Off Topic War Stuff Still hurts my heart Bill
William Wagner
compiled and edited
by Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: Judith Coburn on the Unnamed Dead of Iraq
On July 23, 2003, not quite four months after Baghdad had been occupied
by American troops, Tomdispatch published a piece by Jack Miles, author
of the Pulitzer Prize winning book God: A Biography, entitled How Many
Iraqis Have We Killed? At that time, less than 100 Americans had died in
the "post-war" era in Iraq, while untold numbers of Iraqis were dying in
those same months. The Bush administration and the Pentagon were already
invested in not counting, or even acknowledging, Iraqi deaths, and the
media had already established a habit of leaving those deaths largely
unconsidered and unnamed. Miles suggested that "at stake was American
honor." He asked: "Will it be said -- years from now, perhaps even
months from now -- that in the first preemptive war in American history,
Americans did not ask and did not want to know how many Iraqis they had
killed and did not consider it their responsibility to so much as notify
the orphans, the widows, and the bereaved parents?"
The answer to that question has long been in and, as Judith Coburn, a
journalist who once covered the carnage of the Vietnam War, indicates
below, it's a sorry answer indeed. Back in that now-distant time, to
introduce Miles' piece, I wrote:
"Each day, for instance, a modest box labeled ŒNames of the Dead' --
yesterday with five names: Bertoldie, Joel L, Garvey, Justin W, Jordan,
Jason D., Rozier, Jonathan D, and Whetstone, Mason Douglas -- is nestled
on the inside page devoted to Iraq stories in my hometown paper the New
York Times. Our casualties have, in fact, turned into a kind of
countdown -- or count up -- though to what still remains in question."
What our casualties were already a countdown to seems horrifically
clearer today, while the casualties of the people we claimed to be
liberating still remain largely missing in action.
Two years later, the latest "Names of the Dead" box at the bottom corner
of page 9 of Friday's Times notes: "The Department of Defense has
identified 1,752 American service members who have died since the start
of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American
yesterday. YAHUDAH, Benyahmin B. 24, Specialist, Army; Bogart, Ga.;
Third Infantry Division."
Benyahmin B. Yahudah was killed when a suicide bomber detonated his SUV
near a U.S. military vehicle surrounded by Iraqi children, many of whom
died in the blast. We are told in reports from Iraq that, in the last
few days, two Marines, whose names will in due course be included in one
of those boxed announcements, were killed when their vehicle struck an
IED near the Jordanian border, and seven Americans were wounded in a
string of suicide bomb blasts and explosions across the Baghdad area
which killed at least 29 Iraqis, many (but hardly all of them) policemen
and soldiers, and wounded perhaps another 104.
Of those Iraqis -- as opposed to the Londoners who died (or survived)
the recent subway and bus bombings -- there will be no stirring
portraits of stiff-upper-lip courage or of horror. Hardly even the odd
name. Not here anyway. In this country, there is something impersonal,
numbingly distant, and unreal about Iraqi deaths, even though the dead
Iraqis too had parents and relatives, friends and neighbors, husbands,
wives, or lovers, possibly children of their own.
When it comes to Iraqis, in fact, even the simplest official figures
have been hard to come by. As a result, the carnage we unleashed in the
now failed-state of Iraq in the wake of our invasion is hard even to
grasp. Based on rare figures for Iraqi deaths that Sabrina Tavernise of
the New York Times succeeded in getting the Iraqi Health Ministry to
release, Juan Cole recently concluded the following at his Informed
Comment blog:
"[The ministry officials] estimate about 8,000 [dead Iraqi civilians] in
the past 10 months, or 800 per month. This number appears not to include
persons killed by US military action. Even if the figure of 300,000 for
the number of civilian victims of the Baath regime [of Saddam Hussein]
is not an exaggeration, that would be over 37 years, or 8,000 per year.
That is, American Iraq is presiding over a civilian death rate greater
than the highest estimates per month per capita for that of the Baath
regime."
