Army Reserve "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force,"
Gaia's Avenger
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON - The Army Reserve, whose part-time soldiers serve in
combat and support roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, is so hampered by
misguided Army policies and practices that it is "rapidly degenerating
into a 'broken' force," the Reserve's most senior general says.
Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, wrote in an
internal memorandum to the Army's top uniformed officer that the
Reserve has reached the point of being unable to fulfill its missions
in Iraq and Afghanistan and to regenerate its forces for future
missions.
The Army Reserve has about 200,000 soldiers, nearly 52,000 of them on
active duty for the war on terrorism, mainly in Iraq. They provide
combat support, medical care, transportation, legal services and other
support. About 50 have died so far in the Iraq war.
Helmly's Dec. 20 memo is addressed to Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army
chief of staff, and was first reported in Wednesday's editions of the
Baltimore Sun, whose Web site has a link to the eight-page document.
Two officials who saw the original memo confirmed its contents to The
Associated Press.
"The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of the Army Reserve's
inability under current policies, procedures and practices ... to meet
mission requirements associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom and
Enduring Freedom," Helmly wrote, using the military's names for the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
"The Army Reserve is additionally in grave danger of being unable to
meet other operational requirements," including those in classified
contingency plans for other potential wars or national emergencies,
"and is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force," Helmly wrote.
The Army Reserve's ability to regenerate its recently deployed forces
is "eroding daily," he added, in part because Reserve troops who
finish tours in Iraq and Afghanistan are required to leave substantial
amounts of their equipment for other forces and for contractors.
Helmly also referred to a practice, not previously disclosed, of
requiring each Reserve soldier who receives a mobilization order with
less than 30 days notice to sign a "volunteer statement." From his
brief description of the practice it appears that this is done to
reduce the number of reported cases of short-notice, involuntary
mobilizations.
He also criticized the practice of offering Reserve soldiers an extra
$1,000 a month if they volunteer to be mobilized a second time. This
confuses "volunteers" with "mercenaries," he said.
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism
by those who have not got it." - G. B. Shaw
Want to know what's really going on in Iraq?
http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/wakeup.html
The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roller Empire
The God-Awful Truth about Christian Zionism
http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/armageddon.html
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
El Kabong
cases -- The Department of Veterans Affairs does not have the
resources to handle the expected posttraumatic stress disorder cases
from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Government Accountability
Office report.
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=27372
+
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
El Kabong
Amanecer
February 2005
While Iraqi insurgents expand their ranks and operations in the
occupied Iraq, the US Army is fighting desertion, open criticism,
recruitment shortfalls and lawsuits from its own troops. According to
the CBS programme 60 Minutes, more than 5,000 US troops have deserted
since the war started in March 2003. More than 1,300 US military have
been killed in Iraq, 503 of them in the second half of 2004. The
number of wounded is over 10,000.
The Pentagon´s original plans fixed the withdrawal of US troops by
September 2003. After that, a small force would remain behind to
guarantee security in Iraq. Until now, however, only US allies have
withdrawn their troops, including Hungary and Ukraine, which announced
at the end of 2004 that they would bring their military home
immediately. Currently, there are about 150,000 US military in Iraq
and no plans for withdrawal up to now.
The United States has 1.4 million troops in active service and another
870,000 in part time service. That means that the US army is
overstretched to a breaking point due to its involvement in the Afghan
and Iraq wars. It is increasingly evident that the US policy for the
so-called greater Middle East is going to fail.
To maintain a security force of 150,000 troops in Iraq in long term,
the United States would in fact need three times as many soldiers as
it has now. According to military planners, a third of the current
troops would be preparing for deployment, a third would be deployed,
and a third would be involved in post-deployment work or on vacation.
Some top military officers have warned the Congress that "it may be
necessary to increase the number of the regular armed
forces,"something that the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
wants to avoid at all costs due mainly to budgetary reasons.
Moreover, many Marines suffer from deep psychiatric illnesses after
serving in Iraq, according to a report by the US Navy obtained by the
American Civil Liberties Union. The document points out that some
Marines have described how they had shot Iraqi soldiers in combat or
stabbed Iraqis on the ground to make sure they were dead. Some of them
were stabbed up to 28 times. According to the New York Times, the
study shows that "one in six soldiers in Iraq have symptoms of serious
anxiety, major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, a
proportion that some experts believe could eventually increase to one
in three, the rate which was found in Vietnam veterans."
Many soldiers suffer from nervousness due to the continued resistance
attacks, especially bombings or rocket or mortar fire. "When you have
people using car bombs to target convoys and locations, they have the
ability to choose their time and place,"said Lieutenant Colonel Steve
Boylan to the Agence France Presse.
These psychological problems have increased the suicide rate among US
Marines, which have reached their highest level in five years. There
were 32 confirmed or probable suicides of US Marines in 2004,
surpassing the 28 who killed themselves in 2001 when the US invaded
Afghanistan. Although the Marines are the smallest of the US military
corps by number of troops, they have had the highest suicide rate,
about 25 per year, of the armed corps since 1999, the year when the US
government started to keep detailed records. Furthermore, the Times
points out that “until the end of September, the Army had evacuated
885 troops from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, including some who had
threatened or tried to commit suicide.”
Problems for the National Guard
Many of the part-timers are members of the National Guard, which is
made up by civilians that want to earn some extra money to pay for
university fees or other needs. Most people who joined the National
Guard thought that their mission would be to fight against natural
disasters in their states. However, many of them are being currently
sent to Iraq where some of them will probably be killed. Around 40% of
the 150,000 US troops in Iraq are currently part-timers who had never
expected to be sent to the front line. In peacetime the commitment of
the NG members means a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the
summer. There are currently 42,000 NG soldiers serving in Iraq and
Kuwait, and 8,200 more serving in Afghanistan. The number of National
Guards on active duty is now 183,000 compared with 79,000 before the
invasion. This has caused that, for the first time since 1994, the
National Guard has missed its recruitment target in 2004. Instead of
signing up 56,000 people, only 51,000 did so. This has forced
recruiters to drop educational levels and other requirements.
Some of the most dangerous missions, including driving military
vehicles and guarding bases and other facilities, are often assigned
to Guard troops. Many of these soldiers have been killed when Iraqi
insurgents have attacked convoys with rocket-propelled grenades and
roadside bombs.
The Reserve has a similar problem. Historically, many former military
of the regular Army have enlisted the Reserves, but now many of the
soldiers that have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan have no desire to
return there again as Reserve members. On 6th January the AFP agency
indicated that the commander of the US Army Reserve, Lieutenant
General James Helmly, had stated that it was turning into "a broken
force"and might not be able to meet its operational requirements in
the future.
Reserve resignation requests have increased from just 15 in 2001 to
more than 370 during a 12-month period which ended last September. To
preserve its leadership ranks - many of the requests were presented by
officers- the Reserve has had to take some measures. It has rejected
most resignation requests and forced some officers to stay on even
after they fulfilled their initial eight-year operational service
period.
According to Hal Bernton, a Seattle Time journalist, the "Army Reserve
is crafting a new policy to curb these resignations. Under this
policy, company-grade officers who have not yet been deployed to Iraq
or Afghanistan will not be allowed to resign unless they can
demonstrate extreme personal reasons."
At least eight soldiers in Iraq have preferred to sue the Army to
prevent this from extending his one-year contract for other two years
or even more. These soldiers accuse the Army of deceiving them, since
they enlisted for a fixed term and were not told that they could be
obliged to stay longer. Once their contracts expire, soldiers are
increasingly refusing to re-enlist despite the hefty bonus and other
benefits that they are offered. A recent survey carried out by the
Army discovered that half the soldiers were not willing to re-enlist,
let alone be killed to satisfy the geopolitical ambitions of the Bush
Administration.
Recently, 17 soldiers of the 343rd Company, based in Tallil, refused
to embark on what they considered a "suicide mission". They claimed
their vehicles were inadequately armoured and poorly repaired and ran
on contaminated gas that could cause them to become easy victims of
roadside bombings and sniper fire.
Moreover, many wounded and maimed soldiers are coming home with horror
stories about a war that is claiming more and more US and Iraqi lives.
Between June, when the Iraqi interim Government took over, and
September, the average casualty rate among US troops was 747 per
month, in comparison with 482 during the time of invasion. Some
experts point out that human resources are being exploited and wasted
in a way that could leave the service damaged for a whole generation.
Growing Desertions
Many soldiers who are not willing to take part in the war and its
horror have decided to abandon the Army. According to several sources,
the army of 150,000 in Iraq has experienced 5,000 desertions -an
astonishing rate of 3.3%- up to now. Some of these deserters have fled
to Canada. The German weekly magazine Spiegel has recently written a
report in which it tells the story of Darrell Anderson, a 22-year-old
soldier from Lexington, Kentucky who deserted after knowing that his
unit, the Germany-based First US Tank Division was going to be sent to
Iraq. He is now in Canada with some other former US soldiers.
According to Spiegel, "Anderson spent seven months in Iraq last year
as a part of a unit assigned the dangerous mission of guarding police
stations in Baghdad. He was wounded by grenade shrapnel during an
insurgent attack, was awarded the Purple Heart and allowed to spend
Christmas at home in the United States. But instead of returning to
duty, Anderson fled to Toronto."
In justifying his desertion, Anderson says: "I can't go back to this
war. I don't want to kill innocent people."He talks about the constant
pressure soldiers face to make decisions in the daily grind of war.
Once, when a car came too close to their Baghdad checkpoint, his
commanding officer ordered him to shoot, even though Anderson could
only make out a man and children in the vehicle. The soldier refused.
"Next time you shoot," his commanding officer barked.
Spiegel adds: "Anderson has applied for political asylum in Toronto.
His attorney, Jeffrey House, was once one of the 50,000 draft dodgers
who fled to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. Deserters who
are now fleeing to Canada to avoid the Iraq war have reawakened
memories of an exodus that took place more than thirty years ago.
House says: 'Every day I get calls from at least two soldiers looking
for a way out'. "
El Kabong
-- What Does "Mildly Radioactive" Mean, Anyway?
Bob Nichols
Project Censored Award Winner
February 18, 2005 -- The Russians just recently stopped a
weightlifter coming across the border with about 100 pounds of "highly
radioactive depleted uranium." The guy said he was using it for
dumbbells in weightlifting.
The American Department of Defense and other government departments
all are unanimous in calling so-called depleted uranium "mildly
radioactive depleted uranium." They like to use it for bombs, shells
and heavy caliber bullets.
Highly radioactive, mildly radioactive, moderately radioactive. What
does it mean? Whom to believe? The godless former Commies or the brave
Iraq-smashing Americans? Decide for yourself. Radioactivity is a
standard property of the metal uranium, used by Americans for bombs,
shells and bullets, and one gram will always give off 12,000 "atomic
disintegrations" per second.
This lasts forever, as far as we are concerned. Think of the "atomic
diserntegrations" as little atomic bullets. The kind that are only
harmful from inside the human body. What do you think? Does 12,000 per
second rank high or low with you? What if it is in your lung?
Delicate lung cells of 19 year old American troopers and 60-year-old
Iraqi "guerrillas" don't have the ability to "spin" what is turning
them into infection, pus and cancer.
Just so you know, that is 43 million, 200 thousand little bullets per
hour. This nuclear bombardment at the heart of a cell in the lung or
the rest of the body never stops. Of course, the "throwaway soldiers"
will get cancer and die; but, the chicken-hawk Neo-Cons in the Bush
Administration say that is OK! They just don't want to pay for it.
Remember the 100-hour-long First Gulf War? Only an unlucky few were
killed. We Americans used 375 tons of uranium munitions. Out of the
one half million, or so, soldiers in the prime of life in the war,
11,000 are now dead. and hundreds of thousands are on Medical
Disability.
The latest good journalist to "Drink the Government Kool-Aid" was Bob
Evans of the Daily Press in Virginia. Evans used the deceptive
Government term "mildly radioactive" over and over, in his recent
seven-part series on uranium weapons in use by the US Military. In his
effort to be fair, Evans, a respected veteran journalist, never used
the forbidden words "illegal" or "war crimes." The Daily Press
readership includes a large segment of "retired military."
Since uranium is a metal that also catches on fire and burns, the
bombs, shells and bullets burn and vaporize when they hit something
hard like a tank, bunker, or building. Uranium gas and smoke ends up
in the nose, throat and lungs of our kids and friends in the US
Military and any unlucky Iraqi around. Some of the gas also hitches a
ride on the desert winds to the rest of the world, including the
American ally, Israel.
This is a real bummer for the American Troopers and the Iraqis.
Uranium by the thousands of tons has been dispersed this way in Iraq
during Gulf War I, the No-Fly Zones era, Gulf War II, the war after
the war, and to this very day. Once the uranium gas and dust is in
their lungs and bodies the soldiers and civilians become radiation
poisoning victims and are forever changed.
There is no way to remove the uranium smoke from the body. It is
radioactive. There is no treatment; there is no cure. This stuff stays
dangerous, lethal even, forever and a day. After all, it is highly
radioact ... err, ... pardon me, "mildly radioactive," ... err ...
whatever!
Our victimized soldiers don't have forever, though. With the same
absolute certainty of the Atomic Clock the US Government uses to tell
time, the constant ticking of the "atomic disintegrations" (little
bullets) starts the countdown to death from radiation poisoning for
the soldiers and civilians alike. It's just a matter of the dose of
lethal poison they received. A greater dose equals less time.
It gets worse. Captain Terry Riordon unknowingly brought radiation
poisoning home with him from Iraq to his wife, Susan Riordon. As
recounted in the November, 2004 issue of the mainstream Conde Nast
publication Vanity Fair, Mrs. Riordon was constantly burned by her
husband's semen during intercourse.
Seems Terry's semen was turned to a fiery alkali by the radioactive
uranium that settled in his testicles. The happily married couple had
no idea what this new and horrifying complication was in this
intensely private part of their life together. Little did they know
the American Department of Defense had hopped into bed with them with
a deadly intent.
With her husband slowly dying of radiation poisoning and in intense
pain herself, Mrs. Riordon resorted to filling condoms with frozen
green peas to use on herself to obtain relief from the internal
burning's intense, excruciating, lasting pain. Other couples do that
and other wildly frantic and imaginative measures seeking relief. The
burning can leave blisters and contamination.
"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed
wire," Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any
on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate
attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms
with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant." That,
she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he
became impotent. "And that was like our last little intimacy gone."
Children produced from radioactive soldier's couplings have
devastating birth defects; both to war's children born in the United
States and in Iraq. After all, uranium gas is just a dumb radioactive
metal; it does not care one whit about the nationality of the body
parts it targets.
In Iraq, women call the doomed pregnancies the "jelly belly." The
world simply calls it "Genocide." That's the purposeful targeting of a
race or ethnic group of people for extermination. That's our red
blooded, By Gawd, All American Policy. Exterminate them! That is one
answer to the question Americans are always indignantly asking "Why do
they hate us so? Haven't we set them free!?!"
Bob Evans, in his series, even inadvertently let a Classified
Specification out of the bag. The 140,000 pound Abrams Main Battle
Tank, a primary dispenser of radioactive, poisonous uranium gas and
dust in Iraq, fires its big gun at a spectacular 2,100 MPH or three
times the speed of sound (MACH III.)
The three foot long solid uranium projectiles then vaporize and burn
at temperatures ranging from an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 degrees as
they penetrate their target. Mr. Evans, guru-like, informs us the
temperature is 5,600 degrees.
What is the difference in "highly radioactive in Russia or "mildly
radioactive" in Virginia? Is it the same metal? Yes, it is. Are both
metals radioactive? Yes! Whether they are in Russia or the United
States, yes, they are: at 12,000 little bullets per second, anywhere
in the known universe! Uranium is our own perverse absolute value.
Well, this is kind of a bummer for all US citizens. President Bush and
the US Military have gone and screwed the pooch. Turns out that using
uranium for weapons is, like, kind of a "Big Time" War Crime. Not only
is it a War Crime, it is a War Crime four different ways, according to
famous UN War Crimes and humanitarian lawyer Karen Parker, JD.
Parker stated "My 'four-point' test is especially intelligible: people
understand. "It spreads" (beyond the field of battle); "it lasts"
(can't be turned off when the war ends); "it injures people in
impermissible ways" (as in making an as yet unborn child deformed);
and "it harms the environment".
Ever since we Americans obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan with
nuclear weapons in August of 1945, immediately killing an estimated
quarter of a million people, the rest of the world has taken a really
dim view of actually using nuclear weapons.
Uranium bombs, shells and bullets are just different forms of
slow-acting, stealth nuclear weapons. They are slower than the instant
big boom and flash of Nagasaki type Nuclear Weapons - the atom bomb
and hydrogen bomb. They are the answer to the Administration's
dedicated Crusade for the Holy Grail of a "usable" nuclear weapon.
Time has telescoped from 1945 instantly -- past to present; World War
II is just over, and we used nuclear weapons on civilians. Now we are
using the next generation of nuclear weapons on the hapless guerrillas
and civilians of Iraq. They never had a chance. Not a prayer.
Uranium weapons spread deadly radioactivity that kills and
contaminates forever. Iraq is simply "toast" because of the
indiscriminate, promiscuous and criminal use of millions of pounds of
uranium weapons by our kids and friends in the US Military, at the
command of their political masters. The masters and troopers are war
criminals, and we, the U.S. taxpayers, are accessories to war crimes.
US Military Out of Control - Defies Law
So, what to do? It's all right there, in US Army Regulations,
according to Maj. Doug Rokke, Ph.D. Ret., the former Director of the
Pentagon Depleted Uranium Project. U.S. Army Regulations AR 700-48 and
TB 9-1300-278 require the Army to "Clean and Treat." The Army is
required by US law to treat all persons affected and all areas
contaminated by the radioactive uranium munitions. There are no ifs,
ands, or buts.
The self-claimed right to use war crime weapons carries the with it
big responsibility to clean up after oneself. Refusing to clean up and
treat is purposeful genocide. It is that simple. We are guilty as sin.
Dennie Williams' breakthrough CommonDreams.org article of November 11,
2004 sets the record straight on the US Military's view of using and
cleaning up after illegal uranium munitions. "The Department of
Defense 'does not clean up DU [depleted uranium weapons] once it
leaves a U.S. weapons system such as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and
hits an enemy building, or vehicle', said Melissa Bohan, an Army
public affairs official."
The "suits" in the Pentagon can't be anymore clear than that. They
absolutely refuse to treat the people poisoned, including their own
troopers, and refuse to clean up the poisoned radioactive land. The US
Military did the same thing in Vietnam with the chemical Agent Orange,
which was denied and covered up for decades. As one Vietnam War medic
says "Uranium weapons are like Agent Orange on steriods."
Therefore, the situation is this: the political leadership of the U.S.
decided to secretly use thousands of tons of a genocidal weapon,
uranium, in Iraq. Their servants in the US Military are gung-ho to
irradiate the Iraqis and poison their land, forever, with illegal
uranium-based war crimes weapons. The Army refuses to obey their own
Regulations, that have the force of law, to Clean & Treat, in their
slavish obedience to the sub-human, sick, perverted genocidal desires
of their politically appointed controllers.
What's wrong with this picture?
This is real Nazi Germany stuff, isn't it? Closer to home, it is very
similar to Andrew Jackson’s policy of exterminating Native Americans.
Citizens here in the U.S. may not want to know or accept that fact,
but that is the sleight-of-hand dealt to us mere citizens in America
in 2005 by our corporate-owned and sponsored politicians and media.
Denying a fact situation does not make it disappear. The facts, and
the thousands of tons of weaponized uranium oxide gas and dust, just
hang in there. This is impossible for supposedly patriotic "My Country
Right or Wrong - Love It or Leave It" type Americans to explain away.
Uranium is as real as it gets, and it never goes away. As long as
there are congenitally deformed Iraqis left in the world, and until
the Iraqis are finally exterminated by these long-lived genocidal
weapons, they will continue to whisper and croak in whatever voice
left to them: "America Exterminated Me, Punish Them!" and demand
justice.
Americans of all political stripes should be enraged to hear of what
our US Military has done to Iraq. It is not OK, and they should feel
betrayed by the Bush Administration, perhaps especially the
center-right Americans responsible for twice electing Bush. (And the
results of Both elections are still disputed.)
It was real Americans some 60 years ago "The Greatest Generation," as
network news reader Tom Brokaw called them, in his book of the same
name, who with the Russians, Free French, British and others stomped
the fascist war makers in Germany and their Axis ally Japan in World
War II.
Now the "World's Only Superpower's" American Army has taken the place
of Hitler's Storm Troopers in ruling the modern world. It is supremely
ironic that their own uranium weapons kill them as well as the "enemy"
civilians, as they set out to control. These unthinking soldiers will
ultimately destroy the world, and that seems to be the desired outcome
of Administration's cult like "Rapture Me" Christofascist radical
religious tradition.
In the famous Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, established after World War
II to try Nazi War Criminals and assess their guilt and punishment,
the Chief Prosecutor said of the German people something that applies
directly to Americans today. He speaks knowingly and directly across
more than 50 years of time to resolutely instruct American citizens on
exactly what our duty is today, right now:
"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national
obligations of obedience…therefore have the duty to violate domestic
laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."
- Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950
The statement was affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is now
international law and by extension, U.S. law. It is our duty as
American citizens. The fascist government controlling the United
States and the US Military can no longer be allowed to exist. The
world and international law holds us all accountable, and the price is
dear.
These white-collar criminals must all be impeached and imprisoned for
their war crimes, commensurate with their degree of complicity and
guilt. If the House will not impeach and the Senate will not put them
on trial, then, we have a problem.
We will have to do it ourselves. Additionally, we have to vote out the
co-conspirators in the Senate and the House for refusing to impeach.
That is the law, handed down in 1950 after a disastrous world-wide
war. We Americans must follow the law. It is our sacred duty. As
President Bush likes to say "they [the House and Senate] are either
for us or against us."
Can we wait till tomorrow, next week, or, next year to impeach?
In a word, "No!"
Leuren Moret, world famous former Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons
Lab scientist, said the following in an Email on Valentine's Day,
2005, requesting hundreds of physicists, scientists, professionals,
managers, writers and others to join in the world-wide effort to stop
the current flagrant use of illegal uranium weapons:
"I believe in the end that ... you will comprehend that the amount of
DU [Depleted Uranium] released into the atmosphere since 1991 is far
more than my estimate. Whatever you or I think or differ about, the
disaster is worse than we even know ... but that tale will be told
each year, each decade, each century. Humanity has changed the genome
of the entire planet forever."
"How can you help us present the disaster in a way that ordinary
people can comprehend? Infant mortality is increasing globally for the
first time in 41 years..."
"This planet is being turned into a death star," Moret added.
The time to act is now. The Bush Administration controls the big media
on this issue. They do not control you. Tell your friends and email
this article everywhere. As U.S. citizens, as human beings, we know
what we should do, and we know that we cannot afford to wait any
longer.
Writers & Warriors Speakers Group:
Contact Bob Nichols at info-radi...@cox.net for College
Distinguished Lecture Series Speakers, Commencement Speakers, People's
Events and Rallies.
