is coming.
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Guardian Removes bin Laden Letter to America After Viral Resurgence
The U.K. paper confirmed it had removed the letter because of its sudden surge in popularity on TikTok and other social media sites.
Nov 16, 2023
The Guardian has removed Osama bin Laden's "Letter to the American People," which had been on its website for more than 20 years, after it went viral on TikTok and other social media sites.
"This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden's 'Letter to the American People,' as reported in The Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002," the page previously hosting the letter now reads. "The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023."
In the letter, which is still available via web archive, bin Laden outlines his grievances against the United States, including its support for Israel, its placement of military bases in Islamic countries, and its participation in or support of other military actions or economic sanctions against people in the Islamic world. He justifies his attacks on U.S. civilians by arguing that they have the power to vote for governments that support different policies. Bin Laden also makes homophobic and antisemitic remarks, including blaming Jews as a group for the excesses of U.S. capitalism.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context."
The letter saw a surprising resurgence on TikTok over the past two days, as posters documented their responses to reading it for the first time.
"The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds," journalist Yashar Ali wrote on social media. "Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they'll never see geopolitical matters the same way again. Many of them—and I have watched a lot—say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power."
The Wrapsourced the trend to a video posted by Lynnette Adkins that TikTok says is currently unavailable.
"I need everyone to stop doing what they're doing right now and go read 'Letter to America,' I feel like I'm going through an existential crisis right now," Adkins reportedly said.
Ali said he saw thousands of similar videos on TikTok and more on other social media platforms. 404 Mediareported Wednesday that searching for "Letter to America" on TikTok brought up a few dozen results, some with as many as hundreds of thousands of views. Videos using the hashtag #LettertoAmerica have together generated 1.3 million views. However, the outlet noted that some of the videos were "not particularly viral by TikTok standards." The top-liked video had 75,000 likes, but true TikTok phenomenons can bee seen hundreds of millions of times. It also noted that not all of the videos expressed support for bin Laden's views: Some simply explained the letter, the trend, or the 9/11 attacks.
The Guardian confirmed to both The Wrap and 404 Media that it had removed the letter because of its surge in online popularity.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context," the paper said in the statement. "Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead."
404 Media noted that removing the letter absent major factual errors or danger to life was a "highly unusual move," one that has only prompted more commentary on TikTok and other social media platforms.
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