As he notes, even those figures are exceedingly partial, leaving out as
they do the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as well as those of Iraqis who have
died due to U.S. military action. Consider now Judith Coburn's in depth
look at just how we have treated Iraqi civilian deaths. Tom
Unnamed and Unnoticed
Iraqi Casualties
By Judith Coburn
How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better
symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance
about the cost of the war to Iraqis?
"Cost of the war": a clich to normalize the carnage, like the
anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and that new semantic horror,
"torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war" report, by now a hackneyed
convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties --
no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own
professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years of "anniversary"
articles in the American media adding up the so-called "cost of the war"
in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars
spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi
dead as part of that "cost."
The dead are counted. But they are Americans. The names are named. But
they are Americans. The names and numbers of the dead are intoned aloud
or their photographs papered on media "walls" and they are always only
American.
Publishing or pronouncing the names of the American dead everyday
without ever mentioning the names of the Iraqi dead offers a powerful
message that only American dying matters. In Indochina, during the years
I covered that war, we counted but didn't name Americans. That wasn't
done until after the war was over. We never counted and never named the
Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao dead. Still today, though the estimates
run into the millions, there is no reliable count of how many
Indochinese died or were hurt in our war there. Not to mention El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, and the First Gulf War.
But there's no way to count, protest American journalists. What they
mean is that the Pentagon doesn't count for them - "We don't do counts,"
was the way General Tommy Franks put the matter during our Afghan war.
But Iraq Body Count (IBC) counts as does the Brookings Institute among
others. As of July 13, IBC estimated Iraqi civilian casualties to be
between 22,838 and 25,869, an extremely conservative number. (The range
between the two figures represents occasional discrepancies in the
number of civilian casualties reported by different media sources about
the same incident). So what journalists really mean is that only
Pentagon counting counts and that the prosecutor of the war is the only
"reliable" source on the magnitude of its own killing. Pentagon casualty
figures are rarely questioned. When anyone else counts, these figures
are given short shrift.
Who Counts
The alternative media, bloggers included, have seized on Gen. Franks'
words with outrage. But the fact is the Pentagon does count. It just
doesn't care to add those dead bodies up, let alone tell the American
public or the rest of the world how many dead Iraqis there have been or
how many more are being killed at this very moment. In Iraq, as in
Vietnam and the first Gulf war, every unit of the American military must
file "after action" reports about any "contact" with the enemy. Most of
these include injuries and deaths to civilians (even if these are often
counted as enemy-soldier deaths to cover them up, a practice the media
eventually exposed in Vietnam, but has not yet explored in Iraq). Also,
any injury or death of a suspected civilian is supposed to be reported
in a separate "incident" report. "We do keep records of innocent
civilians who are killed accidentally by coalition force soldiers,"
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant commander for the First Armored
Division, told New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman last year.
"And, in fact, in every one of those innocent death situations, we
conduct internal investigations to determine what happened."
The military also has a compensation program for victims injured or
killed by American soldiers under the Foreign Claims Act. The bar for
qualifying for this program is absurdly high -- the victim must know and
be able to prove which specific military unit injured or killed her or
his relative, have a claim form filled out by that unit admitting its
responsibility, have two witnesses and produce copies of medical
reports, not to mention being willing in the first place to approach the
very forces who inflicted the suffering. Compensation is apparently
approved for only 50% of those who get up the nerve to file for it. But
the military does at least have figures on how many Iraqis have been
compensated, which it has refused to release, even to Vermont Senator
Patrick Leahy, who requested them. CNN, Newsday, the Associated Press,
and the Christian Science Monitor have managed to ferret out a partial
count: the Pentagon doled out $2.2 million to Iraqis between May, 2003
and February, 2004 with 5,700 out of 11,300 cases approved. (But since
such compensation includes damage to property and people wounded as well
as killed, this figure doesn't translate into numbers of civilian
casualties).
Under another American government program, the Iraqi War Victims Fund,
mandated by Congress and renamed for young aid worker Marla Ruzicka
after her death in a car-bomb attack in Baghdad, $2.4 billion in relief
and reconstruction funds will include compensation for Iraqi civilian
casualties. Once details are worked out of how the victims will be
found, there might be figures of some sort, should the Bush
administration deign to release them.