Speakers include Bob Nichols, Leuren Moret, Maj. Doug Rokke, Ph.D.,
Ret., former S. Sgt. Dennis Kyne, Karen Parker, J.D. Send email only,
no attachments, to: Attention: Bob Nichols at
info-radi...@cox.net
The following sources were consulted for this article.
1. Nichols - "There Are No Words"
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/Nichols0327.htm
2. Nichols - "My God! My Country Is Using Poison Gas In Iraq"
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug04/Nichols0807.htm
3. Russell Hoffman "Poison Fire, USA"
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf
4. Moret - Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty
bullets
http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml
5. World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference:
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference
6. International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan written opinion of
Judge N. Bhagwat: also at
http://www.traprockpeace.org/tokyo_trial_13march04.doc
7. Gsponer and Hurni "Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: The Physical
Principles Of Thermonuclear Explosives, Inertial Confinement Fusion,
And The Quest For Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons"
http://www.inesap.org/publ_tech01.htm
8. Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, Depleted Uranium: U.S.
Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html
9. Parker, K., “Weapons and the Laws and the Customs of War,”
International Education Development/Humanitarian Law Project, San
Francisco, California, May 1997.
10. The Nuremburg Trials, 1945 - 1949.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm
11. Memorandum To Brigadier General L. R. Groves from Drs. Conant,
Compton and Urey.
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm
12. "Heavy Metal or Death Metal," IDUST Archives.
http://www.idust.net/Docs/Docs002.htm
13. "Poisoned? Special Investigation," by Juan Gonzales, New York
Daily News.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/180333p-156685c.html
14. Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted
extensive research on depleted uranium, Uranium Medical Research
Center.
15. "Three Questions from Doug Rokke, Ph.D. to the Department of
Defense concerning its use of radioactive weapons." Traprock Peace
Center, September 13, 2004.
http://traprockpeace.org/rokke_du_3_ques.html
16. "The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium," by Christopher Bollyn,
August 4, 2004, WagingPeace.org.
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/06_bollyn_real-dirty-bombs.htm
17. "Dahr Jamil's Iraq Dispatches."
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/index.php
18. "Living Under Fascism," Davidson Loehr, First UCC Church of
Austin, 11/07/04. http://207.44.245.159/article7478.htm
19. November, 2004 magazine "Vanity Fair." Weapons of Self-Destruction
by David Rose.
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/041115roco04
20. Nov. 21 2004, "Hartford Courant" newspaper. "Legislator Takes
Veterans' Cause." by Thomas D. Williams, Courant Staff.
http://www.ctnow.com/news/health/hc-dubill1121.artnov21,1,7836871.story?coll=hc-headlines-health
21. CommonDreams.org "Weapons Dust Worries Iraqis" by Thomas D.
Williams.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines04/1101-01.htm
22. Leuren Moret, February 14, 2005 email on du-list, a YahooGroups
email listserv group.
Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award Winner and lives in Oklahoma.
He is a frequent contributor to AxisofLogic.com, other online
publications and the "San Francisco Bay View" newspaper. Nichols is a
former employee of the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. (c)
AxisofLogic, 2005.
Perry
com> wrote:
>The crisis of the US Army in Iraq
>Amanecer
>
>February 2005
Fucking idiot.
mensgearauctions
I saw a post recently that said bush has authorized the military to conduct
tests of the new "small nukes" bunker buster bombs within THREE MILES OF
EIGHT U.S. METROPOLITAN AREAS, and what's more, the eight cities chosen are
ALL "BLUE STATE" METROPOLITAN AREAS!
Anyone heard any more info on this?
kewl links:
http://www.thinkblue2008.com
http://www.cafepress.com/trock/406066
http://www.reddragon.com/
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
news:soo421p2r1vff7psa...@4ax.com...
> obligations of obedience.therefore have the duty to violate domestic
Mitchell Holman
news:pnp42117n71psnpv8...@4ax.com:
What an insightful, fact filled response.
Just what we have come to expect from conservatives.
El Kabong
"I really believe it will go the same way as Vietnam," he told the
John Laws radio program on 2UE.
"It will get no better – (only) worse – and eventually public opinion
in both the US and Australia and elsewhere will demand our troops come
back and when they do they will be pretending that the locals can
handle it all themselves, and we will just leave a bloody mess."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12356131-29277,00.html
Iraq to be a Vietnam: retired general
February 24, 2005
From: AAP
AUSTRALIA'S involvement in Iraq would end in disaster just like
Vietnam, a retired general said today.
Major General Alan Stretton said the Government would eventually bow
to public pressure and withdraw the troops, leaving behind a bloody
mess.
Prime Minister John Howard has rejected comparisons with Vietnam,
saying such analogies are misplaced.
Maj Gen Stretton, who served as chief of staff of the Australian force
in Vietnam from 1969-70 but is best remembered for his role heading
relief operations in Darwin following Cyclone Tracy in 1974, said
there could never be democracy in Iraq.
"I really believe it will go the same way as Vietnam," he told the
John Laws radio program on 2UE.
"It will get no better – (only) worse – and eventually public opinion
in both the US and Australia and elsewhere will demand our troops come
back and when they do they will be pretending that the locals can
handle it all themselves, and we will just leave a bloody mess."
Prime Minister John Howard this week announced that Australia would
send a 450-strong task force to southern Iraq to protect Japanese
engineers rebuilding the largely peaceful Al Muthanna province.
Mr Howard said Iraq was at "tilting point" following last month's
democratic elections.
Maj Gen Stretton said Australia should not have been involved in Iraq
in the first place as there were no weapons of mass destruction and no
links with al-Qaeda.
"The whole lot of it has turned into a bloody civil war," he said.
"All we are doing is reinforcing disaster. I just cannot understand
it."
Maj Gen Stretton said Iraq was already going the way of Vietnam.
"You would have noticed the Prime Minister use a new word ... tilting.
That is the same as the graduated response in Vietnam," he said.
"In other words you just put a bit more in to stop it tilting the
wrong way. It will end up exactly the same way. The whole thing is
flawed strategy."
He said Iraq could never be democratic.
"This talk about fighting for democracy, that is absolute, to use a
phrase, bullshit," he said.
"You have three different people in three virtually different areas.
The most you could have would be some sort of loose confederation."
Mr Howard said last night there was no analogy between Iraq and
Vietnam.
"I don't wish to be disrespectful to a retired major-general who's
fought for his country, but I think these analogies with Vietnam are
misplaced, and many other people think they are, too," he told ABC's
Lateline program.
"I accept the historical facts about Vietnam. I also know the
historical facts about Iraq, and they are totally different
situations."
Horvath
<ta2eeneN*Em...@comcast.com> wrote this crap:
>>
>> Fucking idiot.
>>
>
> What an insightful, fact filled response.
>
> Just what we have come to expect from conservatives.
Truthful, and right to the point.
Fucking idiot.
Geor...@Horvath.net
This signature is now the ultimate power in the universe.
Brandon K. Montoya
>
> "El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
> news:tv66219nae3mc77b8...@4ax.com...
>
> "El Kabong" portrait.........................
>
> [Image]
Stupid images do not an argument make, read this, you pukes just handed
Iraq over to a theocratic government, moron.
AP: Islamic Sharia and the constitution?
Al-Hakim: There are three points: first, that there must be a respect
for the Islamic identity. Second, that Islam is the official religion
of the state. Third, that there should not be any law that violates
Islam.
...
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Many consider Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the prominent cleric
who leads the United Iraqi Alliance, to have emerged as the country's
top Shiite power broker after the Jan. 30 elections.
A leader of a key Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council of
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (news - web sites), al-Hakim opposed
Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) from exile in Iran (news - web sites)
before returning after the U.S.-led invasion.
The alliance he leads with the backing of Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, took 140 of
the 275 seats in the National Assembly, the body charged with writing a
new constitution.
Al-Sistani also endorsed the alliance's choice for prime minister,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, leader of the conservative Islamic Dawa Party,
silencing support for the secular Shiite Ahmad Chalabi.
--
The Neo Conservative movement in the Republican party was founded
ideologically by Leo Strauss, a "man" who believed that saving his
cowboy image for America was more important than truth or honesty. Since
their inception they have invented imaginary threats to America such as
Rumsfeld's overblown image of the USSR up to Saddam's non existent WMDs.
The story is deeper, far deeper than I have written here in this sig
file. Check out this three part documentary by the BBC to learn more
about it.
El Kabong
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (Reuters) - Thirty-one years after his first
suspected murders, Wichita police arrested a man who called himself
BTK for "bind, torture, kill" and was believed responsible for 10
gruesome deaths, officials said on Saturday.
The suspect, identified as Dennis Rader, 59, was apprehended without
incident in Park City, said Lt. Kenneth Landwehr, the Wichita police
homicide section commander who leads the investigation.
Rader, a native of Park City, worked for the town in charge of animal
control since about 1990, the Wichita Eagle reported on its Web site.
He served in Vietnam, was married and had grown children, the
newspaper said.
Military training links string of serial killers
by Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail (Toronto) - October 28, 2002
... Mr. Muhammad served in the Persian Gulf war, as did Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Both received weapons training and
basic military training designed to psychologically condition soldiers
to kill. They are far from alone.
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer received military training in Texas and
Alabama. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer, was an army
veteran. Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people and injured 31 in a
1961 sniper-shooting rampage from the top of a tower in Austin, Tex.,
had just been discharged from the U.S. Marines. Arthur Shawcross, who
killed 12 people, was a Vietnam veteran.
'The Green River Killer', Gary Ridgway, the mild mannered, church
going, bible reading, former Navy man ......
In an overwhelming number of cases, serial killers and other mass
murderers learned to kill in the military.
Full Text >>
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/news/id2838/pg1/
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/swango/swango_2.html
Michael Swango
He started a scrapbook of clippings from newspapers referring to car
and plane crashes, bloody military coups, savage sex crimes, arsons
and riots. Losing interest in school, he left after his second year to
join the U.S. Marine Corps.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/ng/killer_5.html
Charles Ng
Shortly after, he enlisted in the Marines, even though he wasn't an
American citizen, listing Bloomfield, Indiana as his place of birth.
By 1981, Ng had been promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal.
A month later, he was arrested by the Military Police and locked up.
Within days of his incarceration, he escaped and made his way to
California where he met up with Leonard Lake.
At the age of nineteen, Lake left home and enlisted in the Marines
where he was trained as a radar operator. Following his specialist
training, he was sent to Da Nang in Vietnam. According to his medical
records, Lake was hospitalised during his first tour for "exhibiting
incipient psychotic reactions."
+
El Kabong
U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to
German hospitals are not counted by Bush.
They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005.
There is excellent reason to believe that the Department of Defense is
deliberately not reporting a significant number of the dead in Iraq.
We have received copies of manifests from the MATS that show far more
bodies shipped into Dover AFP than are reported officially. The
educated rumor is that the actual death toll is in excess of 7,000.
Given the officially acknowledged number of over 15,000 seriously
wounded, (which is now suspected to actually be close to 30,000)
this elevated death toll is far more realistic than the current 1,500+
now being officially published.
When our research is complete, and watertight, we will publish the
results along with the sources.
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1390.htm
What is TBRnews?
TBRnews is a compendium of political articles, many gathered from
prestigious foreign sources as well as from American news web
postings.
The name, TBRnews, originally came from the Barnes Review magazine and
the site began as a listing of historical books.
Contrary to the hysterical views of rabid trailer park Bush
supporters, I was not suckled by a werewolf and I am not a member of
the far left. In point of fact, I am a very disillusioned moderate
Republican whose family were bankers, brokers and CEOs of various nice
companies.
There does not seem to be much moderation left after the Bush people
finished polarizing the electorate.
HMFIC@1369
"Hü©klëßë®®ÿ Hö§hïmötö" <huck...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:mekVd.2975$L17....@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>
> "El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
>
>
>
El Kabong
By Robin Pomeroy
ROME (Reuters) - Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena, shot and wounded
after being freed in Iraq, said Sunday U.S. forces may have
deliberately targeted her because Washington opposed Italy's policy of
dealing with kidnappers.
She offered no evidence for her claim, but the sentiment reflected
growing anger in Italy over the conduct of the war, which has claimed
more than 20 Italian lives, including the secret agent who rescued her
moments before being killed.
The United States has promised a full investigation into incident, in
which soldiers fired on the Italians' car as it approached Baghdad
airport Friday evening.
The U.S. military says the car was speeding toward a checkpoint and
ignored warning shots, an explanation denied by government ministers
and the driver of the car.
Speaking from her hospital bed where she is being treated, Sgrena told
Sky Italia TV it was possible the soldiers had targeted her because
Washington opposes Italy's dealings with kidnappers that may include
ransom payments.
"The United States doesn't approve of this (ransom) policy and so they
try to stop it in any way possible."
According to Italy's leading daily Corriere della Sera, the driver, an
unidentified Italian agent, said: "We were driving slowly, about 40-50
km/h (25-30 mph)."
In a harrowing account of her ordeal, Sgrena wrote in Sunday's Il
Manifesto newspaper that the secret agent, Nicola Calipari, saved her
life by shielding her with his body.
"Nicola threw himself on to protect me and then suddenly I heard his
last breath as he died on top of me," she wrote.
JustMe
speed then normal speed and now slowly. Sgrena offers no evidence for her
claim she was targeted? Let's see... she's a leftist reporter for a
communist mouthpiece with an ax to grind and we find she offers no evidence.
Amazing. Since when have these folks ever allowed the facts to interfere?
Personally, I think her "capture" was a put up deal from the git go,
designed to further the cause of forcing American forces out of Iraq as well
as Italian forces while augmenting the coffers of thr insurgency with ill
gotten ransome.
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
news:l82m21t62tf9vdafs...@4ax.com...
Rich Greene
newsgroups that have been bad mouthing the Italian heritiage. The two that
are doing this, ( Rich Greene of Olathe, Kansas, and Daryl Hunt) are two
known racist and fakes.
I just think it is pathetic the things they say about Italians.If I was an
Italian I would kick both their asses and spam that newsgroup over and over
again. I would suggest to all Italians to do the same and keep it going for
ever. That would teach the fake war hero a lesson. We must root out racism
and we have to get everyone to crosspost to alt.military.retired to
exercise their 1st Amendment rights that so be it. The evidence against
those known racists is compelling.
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
news:l82m21t62tf9vdafs...@4ax.com...
Mark Test
being
known, she's just following the "leftist" playbook and starting the mud
slinging
early. BTW doesn't everyone know by now that the preferred assassination
weapon of US forces is the Tomahawk? Or maybe the M-1A tank, or any
other high-tech and expensive weps, but not bullets.
Mark
--
"It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."
Robert E. Lee
"JustMe" <Jus...@nowhere.nyet> wrote in message
news:sKadnTa5lPB...@comcast.com...
Dott.Piergiorgio
> Oh, goodie. Now we have a 3rd description of the speed. First it was
> regular speed then normal speed and now slowly.
Pleasee.... A woman whose was just freed and seated on the backseat bother
to look at the tachimeter ?
Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.
[X-post trimmed]
~LoveShack~
JustMe wrote:
> Oh, goodie. Now we have a 3rd description of the speed. First it was regular
> speed then normal speed and now slowly. Sgrena offers no evidence for her
> claim she was targeted? Let's see... she's a leftist reporter for a
> communist mouthpiece with an ax to grind and we find she offers no evidence.
> Amazing. Since when have these folks ever allowed the facts to interfere?
Yeah, just like all that "Evidence" of WMD's that Colin Powell showed to
the UN.
~LoveShack~
PeacePotPeoplePower.
Christopher Helms
~LoveShack~ wrote in message <422b815d$1...@news.nucleus.com>...
Why should this surprise anybody? We've been targeting journalists in Iraq
from the beginning. Everybody on the planet knows it, except the roughly 51%
of Bush-worshipping Americans for whom having their heads up their asses is
very fashionable.
Jack Love
Strangely, Eason Jordan resigned his job has head of CNN news rather
than simply provide any evidence of the above claim.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/02/11/esn_res.html
Christopher Helms
Jack Love wrote in message ...
Strangely, you think a blog is a solid source for information.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12761
Bert Hyman
"Christopher Helms" <Hellms...@nonuyerbuisiness.net> wrote:
Are you saying he didn't resign? You have a "solid source" for that?
> http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12761
It says they've "called for an investigation".
Why don't you get in touch with them and tell them they're wasting their
time since you already know the answer.
--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN be...@visi.com
Eliminate SPAM
> http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12761
Strangely, you use as a source a group who makes the statement
"Reporters Without Borders had voiced "extreme disappointment" about the
report of the US army's enquiry into the April 2003 Palestine Hotel
shooting, which cleared the coalition forces of any fault or negligence."
So, according to you (and RSF) the _only_ permittable conclusion (in
both cases) is that the US must have deliberately targeted them. It
couldn't have possibly been a tragic accident, because accidents never,
ever happen in war zones, and the US troops are omnipotent so they could
never, ever mistake a car driving towards them at night and not stopping
for a suicide bomber - that never happens in Iraq.
And since the reports I've heard all say one mistake the Italians made
was not contacting anyone in the US military to let them know they would
be driving down one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq after curfew
with no warning - since the Italians didn't do this, how, pray tell, did
the US forces know it was her to target her? Or are we back to the
ompipotent US forces theory again?
This also ignores the real danger to journalists in Iraq - being
kidnaped and killed by the terrorists. The same RSF notes 21 journalists
have been kidnapped in Iraq to date
(http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12622).
Finally, you want more credible sources as to Eason Jordan's statement
and resignation? Try:
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6490-2005Feb7.html
-
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/02/11/esn_res.html
- http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/13/business/cnn.html
If he really didn't say that, all CNN had to do was release the tape (or
the transcripts). The fact they refused to do so is very strong proof he
said what he was accused of saying.
JustMe
"~LoveShack~" <us...@example.net> wrote in message
news:422b815d$1...@news.nucleus.com...
Hey David, I think I found one of those howling moonbats you were talking
about.
JustMe
"Christopher Helms" <Hellms...@nonuyerbuisiness.net> wrote in message
news:SuLWd.338217$w62.3...@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
Oh, Dave. Got another one. Will the loon mallet work on moonbats?
Jack Love
<Hellms...@nonuyerbuisiness.net> wrote:
So your position is that he didn't resign? Or, he didn't resign
because he had made statements (repeatedly) that he couldn't with all
of the resources of CNN available to him, back up?
>http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12761
Which indicates what? Do they have any evidence? Or to they just
cast aspersions. Eason Jordan would be really glad to have all the
evidence they've got in support of getting his job back and proving
that he isn't an unmitigated liar.
>
>
El Kabong
occupation!
What a mess Bush made in Iraq!
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=37900
Political survivor Chalabi reaches out to Iraq insurgents
Published: 3/3/2005
Latest wire from AFP
by Ned Parker
BAGHDAD - Shiite secular politician Ahmed Chalabi, long known as a
vehment opponent of Saddam Hussein, called for talks with Iraq
insurgents in the latest twist in a controversial career built on
reinvention.
"We have already started this process, we are meeting with people who
want to fight the occupation," Chalabi told AFP.
The political chameleon, accused last year of trading US intelligence
to Iran after providing volunteers for the 2003 US-led invasion,
described the contacts as being with "those the insurgents look up to"
and not the actual fighters.
"We've had several meetings. There is a genuine interest in working
and cooperating together to end the foreign presence in Iraq so they
do not feel they have to fight to defend the country against foreign
occupation."
Daryl Hunt
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo dot com> wrote in message
> Chalabi wants to work with the insurgents now to end US
> occupation!
>
> What a mess Bush made in Iraq!
>
> http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=37900
>
> Political survivor Chalabi reaches out to Iraq insurgents
> Published: 3/3/2005
> Latest wire from AFP
>
> by Ned Parker
>
> BAGHDAD - Shiite secular politician Ahmed Chalabi, long known as a
> vehment opponent of Saddam Hussein, called for talks with Iraq
> insurgents in the latest twist in a controversial career built on
> reinvention.
>
> "We have already started this process, we are meeting with people who
> want to fight the occupation," Chalabi told AFP.
>
> The political chameleon, accused last year of trading US intelligence
> to Iran after providing volunteers for the 2003 US-led invasion,
> described the contacts as being with "those the insurgents look up to"
> and not the actual fighters.
>
> "We've had several meetings. There is a genuine interest in working
> and cooperating together to end the foreign presence in Iraq so they
> do not feel they have to fight to defend the country against foreign
> occupation."
You missed the whole point here. The Legal Guv of Iraq MUST open dialogue
with the Insurgents to end the fighting. It's part of the healing process.
Until the Insurgents can either be included in Iraq in a peaceful solution
or be completely eliminated, there can be no successful peace process.
Sounds to me that the Iraqi Guv is on track for success and that success
limits the time that the US Forces are necessary. It's not up to the US to
cure all, it's up to the Iraqis and surrounding Countries.
~LoveShack~
Woooooooo, motherfucker.
:)
~LoveShack~
PeacePotPeoplePower.
El Kabong
One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military
by Jeffrey McGowan, Maj USA (ret.)
Broadway, $24.95
Hardcover | 288 pages | 0767918991 | March 2005
A book that will move hearts and open minds, Jeffrey McGowan’s memoir
is the first personal account of a gay man’s silent struggle in the
don’t-ask-don’t-tell military, from a cadet who rose to the rank of
major, left as a decorated Persian Gulf hero, and whose same-sex
marriage was the first on the East Coast.
Love of country and personal love combine in this groundbreaking
memoir of one gay man’s life in the military — and beyond. In Major
Conflict, Queens-born Jeffrey McGowan tells how he enlisted in the
army in the late 1980s and served with distinction for ten years. But
McGowan had a secret: he was gay. In the don’t-ask-don’t-tell world of
the Clinton-era army, being gay meant automatic expulsion. So, at the
expense of his personal life and dignity, he hid his sexual identity
and continued to serve the army well.
Major Conflict is a moving account of his years in the military, the
homophobia he encountered there, and his life afterward. McGowan
presents a vivid portrait of his experience as a soldier in the
Persian Gulf, where he commanded U.S. troops in Operation Desert
Storm, eventually rising to the rank of major. Ultimately, however, he
realized that the army held no future for gay men — even closeted
ones. Desiring more of a personal life and tired of hiding his true
identity, McGowan resigned from the Army he loved in 1998. In February
2004, he married his partner of six years in New Paltz, New York,
making front-page news in the New York Times.
“Jeffrey McGowan is a decorated Army officer, a valued leader of men
in combat. For those in our society who see gay men only through the
eyes of media stereotypes, McGowan’s successful military career may
well be a revelation. But the power of this book lies not in the
politics of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, but rather in the poignant
recognition of McGowan’s humanity.”
— Rear Admiral Alan M. Steinman, MD, USPHS (USCG) (Ret.)
“This is essential reading for anyone interested in promoting full
access to American society for its gay, lesbian, and bisexual
citizens. It is also an absorbing personal account of the life of a
gay soldier. All Americans lose when good and talented people like
Jeffrey McGowan leave the service they love.”
