“Comin’ up,” Deputy Bob Brandt called out to his partner, John McDonnell. He nudged the throttle with his right hand as the August Vollmer, Alameda County’s antiterrorism gunboat, lifted its nose and motored away from its Alameda berth toward the Bay Bridge. It was just after 10 a.m., and the boat skipped over tiny ripples in the green bay waters, which resembled a rumpled sheet of AstroTurf. To the left, San Francisco was still capped in morning fog. To the right, Oakland’s downtown skyline was obscured in a cottony haze. Twin outboards buzzed from the Vollmer’s stern as it cut through the water.
The day’s primary mission was the same as it has been since the boat first launched in January 2004: To protect the county’s forty linear miles of coastline from terrorists. The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department believes it is the only county agency in the nation that defends its residents with a fully manned gunboat. The Vollmer is only 37 feet long, but is mounted with two belt-fed machine guns that can rattle off eight hundred rounds per minute. Beneath their life jackets, Brandt and McDonnell sport dark-blue fatigues like those worn by SWAT team members. Each deputy carries a hunting knife and a sidearm. Brandt also carries aboard an automatic machine gun, McDonnell a single-barrel shotgun.
The morning’s patrol began quietly as usual. Despite the heavy artillery and the gravity of their duty, Brandt and McDonnell looked as relaxed as two buddies going fishin’. A few days earlier, as the scare from the London subway bombings faded, the Department of Homeland Security had lowered its terror-alert level from orange to yellow, signifying an elevated risk for terrorist attack. If today was typical, Brandt said, we’d spend it poking around the bay, perhaps reminding fishermen to steer clear of the bridge’s new pillars, or shooing away absent-minded boaters who floated too close to the runways of Oakland International Airport.
But the bay is a busy place. The Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth-largest, is second on the state’s list of most likely terrorist targets, behind Los Angeles International Airport. On this late-summer day, 335 cargo-bearing vessels were scheduled to use the port, not to mention hundreds of sailboats, yachts, rowboats, and windsurfers. Amid this hustle and bustle, Brandt cautioned, anything that looked out of place was cause for immediate investigation. “As for homeland security,” the deputy said over his shoulder, “it might not look like anything at the time, but it can turn into something down the road.”
“And sometimes,” McDonnell added, “those little things are what lead to bigger things.”
and, even more shockingly:
If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.
At Wilson’s Web site, you can see an Arab man’s face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man’s head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.
The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, “What every Iraqi should look like.” The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption “bad day for this dude.” One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection “DIE HAJI DIE.” The soldiers take pride, even joy, in displaying the dead.