As for Iraq Body Count's methods, to be added to their count of
civilians killed, each civilian death must be reported by two separate
media sources from IBC's approved list of media websites and then
cross-checked by two different IBC staffers from the original compiler.
More important, IBC counts only civilian deaths inflicted by US-led
coalition forces, so civilians killed by suicide bombers, insurgent
attacks, or the increasing number of assassinations and kidnappings by
insurgents and others are not reflected in their totals. As a result,
the IBC figures certainly now greatly underestimate the actual toll of
the ongoing war on Iraqi civilians-- by far the highest "cost" of the
war.
Human Rights Watch reports that while coalition forces killed more Iraqi
civilians than the insurgents did in the early months of the war, now
insurgents are killing many more civilians than coalition forces. The
Education for Peace in Iraq project, a non profit group of antiwar Gulf
War veterans, Iraqis, and others, reports that insurgents are now
killing 15 times the number of civilians killed by coalition forces and
that the number of civilians killed by insurgents has doubled since the
first six months of 2004. Just last week, the New York Times front-paged
rare Iraqi Interior Ministry figures showing insurgents are now killing
an average of 800 Iraqi policemen and civilians a month.
It's hardly surprising that the Pentagon is loath to tell us how many
innocent Iraqis it has killed. It's a political issue. Early in the war,
the Iraqi Health Ministry ordered morgues and hospitals to count the
number of war dead and wounded coming in. They reported 1,764 civilians
killed in the summer of 2003. But the American occupation's Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) ordered them to stop counting. After the
interim Iraqi government took over, the Health Ministry tried again to
count but was ordered in October, 2004 by the new government of Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi to stop releasing the figures. Last week's Interior
Ministry figures, given to the Times at its request, are the first
official Iraqi counts to be released since then.
The lack of "official" figures, however, shouldn't absolve the media --
or Americans -- from their blindness to Iraqi suffering, since available
figures, incomplete as they are, are staggering for a guerrilla war.
Reliable sources have certainly done their best to count, sources like
IBC, Brookings, and the Iraqi and American epidemiologists who estimated
in a study published in the British medical journal the Lancet that
100,000 Iraqis might have died in the war by September, 2004.
These sources are admittedly critical of the war. But as such, are they
less "objective" than the Pentagon? The American media apparently thinks
so. Yet Iraq Body Count's figures are clearly conservative exactly
because they depend on media reports. Because it is now so dangerous for
journalists to travel outside Baghdad or even the capital's "Green Zone"
where Westerners huddle, many Iraqi deaths go unreported and are thus
uncounted by IBC. (Using hospital or morgue records also results in an
undercount since Iraqis often don't bring their dead, or near-dead, to
chronically overwhelmed, understaffed hospitals and morgues).
Ironically, IBC, once heralded as a brilliantly conceived breakthrough
in monitoring war casualties -- impossible without the Internet -- is
now an object of some dismay among anti-war activists because its
methodology inevitably leads to a casualty undercount.
"Collateral Damage" as a Collateral Story
Most of the American media have now had their one dutiful piece on IBC.
But is it such a radical idea for, say, the New York Times to have a box
next to its daily listing of Americans killed in Iraq with IBC's or
Brookings' Iraq Index count of how many Iraqis have been killed by
coalition forces? A header could explain the source, just as one now
cites the Pentagon as the source for Americans killed. Why, when Ted
Koppel read the names of the American dead on Nightline on the
anniversary of the war, couldn't he have added at least a few Iraqi
names to the list?
The politics of counting got thick the week before the American
presidential election when the Lancet, the British medical journal, put
on line a study by American and Iraqi epidemiologists comparing death
rates before and after the March 2003 invasion. The study estimated that
at least 100,000 Iraqis (and possibly many more) had died in the 18
months that followed the invasion of Iraq who would not have died had
the war not happened. Coalition air strikes were the largest cause of
violent death. The international media has generally misreported the
100,000 as estimated civilian deaths. But the study actually makes clear
that the 100,000 estimate includes all Iraqi dead -- police, soldiers
and insurgents as well as civilians. Last week, Swiss researchers
announced at a UN press conference that, using the data from the Lancet
study, they estimated that, out of the estimated 100,000 dead Iraqis,
39,000 were civilians who had been killed since the war began.