— Keith H. Kerr, Brigadier General, CSMR (Ret.)
“Jeff McGowan’s story is one we all need to read, and more stories
like his are desperately needed. I hope his book is found by gay and
lesbian youth feeling isolated and alone so that they know there are
other people who’ve gone through what they’re feeling. I hope his book
is read by straight America, so that we can better understand what it
means for people to have to choose between how they were born and how
they want to live, knowing that both are part of who they are.”
—Jason West, mayor, New Paltz, New York
"Jeffrey McGowan's courageous personal account of his experience as a
gay man serving in the U.S. Army connects two important issues that
are front and center in the minds of many Americans. With the
political landscape in our country dominated by such issues as war and
gay rights, Major Conflict clearly and cogently examines the impact
that the confluence of these issues has on an individual's psyche and
sense of self. This story of personal conflict, service, and
patriotism will help to enlighten the American public and its policy
makers.
— U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Jeffrey McGowan joined the army in the late 1980s and served for ten
years. Since leaving the service, McGowan has developed a successful
sales career in the pharmaceutical industry. In February 2004, he and
his partner, Billiam van Roestenberg, were the first same-sex couple
to be married on the East Coast. They live in New Paltz, New York.
http://www.militaryink.com/books/2005/march/0767918991.htm
El Kabong
Sunday 20 March 2005, 4:04 Makka Time, 1:04 GMT
Journalists accuse US soldiers of targeting children
All is quiet in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that
the mainstream media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But
independent journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very
different story.
The picture they are painting is of US soldiers killing whole
families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the
use of napalm-like weapons and sections of the city destroyed.
One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr
Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had
filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl.
"She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were
killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home
with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters.
She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father
directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then
shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at
the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead," Jamail
relates.
Disturbing reports
Another report comes from an aid convoy headed up by Dr Salem Ismael.
He was in Falluja last month. As well as delivering aid he
photographed the dead, including children, and interviewed remaining
residents.
Again his story does not tally with the indifference shown by the main
media networks.
"The accounts I heard ... will live with me forever. You may think you
know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could
possibly have imagined," he says.
He relates the story of Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Julan
district of Falluja: "Five of us, including a 55-year-old neighbour,
were trapped together in our house in Falluja when the siege began. On
9 November American marines came to our house.
'My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We were
not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the
kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and
it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.
"This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door,
the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.
"Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge.
The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat
her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but
not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from
my father's pocket."
Targeting media
Journalist and writer Naomi Klein has also come under attack for
insisting that US forces are eliminating those who dare to count
casualties.
No less than the US ambassador to the UK David Johnson wrote a letter
to British newspaper The Guardian that published Klein's work,
demanding evidence, which she then provided.
The first piece of evidence Klein sent to Johnson was that the
hospital in Falluja was raided to stop any reporting of casualties, a
tactic that was later repeated in Mosul.
"The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to
storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the
facility under military control.
US troops have reportedly used
napalm-like weapons
"The New York Times reported that 'the hospital was selected as an
early target because the American military believed that it was the
source of rumours about heavy casualties', noting that 'this time
around, the American military intends to fight its own information
war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents'
most potent weapons'.
The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers
'stole the mobile phones' at the hospital - preventing doctors from
communicating with the outside world."
As Dahr Jamail reports from his online diary "doctors are now
technically forbidden to talk to the media or allow them to take
photos in Iraqi hospitals unless granted permission from the Ministry
of Health and its US-adviser".
Napalm-like weapons
Allied to this are various reports of the US using napalm and
napalm-like weaponry in Falluja.
US troops are accused of
threatening Falluja hospital staff
Jamail recounts: "Last November, another Falluja refugee from the
Julan area, Abu Sabah, told me: 'They (US military) used these weird
bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall
from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.'
"He explained that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires
that burned peoples' skin even when water was dumped on their bodies,
which is the effect of phosphorous weapons, as well as napalm."
The reports of the use of napalm in civilian areas are widespread, as
are many other frightening allegations.
The attacks on the hospitals and medical facilities in Falluja are
also in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions.
But as Richard Perle, a senior adviser to US President George Bush
said at the start of the Iraq war: "The greatest triumph of the Iraq
war is the destruction of the evil of international law."
Rick
El Kabong
Fonda, whose memoir "Jane Fonda: My Life So Far" comes out next week,
said she did not regret meeting with American POWs in North Vietnam or
making broadcasts on Radio Hanoi. "Our government was lying to us and
men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I
could to expose the lies and help end the war," she said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=9&u=/ap/20050331/ap_on_en_ot/books_jane_fonda
NEW YORK - Jane Fonda says her 1972 visit to a North Vietnamese
anti-aircraft gun site, an incident that brought her the nickname
"Hanoi Jane," was a "betrayal" of American forces and of the "country
that gave me privilege."
"The image of Jane Fonda, `Barbarella,' Henry Fonda's daughter ...
sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal ... the largest lapse
of judgment that I can even imagine," Fonda told Leslie Stahl in a "60
Minutes" interview that will air Sunday night.
-------------------------------------------
Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a
study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along
the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now
known as Vietnam.
- Denny, Ludwell, We Fight of Oil, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1928.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, active mainly in
South-East Asia, and received a career achievement medal upon
retirement. Initially a gung-ho anti-communist crusader, McGehee's
experiences in Vietnam, where he witnessed American bombing and
napalming of villages, and of the men, women and children who lived in
them, led him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He
concluded that:
"Essentially the CIA stopped all accurate info on Vietnam while
conducting a propaganda campaign to keep us in this war that was
unwinnable. We were there to impose a US-controlled regime over
Vietnam....We refused to admit the real strength of the South
Vietnamese Communists. Had we ever done it, then we would have to come
up with totally new justifications for being there or just pulled
out."
"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence
agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy
advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign
governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those
activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as
Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support presidential policy.
Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility,
and the American people are the primary target of its lies."
After a long legal battle with the CIA censors Ralph McGehee published
in 1983 his account of the CIA in his book Deadly Deceits (from which
the paragraph above is quoted). A synopsis of this book is at Ralph
McGehee, The CIA and Deadly Deceits
http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/mcgehee.htm
The 'official' or commonly accepted version of how and why the U.S.
was involved in Vietnam sort of goes along the following lines:
Non-communist South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam
The United States came to the aid of the regime in the South.
The regime in the South was democratic
Yet, it turns out that this is untrue, and it required massive
propaganda to create this standard and accepted image.
A lot of the info on the webpage Media, Propaganda and Vietnam is a
summary of part of journalist John Pilger's book, Heroes, (Jonathan
Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), mainly chapters 15 and 20, mostly written in
the 1980s (and reprinted in 2001, from which the citations are taken.
Where page numbers are cited in parenthesis, it is from this book
unless indicated otherwise). He was in Vietnam many times, during the
war, and returned on various occassions as well. He received a number
of awards for his Vietnam reporting.
Media, Propaganda and Vietnam
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Propaganda/Vietnam.asp
Rev. P.J. Billy Bob Bubba, Jr.
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War
by Andrew Bacevich
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195173384/002-3086421-1771246
As a West Point graduate, a soldier for more than 20 years, a Vietnam
veteran, and a self-described conservative, Bacevich is far from your
average anti-war writer. The fact that someone with his credentials is
so deeply concerned with America's tendency to shoot first and ask
questions later should make all of us think twice about the direction
in which we are headed. Bacevich examines the trends - military,
political, intellectual, and cultural - that have lead to our
increasing preoccupation with the military since the Vietnam war. His
discussion is interesting and all-encompassing (anyone who likes Tom
Clancy novels as much as I do will enjoy the chapter in which he
examines the growing prevalence of militarism in pop culture.)
Rev. P.J. Billy Bob Bubba, Jr.
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
By PETER GROSE Special to The New York Times - Sep 4, 1967, pg. 2
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/82602711.html?did=82602711&FMT=ABS&FMTS=AI&date=Sep+4%2C+1967&author=By+PETER+GROSE+Special+to+The+New+York+Times&desc=U.S.+ENCOURAGED+BY+VIETNAM+VOTE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 United States officials were surprised and
heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential
election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million
registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked
reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to
destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a
preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete
returns reaching here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pilger finds our children learning lies
In our schools, children learn that the US fought the Vietnam war
against a "communist threat" to "us". Is it any wonder that so many
don't understand the truth about Iraq?
John Pilger
02/05/17 "New Statesman" - - How does thought control work in
societies that call themselves free? Why are famous journalists so
eager, almost as a reflex, to minimise the culpability of a prime
minister who shares responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a
defenceless people, for laying waste to their land and for killing at
least 100,000 people, most of them civilians, having sought to justify
this epic crime with demonstrable lies? What made the BBC's Mark
Mardell describe the invasion of Iraq as "a vindication for him"? Why
have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with
terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited
access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified,
illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal
occupation, as "democratic", with the pristine aim of being "free and
fair"? That quotation belongs to Helen Boaden, the director of BBC
News.
Have she and the others read no history? Or is the history they know,
or choose to know, subject to such amnesia and omission that it
produces a world-view as seen only through a one-way moral mirror?
There is no suggestion of conspiracy. This one-way mirror ensures that
most of humanity is regarded in terms of its usefulness to "us", its
desirability or expendability, its worthiness or unworthiness: for
example, the notion of "good" Kurds in Iraq and "bad" Kurds in Turkey.
The unerring assumption is that "we" in the dominant west have moral
standards superior to "theirs". One of "their" dictators (often a
former client of ours, such as Saddam Hussein) kills thousands of
people and he is declared a monster, a second Hitler. When one of our
leaders does the same he is viewed, at worst, like Blair, in
Shakespearean terms. Those who kill people with car bombs are
"terrorists"; those who kill far more people with cluster bombs are
the noble occupants of a "quagmire".
Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only ten years after the
Vietnam war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States
found that a third of Americans could not remember which side their
government had supported. This demonstrated the insidious power of the
dominant propaganda, that the war was essentially a conflict of "good"
Vietnamese against "bad" Vietnamese, in which the Americans became
"involved", bringing democracy to the people of southern Vietnam faced
with a "communist threat". Such a false and dishonest assumption
permeated the media coverage, with honourable exceptions. The truth is
that the longest war of the 20th century was a war waged against
Vietnam, north and south, communist and non-communist, by America. It
was an unprovoked invasion of the people's homeland and their lives,
just like the invasion of Iraq. Amnesia ensures that, while the
relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly acknowledged, the
deaths of up to five million Vietnamese are consigned to oblivion.
What are the roots of this? Certainly, "popular culture", especially
Hollywood movies, can decide what and how little we remember.
Selective education at a tender age performs the same task. I have
been sent a widely used revision guide for GCSE modern world history,
on Vietnam and the cold war. This is learned by 14- to-16-year-olds in
our schools. It informs their understanding of a pivotal period in
history, which must influence how they make sense of today's news from
Iraq and elsewhere.
It is shocking. It says that under the 1954 Geneva Accord: "Vietnam
was partitioned into communist north and democratic south." In one
sentence, truth is despatched. The final declaration of the Geneva
conference divided Vietnam "temporarily" until free national elections
were held on 26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh
would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government.
Certainly, President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. "I have never
talked with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs," he wrote,
"who did not agree that . . . 80 per cent of the population would have
voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader."
Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer
the agreed elections two years later, but the "democratic" regime in
the south was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official
Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a
brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New
Jersey to be "president" and a fake government was put in place. "The
CIA," he wrote, "was ordered to sustain that illusion through
propaganda [placed in the media]."
Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as "free and fair",
with American officials fabricating "an 83 per cent turnout despite
Vietcong terror". The GCSE guide alludes to none of this, nor that
"the terrorists", whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also
southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American
invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.
The tone of this tract is from the point of view of "us". There is no
sense that a national liberation movement existed in Vietnam, merely
"a communist threat", merely the propaganda that "the USA was
terrified that many other countries might become communist and help
the USSR - they didn't want to be outnumbered", merely that President
Lyndon B Johnson "was determined to keep South Vietnam communist-free"
(emphasis as in the original). This proceeds quickly to the Tet
Offensive of 1968, which "ended in the loss of thousands of American
lives - 14,000 in 1969 - most were young men". There is no mention of
the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in the offensive. And
America merely began "a bombing campaign": there is no mention of the
greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of warfare, of a
military strategy that was deliberately designed to force millions of
people to abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a manner that
profoundly changed the environment and the genetic order, leaving a
once-bountiful land all but ruined.
This guide is from a private publisher, but its bias and omissions
reflect that of the official syllabuses, such as the syllabus from
Oxford and Cambridge, whose cold war section refers to Soviet
"expansionism" and the "spread" of communism; there is not a word
about the "spread" of rapacious America. One of its "key questions"
is: "How effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?"
Good versus evil for untutored minds.
"Phew, loads for you to learn here . . ." say the authors of the
revision guide, "so get it learned right now." Phew, the British
empire did not happen; there is nothing about the atrocious colonial
wars that were models for the successor power, America, in Indonesia,
Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, to name but a few along modern
history's imperial trail of blood of which Iraq is the latest.
And now Iran? The drumbeat has already begun. How many more innocent
people have to die before those who filter the past and the present
wake up to their moral responsibility to protect our memory and the
lives of human beings?
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in
current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print
edition.
Copyright: New Statesman.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=2507
Torture Is News But It's Not New
May 8, 2004
by John Pilger
When I first went to report the American war against Vietnam, in the
1960s, I visited the Saigon offices of the great American newspapers
and TV companies, and the international news agencies.
I was struck by the similarity of displays on many of their office
pinboards. "That's where we hang our conscience," said an agency
photographer.
There were photographs of dismembered bodies, of soldiers holding up
severed ears and testicles and of the actual moments of torture. There
were men and women being beaten to death, and drowned, and humiliated
in stomach-turning ways. On one photograph was a stick-on balloon
above the torturer's head, which said: "That'll teach you to talk to
the press."
The question came up whenever visitors caught sight of these pictures:
why had they not been published? A standard response was that
newspapers would not publish them, because their readers would not
accept them. And to publish them, without an explanation of the wider
circumstances of the war, was to "sensationalize."
At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this; atrocities and
torture by "us" were surely aberrations by definition. My education
thereafter was rapid; for this rationale did not explain the growing
evidence of civilians killed, maimed, made homeless and sent mad by
"anti-personnel" bombs dropped on villages, schools and hospitals.
Nor did it explain the children burned to a bubbling pulp by something
called napalm, or farmers hunted in helicopter "turkey shoots," or a
"suspect" tortured to death with a rope around his neck, dragged
behind a jeep filled with doped and laughing American soldiers.
Nor did it explain why so many soldiers kept human parts in their
wallets and special forces officers who kept human skulls in their
huts, inscribed with the words: "One down, a million to go."
Philip Jones Griffiths, the great Welsh freelance photographer with
whom I worked in Vietnam, tried to stop an American officer blowing to
bits a huddled group of women and children.
"They're civilians," he yelled.
"What civilians?" came the reply.
Jones Griffiths and others tried to interest the news agencies in
pictures that told the truth about that atrocious war. The response
often was: "So what's new?"
The difference today is that the truth of the equally atrocious
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is news. Moreover, leaked Pentagon
documents make clear that torture is widespread in Iraq. Amnesty
International says it is "systematic."
And yet, we have only begun to identify the unspeakable element that
unites the invasion of Vietnam with the invasion of Iraq. This element
draws together most colonial occupations, no matter where or when. It
is the essence of imperialism, a word only now being restored to our
dictionaries. It is racism.
In Kenya in the 1950s, the British slaughtered an estimated 10,000
Kenyans and ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh
that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse
of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote
the imperial historian V.G. Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any
similar Nazi or Japanese establishments."
None of this was news at the time. The "Mau Mau terror" was reported
and perceived one way: as "demonic" black against white. The racist
message was clear, but "our" racism was never mentioned.
In Kenya, as in the failed American attempt to colonize Vietnam, as in
Iraq, racism fueled the indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and the
torture. When they arrived in Vietnam, the Americans regarded the
Vietnamese as human lice. They called them "gooks" and "dinks" and
"slopes" and they killed them in industrial quantities, just as they
had slaughtered the Native Americans; indeed, Vietnam was known as
"Indian country."
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
In boasting openly about killing "rats in their nest," US marine
snipers, who in Fallujah shot dead women, children and the elderly,
just as German snipers shot dead Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, were
reflecting the racism of their leaders.
Paul W Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary who is said to be the
architect of the invasion of Iraq, has spoken of "snakes" and
"draining the swamps" in the "uncivilized parts of the world."
Much of this modern imperial racism was invented in Britain. Listen to
its subtle expressions, as British spokesmen find their weasel words
in refusing to acknowledge the numbers of Iraqis killed or maimed by
their cluster bombs, whose actual effects are no different from the
effects of suicide bombers; they are weapons of terrorism. Listen to
Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, drone on in parliament,
refusing to say how many innocent people are the victims of his
government.
In Vietnam, the shooting of women and their babies in the village of
My Lai was called an "American Tragedy" by Newsweek magazine. Be
prepared for more of the "our tragedy" line that invites sympathy for
the invaders.
The Americans left three million dead in Vietnam and a once bountiful
land devastated and poisoned with the effects of the chemical weapons
they used. While American politicians and Hollywood wrung their hands
over GIs missing-in-action, who gave a damn for the Vietnamese?
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
First published in the Mirror
Rev. P.J. Billy Bob Bubba, Jr.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1263901,00.html
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by
Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves'
is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were
given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published,
including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's
mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves
produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is
quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so
far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by
Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted
on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings
[have] already [been] found in mass graves.'
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a
week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler
report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence
reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by
Iraq.
Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over
precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror,
and the location of the bodies of the dead.
The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights
abuses - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of
Saddam Hussein's murders.
----------------------------------------------
The US mass graves expert is Sandra Hodgkinson, who has worked
with the "Iraqi opposition" and Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress
since 1998.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/8_26/national_news/24050-1.html
Sandra Hodgkinson, the Coalition Provisional Authority's director of
human rights
Under the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, defense officials provided
some war crimes and crimes against humanity training at the Defense
Institute of International Legal Studies in Newport, R.I., for the
Iraqi opposition. "I was the course coordinator and an instructor for
that program," Hodgkinson said".
In her civilian capacity, Hodgkinson has participated in the State
Department's Future of Iraq Project, and about two years ago, she
spoke at a Human Rights and Transitional Justice seminar arranged by
the Iraqi National Congress in London. In February she began working
with the Defense Department's Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance, deploying first to Kuwait and then to Baghdad
on March 16
Read the news article at the bottom, wherein is stated:
"A Defense Intelligence Agency internal review determined that much of
the information Iraqi defectors gave to U.S. officials could not be
substantiated or was otherwise unusable.....
"that they and others now question the credibility of the group's
leader, Ahmad Chalabi, as well as doubt the Iraqi National Congress. "
Investigators Say Iraqi Mass Graves Hold 300,000
By Andrew Hammond
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi and U.S. rights investigators said on
Saturday they suspected Iraq had up to 260 mass graves containing the
bodies of at people murdered by the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
"We have reports of 260 mass graves and we have confirmed
approximately 40 of them," said Sandra Hodgkinson, director of the
Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) mass grave action plan'.
________________________
Iraqi Defector Information Unreliable
Sept. 29, 2003
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Defense Intelligence Agency internal review
determined that much of the information Iraqi defectors gave to U.S.
officials could not be substantiated or was otherwise unusable, the
New York Times reported on Monday, citing federal sources.
Also, some defectors from Iraq that the Iraqi National Congress had
introduced to U.S. intelligence officials gave false information about
their credentials and misled interviewers about how much they knew
about the Iraqi government's weapons program, said the paper.
No more than one-third of the information gained from the defectors
was potentially useful and many leads did not pan out, officials told
the daily.
Some of the intelligence in question includes information on Iraq's
suspected program for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Data
provided about the Iraqi government is also doubted, the officials
informed the Times.
The arrangement between the United States and the exile group, which
was funded by taxpayers, may have wasted more than $1 million,
officials informed the Times, adding that they and others now question
the credibility of the group's leader, Ahmad Chalabi, as well as doubt
the Iraqi National Congress.
El Kabong
"The rally must be peaceful. You should demand the withdrawal of the
occupation forces and press for quicker trials for Saddam Hussein and
his aides before an Iraqi court," Suwaidi told worshippers in
Baghdad's Sadr City.
Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), which
organised a boycott of the January elections, urged followers to join
the protest.
Iraq call for demo against US presence
Friday 08 April 2005, 20:35 Makka Time, 17:35 GMT
Iraqi leaders have called for a mass demonstration against the US-led
troop presence on the second anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein's government.
Preachers called on their congregations to rally in Firdus Square on
Saturday in central Baghdad where US troops helped haul down a statue
of Saddam Hussein in footage that was beamed around the world.
Both Shia and Sunni leaders joined forces in calling for the protest.
Withdrawal demand
"To mark the anniversary of the start of the occupation, I call on all
Iraqis to demonstrate tomorrow in Firdus Square where Saddam's statue
was toppled," said Shaikh Abd al-Zahra al-Suwaidi, a supporter of Shia
leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
"The rally must be peaceful. You should demand the withdrawal of the
occupation forces and press for quicker trials for Saddam Hussein and
his aides before an Iraqi court," Suwaidi told worshippers in
Baghdad's Sadr City.
Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), which
organised a boycott of the January elections, urged followers to join
the protest.
"I ask all Iraqis to join in peaceful demonstrations tomorrow against
the occupation," said Shaikh Harith al-Dhari.
"The people must speak with one voice and say: 'No to the occupation;
the occupiers must leave.'
"Two years have passed and all we see is bloodshed, destruction and
looting."
The AMS has lines of communication to the Sunni Arab fighters
operating in Iraq.
Fighters loyal to al-Sadr mounted two uprisings against US-led troops
in central and southern Iraq last year before accepting a truce
brokered by the Shia leadership.
Seawolf
Good for them! They sure couldn't protest back in 2002!!!
That whole Democracy thing must be working....
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:jovd51hm3abn810nj...@4ax.com...
El Kabong
PHOTO:
http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20050409/lthumb.bag11504091041.iraq_bag115.jpg
Iraqis burn an American flag during a demonstration in Baghdad, Iraq
Saturday, April 9, 2005. Tens of thousands called Saturday for
American forces to withdraw from Iraq. The demonstration overflowed
Firdos Square, where U.S Marines pulled down a towering statue of
Saddam Hussein two years ago to the day.(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
Iraqis urge US exit as soldiers killed
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Tens of thousands of protestors poured into Baghdad's
Firdos square to demand US troops leave the country, as 15 Iraqi
soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing.
Chanting "No, no, USA," protesters converged Saturday on the square, a
symbol of the ouster of former president Saddam Hussein, two years to
the day since Baghdad fell to US forces.
The rally is believed to be the largest demonstration since US troops
entered the country.
"Oh God, cut off their necks, the way they are cutting off our necks
and terrorising us," said Sadr representative Sheikh Nasir al-Saaidi,
reading a speech from his boss. "There will be no peace, no security,
until the occupation leaves."