The Lancet study was based on interviews by a team of Iraqi scientists.
It made headlines in Europe but dropped like a stone in the U.S. (as did
the recent Swiss report). The study's lead American author Johns Hopkins
Professor of Public Health Les Roberts may have shot himself in the foot
by rushing the study out in the midst of 24/7 election coverage in the
U.S. He admitted to Lila Guterman of The Chronicle of Higher Education
that he was anti-Bush and hoped to swing votes away from the President.
Had the study been released after the election, however, in a more
sober, scientific way, the American media might still have buried it, as
it has the whole issue of civilian casualties. Only the Washington Post
took much notice. But the Post got Human Rights Watch military expert
Mark Garlasco on the record opining that the figure was way too high
(even though he hadn't read the report). Without the respected HWR
imprimatur, there was even more reason than election mania for the rest
of the American media to spike the report. Ironically, it may have been
the American media's own longstanding blindness to the suffering of
Iraqi civilians that made the 100,000 estimate seem too shockingly high
to be credible to American reporters and their editors.
Only the enterprising Lila Guterman followed up, interviewing other
epidemiologists around the country, who found the methodology and the
study itself to be sound. Guterman also underlined the incredible
bravery of the Iraqi scientists who risked their lives traveling
throughout Iraq -- even to radical Sunni strongholds like Fallujah -- to
interview Iraqis about how many of their families had been killed or
injured in the war. (What does it say about the mainstream media that --
except for the Associated Press and recently the New York Times --
crucial stories about Iraqi civilian casualties are being broken here by
publications like Editor and Publisher and the Chronicle of Higher
Education?)
Granted, it's impossible for any individual journalist in Iraq to count
how many Iraqi civilians have been hurt in the war. You'd have to visit
every battle site, every morgue, and every hospital every day -- in a
country where, for reporters, it's dangerous just to leave your hotel.
Then there is the problem of distinguishing who is a civilian and who is
an insurgent in a guerilla war where combatants don't wear uniforms. But
a few American journalists haven't taken that as an excuse not to try to
count as best they can. The Associated Press, under New York editor
Richard Pyle (AP'S longtime Saigon Bureau Chief during the Vietnam War),
was the first and only news organization to ask its reporters in Iraq to
try to count the civilian dead soon after the invasion. On June 11,
2003, AP reported that 3,240 Iraqis civilians had been killed up to that
moment in the war, based on a survey of 60 of Iraq's largest hospitals.
AP reporters, especially Niko Price, have stayed on the civilian
casualty story, continuing to monitor civilian casualties regularly,
reporting soaring casualties in hard fought battles like one for Hillah
or the siege of Fallujah last November where approximately 600 civilians
reportedly died.
AP broke the story of the CPA suppression of the Health Ministry's count
of civilian deaths, reported the huge increase in car bombs after the
handover of sovereignty and -- alone in the mainstream American media --
included Iraqi casualty figures as well as American ones in their
"anniversary" pieces about "the cost of the war." The New York Times --
especially reporter Sabrina Tavernise -- has recently stepped up
coverage of civilian casualties. One ingenious survey effort for the
Times, written by Norimitsu Onishi with reporting by the paper's Iraqi
staff (unnamed, perhaps for their safety) reported that in one week --
October 11-17, 2004 -- 208 Iraqis died, including policemen, civilians,
journalists, politicians and soldiers. (It did not include deaths in
Kurdish areas).The story pulled together sources from hospitals, the
Iraqi and American military, news sources and reporting by Iraqi
reporters for the Times.