Iraqi flags fluttered in the sea of demonstrators, many of whom were
dressed in black, the uniform of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia. Many wore
green and black Islamic headbands.
Some waved the notorious picture of a hooded naked Iraqi detainee,
with wires attached to his body. It was released during the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal last year that blemished the US record in Iraq.
Demonstrators also carried signs saying "No to the occupation," "No to
the devil" as they descended on the square from north, east and west.
Sunni clerics from the Committee of Muslim Scholars, which organized a
boycott of historic January elections, also urged followers to join
the protest.
"The war has been finished for two years. What did we get? Nothing.
Our country has become the centre of terrorism," said Ali Hussein, 30,
from Sadr City, who was dressed all in black. "There is no
electricity, no services, no nothing."
A shopkeeper from Sadr City, Baqr Mussa, vented frustration at the
continuing US presence and the failure by the Americans to execute
Saddam. He was dressed in white religious robes, symbolic of
martyrdom.
"We are very angry. We don't believe we've just lived two years since
the war. All the buildings are still burnt and destroyed," Mussa said.
PHOTOS:
http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20050409/s/r1306355167.jpg
Thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites hold a protest in Baghdad April 9, 2005.
The rally was called on the second anniversary of the fall of Baghdad
with protesters demanding an end to the U.S. military presence in Iraq
and a speedy trial for former president Saddam Hussein. REUTERS/Ali
Jasim
http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20050409/lthumb.bag10804091002.iraq_bag108.jpg
Iraqis demonstrators carry cut outs of U.S. President George W. Bush,
right, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a rally in
Baghdad, Iraq Saturday, April 9, 2005.
http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20050409/s/r2498563933.jpg
Iraqi Shi'ite demonstrators march past a U.S. Army tank en route to a
protest in Baghdad April 9, 2005. The rally was called on the second
anniversary of the fall of Baghdad with protesters demanding an end to
the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20050409/s/r3088539917.jpg
An Iraqi Shi'ite waves the Iraqi flag during a protest in Baghdad
April 9, 2005. The rally was called on the second anniversary of the
fall of Baghdad with protesters demanding an end to the U.S. military
presence in
El Kabong
Photo of crowd of Iraqis carrying banners that say
"No, No to Occupation!"
http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20050409/i/r852879208.jpg
The protesters filled Firdos Square and spilled onto nearby avenues,
waving Iraqi flags. Mimicking the famous images of U.S. soldiers and
Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam as Baghdad fell, protesters
toppled effigies of President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
and Saddam — all dressed like Iraqi prisoners in red jumpsuits. Other
effigies of Bush and Saddam were burned.
Shiites Mark Anniversary of Baghdad's Fall
By ANTONIO CASTANEDA, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Tens of thousands of Shiites marked the anniversary of
the fall of Baghdad with a protest against the American military
presence at the square where U.S. troops toppled a statue of Saddam
Hussein two years ago.
"This huge gathering shows that the Iraqi people have the strength and
faith to protect their country and liberate it from the occupiers,"
said Ahmed Abed, a 26-year-old who sells spare car parts.
The protesters filled Firdos Square and spilled onto nearby avenues,
waving Iraqi flags. Mimicking the famous images of U.S. soldiers and
Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam as Baghdad fell, protesters
toppled effigies of President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
and Saddam — all dressed like Iraqi prisoners in red jumpsuits. Other
effigies of Bush and Saddam were burned.
"Force the occupation to leave from our country," one banner read in
English.
Demonstrators swung from a statue said to represent freedom and
constructed on the pedestal where Saddam's statue once stood. They
also acted out examples of prison abuse widely reported after photos
were released showing U.S. soldiers piling naked inmates in a pyramid
at Abu Ghraib prison.
Robed and turbaned Shiite clerics were seen among the crowd.
U.S. and Iraqi security forces kept a close eye on the march, with
U.S. soldiers standing behind blast walls topped with barbed wire and
armed soldiers watching from rooftops. The protest was held in the
shadow of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, both of which have been
home to foreign journalists and contractors.
oldsarge.nospam.@richgreene.com
Hey Gyra
Leave it to the dune coons to want Saddam back. Lesson learned: Camel
jocks don't want democracy. Were it not for the oil we could abandon them
to their fate and Ayatollahland would be just another forgettable turd-world
backwater like Sub-Saharan Africa ---
El Kabong
Reports from Iraq
* Please pass these reports on and take any action you can. We as
Americans are the only ones who can force our Congress to end the
occupation in Iraq and bring our troops home. The Iraqis send this
message and are pleading for us to take action. Click the link at the
end of this message to take action: "No more money for Iraq war."
Imagine the GOOD this money could do for us instead.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
Last night independent journalist Dhar Jamail came to my hometown and
gave a presentation of photographs of the Iraq war. His work has since
been picked up by "The Nation" magazine and other news outlets. His
reports give an entirely different depiction of events and conditions
in Iraq in contrast to the US mainstream media. It is tragic because
Europe and the rest of the world know what is really going on with the
US occupation in Iraq, only Americans are in the dark.
Dhar Jamail described two aspects to the war that we need to be aware
of: US troops may be enthusiastic about fighting for Iraqi "freedom"
when they first arrive but after about three months they see the
actual plight of the Iraqis and are soon acquainted with the dangerous
hopelessness of carrying out the occupation. As an aside, a cartoon by
Nicolas Anderson shows a rich American with his new Hummer that he
bought with his tax cuts, proudly displaying a "support our troops"
magnet. Meanwhile in Iraq US soldiers drive broken down Hummers, that
are missing armor.
Dhar Jumail focused mostly on the battle of Falluja and described a
situation where the 350,000 citizens of that religious city have been
massacred by the US soldiers and contract mercenaries. Falluja has
been destroyed. This was painfully made clear by a six minute film
that Dhar Jamail showed which is a stunning story in itself: An
American from Santa Barbara Calif. went over to Iraq and shot hours
and hours of video footage. He flew back to the US and after meeting
his girl friend, they dropped off his cameras and equipment in a hotel
and went to the beach. While at the beach, their car was broken into
and their belongings stolen. When they went to back to the hotel room
all of his equipment from his trip to Iraq, including hours of film of
the war was gone. His lap top was not stolen. All that was left of his
film was six minutes that he took of Falluja after the siege. It
showed a a devasted city, deserted, most of the building are in
rubble. This man was contacted by a mysterious "homeless person" who
claimed to have stolen the camera equipment. He gave a veiled "death
threat" if the footage of Iraq was made public.
What took place in the battle of Falluja is nothing like the media's
version. The US military came in and bombed the city and massacred as
many people as possible, mostly women and children. They used illegal
methods and chemical weapons. When the city was attacked the skilled
doctors and all but 25,000 Iraqis left the city. The Iraqis that
stayed did only because they had no way of leaving, no money, no
transportation or they were disabled. What's left of Falluja is a
ghost town. The hospital has little or no medical supplies to help the
Iraqis that have been mortally wounded. The young medical staff that
stayed behind are interns and barely trained doctors. The city has
little to or no electricty, water or gas. Iraqis have to drink the
contaminated water and are getting cholera and diarrhea. The thousands
of Iraqis that fled Falluja have had no where to go, there are some
refugee camps, but those camps have no water or medical supplies.
These dire conditions caused by the US occupation are illegal.
What is also falsely reproted by the LA TImes, The New York Times, the
Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post is that American tax payer
money is paying for the reconstructiuon of Falluja. Dhar Jamail's
photographs show that this is simply not happening. Little rebuilding
has occured. The hospitals are unsanitary pits, buildings and homes
continue to be piles of rubble. Where are the billions of dollars
awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton for the reconstruction contracts?
Dhar Jamail says no one knows where the money has gone. Enron deja vu?
The US media claims that the dangerous "insurgents" are provoking the
heavy hand of the US military. The insurgents are just native Iraqis
who are the brothers, fathers and sons of the women, children and
elderly who were massacred during the seige. I think Americans would
resist if our families were killed by an occupying force. The recent
January elections is a farce, the Iraqi people do not trust nor
believe the new leadership will bring stability or recontruction to
their ravaged country.
It is clear that the US military, without the permission of the
American people have pre-empitively attacked Iraq. According the
Lancet report done by Columbia University we have killed at least
100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. The US is building permanent bases.
Scott Ritter former Marine and weapons inspector claims Bush plans to
repeat this war scenario in Iran, starting in June 2005. Please, do
not believe the US media propaganda. Take action to save the Iraqis
and the US troops from this evil war.
Please call Congress: No more money for Iraq:
http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/callalert/index.tt?alertid=7329151&type=CO
Cost of Iraq war -- with a calculator for each state. And this is
only in money, not lives:
More on the Iraq war and its profiteering:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0316-12.htm
http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/1800/1/39?TopicID=1
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsletter/issue22/issue22_part9.htm
Wounded American soldiers moved to Walter Reed at night, out of sight
of cameras:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/08/night_flights/print.html
El Kabong
MAMs (Military-Age Males) Are Back
By STAN GOFF
<snip>
On March 16, 1968, the US Infantry of C Company, Task Force Barker,
11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division went into a Vietnamese hamlet
designated My Lai 4 and killed 347 unarmed men, women, and children,
engaging in rape and torture along the way for four hours before a US
helicopter pilot who observed the massacre ordered his door gunners to
open fire on the grunts if they didn't desist. The chopper pilot,
however, did not report the massacre.
Six months later, a young enlisted man, Spec 4 Tom Glen, sent a letter
to General Creighton Abrams, commander of US forces in Vietnam.
Without specifically mentioning My Lai, Glen said that murder had
become a routine part of Americal operations. The letter was shunted
over to Americal Divison, and then to the office of the same officer
who had been leading the South Vietnamese arson campaign five years
earlier, since promoted to major. He was now the deputy assistant
Chief of Staff of the division--a functionary who was directed to
craft a response to this report of widespread atrocities against
Vietnamese civilians.
"In direct refutation of this portrayal," wrote the officer
dismissively and with no investigation whatsoever, "is the fact that
relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are
excellent." Perhaps he believed that those killed were MAMs, and
therefore outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions and
international law.
That officer is (former) Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who is
still dutifully spinning out prevarications and excuses for his
massahs. Apparently his perceptions of right and wrong are still
dulled by his brief experience of "combat," burning people's houses
and barns and crops and ordering that young men who run from heliborne
machine gun fire be killed because running away from machinegun fire
is... "hostile."
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the MAMs are back.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the rat-faced boy of CENTCOM, with
help from a Marine moron named Mattis, has resurrected the MAM to
justify coordinated air-land attacks against weddings.
At 3 AM, on May 19th, 2004, the Rakat family of Makr al-Deeb--a
village in western Iraq--were winding down after an all night party
celebrating a double wedding, when American war planes suddenly
screamed in from over the dark horizon and dumped a fiery axis of
bombs across the village. In the wake of the bombing "prep," ground
troops equipped with night vision equipment, explosives, and expensive
aimpoint sights on their weapons, swept over the shattered ruins and
through the terrified and fleeing wedding guests delivering a kind of
close-up coup.
Neil McKay writes a harrowing account in the Sunday Herald, in which
witnesses describe the ground assault as little different than the My
Lai incident, just shorter and on a smaller scale. Troops were razing
buildings and killing people as they were encountered. People's
children were killed in front of them.
There is an unofficial excuse making the rounds that this was a
mistake, that war planes targeted the wedding because this "alien
culture" fires weapons into the air during celebrations. This comports
well with the notion that being sodomized and sexually humiliated and
beaten to death are "particularly offensive to Arabs," as if
Americans, for example, would equate this treatment to root canal
work--unpleasant but tolerable.
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff05242004.html
El Kabong
after the "successful" 1967 election in Vietnam.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/2335/87390
"A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in
President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional
processes in South Vietnam."
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and
heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's
presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt
the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million
registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked
reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to
destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a
preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete
returns reaching here.
Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the
White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the
military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for
president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice
president.
A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President
Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes
in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a
constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which
President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky
and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon
Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since
November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a
military junta.
Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or
exiled in subsequent shifts of power.
Significance Not Diminished
The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals
who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in
the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the
constitutional step that has been taken.
The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with
a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics.
That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating
widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development,
or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting.
American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the
figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly.
Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in
elections for local officials last spring.
Before the results of the presidential election started to come in,
the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80
per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three
hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per
cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States
Presidential election was 62 per cent.
Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a
serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be
required to render the election meaningless. This effort has not
succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon.
NYT. 9/4/1967: p. 2.
--------------------------------------
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/vietnam.asp
Vietnam Vote
Claim: A 1967 news article reported terrorist efforts to disrupt
elections in South Vietnam.
Status: True.
Dean J Garrett
that will hopefully happen again and again in the region, is that the U.S.
finally realized the need for a permanent military presence in the middle
east, and Iraq was a convenient target given how Saddam Hussein ran the
country into the ground after the Gulf War (thanks to U.N. sanctions). Iraq
posed no threat to the U.S. but it did pose a tremendous booty for the
strongest world player. It is sad, however, that the American people had to
be "sold" this war under the pretense of terrorism, and yes, of course they
were lied to. But Americans should stand proud as President Bush marches
forward in bringing the world Christian moral values.
http://pnamorg.blogspot.com [Project for a New American Millennium]
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:lj9j51564m5n9ssqu...@4ax.com...
El Kabong
served in Iraq from April 1st , 2003 through April 1st, 2004. After
spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, he spent six months
helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.
The handsome 23-year-old mechanic was a witness to widespread, almost
daily, U.S. war crimes in Iraq. His story contains new revelations
about ongoing brutality at Abu Ghraib, information yet to be reported
in national media.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/133/133_think_racism_military.html
It was common practice to set up blockades.The Third Infantry would
block off a road. In advance of the assault, civilians would flee the
city in a panic. As they approached us, someone would yell:"Stop,
stop!" In English. Of course they couldn't understand. Their cars were
blown up with cannons, or crushed with tanks. Killing noncombatants at
checkpoints happened routinely, not only with the Third Infantry, but
the First Marines. And it is still going on today.
There were 4,000 to 6,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I got to work with
a lot of officers, so I got to see the paperwork. I found out that a
lot of prisoners were imprisoned for no crime at all. They were not
insurgents. Some were inside for petty theft or drunkenness. But the
majority -- over sixty percent-- were not imprisoned for crimes
committed against the coalition.
The enemy around Baghdad randomly shelled our base. Under the Geneva
Conventions, an occupying power cannot place protected persons in
areas exposed to the hazards of war. More than 50 detainees were
killed because they were housed outside in tents, directly in the line
of fire, with no protection, nowhere to run.They were hemmed in by
barbed wire. They were trapped, and they had to sit and wait and hope
they would survive.
El Kabong
"I fear that our democracy is in much worse shape than I had imagined,
and that even the appearance of democracy we now have might be quickly
swept aside. "
http://independent.com/news/news906.htm
Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts
Theologian Charges White House
Complicity in 9/11 Attack
by Nick Welsh
There’s nothing the least bit wild-eyed or hysterical about David Ray
Griffin. In person, he’s disarmingly calm, and speaks in the
unflappably precise and deliberate style of a lifelong academic. Which
is exactly what Griffin is. A respected philosopher of religion at the
Claremont School of Theology since the 1970s and longtime Santa
Barbara resident, Griffin is now raising questions that even President
Bush’s harshest critics are afraid to think, let alone ask aloud.
In his latest book, The New Pearl Harbor — released just two weeks ago
— Griffin all but accuses the Bush administration of taking a dive on
September 11 and giving Al Qaeda terrorists an unobstructed shot at
the World Trade Center. According to Griffin, a case can be made that
the Bush administration arranged the attack, or allowed it to happen.
He is aware that he may be dismissed as a conspiracy nut, but given
the “transcendent importance” of the issue, Griffin is willing to
assume that risk and has taken to repeating Michael Moore’s line on
the subject: “Personally, I’m not into conspiracy theories except
those that are true.” I met with Griffin over coffee to discuss his
book and the September 11 investigation. The following is an edited
account of their conversation.
NICK WELSH:
Is there a smoking gun that shows the Bush administration knew 9/11
was likely to happen and did nothing about it?
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: I think there are four. One is the fact that
standard operating procedures for dealing with possibly hijacked
airplanes were not followed on 9/11. Those procedures call for fighter
jets to be sent out immediately upon any sign that a plane may have
been hijacked. These jets typically get to the plane within no later
than 15 minutes anywhere in the United States. And on that day, there
were four airplanes that went for a half-hour or more after they were
hijacked without jets intercepting them.
What’s the official explanation of that?
I’m afraid the press has not done its job. They have not forced
government officials to explain why standard operating procedures were
not followed that day, nor have they pressed the FAA (Federal Aviation
Administration) to explain why they didn’t report these hijackings as
they were supposed to. The official story is that [the fighter jets]
were very late.
And the other smoking guns?
The second strongest piece of evidence I would say is the crash at the
Pentagon. The physical evidence contradicts so violently the official
account, that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757 — Flight 77, that
is. The physical evidence, photographs, and eyewitness testimony say
that the Pentagon was hit by something that caused a hole no larger
than 18 feet in diameter. The story the Pentagon put out, and was
published by the Washington Post, was that the hole in the Pentagon
was five stories high and 200 feet wide. If you look at the
photographs taken by Tom Horan of the Associated Press — that’s just
not the size of the hole.
But if the hole was only 18 feet wide, it had to have been created by
something other than a Boeing. Whatever went into the Pentagon pierced
six reinforced walls. This was the west wing, the part of the Pentagon
being refurbished and reinforced. These walls were extra strong, and
yet whatever it was went through six walls creating a hole about seven
feet in diameter in the sixth wall. This had to have been something
with a very powerful head on it. A Boeing 757 has a very fragile nose,
and would not have pierced through all those walls; it would have been
crushed by hitting the Pentagon. And given that it only penetrated
these three rings, the rest of the aircraft would have been sitting
outside on the yard. And yet the photographs taken just as the fire
trucks got there — very shortly after the crash — show no plane
whatsoever.
What do they show?
They show no aircraft whatsoever. And everyone agrees on this. The
official story is that the whole aircraft went inside the Pentagon.
The problem with that — the firefighters in there would have seen the
airplane. They would have seen the engines, they would have seen the
aluminum fuselage, but they reported nothing. Ed Plower, the fire
chief, when asked what he saw, said, “I didn’t see any big pieces, no
fuselage, no engines, no nothing.” But about a month later, when asked
he said, “Oh yes, I saw all that.” His memory had had time to be
refreshed.
If what you’re saying is accurate — that it was a missile — then what
happened to the plane and all the people on it?
That’s why I stress I’m not trying to give an account of what really
happened. I have no idea what happened to Flight 77.
President Bush has also been criticized for behaving somewhat
bizarrely that day.
As he and the Secret Service got word that a second plane had crashed
into the World Trade Center and that three planes had been hijacked,
there could have been no possible doubt in their mind that the United
States was under terrorist attack . . . The most horrendous attack the
United States had ever suffered. And they would have had to assume
that one or more of them were heading toward President Bush himself.
And so upon learning about this, the Secret Service surely would have
whisked him away immediately. In fact, one Secret Service agent on the
scene said, “We’re out of here.” But obviously he got overruled
because President Bush stayed there. After Andrew Card reported the
second crash on the World Trade Center, the president just nodded as
if he understood and said, “We’re going to go ahead with the reading
lesson.” And he sat there another 15 minutes listening to the children
read a story about a pet goat. This was a photo op and when it was
over he lingered around talking to the children and talking to the
teacher.
Bill Sammon, of the Washington Times, wrote a very pro-Bush book, yet
he comments how casual and relaxed the president was given the fact
he’d just learned the country was under attack. He said Bush took his
own sweet time and in fact called him “Our Dawdler in Chief.” And then
the president went on national TV, going forward with an interview
that had been planned and announced in advance . . . then they took
their regularly scheduled motorcade back to the airport. In other
words, [Bush and the Secret Service] showed no fear whatsoever that
they would be targeted for attack, which strongly suggests they knew
how many aircraft were being hijacked and what their targets were.
Couldn’t it have been that he was trying to project calm in the eye of
the storm, that this was Bush projecting Churchillian resolve in the
face of calamity?
People who want to believe such things can, of course, imagine such
scenarios. But the president in a situation like that does not make
the decisions; the Secret Service team makes the decisions. And the
guys in the Secret Service are trained to be ready for a catastrophe
like this where they make snap decisions and whisk the president to
safety immediately. They would have had an escape route planned; they
would have had contingencies planned — they always do. It is at least
not very plausible to think they would have remained there and
endangered the lives of all the children and teachers at that school
in order to exude that Churchillian confidence.
What about the plane thatcrashed down?
We know that on Flight 93, which crashed over Pennsylvania, the
passengers were trying to get control of the aircraft. They had
decided the hijackers did not have bombs and probably didn’t even have
guns. And because their plane didn’t take off until a half-hour after
the others, they knew that the others had crashed into the World Trade
Center — so they knew they were going to die anyway, even if they
didn’t do anything. So as one of the passengers is saying, “They’re
doing it, they’re forcing their way into the cabin, they’re going to
make it.” As soon as that happened, with the FBI listening in, the
plane went down. There was a whoosh, then the sound of wind. And
people on the ground reported hearing what Vietnam veterans said
sounded like a missile. Furthermore, there was debris from the plan
eight miles from the crash site, suggesting the plane had been hit and
stuff started falling out. And one of the engines was found over a
mile from the crash site. Of course, if it had been a missile that
downed the plane, it most likely would have been a heat-seeking
missile that would have found the engine and knocked it off.
Why would the government have an interest in doing this?
So the hijackers couldn’t speak to anyone?
That would be a very good reason. If it were a conspiracy and the
hijackers knew about it, it would have been very threatening to those
who made the plan to have anybody left alive. Again, I don’t pretend
to know, but that’s at least a plausible scenario. There were many
rumors that day that the plane was shot down, but the government
denied it.
You suggest that the World Trade Center buildings must have been
detonated with explosives to account for the heat generated and the
speed the structures collapsed on themselves. That sounds extreme.
What’s the evidence?
The evidence is cumulative — several things that point to controlled
demolition. First, a steel-framed building, according to all the
reading I’ve done, has never collapsed solely because of fire. They
will bend and buckle in a very large all-consuming fire that lasts for
a very long time. But they have never collapsed.
But it was not just fire — it was fire and impact at the same time.
The twin towers were very large buildings and extremely well built
with a lot of redundancy. Even people who believe the official theory
say that the crash of the plane into the towers should have been
insignificant, that the shock would have been immediate, but it was
over very soon and that the buildings were extremely solid and stable
and not moving. In the south tower, much of the fuel from it spilled
outside as it collided into the corner. So there was a giant firebomb
which looked very impressive, but what that means is that most of the
fuel was burned up within a minute, so there was not much fuel inside.
Therefore, the fire in the south tower had almost gone out in less
than an hour. And that brings us to another strange fact about the
towers. If the official story were correct, that the combination of
the crash and the fire brought the buildings down, we would expect the
north tower to have come down first, because it was hit first. And yet
the south tower collapsed first. It collapsed in less than an hour.
That makes perfect sense if you’re willing to accept that it was
caused by controlled demolition, meaning the building was wired with
explosives. And if the official story has it that the buildings were
brought down by fire, you’d want the buildings to go down before the
fire had completely gone out.
What you’re suggesting sounds like something from. X-Files. But on
X-Files, you always had agents Scully and Mulder trying to get the
truth out. Here we don’t have any Scullys and Mulders. You’d think
this whole new unilateral expression of military supremacy might have
opponents within the administration coming unglued and that they’d be
leaking info damaging to Bush, but we don’t hear those voices. Why
not?
Members of the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies have
taken oaths to not reveal things they’ve been told not to reveal . . .
and if they violate this oath, repercussions may occur. You have a
wife and children, and somebody says to you, “If you go public with
that I cannot guarantee the safety of your family.” Would you go
public with that? You have to choose between your family’s welfare and
the welfare of the nation, and your story might not do that much good.
You might just be denounced as a conspiracy kook. The press would
ignore you, belittle you. People might look into your past and find
that you had done some things you’re not so proud of. People would
learn very quickly to keep their mouths shut.
Let’s say there has been this complicity. To what end?
There were several benefits that could have been anticipated from
9/11. One was the so-called Patriot Act. It did appear that the
Patriot Act, given how fast it was rushed into Congress, voting had
already been prepared. The Patriot Act is so large that it’s
inconceivable it could have been written after 9/11. Rushing it
through Congress when most members had not even read a small portion
of it was clearly one benefit, giving the government increased powers.
Also, there was the desire to wage war in Afghanistan to force out the
Taliban and put an American-friendly government in place because of
the desire of Unical and other gas companies to build an oil pipeline,
which they felt was too dangerous with the Taliban in power. There was
a meeting in Berlin in July 2001, a final effort to get an agreement
between the Taliban and the United States that would allow a sort of
joint government, where the Taliban would share power with more
American-friendly leaders. The Taliban refused, at which point they
were told, “If you don’t take our carpet of gold, we’ll bury you under
a carpet of bombs.” The Pakistani representative at this meeting said
the Americans told him that the war would start before the snows came
that October. And after 9/11 happened, there was exactly the right
amount of time for the U.S. forces to get organized to begin the war,
and the war began on October 7.
Another benefit is that many senior members of the Bush administration
had for a long time wanted to attack Iraq. Getting control of the oil
there was one motive; the more general motive was to secure a military
presence in that part of the world.
Don’t you think it’s a good thing that Saddam Hussein was taken out,
and don’t you think Bush had a moral obligation to do so because it
was his father who was responsible for building up Hussein in the
first place?
Certainly you can say there were some benefits to the people of Iraq.
But if we had an obligation to take out Saddam Hussein then we have
obligations to take out many other nefarious leaders around the world,
many of whom are far worse, believe it or not, than Saddam Hussein.
And the sorry history is that we have in fact supported such leaders
and that Saddam Hussein was in power only because of American support.
He remained in power after gassing the Kurds became common knowledge.
Donald Rumsfeld himself visited Saddam at that period. Actually our
aid to Saddam went up after we knew that he had done this.
So you think this is mostly about oil.
It is to a significant extent about oil, given the projections that
the world is beginning to run out
of oil. The United States wants to get control of it because our way
of life, which is so dependent upon oil, is nonnegotiable. And also
because military dominance itself runs to great extent on oil. But
it’s not just about oil. It’s about geopolitical dominance. And this
brings up the U.S. Space command. In the document “Rebuilding
America’s Defenses,” published in 2000 by the Project for the New
American Century — an organization founded by people such as [Richard]
Perle and [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Dick] Cheney and Rumsfeld — there is a
statement in there that says we need to move forward with this
revolution in military affairs. The central feature of this is the
augmentation of the U.S. Space Command through which the United States
would have what’s called now Full Spectrum Dominance. In addition to
having dominance over land, air, and sea, we would have dominance in
space. But building the space stations and the satellites for the
weaponization of space will be an extremely expensive undertaking. One
projection has the first stage of it being about a trillion dollars.
So an enormous amount of money has to be shifted from the American
taxpayers and other parts of the economy to the military and the space
command. The document states that such a revolution in military
affairs will probably proceed very slowly absent some catastrophic and
catalyzing event such as a new Pearl Harbor.
Hence the title of your book . . . You’ve complained the American
media has been asleep at the switch on this. How do you account for
this?
It is very difficult for Americans to face the possibility that their
own government may have caused or deliberately allowed such a heinous
event. Secondly, one can understand that insofar as the media is owned
by companies like General Electric, which is one of the largest makers
of weapons, stations like NBC that are owned by GE would not wish to
publicize these connections. And finally, 9/11 was immediately treated
not only as a matter of patriotism but almost as a religious event.
Bush declared his war on terrorism from the national cathedral. And so
from then on, any questioning of the official account could be and was
criticized as being undemocratic and almost sacrilegious.
I at least hope that if we can begin to get a public discussion of
9/11 and of the many, many discrepancies between the official story
and what at least appear to be the facts, that some of those people
might be emboldened to step forward.
How has researching and writing this book affected you personally?
I fear that our democracy is in much worse shape than I had imagined,
and that even the appearance of democracy we now have might be quickly
swept aside.
Ike
religion from the world-famous Claremont School of Theology, an educational
cauldron just bubbling with the technologies on which a proper disaster
investigation depends. He testifies as to the operational SOP of the Air
Force, the structural characteristics of a Boeing 757, the workings of the
FAA, strengths and weakness of a steel-frame building, what the passengers
of Flight 93 knew and had decided, how our government really works, the evil
machinations of our president and his staff, and much more. He states that
the administration's devilish secrets are protected because those who might
disclose them are threatened with the deaths of their families. With
incredible insight, second sight, and hindsight, and despite a bit of
oversight, Reverend Griffin's authority brings crystal clarity to a
previously smoky situation.
Reverend Griffin is to be thanked (Praise His Soldier for Truth!) for
couragrously bringing all this out into the open, for taking the risk of
retribution from the Soldiers of Evil, and for Making His Case For Justice.
Well! I had reservations regarding the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, but
this endorsement from God's spokesman ends all doubt.
Ike
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a6h8619gsip4i0v62...@4ax.com...
El Kabong
Ruzicka refused to accept the official line that the U.S. military
does not keep track of civilian casualties, writing in an op-ed piece
the week before she was killed that this position "outraged the Arab
world and damaged the U.S. claim that its forces go to great lengths
to minimize civilian casualties."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=533&e=8&u=/ap/20050423/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_american_activist
Slain U.S. Activist's Project Stalls
Sat Apr 23,
By JAMIE TARABAY, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq -
A one-woman human rights movement, Ruzicka was instrumental in
securing millions of dollars in aid for distribution in Iraq. She'd
been traveling to and from the country since U.S.-led forces invaded
in March 2003, often going door-to-door to meet wounded Iraqis and
collect the figures for her surveys on the number hurt and killed.
She badgered the military for numbers and Washington for money. She
sweet-talked journalists and soldiers alike into helping her out. And
everyone got a hug.
Ruzicka refused to accept the official line that the U.S. military
does not keep track of civilian casualties, writing in an op-ed piece
the week before she was killed that this position "outraged the Arab
world and damaged the U.S. claim that its forces go to great lengths
to minimize civilian casualties."
An Associated Press survey of deaths in the first 12 months of the
occupation found that more than 5,000 Iraqis died violently in just
Baghdad and three provinces. Since then, however, neither U.S. nor
Iraqi officials have produced a complete tally.
Ruzicka thought she was close to uncovering the figures.
"Recently, I obtained statistics on civilian casualties from a
high-ranking U.S. military official. The numbers were for Baghdad
only, for a short period, during a relatively quiet time," she wrote
in the article published posthumously in USA Today and posted on her
Web site.
It wasn't clear if the deaths were caused by U.S. troops or
insurgents, she wrote, but it was clear the U.S. military did actually
keep track of the civilian dead. A U.S. official told her it was
"standard operating procedure for U.S. troops to file a spot report
when they shoot a noncombatant," she said.
The U.S. military did not immediately respond to her claims.
Ruzicka was on her way to visit an Iraqi girl injured in a bomb blast
when she was killed, according to her colleagues from the Campaign for
Innocent Victims in Conflict, the organization she founded.
El Kabong
by Scott Simon and Philip Reeves
Weekend Edition - Saturday, April 23, 2005 · Recent violence in Iraq
reflects continuing resiliency among various groups of insurgents.
Meanwhile, arguments over how much power to give Sunni Muslim
politicians has slowed the development of the fledgling Iraqi
government.
Listen here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4616755
+
Johnny Asia, Hippie Guitarist
http://johnnyasia.info
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/painterny/johnny/ja2.jpg
"I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what
you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing even if it does take
them fifteen, twenty years." - Thelonious Monk
El Kabong
After 84 years of secular rule, the triumph of the religious-flavored
Shiite alliance in Iraq's January 30 elections has sealed Islam's
return to public life in the country.
The Shiite nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, is in favor
of implementing the Sharia, or Islamic law.
His Dawa party and the other major Shiite powerhouse, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), both with long
sojourns in Iran, have not hidden their desire for an Islamic state.
disgust99
>
> After 84 years of secular rule, the triumph of the religious-flavored
> Shiite alliance in Iraq's January 30 elections has sealed Islam's
> return to public life in the country.
>
> The Shiite nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, is in favor
> of implementing the Sharia, or Islamic law.
President thinks, that is exactly what they do. It would be fantastic if it
did indeed happen, just to see what the Jews tell Bush to do to put a stop
to it. Bush invaded Iraq just to remove a threat to Israel, nothing more
nothing less.
qwe...@bellsouth.net
I thought you said it was the oil?
El Kabong
The Iraq Survey Group believes "it was unlikely that an official
transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place."
April 25
U.S. Weapons Inspector Finishes Iraq Work
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - In his final word, the CIA's top weapons inspector in
Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has
"gone as far as feasible" and has found nothing, closing an
investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were
used to justify the 2003 invasion.
"After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of
the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted," wrote Charles Duelfer,
head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he
issued last fall.
"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as
feasible."
In 92 pages posted online Monday evening, Duelfer provides a final
look at an investigation that occupied over 1,000 military and
civilian translators, weapons specialists and other experts at its
peak. His latest addenda conclude a roughly 1,500-page report released
last fall.
On Monday, Duelfer said there is no purpose in keeping many of the
detainees who are in custody because of their knowledge on Iraq's
weapons, although he did not provide any details about the current
number. A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the
ultimate decision on their release will be made by the Iraqi
authorities.
Among unanswered questions, Duelfer said a group formed to investigate
whether WMD-related material was shipped out of Iraq before the
invasion wasn't able to reach firm conclusions because the security
situation limited and later halted their work. Investigators were
focusing on transfers from Iraq to Syria.
No information gleaned from questioning Iraqis supported the
possibility, one addendum said. The Iraq Survey Group believes "it was
unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria
took place."
disgust99
<qwe...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:DFgbe.99078$f%4.1...@bignews1.bellsouth.net...
> disgust99 wrote:
> I thought you said it was the oil? Never it was never about oil. It was
> to remove a threat to Israel, nothing more nothing less. Go back and
> look. When Hussein started bragging about giving $25000 to the families
> of the suicide bombers he became a real threat to America. Prior to that
> he was just a pain. The Jews told the United States either you do it and
> make a lot of money for your cronies or we do it and make the money.
El Kabong
By Charles Babington and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page A06
Congressional Republicans and President Bush have seized upon the
Terri Schiavo case with such fervor that they may find themselves out
in front of an American public that is divided over right-to-die
issues and deeply leery of government intrusion into family affairs,
according to analysts and polls.
Dominating a debate that many Democrats seem eager to avoid,
conservative lawmakers and the White House have taken extraordinary
steps to allow a federal judge to override the decisions of Florida
courts to remove the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube. Antiabortion
activists, a key GOP constituency, have cheered the moves, which
included Bush rushing back to Washington to sign the bill in the dead
of night after a rare Palm Sunday congressional session.
In another sign of the priority that the GOP has placed on the Schiavo
matter, they have let it trump their traditional calls for a limited
federal judiciary and respecting the "sanctity of marriage."
Bush said yesterday that his decision to fly back from his Texas ranch
to the White House to sign the legislation gave Schiavo's parents
"another opportunity to save their daughter's life." Speaking in
Tucson before an event promoting his plan to restructure Social
Security, he said: "This is a complex case with serious issues. But in
extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to err on the side
of life."
Polls and analyses suggest that Republicans could find themselves out
of step with many Americans, especially if Democrats find a more
unified voice on the subject. An ABC News poll released yesterday
concluded that "Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal
intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, with sizable majorities saying
Congress is overstepping its bounds for political gain."
By 63 to 28 percent, Americans support the removal of Schiavo's
feeding tube, which her husband says would be her wish. Seventy
percent of the respondents said it was inappropriate for Congress to
get involved as it has. And 67 percent said they believe that elected
officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so mainly for
political reasons.
The poll suggests that Democrats have an opportunity to speak for a
significant portion of Americans who feel the GOP is overreaching.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55214-2005Mar21.html?nav=hcmodule
+
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their
dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens."
- William H. Beveridge, 1944
El Kabong
26 Apr 2005 21:50:13 GMT
Source: Human Rights Watch
(New York, April 27, 2005)- The crimes at Abu Ghraib are part of a
larger pattern of abuses against Muslim detainees around the world,
Human Rights Watch said on the eve of the April 28 anniversary of the
first pictures of U.S. soldiers brutalizing prisoners at the Iraqi
jail. Human Rights Watch released a summary (below) of evidence of
U.S. abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, as well as of the programs of secret CIA detention,
"extraordinary renditions," and "reverse renditions."
"Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg," said Reed Brody, special
counsel for Human Rights Watch. "It's now clear that abuse of
detainees has happened all over-from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to
a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent
prisoners. And probably quite a few other places we don't even know
about."
Human Rights Watch called this week for the appointment of a special
prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and ex-CIA Director George Tenet, as well as Lt. Gen.
Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen.
Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba in cases of crimes against detainees. It rejected last
week's report by the Army Inspector General which was said to absolve
Gen. Sanchez of responsibility.
"General Sanchez gave the troops at Abu Ghraib the green light to use
dogs to terrorize detainees, and they did, and we know what happened,
said Brody. "And while mayhem went on under his nose for three months,
Sanchez didn't step in to halt it."
Human Rights Watch also expressed concern that, despite all the damage
that had been done by the detainee abuse scandal, the United States
had not stopped the use of illegal coercive interrogation. In January
2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed in a written response
during his confirmation hearings that the prohibition on cruel,
inhuman, or degrading (CID) treatment does not apply to U.S. personnel
in the treatment of non-citizens abroad, indicating that no law would
prohibit the CIA from engaging in CID treatment when it interrogates
non-Americans outside the United States.
Human Rights Watch said that the U.S. government was still withholding
key information about the treatment of detainees, including directives
reportedly signed by President George W. Bush authorizing the CIA to
establish secret detention facilities and to "render" suspects to
countries where torture is used.
"If the United States is to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it
needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse
and come clean on what the president has authorized," said Brody.
"Washington must repudiate, once and for all, the mistreatment of
detainees in the name of the war on terror."
Reda about U.S. Abuse of Detainees around the World
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/0a95a728282ef1cf141236fe2b3827fb.htm
El Kabong
are truly fine and upstanding men. They truly serve their country
well. We need many more like these men, and far fewer
murdering yahoos in uniform.
"A second Marine, identified only as "Corporal O" and described as a
cook working to be an Arabic linguist, said the men were scared and
claimed to be visiting family in the residence.
"Corporal O" testified he was inside the house talking with women and
children when the shooting occurred. He said they confirmed the men's
story that they were visiting relatives.
Marines Testify in Iraq Murder Hearing
By AARON BEARD, Associated Press Writer
CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. - A Marine testified that a fellow soldier accused
of killing two Iraqis left a sign near their bodies bearing an
"inappropriate" Marine slogan.
Second Lt. Ilario Pantano, 33, has admitted to shooting the men during
an April 2004 search in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. He has claimed the slayings
were in self-defense.
Fellow Marines testified Tuesday that Pantano shot the men in the back
and put a sign near the bodies bearing a Marine slogan: "No better
friend, no worse enemy."
First Lt. Samuel Cunningham testified that after being told of the
sign, he told Pantano to remove it, then called to have the bodies
taken away by Iraqi National Guardsmen.
"I was surprised," Cunningham said of the sign. "I told him it was
inappropriate. ... It's just unprofessional." Cunningham called it "a
death card."
In the incident, Pantano's unit was ordered to search a house in
Mahmudiyah, and stopped Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil as they
tried to leave a residence suspected of being a terrorist hideout.
According to written charges, Pantano ordered other troops to remove
the suspects' handcuffs and look away, then shot the pair in the back,
vandalized their vehicle and hung the sign.
disgust99
> U.S.: Abu Ghraib Only the "Tip of the Iceberg"
> 26 Apr 2005 21:50:13 GMT
>
> Source: Human Rights Watch
>
> (New York, April 27, 2005)- The crimes at Abu Ghraib are part of a
> larger pattern of abuses against Muslim detainees around the world,
> Human Rights Watch said on the eve of the April 28 anniversary of the
> first pictures of U.S. soldiers brutalizing prisoners at the Iraqi
> jail.
techniques and who trained the U S military and the paramilitary groups
currently in Iraq. The Jews have had decades to refine the methods of
torture while claiming to the the "good guys" in their invasion and
occupation of the land once known as Palestine.
Unpleasant Truth
"disgust99" <disg...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:IaMbe.133511$cg1....@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
Oh, you mean the lands the Jews held for three millennia until the Muslim
invaders stole it?
El Kabong
By Scott Ritter
Sunday 01 May 2005
In the months that have passed since Iraq's much-hyped democratic
elections, one word keeps creeping into my mind as I assess the tragic
events unfolding in Mesopotamia today: Vietnam.
The American press and punditry, intimidated and compensated into
slavishly reporting on Iraq solely along lines that will not overly
alienate them from the powers that be inside the administration of
George W Bush, have long ago foregone drawing comparisons between the
ongoing conflict in Iraq and the one America lost in Southeast Asia
some three decades in the past.
The lack of a basis for direct comparison makes accomplishing the
denigration of any such correlation between conflicts all-too-easy for
the uninformed consumer of what passes for "news" in America today:
the terrain is different, the scale of violence is different, the Cold
War is over, and, of course, everything changed after 9/11.
Recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard
Myers, insisted, at a press conference, that the US and coalition
forces were winning the war in Iraq, and noted that he was confident
of a military victory.
"I'm going to say this: I think we are winning, okay. I think we're
definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time," Myers
said.
Public posturing
Myers' statements, mirroring his earlier pronouncements, as well as
those of his fellow joint chiefs, represent a posturing for the public
that is not matched by the reality on the ground in Iraq.
For every general who speaks of 'winning the war', there are hundreds
of soldiers and marines, veterans of the harsh reality of ground truth
in Iraq, who believe otherwise.
A typical example is the experience of the third battalion, seventh
marines, who are based in 29 Palms, California. This battalion was
assigned the task of securing the area around the western Iraqi city
of al-Qaim in April 2004.
"The marines", the battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Lopez wrote
in a letter to families back in the US, "are hard at work establishing
security and bringing a better life to the people of al-Qaim ... we
are actively engaged in establishing local governance, local Iraqi
police forces, and improving schools".
However, the reality of al-Qaim was much different. The marines
entered what they called "silent war", where they engaged in
unforgiving combat with faceless insurgents that killed and wounded
them in alarming numbers, and which went largely unreported back home
in America.
Al-Qaim incident
The anonymity of their struggle briefly lifted in mid-April 2004, when
the town of Husaybah, located near al-Qaim along the Syrian border,
exploded into violence when some 300 well armed and well organized
Iraqi insurgents launched a coordinated attack on the marine
positions.
The marines were able to repel their attackers, but at a high cost:
five marines killed, and another nine wounded.
Back home, marine families and friends communicated back and forth
about this fight: "No better friend, no worse enemy", one wrote in a
blog.
"It's not a question of 'if'', it's 'when'. In this battle, it took
less than 10 hours. We'll grieve with the families of our fallen
heroes, knowing that their sons and husbands made a difference. Semper
Fi."
But this chest-pounding bravado wasn't shared by the marines walking
the ground. "I guarantee you that people don't understand what we're
going through," one young officer was quoted as saying.
"Sometimes, you walk right by a bomb, and there's just nobody there to
push the button."
Waste of time
The third battalion, seventh marines returned home in September 2004,
having suffered 17 dead and many dozens wounded.
The marines of this proud battalion were deeply scarred by their
experiences in Iraq. This was the same unit that had, in April 2003,
spearheaded the American assault on Baghdad, helping liberate Iraq
from Saddam Hussein. During that phase of the war, not a single marine
from 3/7 was killed.
This time it was different. Rather than a sense of victory, the
marines were struck by the futility, and tragedy, of what they had
gone through.
"I feel like I wasted my time, caring about something that doesn't
have any meaning anymore", one marine was quoted as saying, speaking
of his time in al-Qaim. "I felt like I was wasting time and the
taxpayers' money."
His battalion commander concurred, noting that while much had been
accomplished on the surface, little had fundamentally changed in Iraq
as a result of the sacrifices of his marines.
"If we can't turn the corner on turning security and governance over
to the Iraqi people", Lopez said, "we will continue to be frustrated."
'Dereliction of duty'
Myers knows this reality, and yet, he ignores it. His words and
actions, together with his fellow joint chiefs, remind me of another
generation of American generals, who occupied the office of joint
chiefs of staff, those written about so devastatingly by HR McMasters
in his classic book, Dereliction of Duty.
McMasters details how general officers could, and did, forsake their
fellow warriors by glossing over the reality of what was transpiring
in a conflict in the name of political expediency, designed to further
their own personal careers and reputations.
As McMasters points out, however, careers may be salvaged, but
personal reputations stained by such cowardice cannot stand the test
of time and history.
Myers and his fellow joint chiefs, like those of their ilk who so
shamefully served during the Vietnam era, have committed a massive
dereliction of duty in the manner in which they so brazenly embraced
an illegal war of aggression.
This embrace has led to an acceptance of an ongoing brutal occupation
that only deepens the social and political divides inside Iraq,
guaranteeing that so long as American forces remain in that embattled
nation, the only path our forces are on is one leading inexorably
towards civil war, and more death and destruction.
"Go tell it to the marines". This slogan has long signified the
reality that America's marines were the first to fight in our nation's
wars, and, therefore, the ones who bore the brunt of the sacrifice,
and were in the best position to gauge reality.
Snapshot in time
"I told the marines we were there to begin a process and turn it over
to other marines," Lopez said of his time in al-Qaim. "Ours was a
snapshot in time."
Another marine battalion now occupies al-Qaim. Far from the optimistic
mission of "nation building" the marines of 3/7 had embarked on in
April 2004, the marines of the third battalion, second marines are
more concerned with security and stability operations.