But stories highlighting the magnitude of Iraqi suffering have been rare
indeed. A study by George Washington University researchers found that
American television coverage of the invasion of Iraq itself was
remarkably sanitized. Only 13.5% of the 1,710 TV news stories they
reviewed from the start of the war to the fall of Baghdad on April 9,
2003 included shots of wounded or dead Americans or Iraqis. Only 4%
showed any dead. One reason the war may seem so inconsequential to so
many Americans is that the casualties, as reported in the American
media, are almost exclusively American and so are relatively modest
(though hardly inconsequential, of course, to those who knew and cared
for the dead). "Collateral damage" has lived up to its name. Iraqi
casualties have been collateral to the story of the war told by most
American journalists -- just as they have been to the warmakers in
Washington and London.
War in Another Galaxy
Counting the dead, however, may not finally be the point. Numbers seldom
convey human suffering in a way that moves the distant onlooker. Most
coverage of Iraqi civilian casualties is anecdotal -- the daily carnage
of yet more suicide bombs, the daily photo of ripped-up cars and ripped
apart bodies. Unnamed victims, and all of them -- except rarely -- Iraqi.
While there has been some fine reporting out of Iraq by journalists like
the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, there is no one in Iraq like
Gloria Emerson, the New York Times' prize-winning reporter in Vietnam,
with her boundless outrage against the war and her novelist's eye.
Emerson's war wasn't the "bang bang" (as she called it). She covered war
from the graveyards where Vietnamese mourned their dead and from the
streets where homeless kids hustled GIs and lepers held out their babies
for alms. Her story was how the Vietnamese got by day-by-day in the war,
simply how they could stand it. So far in Iraq there has been no Gloria
Emerson listening, as she did one night in Saigon, to her Vietnamese
interpreter Nguyen Ngoc Luong and his office mates recite from memory
verses from "The Tale of Kieu", Vietnam's great epic poem, their psychic
bulwark against the mayhem that was devouring their country. But that
kind of passionate identification with the people of a war-torn country,
that kind of -dare we call it personal -- journalism which might help
summon American empathy for the Iraqi victims of our war machine, isn't
in fashion these days. Media cool and caution rule in our culture of
fear.
There are photographs, even a few great war photographs, coming out of
Iraq. Peter Turnley's photo essay in Harper's, "The Bereaved," which
matched images of Iraqis and Americans mourning their dead is
magnificent. But this isn't Vietnam -- the first "television war," as
Michael Arlen so aptly named it. East Timor, Somalia, the first Gulf
War, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Congo... The list goes on and on.
By now, there have been so many TV wars, so many grisly scenes, that
they all blur together. Star Wars is so much more exciting anyway,
closer to home in the cineplex or on DVD, and it's all happening far
away in another galaxy. There's no military draft to concentrate kids'
and parents' attention. And it isn't the Sixties -- cynicism reigns
rather than the reach for freedom that led so many Americans then to
take on the powers that be. Should the war intrude? Follow the advice of
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, who, when asked about images of Iraqi civilians
killed by Americans on TV, recommended: "Change the channel."
Patterns of Brutality
Another part of the civilian casualty story neglected by our media
involves American military tactics that have inflicted unnecessary
suffering on civilians. The indispensable Human Rights Watch, which has
staff specialists in military affairs, has done two detailed research
reports on some of these patterns. The October, 2003 report Hearts and
Minds charged that American soldiers often used "indiscriminate force,"
especially at checkpoints after insurgent bombings, and also in raids on
civilian houses, causing many civilian casualties. Few of these injuries
to civilians are investigated by the military, HWR found. The report
pointed out that many checkpoints were manned and house searches
conducted by soldiers who had been trained for combat, not policing, and
called for more training in police techniques.
Although a December, 2003 HRW report, Off Target, found that "US-led
coalition forces took precautions to spare civilians," it decried the
use of cluster munitions (launched both from the air and the ground) by
the American military. These particularly vicious weapons, which pepper
victims with shrapnel so small that the shards shred flesh and are
impossible to remove, are being used in Iraqi cities. They can maim long
after their original use. The unexploded bomblets remain live and go
off, often in the hands of children. "Tens of thousands of duds" litter
Iraq -- as they still do Vietnam, Cambodia, and many other war-torn
countries -- the report charges. HRW reported that cluster bombs had
caused "at least hundreds of civilian casualties" by June, 2003.