In early April 2005, these marines withstood a massive assault on
their positions by more than 100 enemy fighters, equipped with mortars
and explosive-laden vehicles.
The marines repelled the attack, suffering no significant losses,
through a combination of skill, bravery and good fortune.
The "snapshot in time" Lopez spoke of is a much different one for the
marines of 3/2. And it is a far cry from any viable notion of victory
that could be imagined when listening to General Myers' speak of
"winning" the war in Iraq.
Go tell it to the marines, General Meyers. You might be surprised by
the answer you get.
Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, and a former
major in the US marines, having served for 12 years, including in the
first Gulf War in 1991. Author of Iraq Confidential, to be published
by IB Tauris (London) in the Summer of 2005.
El Kabong
as an 18-year-old boy to chat with West, who used the online aliases
"Cobra82nd" and "RightBi-Guy" to chat on the Web site. West was in the
Army's 82nd Airborne.
West said he would not characterize himself as gay. As for his visits
to the Gay.com Web site, he told the newspaper: "I can't tell you why
I go there, to tell you the truth ... curiosity, confused, whatever, I
don't know."
Wash. Mayor Denies Molesting Boys in '70s
By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS, Associated Press Writer
SPOKANE, Wash. - Mayor James E. West, a Republican foe of gay rights,
was accused in a newspaper story Thursday of molesting two boys
decades ago and was caught by the paper using the trappings of his
office to try to court a young man on a gay Web site.
West on Thursday denied the molestation allegations, but acknowledged
he "had relations with adult men."
He admitted offering autographed sports memorabilia and a possible
City Hall internship to what he thought was an 18-year-old man on the
Web site Gay.com. The man was actually a private computer expert hired
by The Spokesman-Review as part of a journalism sting operation.
West, 54, a former Boy Scout leader and Army paratrooper who was
married briefly in the 1990s, denied that the online offers
constituted abuse of his office, and he said he would serve out the
more than three years remaining in his term.
"I am a law-abiding citizen," West said during a brief news
conference. He took no questions.
The Spokesman-Review ran interviews Thursday with two men who allege
West molested them decades ago when they were Boy Scouts and the mayor
was a troop leader and sheriff's deputy. Both men have criminal
records because of drug problems.
"I categorically deny allegations about incidents that supposedly
occurred 24 years ago as alleged by two convicted felons and about
which I have no knowledge," West said.
No criminal investigations are under way, according to sheriff and
police departments, which said the statute of limitations for any
charges has run out.
West, a conservative with an abrasive style and a fierce temper, rose
to become majority leader of the state Senate during a two-decade
legislative career. He consistently opposed efforts to expand civil
rights protections for gays and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act,
a ban on gay marriage, in 1998. During a 1990 hearing on AIDS
education, West proposed that teen sex be criminalized.
In 1990, he proposed marriage from the floor of the Senate to Ginger
Marshall while she was visiting the Capitol. Their marriage ended five
years later.
The newspaper said its investigation of West arose out of tips
received in 2002 during its investigations of sexual abuse of children
by priests.
The newspaper hired a computer expert to create a fictitious identity
as an 18-year-old boy to chat with West, who used the online aliases
"Cobra82nd" and "RightBi-Guy" to chat on the Web site. West was in the
Army's 82nd Airborne.
West said he would not characterize himself as gay. As for his visits
to the Gay.com Web site, he told the newspaper: "I can't tell you why
I go there, to tell you the truth ... curiosity, confused, whatever, I
don't know."
El Kabong
Child Abuse Death Risk High in Military Families
TUESDAY, May 17 (HealthDay News) -- Children from military families
are twice as likely to die from severe abuse as other children are,
according to a North Carolina study.
Based on the findings, the pediatric experts who led the study are
calling on officials at the Pentagon to do more to investigate the
reasons children growing up in military households face such risks.
The study was presented Tuesday at the Pediatric Academic Societies
annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.
Researchers at the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute examined
cases of child abuse murders in North Carolina from 1985 to 2000. They
focused on cases involving babies and children up to 10 years old.
They report that four military installations are in the two counties
with the highest rates of child abuse murders.
Overall, North Carolina had 378 abuse murders of children in this age
group, for a annual rate of 2.2 deaths per 100,000 children. In
Cumberland County -- home to Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base -- the
abuse murder rate for children of military families was five deaths
per 100,000 children, more than double the state average. The rate for
children from non-military families living in Cumberland County was
also higher than the state average.
In Onslow County -- home to Camp LeJeune/New River Air Station -- the
annual abuse murder rate for children of military families was 4.9 per
100,000. The rate for non-military children in Onslow County was also
higher than the state average.
"In this study, the long-term patterns of child abuse homicides are
not coincidence," Marcia Herman-Geddens, senior fellow at the North
Carolina Child Advocacy Institute and an adjunct professor at the
School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, said in a
prepared statement.
"They suggest problems in and around North Carolina military families
and military communities that predictably result in a consistently
higher number and rate of child abuse homicides than in non-military
communities."
And she said that "although military bases have many laudable programs
and interventions to reduce child abuse and other family violence,
strategies with sufficient effectiveness may be lacking, missing,
inadequate and/or undermined by other influences on military and
civilian families."
More action is required at the local, state and national levels to
deal with this problem, Herman-Geddens said. The study recommends that
the U.S. Department of Defense begin a data collection system for
all child and adult cases of family violence, and that this
information be made public so it can be used for prevention research.
The study also recommended that current prevention, treatment and
support services available to military families be examined for
effectiveness, and expanded with a coordinated response to family
violence to reduce child and spouse abuse.
El Kabong
OSCAR CASTRO, http://www.afsc.org/youthmil/default.htm
Castro is coordinator of the National Youth and Militarism Program
for the American Friends Service Committee, which is organizing
teach-ins and demonstrations around the country about recruitment
today. He said: "The Army plans to suspend all recruiting on May 20.
This follows reports of serious recruiter improprieties -- including
fraud and coercion -- having surfaced, prompting the need, recruiters
say, for retraining. We know from our work that there are systematic
unethical and illegal tactics used by recruiters, particularly in poor
communities and communities of color. And we know [the problem] is
growing. There's a lack of parent and student awareness about the No
Child Left Behind Act (Military Recruiter Provision - Sec. 9528) that
gives recruiters unfettered access to private, confidential
information. Many people join the military without ever really
understanding the fundamentals of what they are doing -- that they are
giving up constitutional rights; that it's a one-way contract."
NANCY LESSIN,
http://www.mfso.org, http://www.bringthemhomenow.org
Currently in the Washington, D.C., area, Lessin is co-founder of
Military Families Speak Out. She said today: "This recruitment
'stand-down' will not focus on the real problem, which is a military
that is recruiting men and women to serve in a war based on lies.
Instead, Friday's activity will bring attention to a 'few bad apple'
recruiters and a need for 'more training.' When given a job to sell a
bad product, and placed under enormous pressure to make more and more
sales, bad recruiting practices are inevitable. Instead of playing PR
games, what the military needs to do is call a stand-down on the war
itself."
CINDY SHEEHAN, http://www.gsfp.org,
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040805C.shtml
Sheehan is co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, which is
affiliated with MFSO. Her son, Casey, born on Memorial Day, 1979, was
killed in Iraq on Palm Sunday, April 4, 2004. She said today:
"Recruiters lie to our young people -- they lied to my son. They said
-- in writing -- that he could be a chaplain's assistant, but once he
joined they said he had to choose between being a Humvee mechanic or a
cook. They promised he would get a $20,000 bonus, but he only got
$4,000; they told him the rest would go towards his future education
but he isn't going to have any future education. They said he would be
able to take classes, but after he joined they always came up with
excuses why he couldn't. They told him he would get a laptop computer
and he never did. And, most insidiously, they told my son that he
would never see combat since he scored so high on the ASVAB (military
competency test). He was in Iraq for only two weeks before he was
killed in combat."
Warrior
program going" The only trick I told them is staying alive.news:mdlr815geoq2rikcp...@4ax.com...
El Kabong
"....Sadr is cashing in on his anti-occupation stance....."
Moqtada is a fundamentalist Shiite but his staunch opposition to the
presence of foreign troops in Iraq brings him closer to the Sunni
clergy than his fellow Shiites in the government, who have
consistently stressed the need for US troops to remain until the
country was stabilised.
Although his movement did not run in the January 30 elections -- the
country's first multi-party polls in half a century -- Sadr is thought
to have around 20 supporters in parliament who were elected on other
lists.
Three ran in the polls on the pro-Sadr National Independent Cadres and
Elites list, while the huge Shiite alliance also has about 17 of his
sympathisers, according to experts and officials.
Despite his official absence from the National Assembly, Sadr also
managed to place one of his men on the parliamentary committee tasked
with drafting the country's permanent constitution.
A demand for the pullout of coalition troops from Iraq was the second
point in the electoral programme of the Shiite coalition that won the
elections four months ago.
In the meantime, Sadr is cashing in on his anti-occupation stance
whilst carving himself a new image as a responsible statesman and
observers predict he could fancy his chances in the elections,
scheduled for the end of this year.
Hey Gyra
>
> "....Sadr is cashing in on his anti-occupation stance....."
>
> Moqtada is a fundamentalist Shiite but his staunch opposition to the
> presence of foreign troops in Iraq brings him closer to the Sunni
> clergy than his fellow Shiites in the government, who have
> consistently stressed the need for US troops to remain until the
> country was stabilised.
Add this boy-king-wannabe to the list of moving targets (Bin Laden, Zaqawi,
etc.) ---
El Kabong
By PAUL GARWOOD, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb exploded next to a U.S. Army convoy in
Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three soldiers, while another American
died in a drive-by shooting a half-hour later. Their deaths pushed the
number of U.S. troops killed in three days to 14, part of a surge in
attacks that have also killed about 60 Iraqis.
In the northern city of Tal Afar, there were reports that militants
were in control and that Shiites and Sunnis were fighting in the
streets, a day after two car bombs killed at least 20 people. Police
Capt. Ahmed Hashem Taki said Tal Afar was experiencing "civil war."
Journalists were blocked from entering the city of 200,000.
Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq during the past week,
raising concerns that insurgents may again be focusing their sights on
American forces in addition to Shiite Muslims
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=535&e=2&u=/ap/20050524/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
El Kabong
Vets Sue Rumsfeld Over Health Care Cuts
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Tue May 24,10:39 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Residents of a historic retirement home for war veterans
filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday against Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld, asserting that the Pentagon chief has imposed
excessive and illegal cutbacks in on-site medical and dental services.
The suit was filed in federal court on behalf of the nearly 1,000
residents at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington, one of
two such institutions managed by the Defense Department.
The home's chief financial officer, Steve McManus, said in an
interview that the residents who filed the complaint do not fully
understand the reasons for some of the changes. He said they have not
only saved money but also produced efficiencies and improvements.
"We're really trying to improve the benefits for our residents and
create the foundation for the financial stability of the Armed Forces
Retirement Home," McManus said. The budget for operating the home has
fallen from about $63 million last year to $58 this year, he said.
In their complaint, the home's residents said Rumsfeld has a ready
remedy for the financial problems that led to the cutbacks in services
and staffing, but he has chosen not to act.
They said Congress gave the Pentagon authority in 1994 to increase one
source of the home's operating funds — a 50-cent-per-month payroll
deduction paid by every enlisted member and warrant officer in the
military. Raising it to $1 per month would generate $7 million a year
in new revenue, the suit says.
The retirement home's operating costs are borne mainly by a trust fund
and by monthly fees paid by its residents. Another source of revenue
are the fines and forfeitures levied upon members of the active-duty
military in judicial proceedings.
The lawsuit also named as a defendant the Pentagon official who
manages the home, Timothy Cox.
El Kabong
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-milassess24may24,1,7161030.story
May 24, 2005 latimes.com
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Insurgents Flourish in Iraq's Wild West
The center of the rebel movement has shifted to Al Anbar province,
near the border with Syria. But the U.S. has been moving its forces
away.
By Mark Mazzetti and Solomon Moore, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military's plan to pacify Iraq has run into
trouble in a place where it urgently needs to succeed.
U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad agree that Al Anbar province
— the vast desert badlands stretching west from the cities of Fallouja
and Ramadi to the lawless region abutting the Syrian border — remains
the epicenter of the country's deadly insurgency.
ADVERTISEMENT
Yet U.S. troops and military officials in the embattled province said
in recent interviews that they have neither enough combat power nor
enough Iraqi military support to mount an effective counterinsurgency
against an increasingly sophisticated enemy.
"You can't get all the Marines and train them on a single objective,
because usually the objective is bigger than you are," said Maj. Mark
Lister, a senior Marine air officer in Al Anbar province. "Basically,
we've got all the toys, but not enough boys."
The Pentagon has made training Iraqi troops its top priority since
Iraq's national election in late January. But in Al Anbar province,
that objective is overshadowed by the more basic mission of trying to
keep much of the region out of insurgent hands.
Just three battalions of Marines are stationed in the western part of
the province, down from four a few months ago. Marine officials in
western Al Anbar say that each of those battalions is smaller by one
company than last year, meaning there are approximately 2,100 Marines
there now, compared with about 3,600 last year.
Some U.S. military officers in Al Anbar province say that commanders
in Baghdad and the Pentagon have denied their repeated requests for
more troops.
"[Commanders] can't use the word, but we're withdrawing," said one
U.S. military official in Al Anbar province, who asked not to be
identified because it is the Pentagon that usually speaks publicly
about troop levels. "Slowly, that's what we're doing."
Such reductions are especially problematic because U.S. commanders
have determined that it is the western part of the province to which
the insurgency's "center of resistance" has shifted. The insurgency's
base of operations was once the eastern corridor between Fallouja and
Ramadi. Now, Pentagon officials say, it is in villages and cities
closer to the Syrian border.
Commanders also believe the insurgency is now made up of a larger
percentage of foreign jihadists than the U.S. military previously
believed, an indication that there are not enough U.S. and Iraqi
troops to patrol miles of desert border.
Some Pentagon officials and experts in counterinsurgency warfare say
the troop shortage has hamstrung the U.S. military's ability to
effectively fight Iraqi insurgents.
This was evident during this month's Operation Matador, the U.S.
offensive near the Syrian border designed to stem the flow of foreign
fighters and their weapons into Iraq. For seven days, Marines rumbled
through desert villages and fought pitched battles against a
surprisingly well-coordinated enemy.
On the first day of the operation, insurgents appeared to be willing
to stand their ground and fight the Marines, but U.S. military
officials now believe that may have been a tactic to delay U.S. troops
from crossing into the Ramana region north of the Euphrates River.
This delay, officials said, could have given many of the insurgents
time to escape into Syria.
"It's an extremely frustrating fight," said Maj. Steve White,
operations director for the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment.
"Fighting these guys is like picking up water. You're going to lose
some every time."
A military news release declared the mission a success, saying that
U.S. troops had killed more than 125 insurgents. Nine Marines were
killed and 40 were wounded during the operation.
Yet as soon as the operation concluded, the Marines crossed back over
the Euphrates River and left no U.S. or Iraqi government presence in
the region — generally considered a major mistake in counterinsurgency
warfare.
"It's classically the wrong thing to do," said Kalev Sepp, a professor
at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who last fall
was a counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top
U.S. general in Iraq. "Sending 1,000 men north of the Euphrates does
what? Sometimes these things can be counterproductive, because you
just end up shooting things up and then leaving the area."
LL bean
El Kabong <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=534&e=10&u=/ap/20050525/ap_on_
and;
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050524-114247-6871r.htm
Home's retirees sue Rumsfeld
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Residents of a historic retirement home for war
veterans filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, asserting that
the Pentagon chief has imposed excessive and illegal
cutbacks in on-site medical and dental services.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of the
nearly 1,000 residents at the Armed Forces Retirement
Home in Washington, one of two such institutions
managed by the Defense Department.
>
g adds.
MONEY , what a concept
El Kabong
- Series Intro: Dr. Doug Rokke, science teacher and 30-year Army vet,
continues to expose one of the most egregious crimes against humanity,
the US corporate creation and military use and sale of uranium waste
(DU) in Desert Storm and elsewhere.
This video requires the whole vid(18megs) to download before playing.
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/nyc/dougrokkeondu28k.rm
El Kabong
El Kabong
"We have advised" the Americans "that these random attacks on people
and houses gives the insurgents a bigger base," said Hadi al Ameri, an
Iraqi lawmaker and commander of the Shi'ite Muslim Badr Brigade. The
Brigade was the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, a prominent party in Iraq's new government.
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/iraq24e_20050524.htm
In Iraq, efforts to catch militants fuel rage, fear
U.S.-Iraqi operation nets 285 suspects with random raids
May 24, 2005
BY TOM LASSETER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers poured through
Baghdad on Monday, detaining suspected insurgents in house-to-house
searches and finding $6 million in $100 bills, the preferred currency
for paying insurgent hit men and bomb-makers.
At least 285 suspected insurgents had been detained since Sunday.
Bystanders were also apparently caught up in the dragnet, however.
Some Iraqis said that while Operation Squeeze Play took some
insurgents off the streets, it angered moderate Iraqis while giving
insurgents a friendlier environment in which to carry out attacks.
Raad Mutlek, a Sunni Muslim, was sitting in a candy shop in Baghdad's
Abu Ghraib neighborhood Monday. He was filling in for the shop's
owner, his cousin, who was detained the day before.
"They came here and detained people randomly," Mutlek said. "The
families of the innocent people who have been detained will seek
revenge."
Mutlek's brother, Yass, who had been listening to the conversation,
stood and walked out to stretch his legs. An Apache helicopter was
circling overhead. A moment later, he hustled back in.
"Look," he said, nodding toward the street, "the Americans are coming
back."
He paused and then hurried off, looking for a safe place.
One Shi'ite politician warned that the raids could lead to more
problems.
"We have advised" the Americans "that these random attacks on people
and houses gives the insurgents a bigger base," said Hadi al Ameri, an
Iraqi lawmaker and commander of the Shi'ite Muslim Badr Brigade. The
Brigade was the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, a prominent party in Iraq's new government.
El Kabong
"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in
the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad.
About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a
Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote.
FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made
public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing
the Koran down a toilet.
The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary
of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was
redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also
was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of
other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order
through the Freedom of Information Act.
"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in
the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad.
About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a
Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote.
"The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The
guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.
El Kabong
The list below presents specific "incidents" of US policy.
It minimizes the grievances against the US because it excludes
long-standing policies, such as US backing for authoritarian
regimes (arming Saudi Arabia, training the secret police in Iran
under the Shah, providing arms and aid to Turkey as it attacked
Kurdish villages, etc.).
The list also excludes actions of Israel in which the US
is indirectly implicated because Israel has been the leading
or second-ranking recipient of US aid for many years
and has received US weapons and benefited from US
veto in the Security Council.
1949 : CIA backs military coup deposing elected government
of Syria.
1953 : CIA helps overthrow the democratically elected
Mossadeq government in Iran (which had nationalized
the British oil company) leading to a quarter-century
of dictatorial rule by the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi.
1956 : US cuts off promised funding for Aswan Dam in Egypt
after Egypt receives Eastern bloc arms.
1956 : Israel, Britain, and France invade Egypt. US does not
support invasion, but the involvement of NATO allies severely
diminishes Washington's reputation in the region.
1958 : US troops land in Lebanon to " preserve stability".
1960s (early) : US unsuccessfully attempts assassination
of Iraqi leader, Abdul Karim Qassim.
1963 : US reported to give Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be
headed by Saddam Hussein) names of "communists"
to murder, which they do with vigor.
1967 : US blocks any effort in the Security Council to enforce
SC Resolution 244, calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories
occupied in the 1967 war.
1970 : Civil war between Jordan and PLO.
Israel and US prepare to intervene on side of Jordan
if Syria backs PLO.
1972 : US blocks Sadat's efforts to reach a peace
agreement with Egypt.
1973 : US military aid enables Israel to turn the tide in war
with Syria and Egypt.
1973-75 : US supports Kurdish rebels in Iraq. When Iran
reaches an agreement with Iraq in 1975 and seals the
border, Iraq slaughters Kurds and US denies them refuge.
Kissinger secretly explains that "covert action should not
be confused with missionary work".
1978-79 : Iranians begin demonstrations against the Shah.
US tells Shah it supports him "without reservation" and urges
him to act forcefully.
Until the last minute, US tries to organize military coup to save
the Shah, but to no avail.
1979-88 : US begins covert aid to Mujahdeen in Afghanistan
six months before Soviet invasion.
Over the next decade US provides more than $ 3 billion
in arms and aid.
1980-88 : Iran-Iraq war. When Iraq invades Iran, the US
opposes any Security Council action to condemn the
invasion.
US removes Iraq from its list of nations supporting terrorism
and allows US arms to be transferred to Iraq.
US lets Israel provide arms to Iran and in 1985 US provides
arms directly (though secretly) to Iran.
US provides intelligence information to Iraq.
Iraq uses chemical weapons in 1984; US restores diplomatic
relations with Iraq.
1987 US sends its navy into the Persian Gulf, taking Iraq's side.
1984 : An aggressive US ship shoots down an Iranian
civilian airliner, killing 290.
1981-1986 : US holds military maneuvers off the coast of
Libya with the clear purpose of provoking Qaddafi. In 1981,
a Libyan plane fires a missile and two Libyan planes were
subsequently shot down
1986 : Libya fires missiles that land far from any target and
US attacks Libyan patrol boats, killing 72, and shore
installations.
When a bomb goes off in a Berlin nightclub, killing two,
the US charges that Qaddafi was behind it (possibly true)
and conducts major bombing raids in Libya, killing dozens
of civilians, including Qaddafi's adopted daughter.
1982 : US gives "green light" to Israeli invasion of Lebanon,
where more than 10,000 civilians were killed.
US chooses not to invoke its laws prohibiting Israeli
use of US weapons except in self-defense.
1983 : US troops sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational
peacekeeping force; intervene on one side of a civil war.
Withdraw after suicide bombing of marine barracks.
1984 : US-backed rebels in Afghanistan fire on civilian airliner.
1988 : Saddam Hussein kills many thousands of his own
Kurdish population and uses chemical weapons against them.
The US increases its economic ties to Iraq.
1990-91 : US rejects diplomatic settlement of the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait (Rebuffing any attempt to link the two regional
occupations, of Kuwait and Palestine).
US leads international coalition in war against Iraq.
Civilian infrastructure targeted. To "promote stability"
US refuses to aid uprisings by Shi'ites in the south
and Kurds in the north, denying the rebels access
to captured Iraqi weapons and refusing to prohibit
Iraqi helicopter flights.
1991 : Devastating economic sanctions are imposed on Iraq.
U.S. and Britain block all attempts to lift them. Hundreds
of thousands die.
Though Security Council stated sanctions were to be lifted
once Hussein's programs to develop weapons of mass
destruction were ended, Washington makes it known that
the sanctions would remain as long as Saddam remains
in power. Sanctions strengthen Saddam's position.
1993 : US launches missile attack on Iraq, claiming self-defense
against an alleged assassination attempt on former president
Bush two months earlier.
1998 : US and UK bomb Iraq over weapons inspections, even
though Security Council is just then meeting to discuss the matter.
1998 : US destroys factory producing half of Sudan's pharmaceutical
supply, claiming retaliation for attacks on US embassies in Tanzania
and Kenya and that factory was involved in chemical warfare.
US later acknowledges there is no evidence for the chemical
warfare charge.
Jack Anderson
Syndicated columnist
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAandersonJ.htm :
Jack Anderson was born in Long Beach, California, in 1922.
Anderson was brought up in Salt Lake City and served two years
as a Mormon missionary.
His journalistic career when he began writing for his local newspaper,
The Murray Eagle. At eighteen he joined the Salt Lake Tribune
but during the Second World War he served in China.
This included fighting the Japanese with a band of Chinese guerrillas.
He also worked on the Shanghai edition of Stars and Stripes.
--------------------------------------------------------
All of those were before 2001
--------------------------------------------------------
Ever since the United States Army massacred 300
Lakotas in 1890, American forces have intervened
elsewhere around the globe more than 100 times !
Indeed the United States has sent troops abroad
or militarily struck other countries' territory 216 times
since independence from Britain.
Since 1945 the United States has intervened in
more than 20 countries throughout the world.
Since World War II, the United States actually
dropped bombs on 23 countries.
These include : China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53,
China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958,
Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo 1964,
Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73,
Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983,
Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s,
Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-2001 and 2003,
Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, 2001, Yugoslavia 1999.
Post World War II, the United States has also assisted
in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and the
CIA was responsible for half a dozen assassinations
of political heads of state.
The following is a comprehensive summary of the
imperialist strategy of the United States over the
span of the past century :
Argentina - 1890 - Troops sent to Buenos Aires to
protect business interests.
Chile - 1891 - Marines sent to Chile and clashed with nationalist
rebels.
Haiti - 1891 - American troops suppress a revolt by Black workers
on United States-claimed Navassa Island.
Hawaii - 1893 - Navy sent to Hawaii to overthrow the independent
kingdom - Hawaii annexed by the United States.
Nicaragua - 1894 - Troops occupied Bluefields,
a city on the Caribbean Sea, for a month.
China - 1894-95 - Navy, Army, and Marines landed
during the Sino-Japanese War.
Korea - 1894-96 - Troops kept in Seoul during the war.
Panama - 1895 - Army, Navy, and Marines landed
in the port city of Corinto.
China - 1894-1900 - Troops occupied China during the Boxer Rebellion.
Philippines - 1898-1910 - Navy and Army troops landed after
the Philippines fell during the Spanish-American War;
600,000 Filipinos were killed.
Cuba - 1898-1902 - Troops seized Cuba in the
Spanish-American War; the United States still
maintains troops at Guantanamo Bay today.
Puerto Rico - 1898 - present - Troops seized Puerto Rico
in the Spanish-American War and still occupy Puerto Rico today.
Nicaragua - 1898 - Marines landed at the port of San Juan del Sur.
Samoa - 1899 - Troops landed as a result over the
battle for succession to the throne.
Panama - 1901-14 - Navy supported the revolution when
Panama claimed independence from Colombia. American
troops have occupied the Canal Zone since 1901 when c
onstruction for the canal began.
Honduras - 1903 - Marines landed to intervene during a revolution.
Dominican Rep 1903-04 - Troops landed to protect
American interests during a revolution.
Korea - 1904-05 - Marines landed during the
Russo-Japanese War.
Cuba - 1906-09 - Troops landed during an election.
Nicaragua - 1907 - Troops landed and a protectorate was set up.
Honduras - 1907 - Marines landed during Honduras' war with Nicaragua.
Panama - 1908 - Marines sent in during Panama's
election.
Nicaragua - 1910 - Marines landed for a second time in Bluefields and
Corinto.
Honduras - 1911 - Troops sent in to protect American interests
during Honduras' civil war.
China - 1911-41 - Navy and troops sent to China during
continuous flare-ups.
Cuba - 1912 - Troops sent in to protect American
interests in Havana.
Panama - 1912 - Marines landed during Panama's
election.
Honduras - 1912 - Troops sent in to protect American interests.
Nicaragua - 1912-33 - Troops occupied Nicaragua and fought
guerrillas during its 20-year civil war.
Mexico - 1913 - Navy evacuated Americans during
revolution.
Dominican Rep 1914 - Navy fought with rebels over
Santo Domingo.
Mexico - 1914-18 - Navy and troops sent in to
intervene against nationalists.
Haiti - 1914-34 - Troops occupied Haiti after a
revolution and occupied Haiti for 19 years.
Dominican Rep 1916-24 - Marines occupied the
Dominican Republic for eight years.
Cuba - 1917-33 - Troops landed and occupied Cuba
for 16 years; Cuba became an economic protectorate.
World War I - 1917-18 - Navy and Army sent to Europe to
fight the Axis powers.
Russia - 1918-22 - Navy and troops sent to eastern
Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution; Army made five landings.
Honduras - 1919 - Marines sent during Honduras'
national elections.
Guatemala - 1920 - Troops occupied Guatemala for two
weeks during a union strike.
Turkey - 1922 - Troops fought nationalists in Smyrna.
China - 1922-27 - Navy and Army troops deployed
during a nationalist revolt.
Honduras - 1924-25 - Troops landed twice during a
national election.
Panama - 1925 - Troops sent in to put down a
general strike.
China - 1927-34 - Marines sent in and stationed
for seven years throughout China.
El Salvador - 1932 - Naval warships deployed
during the FMLN revolt under Marti.
World War II - 1941-45 - Military fought the Axis
powers : Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Yugoslavia - 1946 - Navy deployed off the coast of
Yugoslavia in response to the downing of an
American plane.
Uruguay - 1947 - Bombers deployed as a show of
military force.
Greece - 1947-49 - United States operations insured a victory
for the far right in national "elections."
Germany - 1948 - Military deployed in response to
the Berlin blockade; the Berlin airlift lasts 444 days.
Philippines - 1948-54 - The CIA directed a civil war against
the Filipino Huk revolt.
Puerto Rico - 1950 - Military helped crush an
independence rebellion in Ponce.
Korean War - 1951-53 - Military sent in during the war.
Iran - 1953 - The CIA orchestrated the overthrow of
democratically elected Mossadegh and restored the Shah to
power.
Vietnam - 1954 - The United States offered weapons to the
French in the battle against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh.
Guatemala - 1954 - The CIA overthrew the
democratically elected Arbenz and placed Colonel
Armas in power.
Egypt - 1956 - Marines deployed to evacuate foreigners after
Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
Lebanon - 1958 - Navy supported an Army occupation of
Lebanon during its civil war.
Panama - 1958 - Troops landed after Panamanians
demonstrations threatened the Canal Zone.
Vietnam - 1950s-75 - Vietnam War.
Cuba - 1961 - The CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasions
failed to overthrow the Castro government.
Cuba - 1962 - The Navy quarantines Cuba during the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
Laos - 1962 - Military occupied Laos during its civil war
against the Pathet Lao guerrillas.
Panama - 1964 - Troops sent in and Panamanians shot while
protesting the United States presence in the Canal Zone.
Indonesia - 1965 - The CIA orchestrated a military
coup.
Dominican Rep- 1965-66 - Troops deployed during a
national election.
Guatemala - 1966-67 - Green Berets sent in.
Cambodia - 1969-75 - Military sent in after the
Vietnam War expanded into Cambodia.
Oman - 1970 - Marines landed to direct a possible
invasion into Iran.
Laos - 1971-75 - Americans carpet-bomb the
countryside during Laos' civil war.
Chile - 1973 - The CIA orchestrated a coup,
killing President Allende who had been popularly
elected. The CIA helped to establish a military
regime under General Pinochet.
Cambodia - 1975 - Twenty-eight Americans killed in an
effort to retrieve the crew of the Mayaquez, which had
been seized.
Angola - 1976-92 - The CIA backed South African rebels
fighting against Marxist Angola.
Iran - 1980 - Americans aborted a rescue attempt to liberate
52 hostages seized in the Teheran embassy.
Libya - 1981 - American fighters shoot down two Libyan fighters.
El Salvador - 1981-92 - The CIA, troops, and advisers aid in
El Salvador's war against the FMLN.
Nicaragua - 1981-90 - The CIA and NSC directed the
Contra War against the Sandinistas.
Lebanon - 1982-84 - Marines occupied Beirut during
Lebanon's civil war; 241 were killed in the American barracks
and Reagan "redeployed" the troops to the Mediterranean.
Honduras - 1983-89 - Troops sent in to build bases
near the Honduran border.
Grenada - 1983-84 - American invasion overthrew the
Maurice Bishop government.
Iran - 1984 - American fighters shot down two Iranian planes
over the Persian Gulf.
Libya - 1986 - American fighters hit targets in and around
the capital city of Tripoli.
Bolivia - 1986 - The Army assisted government troops on
raids of cocaine areas.
Iran - 1987-88 - The United States intervened on the side
of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
Libya - 1989 - Navy shot down two more Libyan jets.
Virgin Islands - 1989 - Troops landed during unrest among
Virgin Island peoples.
Philippines - 1989 - Air Force provided air cover for
government during coup.
Panama - 1989-90 - 27,000 Americans landed in
overthrow of President Noriega; over 2,000 Panama
civilians were killed.
Liberia - 1990 - Troops entered Liberia to evacuate
foreigners during civil war.
Saudi Arabia - 1990-91 - American troops sent to
Saudi Arabia, which was a staging area in the war
against Iraq.
Kuwait - 1991 - Troops sent into Kuwait to turn back Saddam Hussein.
Somalia - 1992-94 - Troops occupied Somalia during
civil war.
Bosnia - 1993-95 - Air Force jets bombed "no-fly zone" during
civil war in Yugoslavia.
Haiti - 1994-96 - American troops and Navy provided a blockade
against Haiti's military government. The CIA restored Aristide to
power.
Zaire - 1996-97 - Marines sent into Rwanda Hutus'
refugee camps in the area where the Congo revolution began.
Albania - 1997 - Troops deployed during evacuation of foreigners.
Sudan - 1998 - American missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical
complex where alleged nerve gas components were manufactured.
Afghanistan - 1998 - Missiles launched towards alleged Afghan
terrorist training camps.
Yugoslavia - 1999 - Bombings and missile attacks carried out by
the United States in conjunction with NATO in the 11 week war
against Milosevic.
Iraq - 1998-2001 - Missiles launched into Baghdad and other large
Iraq cities for four days. American jets enforced "no-fly zone" and c
ontinued to hit Iraqi targets since December 1998 !!!
These aound **100** instances of American military
intervention did not include times when the United States :
(1) deployed military police overseas;
(2) mobilized the National Guard;
(3) sent Navy ships off the coast of numerous countries as a
show of strength;
(4) sent additional troops to areas where Americans were already
stationed;
(5) carried out covert actions where American forces were not
under the direct rule of an American command;
(6) used small hostage rescue units;
(7) used American pilots to fly foreign planes;
(8) carried out military training and advisory programs which
did not involve direct combat.
Omega
and the US, is feminism and secularism. Within Islam women have a specific
role which western feminism interferes with. And secularism rejects the
belief in the Creator and sets man as a "god". That so many in the west are
also pacifistic leads many Muslims to believe that the West is ready for
conquest and that now is the time for the third Holy War.
"El Kabong" <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote in message
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: Why Do They Hate Us ?
El Kabong
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1515&e=3&u=/afp/20050527/wl_mideast_afp/usiraqhelicopter
US helicopter shot down in Iraq 1 hour, 39 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US military helicopter crashed in Iraq after
coming under small arms fire while supporting coalition forces near
the city of Baqubah, the US military said, adding the fate of the crew
is presently unknown.
CNN and CBS television news reported that the downed helicopter had
been carrying two crew members.
A second helicopter also received ground fire but managed to land
safely at a US military base, the US Central Command said in a
statement.
"The other aircraft crashed and the status of the aircrew is unknown
at this time," the command said.
US forces have secured the site of the crash, it said adding that the
kind of helicopter and the number of troops aboard was not immediately
known.
Boner the Cat
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Johnny Asia
White House in 1893: "The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent
of the Founding Fathers of America."
"Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the
Afghan war into enemy territory -- into the Soviet Union itself. Casey
wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet
Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis
agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as
books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical
heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western
officials."
William Casey was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from
1981 to 1987.
Casey directed the successful presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan
in 1980. After Reagan was elected president, he named Casey to the
post of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). During his tenure at
the CIA, Casey played a large part in the shaping of Reagan's
foreign-policy, particularly its approach to Soviet expansionism.
This period of the Cold War saw a ramping up of the Agency's
anti-Soviet activities around the world. Casey was the principal
architect of the arms-for-hostages deal that became known as the
Iran-Contra affair. He also oversaw covert assistance to the
mujahadeen resistance in Afghanistan, the Solidarity movement in
Poland, and a number of coups and attempted coups in South- and
Central America.
Prior to heading the CIA, in the 1960s, Casey served as chairman of
the Securities and Exchange Commission. In World War II, he was a
member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Under William Casey, CIA covert operations proliferated. Casey was
featured prominently in Bob Woodward's book Veil: The Secret Wars of
the CIA (ISBN 0671601172).
Casey and vice presidential nominee Bush met face-to-face with Iranian
mullahs in 1980. According to one set of allegations, the pair slipped
off to Paris for such a meeting on Oct. 19, 1980.
Four French intelligence officials, including France's spy chief
Alexandre deMarenches in statements to his biographer, placed Casey at
the Paris meeting. But two other witnesses, a pilot named Heinrich
Rupp and Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe, also claimed
to have seen Bush in Paris that day. Ben-Menashe testified that Casey
and Bush were accompanied by active-duty CIA officers.
A Washington Post article from 1992 says:
"On a secret visit by the CIA director to plan strategy for the war
against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, helicopters lifted CIA director
William Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border,
where he watched mujaheddin rebels fire heavy weapons and learn to
make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and detonators.
During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that
they take the Afghan war into enemy territory -- into the Soviet Union
itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan
to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The
Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as
well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on
historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and
Western officials.
http://www.tao.ca/~solidarity/s11/afghanistan1979-1992.html
Afghanistan 1979-1992: America’s Jihad
by William Blum
His followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials
I have spoken with call him "scary", "vicious", "a fascist", "definite
dictatorship material".
This did not prevent the United States government from showering the
man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported
government of Afghanistan. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was
head of the Islamic Party and he hated the United States almost as
much as he hated the Russians. His followers screamed "Death to
America" along with "Death to the Soviet Union", only the Russians
were not showering him with large amounts of aid.
The United States began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists
despite the fact that in February of that year some of them had
kidnapped the American ambassador in the capital city of Kabul,
leading to his death in the rescue attempt. The support continued even
after their brother Islamic fundamentalists in next-door Iran seized
the U.S. embassy in Teheran in November and held 55 Americans hostage
for over a year. Hekmatyar and his colleagues were, after all, in
battle against the Soviet Evil Empire; he was thus an important member
of those forces Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters".
A "favorite tactic" of the Afghan freedom fighters was "to torture
victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses, ears, and
genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another", producing "a
slow, very painful death". The Mujaheddin also killed a Canadian
tourist and six West Germans, including two children, and a U.S.
military attaché was dragged from his car and beaten; all due to the
rebels’ apparent inability to distinguish Russians from other
Europeans.
Johnny Asia
PHOTO
http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050529/481/sel10605291123;_ylt=At4VyZqKYVaqoOzSWil2iMf9xg8F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3bGk2OHYzBHNlYwN0bXA-
Students lie down on the road and raise arms while chanting slogans,
South Korean ways to highlight their protest, during an anti-U.S.
rally opposing the United States' hostile policy against North Korea,
in front of the Yongsan Military Compound in Seoul, South Korea,
Sunday, May 29, 2005. More than 1,000 students demanded the withdrawal
U.S. troops in Korea peninsula. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20050529/ap_on_re_as/skorea_us_protest
South Korean Students Hold Anti-U.S. Rally
SEOUL, South Korea - Thousands of South Korean students rallying
Sunday against the U.S. military's five-decade presence clashed with
police after trying to enter the American base, and at least 12 people
were injured and more than 20 were arrested.
Demonstrators marched through Seoul before attempting to enter the
main Yongsan U.S. military base in the city center. They called for
the withdrawal of the 32,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea,
a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Demonstrators also gathered near the U.S. Embassy in downtown Seoul
demanding talks with the ambassador.
Television pictures showed masked protesters repeatedly charging
helmeted riot police, who wielded truncheons and carried shields. At
one point, students lay in the street outside the base, chanting and
clapping.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the protest was the largest of
its kind in recent years.
Warrior
"Johnny Asia" <poki_pongo at yahoo.com> wrote in message
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Johnny Asia
The officers, Capt. Phillip T. Esposito and 1st Lt. Louis E. Allen,
were assigned to the 42nd Infantry Division, New York Army National
Guard. Esposito was company commander and Allen served as a company
operations officer.
The statement said the military's Criminal Investigation Division is
investigating their deaths as a criminal case.
U.S. military officials contacted by The Associated Press declined to
comment further.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-06-10-soldiers-probe_x.htm
Criminal investigation initiated in deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq
BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military has launched a criminal inquiry into
the killings of two Army officers at a base north of Baghdad, the
military said Friday.
The soldiers were killed Tuesday evening in what the military first
believed was an "indirect fire" attack on Forward Operating Base
Danger in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, a military statement
said. An indirect fire attack involves enemy artillery or mortar
rounds fired from a location some distance away.
"Upon further examination of the scene by explosive ordnance
personnel, it was determined the blast pattern was inconsistent with a
mortar attack," the statement added without elaborating.
The officers, Capt. Phillip T. Esposito and 1st Lt. Louis E. Allen,
were assigned to the 42nd Infantry Division, New York Army National
Guard. Esposito was company commander and Allen served as a company
operations officer.
The statement said the military's Criminal Investigation Division is
investigating their deaths as a criminal case.
U.S. military officials contacted by The Associated Press declined to
comment further.
Johnny Asia
talks had started and that a delegation of Sunni tribal leaders from
the volatile Anbar province towns of Ramadi and Fallujah was expected
to meet with al-Sadr later.
"The meeting was held to develop the relationship between Russia and
Muqtada al-Sadr because the al-Sadr movement is very influential and
well-known in Iraq," al-Nouri said without providing further details.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=535&e=10&u=/ap/20050613/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_al_sadr_russia
Russian Ambassador Meets With Iraqi Cleric
NAJAF, Iraq - The Russian ambassador to Iraq flew to this southern
city Monday and started talks with the anti-American Shiite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, the embassy said.
Ambassador Vlidimer Chamov was making the first visit by a Russian
envoy to al-Sadr's office since the war in Iraq started two years ago,
embassy protocol chief Ivan Zhurba said.
Zhurba had no details on the purpose of the talks, but both Russia and
al-Sadr were fierce opponents of the war.
The talks come amid a raging insurgency that has killed more than 940
people since Iraq's new Shiite-led government was announced April 28.
Sheik Jalil al-Nouri, an al-Sadr aide in Najaf, confirmed that the
talks had started and that a delegation of Sunni tribal leaders from
the volatile Anbar province towns of Ramadi and Fallujah was expected
to meet with al-Sadr later.
"The meeting was held to develop the relationship between Russia and
Muqtada al-Sadr because the al-Sadr movement is very influential and
well-known in Iraq," al-Nouri said without providing further details.
Johnny Asia
concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled through
military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston,
the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, in a
comment that echoes what other senior officers say.
Sun, Jun. 12, 2005
Military action won't end insurgency, growing number of U.S. officers
believe
BY TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - A growing number of senior American military
officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military
solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more
than 1,700 U.S. troops during the past two years.
Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force
overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency
doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by
tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.
"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create
three."
- FULL ARTICLE -
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/world/11879261.htm
Johnny Asia
protest
As TONC works to revive, and re-energize the struggle to not only end,
but defeat, the colonial occupation of Iraq, we will walk every extra
mile, and spare no effort in our efforts along with others to forge
greater unity in the antiwar movement. The central question is, how
can this best be done?
We don’t think that you can make the movement “broader” by narrowing
its appeal and relevance. We believe that the idea that the movement
should strive to look more white, colorless, and vapid, and that it
should be fearful of looking too Arab, Black, Latin, and Asian, is a
false notion. There is no power or future in a movement based on this
notion. Either the composition, politics and outlook of the antiwar
movement in this country is going to reflect the world, or it’s going
to be little more than a irrelevant reflection of a distant past.
Clearly the focus of the movement is Iraq. But we must resist any
effort to either exclude or minimize the occupation of Palestine as a
focus of the movement. We must do this because the struggle for the
Right to Return and against the occupation of Palestine is central to
the struggle of Arab people and it is impossible to separate the
Palestinian Question From Iraq. Trying to separate the occupation of
Iraq from the occupation of Palestine is, to us, the same as trying to
separate the struggle against the war from the struggle against racism
at home.
Moreover, instead of abetting anti-Arab and Muslim racism and
repression, the movement must spare no effort in facilitating the
widest participation of the Arab and Muslim community in the Sept. 24
antiwar protest in Washington, and in all of our activities. The
movement reached such a high water mark at the antiwar march on
Washington in April 2002, when after years of struggle within the
movement, the antiwar movement embraced the struggle of Palestine, and
for the first time in history, the streets of the capital were filled
with tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims marching arm and arm with
antiwar protesters.
The movement has moved forwards on Palestine and the Troops Out Now
Coalition is determined to fight any backsliding. Our friends in the
National Council of Arab Americans, as well as others in the Arab and
Muslim community have engaged TONC on this important issue. We have
told our friends and we want to make it clear to all that the Troops
Out Now Coalition supports the call for unity in the anti-war movement
for the September 24, 2005 mobilization on the basis of the political
program achieved on March 20, 2004, the first anniversary of the war
on Iraq. We support, as a basis of the September 24 mobilization, the
Arab American and Muslim community in the political slogan: End
Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine to Haiti, Support the
Palestinian People's Right to Return. Meaningful solidarity with the
Arab and Muslim community will truly make September 24 broader and
stronger. TONC believes that this is what the world wants to see, and
what the Imperialists don’t want.
TONC hopes to build unity on this basis for September 24 and beyond to
unleash the full mass potential of the struggle to shut the war down.
Johnny Asia
TOLGA TEMUGE, 011-356-21-578-442, [after Monday] 011-90-533-644-4687,
tolga....@worldtribunal.org, http://worldtribunal.org
Temuge is the international media coordinator for the World
Tribunal on Iraq modeled on the Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Tribunal
of the late 1960s. Participants in the tribunal, which will take place
in Istanbul from June 24-27, include Arundhati Roy, Richard Falk,
Dennis Halliday, Hans von Sponeck, Walden Bello, Dahr Jamail, and
Barbara Olshansky, as well as numerous witnesses from Iraq. [Deep Dish
TV will provide live coverage; see below.]