Besides cluster munitions, a new and improved version of napalm, the
Vietnam War's other most grisly weapon, and its chemical cousin white
phosphorous, have been used by American forces in Iraq, a fact known to
few Americans because our media has barely reported on the subject. The
Pentagon has admitted that it used napalm near the Kuwaiti border during
the invasion, though the use seems to have been more widespread than the
Pentagon said. For instance, the Bush Administration reportedly lied to
its British allies about its use. (In Europe, the evident use of napalm
by the U.S. in its assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah last November
sparked headlines and furious opposition in the British Parliament.)
Almost nothing has been reported in the American media about bombing
operations in Iraq and especially the use of bunker-buster bombs to
target what the U.S. military calls "high value targets" or insurgent
leaders, who are often dug deep in heavily populated urban
neighborhoods. HWR's "Off Target" examined four such attacks and charged
that they caused "dozens of civilian casualties" while failing to kill
the targeted leaders. Six months after "Off Target" was released, a
front-page piece in the New York Times on such targeted attacks actually
quoted Human Rights Watch. But the piece focused on the spectacular
"zero success rate" of the leadership raids, not civilian casualties
caused by the bombing.
Such Human Rights Watch reports usually receive dutiful but cursory
one-time coverage in the American media. A few hundred words on page 14,
a few seconds on the evening news. Hardly the kind of media spotlight
that could turn Iraqi suffering into a burning issue for most Americans.
So far, these laudable reports haven't been able to change the nature of
the Iraq War story in the United States. The Faces of the Fallen, as the
Washington Post calls its daily count, remain American.
Still, a few million Americans in today's antiwar movement care how many
Iraqis are dying and are committed to honoring them. When the American
Friends Service Committee put its exhibit Eyes Wide Open on the road
with a pair of boots for every American soldier who has died in Iraq, it
also had a "Wall of Remembrance" with the names of more than 11,000
Iraqis who have died in the war. The Iraqis' names, as well as the
American ones, were read at ceremonies at the AFSC wall, the way
veterans read the names of the American -- but not the Indochinese --
dead at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington.
While in the Capitol these days there may be no Sen. William Fulbright
(whose hearings on the Vietnam War galvanized official Washington),
there is some eloquence and even some action about Iraqi suffering from
a few politicians like West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, Massachusetts
Sen. Edward Kennedy, who also campaigned vigorously to help Vietnamese
war victims forty years ago, and Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy. As Leahy
reminded his colleagues in a speech on the Senate floor this May 10:
"More than 90% of the casualties in World War I were soldiers. That
changed in World War II and since then, it is overwhelmingly civilians
who suffer the casualties. Yet while rosters are kept of the fallen
soldiers, no official record is kept of the civilians. This is wrong. It
denies those victims the dignity of being counted, the respect of being
honored and it prevents their families from receiving the help they
need."
Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina,
Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Pacifica
Radio, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles
Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.
Copyright 2005 Judith Coburn
Print this Post
E-mail to a Friend
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
posted July 17, 2005 at 5:00 pm
Pass It Along!
Use the "E-mail to a Friend" link at the bottom of each dispatch to
bring the underreported news and commentary found here to friends and
colleagues.
search
about
Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt
(bio), a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over
post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and
ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from
elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer
sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The
End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold
War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a
fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism
school of the University of California, Berkeley.
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 in a Japanese Jungle manner.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (© ) material the use of
which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to
advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral,
ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided
for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This
material is distributed without profit.
William Wagner
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/national/18visit.html?hp&ex=1121745600&
en=af18cdebeb0c9257&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Iraqi Boy's Journey to Erase the Scars of War
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: July 18, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 16 - Ayad al-Sirowiy came to America this week hoping
doctors here could remove the war embedded in his face.
Thirteen years old, small and skinny, Ayad was severely burned and
blinded in one eye when an American cluster bomb blew up in his face at
the beginning of the Iraq war.
A cluster bomb left Ayad al-Sirowiy blind in one eye and peppered his
face with scars. He hides them by wearing sunglasses, even in his sleep.