BRENDAN SMITH, http://www.fpif.org/papers/0506haltbush.html
Brendan Smith is a lawyer and co-editor of the forthcoming book
"In The Name Of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond." He
said today: "On May 17 a legal summons was delivered to U.S. and UK
embassies in capitals around the world on behalf of the World Tribunal
on Iraq (WTI). The summons requested the attendance of President Bush
and Prime Minister Blair to defend charges that they are in 'violation
of common values of humanity, international treaties, and
international law' for waging war in Iraq. The Istanbul session to
which Bush and Blair are invited is the culminating tribunal of WTI's
held in Paris, Tokyo, New York, and elsewhere around the world. While
the summons was signed by leading international figures, including
international legal scholar Richard Falk and former UN Assistant
Secretary General Dennis Halliday, President Bush's attendance is not
anticipated."
Smith added: "In 1967, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell
convened the International War Crimes Tribunal. The Tribunal was
charged with conducting 'a solemn and historic investigation' of U.S.
war crimes in Vietnam in order to 'prevent the crime of silence.'
Drawing on this tradition, the WTI -- composed of lawyers, former
parliamentarians and judges, journalists, artists, and victims of U.S.
aggression -- has held people's tribunals on multiple continents in
order to compile 'a moral, political, and judicial record that
contributes to build[ing] a world of peace and justice.'"
ELLEN BRAUNE, http://www.deepdishtv.org
Deep Dish TV will provide live coverage of the World Tribunal on
Iraq from Istanbul via a global satellite uplink June 24-27, 2005.
Deep Dish will uplink a one hour daily program from Istanbul featuring
key presentations and evidence as well as in-depth interviews with the
witnesses and presenters. The broadcast will be available for free
downlink by radio and television stations throughout the world at 2100
to 2200 hours GMT (5-6 PM U.S. Eastern Time). The programs will also
be broadcast on Free Speech TV (Dish Network 9415) at 8 PM June 24th
through the 27th.
DAVID MILLER,
Miller is the editor of "Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media
Distortion in the Attack on Iraq" and a member of the Stirling Media
Research Institute. He will be testifying before the Tribunal.
DAVID BARSAMIAN, http://www.alternativeradio.org
Co-author of "Terrorism: Theirs & Ours" (interviews with Eqbal
Ahmad) and "Culture and Resistance" (interviews with Edward Said),
Barsamian said today: "The tribunal is an important moral and legal
judgement on Iraq. These initiatives cannot be underestimated in their
impact. Ripples are set in motion that later become waves." Barsamian
will be testifying before the Tribunal.
SAUL LANDAU,
Landau is a fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies and
director of the film "Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place." He will
be testifying before the Tribunal.
Johnny Asia
hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared that his father's
reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal
of nuclear bombs. The first batch of stories were finished just as a
delegation of American scientists was to visit the city to test for
radiation.
Censored Report on A-Bomb Effects Found
By KENJI HALL, Associated Press Writer
TOKYO - The censored stories written by an American journalist who
sneaked into a southern Japanese city soon after it was leveled by a
U.S. atomic bomb have surfaced six decades later.
They offer an unflinching account about the "wasteland of war" and its
radiation-sickened inhabitants.
The national Mainichi newspaper this month began serializing George
Weller's stories and photographs from Nagasaki, about 614 miles
southwest of Tokyo, for the first time since they were rejected by
U.S. military censors and lost 60 years ago.
Weller's reportage about the unknown affliction he called "disease X"
appeared in the paper in Japanese and on its Web site edition in
English.
By hiring a Japanese rowboat, catching trains and later posing as a
U.S. Army colonel, Weller, an award-winning reporter for the
now-defunct Chicago Daily News, slipped into Nagasaki in early
September 1945, the paper said.
It was about a month after the two A-bomb strikes the first in
Hiroshima on Aug. 6, the second in Nagasaki on Aug. 9 that had led
to Tokyo's Aug. 15, 1945, surrender ending the war.
Weller, who died in 2002, was the first foreign journalist to set foot
in the devastated city, which Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S.
occupation in Japan, had designated off-limits to reporters, it said.
Carbon copies of his stories, running to about 25,000 words on 75
typed pages, along with more than two dozen photos, were discovered by
his son, Anthony, last summer at Weller's apartment in Rome, Italy,
the Mainichi said.
Anthony Weller, a novelist living in Annisquam, Massachusetts,
couldn't be reached for comment. He plans to publish his father's
stories.
Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller
submitted his reports the first was dated Sept. 6 to the censors.
The stories infuriated MacArthur so much he personally ordered that
they be quashed, and the originals were never returned.
Anthony Weller told Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to
hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared that his father's
reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal
of nuclear bombs. The first batch of stories were finished just as a
delegation of American scientists was to visit the city to test for
radiation.
About 70,000 people were killed in the explosion.
In a Sept. 8, 1945 dispatch, Weller walked through the city a
"wasteland of war" and found evidence to back the talk of radiation
fallout from American radio reports.
Though thousands of burn victims had died within a week after the
attack, doctors were stumped by "this mysterious 'disease X'" which
sickened and was killing many Japanese as well as allied soldiers
freed from prison camps a month later.
"In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is
revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the
riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two
hospitals of downtown Nagasaki," he wrote.
One woman at a hospital "lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as
though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words," her legs and
arms covered with red spots. Others suffered from a dangerously
high-temperature fever, a drop in white and red blood cells, swelling
in the throat, sores, vomiting, diarrhea, internal bleeding or loss of
hair.
The next day, he met a Japanese doctor and X-ray specialist who
thought that the bomb had showered the population with harmfully high
levels of beta and gamma radiation. But nobody could say for sure.
"The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease,' uncured because it is untreated
and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away
lives here," Weller wrote.
Weller was 95 when he died in December 2002. He won the Pulitzer
Prize, the most prestigious journalism honor in the United States, for
an eyewitness account of an emergency appendectomy carried out by a
pharmacist's mate on a Navy submarine underwater in the South China
Sea. He also covered the French Indochina war in Southeast Asia and
World War II in Europe, as well as wrote stories from the Mideast,
Africa, the Soviet Union and other parts of Asia.
___
Mainichi newspaper:
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/specials/0506/0617weller.html
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
HIROSHIMA
WHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?
Positions listed refer to WWII positions.
~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my
headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing
to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that
there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such
an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful
bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my
reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of
a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings,
first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and
that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly
because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion
by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer
mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that
Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a
minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my
attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with
Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to
hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
~~~ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of
the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with
conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are
frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we
had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark
Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be
won by destroying women and children."
- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
~~~HERBERT HOOVER
On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way
to end the Pacific war quickly: "I am convinced that if you, as
President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan -
tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will
not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll
get a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over."
Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover,
pg. 347.
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hoover wrote
to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin,
"The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women
and children, revolts my soul."
quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg.
635.
"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February
1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if
such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to
drop the [atomic] bombs."
- quoted by Barton Bernstein in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the
Smithsonian, pg. 142
Hoover biographer Richard Norton Smith has written: "Use of the bomb
had besmirched America's reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It
ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out
into the sky over Japan."
Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover,
pg. 349-350.
In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover
recorded in his diary, "I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May
1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major
objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and
that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the
entry of Russia into Manchuria."
Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351.
~~~GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's
reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to
Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan
surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.'
MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce
their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace
would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to
Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender
did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of
the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort
to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been
unnecessary."
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg.
512.
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the
American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with
MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the
general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General
MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to
learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice
have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the
dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said,
if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the
retention of the institution of the emperor."
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
~~~JOSEPH GREW
(Under Sec. of State)
In a February 12, 1947 letter to Henry Stimson (Sec. of War during
WWII), Grew responded to the defense of the atomic bombings Stimson
had made in a February 1947 Harpers magazine article:
"...in the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that
if such a categorical statement about the [retention of the] dynasty
had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the
[Japanese] Government might well have been afforded by such a
statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an
early clearcut decision.
"If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in
June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific]
war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the
gainer."
Grew quoted in Barton Bernstein, ed.,The Atomic Bomb, pg. 29-32.
~~~JOHN McCLOY
(Assistant Sec. of War)
"I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese
government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the
retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some
reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the
future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I
believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some
disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable
consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion
after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely
associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to
reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the
opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory
to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs."
McCloy quoted in James Reston, Deadline, pg. 500.
~~~RALPH BARD
(Under Sec. of the Navy)
On June 28, 1945, a memorandum written by Bard the previous day was
given to Sec. of War Henry Stimson. It stated, in part:
"Following the three-power [July 1945 Potsdam] conference emissaries
from this country could contact representatives from Japan somewhere
on the China Coast and make representations with regard to Russia's
position [they were about to declare war on Japan] and at the same
time give them some information regarding the proposed use of atomic
power, together with whatever assurances the President might care to
make with regard to the [retention of the] Emperor of Japan and the
treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It
seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which
the Japanese are looking for.
"I don't see that we have anything in particular to lose in following
such a program." He concluded the memorandum by noting, "The only way
to find out is to try it out."
Memorandum on the Use of S-1 Bomb, Manhattan Engineer District
Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 77, National Archives (also
contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg.
307-308).
Later Bard related, "...it definitely seemed to me that the Japanese
were becoming weaker and weaker. They were surrounded by the Navy.
They couldn't get any imports and they couldn't export anything.
Naturally, as time went on and the war developed in our favor it was
quite logical to hope and expect that with the proper kind of a
warning the Japanese would then be in a position to make peace, which
would have made it unnecessary for us to drop the bomb and have had to
bring Russia in...".
quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the
Bomb, pg. 144-145, 324.
Bard also asserted, "I think that the Japanese were ready for peace,
and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss.
And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a
face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily
accepted." He continued, "In my opinion, the Japanese war was really
won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn't have been
necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the
Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would
have if we had not dropped the bomb."
War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb, U.S. News and World Report,
8/15/60, pg. 73-75.
~~~LEWIS STRAUSS
(Special Assistant to the Sec. of the Navy)
Strauss recalled a recommendation he gave to Sec. of the Navy James
Forrestal before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima:
"I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be
demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear
to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly
over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate... My proposal to
the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some
area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be
dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a
demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far
from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our
redwood... I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height
above such a forest... would lay the trees out in windrows from the
center of the explosion in all directions as though they were
matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed
to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese
that we could destroy any of their cities at will... Secretary
Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation..."
Strauss added, "It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary
to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would
find its way into the armaments of the world...".
quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the
Bomb, pg. 145, 325.
~~~PAUL NITZE
(Vice Chairman, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)
In 1950 Nitze would recommend a massive military buildup, and in the
1980s he was an arms control negotiator in the Reagan administration.
In July of 1945 he was assigned the task of writing a strategy for the
air attack on Japan. Nitze later wrote:
"The plan I devised was essentially this: Japan was already isolated
from the standpoint of ocean shipping. The only remaining means of
transportation were the rail network and intercoastal shipping, though
our submarines and mines were rapidly eliminating the latter as well.
A concentrated air attack on the essential lines of transportation,
including railroads and (through the use of the earliest accurately
targetable glide bombs, then emerging from development) the Kammon
tunnels which connected Honshu with Kyushu, would isolate the Japanese
home islands from one another and fragment the enemy's base of
operations. I believed that interdiction of the lines of
transportation would be sufficiently effective so that additional
bombing of urban industrial areas would not be necessary.
"While I was working on the new plan of air attack... [I] concluded
that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a
matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by
November 1945."
Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 36-37 (my emphasis)
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman
to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946
that was primarily written by Nitze and reflected his reasoning:
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by
the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all
probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered
even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not
entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated."
quoted in Barton Bernstein, The Atomic Bomb, pg. 52-56.
In his memoir, written in 1989, Nitze repeated,
"Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly
unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese
government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands [scheduled for
November 1, 1945] would have been necessary."
Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 44-45.
~~~ALBERT EINSTEIN
Einstein was not directly involved in the Manhattan Project (which
developed the atomic bomb). In 1905, as part of his Special Theory of
Relativity, he made the intriguing point that a relatively large
amount of energy was contained in and could be released from a
relatively small amount of matter. This became best known by the
equation E=mc2. The atomic bomb was not based upon this theory but
clearly illustrated it.
In 1939 Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt that was
drafted by the scientist Leo Szilard. Received by FDR in October of
that year, the letter from Einstein called for and sparked the
beginning of U.S. government support for a program to build an atomic
bomb, lest the Nazis build one first.
Einstein did not speak publicly on the atomic bombing of Japan until a
year afterward. A short article on the front page of the New York
Times contained his view:
"Prof. Albert Einstein... said that he was sure that President
Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he
been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war
before Russia could participate."
Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb, New York Times, 8/19/46, pg. 1.
Regarding the 1939 letter to Roosevelt, his biographer, Ronald Clark,
has noted:
"As far as his own life was concerned, one thing seemed quite clear.
'I made one great mistake in my life,' he said to Linus Pauling, who
spent an hour with him on the morning of November 11, 1954, '...when I
signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs
be made; but there was some justification - the danger that the
Germans would make them.'".
Ronald Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, pg. 620.
~~~LEO SZILARD
(The first scientist to conceive of how an atomic bomb might be made -
1933)
For many scientists, one motivation for developing the atomic bomb was
to make sure Germany, well known for its scientific capabilities, did
not get it first. This was true for Szilard, a Manhattan Project
scientist.
"In the spring of '45 it was clear that the war against Germany would
soon end, and so I began to ask myself, 'What is the purpose of
continuing the development of the bomb, and how would the bomb be used
if the war with Japan has not ended by the time we have the first
bombs?".
Szilard quoted in Spencer Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, ed., Leo
Szilard: His Version of the Facts, pg. 181.
After Germany surrendered, Szilard attempted to meet with President
Truman. Instead, he was given an appointment with Truman's Sec. of
State to be, James Byrnes. In that meeting of May 28, 1945, Szilard
told Byrnes that the atomic bomb should not be used on Japan. Szilard
recommended, instead, coming to an international agreement on the
control of atomic weapons before shocking other nations by their use:
"I thought that it would be a mistake to disclose the existence of the
bomb to the world before the government had made up its mind about how
to handle the situation after the war. Using the bomb certainly would
disclose that the bomb existed." According to Szilard, Byrnes was not
interested in international control: "Byrnes... was concerned about
Russia's postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and
Rumania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade
Russia to withdraw her troops from these countries, that Russia might
be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a
demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia." Szilard could see
that he wasn't getting though to Byrnes; "I was concerned at this
point that by demonstrating the bomb and using it in the war against
Japan, we might start an atomic arms race between America and Russia
which might end with the destruction of both countries.".
Szilard quoted in Spencer Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, ed., Leo
Szilard: His Version of the Facts, pg. 184.
Two days later, Szilard met with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head
scientist in the Manhattan Project. "I told Oppenheimer that I thought
it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities
of Japan. Oppenheimer didn't share my view." "'Well, said Oppenheimer,
'don't you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and
then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?'.
'They'll understand it only too well,' Szilard replied, no doubt with
Byrnes's intentions in mind."
Szilard quoted in Spencer Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, ed., Leo
Szilard: His Version of the Facts, pg. 185; also William Lanouette,
Genius In the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, pg. 266-267.
~~~THE FRANCK REPORT: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS
The race for the atomic bomb ended with the May 1945 surrender of
Germany, the only other power capable of creating an atomic bomb in
the near future. This led some Manhattan Project scientists in Chicago
to become among the first to consider the long-term consequences of
using the atomic bomb against Japan in World War II. Their report came
to be known as the Franck Report, and included major contributions
from Leo Szilard (referred to above). Although an attempt was made to
give the report to Sec. of War Henry Stimson, it is unclear as to
whether he ever received it.
International control of nuclear weapons for the prevention of a
larger nuclear war was the report's primary concern:
"If we consider international agreement on total prevention of nuclear
warfare as the paramount objective, and believe that it can be
achieved, this kind of introduction of atomic weapons [on Japan] to
the world may easily destroy all our chances of success. Russia...
will be deeply shocked. It will be very difficult to persuade the
world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and
suddenly releasing a weapon, as indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and
a thousand times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed
desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.".
The Franck Committee, which could not know that the Japanese
government would approach Russia in July to try to end the war,
compared the short-term possible saving of lives by using the bomb on
Japan with the long-term possible massive loss of lives in a nuclear
war:
"...looking forward to an international agreement on prevention of
nuclear warfare - the military advantages and the saving of American
lives, achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan, may
be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and wave of horror and
repulsion, sweeping over the rest of the world...".
The report questioned the ability of destroying Japanese cities with
atomic bombs to bring surrender when destroying Japanese cities with
conventional bombs had not done so. It recommended a demonstration of
the atomic bomb for Japan in an unpopulated area. Facing the long-term
consequences with Russia, the report stated prophetically:
"If no international agreement is concluded immediately after the
first demonstration, this will mean a flying start of an unlimited
armaments race.".
The report pointed out that the United States, with its highly
concentrated urban areas, would become a prime target for nuclear
weapons and concluded:
"We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs
for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the
United States would be the first to release this new means of
indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public
support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and
prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on
the future control of such weapons.".
Political and Social Problems, Manhattan Engineer District Records,
Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 76, National Archives (also contained
in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 323-333).
~~~ELLIS ZACHARIAS
(Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence)
Based on a series of intelligence reports received in late 1944,
Zacharias, long a student of Japan's people and culture, believed the
Japan would soon be ripe for surrender if the proper approach were
taken. For him, that approach was not as simple as bludgeoning
Japanese cities:
"...while Allied leaders were immediately inclined to support all
innovations however bold and novel in the strictly military sphere,
they frowned upon similar innovations in the sphere of diplomatic and
psychological warfare."
Ellis Zacharias, The A-Bomb Was Not Needed, United Nations World, Aug.
1949, pg. 29.
Zacharias saw that there were diplomatic and religious (the status of
the Emperor) elements that blocked the doves in Japan's government
from making their move:
"What prevented them from suing for peace or from bringing their plot
into the open was their uncertainty on two scores. First, they wanted
to know the meaning of unconditional surrender and the fate we planned
for Japan after defeat. Second, they tried to obtain from us
assurances that the Emperor could remain on the throne after
surrender."
Ellis Zacharias, Eighteen Words That Bagged Japan, Saturday Evening
Post, 11/17/45, pg. 17.
To resolve these issues, Zacharias developed several plans for secret
negotiations with Japanese representatives; all were rejected by the
U.S. government. Instead, a series of psychological warfare radio
broadcasts by Zacharias was later approved. In the July 21, 1945
broadcast, Zacharias made an offer to Japan that stirred controversy
in the U.S.: a surrender based on the Atlantic Charter. On July 25th,
the U.S. intercepted a secret transmission from Japan's Foreign
Minister (Togo) to their Ambassador to Moscow (Sato), who was trying
to set up a meeting with the Soviets to negotiate an end to the war.
The message referred to the Zacharias broadcast and stated:
"...special attention should be paid to the fact that at this time the
United States referred to the Atlantic Charter. As for Japan, it is
impossible to accept unconditional surrender under any circumstances,
but we should like to communicate to the other party through
appropriate channels that we have no objection to a peace based on the
Atlantic Charter."
U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States:
Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2, pg. 1260-1261.
But on July 26th, the U.S., Great Britain, and China publicly issued
the Potsdam Proclamation demanding "unconditional surrender" from
Japan. Zacharias later commented on the favorable Japanese response to
his broadcast:
"But though we gained a victory, it was soon to be canceled out by the
Potsdam Declaration and the way it was handled.
"Instead of being a diplomatic instrument, transmitted through regular
diplomatic channels and giving the Japanese a chance to answer, it was
put on the radio as a propaganda instrument pure and simple. The whole
maneuver, in fact, completely disregarded all essential psychological
factors dealing with Japan."
Zacharias continued, "The Potsdam Declaration, in short, wrecked
everything we had been working for to prevent further bloodshed...
"Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and
introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen
and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern
Asia.
"Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it
was time to use the A-bomb.
"I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic
grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds."
Ellis Zacharias, How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender, Look, 6/6/50,
pg. 19-21.
~~~BRIGADIER GENERAL CARTER CLARKE
(The military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted
Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors)
"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it,
and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an
experiment for two atomic bombs."
Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, pg.
359.
Johnny Asia
June 27, 2005 U.S News and World Report
"Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House
is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's
like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that
we're losing in Iraq."
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050627/27bush.htm
Hit by friendly fire --Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry.
He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly
13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string
of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice
Resident Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its
"last throes." "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse.
The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells
U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The
reality is that we're losing in Iraq."
George Z. Bush
> June 27, 2005 U.S News and World Report
>
> "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House
> is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's
> like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that
> we're losing in Iraq."
If he's not careful, Sen. Hagel is going to find out that the administration may
go out of their way to disavow him. He should be aware that Republicans have
eaten their own in the past, and he may end up as the special of the day on
their menu if he keeps on criticizing the Holy Father.
George Z.
Johnny Asia
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=3494462
Iraqi labor leader says troops should withdraw
BURLINTON, Vt. An Iraqi union leader visiting Vermont is calling for
U-S troops to withdraw from Iraq.
Adnan A-Rashed told a crowd in Burlington yesterday that U-S
assistance has helped Iraq build a democracy. But he says the troops
should now leave so that a free, self-governing Iraq can emerge.
The 56-year-old spoke at a rally following an anti-war march along
Church Street.
He is one of six leaders of Iraq's emerging trade-union movement who
are spending two weeks touring the United States. The visit was
organized by U-S Labor Against the War.
Johnny Asia
Iraqi lawmakers from across the political spectrum called for the
withdrawal of foreign forces from their country in a letter released
to the media June 19.
The move comes as U.S. President George W. Bush is under increasing
domestic pressure to set a timetable for the pullout of American
forces in the face of an increasing death toll at the hands of
insurgents.
Eighty-two Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, Christian and communist
deputies made the call in a letter sent by Falah Hassan Shanshal of
the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the largest group in parliament, to
speaker Hajem al-Hassani.
Some of those who signed urged that a detailed timetable be
established for the withdrawal.
There are currently about 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, including a
138,000-strong U.S. force, which has borne the brunt of attacks
against coalition forces.
In the letter, Shanshal said the 275-member parliament was the Iraqi
people’s legitimate representative and guardian of their interests.
”We have asked in several sessions for occupation troops to withdraw,”
the letter said. “Our request was ignored.”
”It is dangerous that the Iraqi government has asked the U.N. Security
Council to prolong the stay of occupation forces without consulting
representatives of the people who have the mandate for such a
decision.
”Therefore we must reject the occupation’s legitimacy and renew our
demand for these forces to withdraw,” the letter added.
The U.N. Security Council agreed on May 31 to extend the mandate of
multinational forces in Iraq “until the completion of the political
process” following a request from the Iraqi government.
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=925971&C=america
Johnny Asia
Johnny Asia
By MAGGIE MICHAEL, Associated Press Writer
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Iraqi's justice minister said Tuesday that U.S.
officials are trying to delay interrogations of Saddam Hussein.
Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal, in Brussels for an
international conference on Iraq, also accused the U.S. of
concealing information about the ousted Iraqi leader.
"It seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide," he told The
Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=2&u=/ap/20050621/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam_trial