Dr. Tina Alster examined Ayad and will try to remove most of his facial
scars. More Photos >
The explosion blasted thousands of fragments into his skin and left
scars deeper than that. The village boys tease him, calling him "Mr.
Gunpowder." Even on sweltering days, Ayad wraps a scarf around his face
when he leaves home, and most nights he sleeps with sunglasses still on.
But all that may change.
On Friday, Ayad and his father walked into a laser surgery clinic in
Washington to begin a series of treatments to clear his skin.
Ayad curled up on the doctor's chair, eyeing the business end of a
washing machine-sized laser.
"Ma, ma, ma," he wailed.
It was the end of one odyssey, which began in a mud hut in southern
Iraq, and the start of another.
Doctors say a full recovery for Ayad may be a long shot, but at the
urging of a lawyer who read about his plight and labored for more than a
year to bring the boy to America, top dermatologists and cornea surgeons
are willing to try.
What finally got Ayad here was an unlikely alliance between Joe Tom
Easley, a lawyer and well-known gay activist, and Robert Reilly, a
Defense Department adviser reviled in gay circles for an article he once
wrote calling homosexuality "morally disordered."
Mr. Reilly used his influence to get Ayad into the United States, where
the boy joined a small but growing circle of Iraqi children who have
been airlifted to the country for medical help.
"People ask me why this boy, why help him, when there are so many others
worse off," Mr. Easley said in an interview. "I tell them, well, I don't
know about the other boys. But I do know about Ayad."
Ayad and his father, Ali, flew from Amman, Jordan, to New York City on
Wednesday. When Ayad's father took his first look down the canyon of
skyscrapers, he shook his head and laughed, "How did Saddam ever think
he could fight this country?"
It was about a month after the American-led war against Iraq began that
Ayad was injured in his hometown, Kifil, also referred to as Al-Kifl,
about two hours south of Baghdad. The town was heavily attacked with
cluster bombs, which crack open in the sky to sprinkle smaller
"bomblets" over a wide area. Some of them do not detonate immediately,
and each year many civilians, especially children, are maimed after
happening upon them.
Ayad says it was his family's cow that set off the cluster bomb that
injured him, in April 2003.
"Boom," the boy said, as he recalled the incident. "Bomb."
His face swelled to a black crisp, and his family, poor date farmers,
had no means to help him. He eventually healed, but his right eye was
ruined and his forehead and cheeks were tattooed with ugly blue
freckles. His disfigurement led to shame, and his shame kept him out of
school. Seeking help, his father made the rounds of American military
bases, where he crossed paths with a reporter in March 2004 in Baghdad.
A week later, Ayad's picture was on the front page of The New York Times.
Mr. Easley saw it. And so did Tina Alster, a laser dermatologist in
Washington.
"When I saw that picture, I turned to my husband and said, 'I could fix
this guy,' " said Dr. Alster, who would cross paths with Mr. Easley and
Ayad months later.
The first step for Mr. Easley, 64, a former law professor who teaches
bar preparation classes, was to establish contact with someone in Iraq
to help him track down Ayad and his family. He found that contact in
Marla Ruzicka, a young American woman working with civilian casualties
there. But this spring, that link was broken when Ms. Ruzicka and an
Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim, were killed in a car bombing.
Mr. Easley then turned to American troops based in southern Iraq to
maintain contact.
It took months of work to secure the proper paperwork for Ayad and his
father to travel to the United States, followed by a bureaucratic
blizzard of setbacks, some because the family had used different last
names for Ayad on different documents.
In May a letter arrived from United States immigration officials that
said their application had been denied, without providing a reason.
"One of the things I learned from Marla was never take no," Mr. Easley
said.
So he pressed on. At the bottom of the one-page rejection letter was a
contact name, Robert Reilly, and a telephone number.
Mr. Easley immediately called Mr. Reilly, a senior adviser for
international security affairs in the office of the secretary of defense.
Iraqi Boy's Journey to Erase the Scars of War
With Mr. Reilly's help, Ayad and his father were able to avoid the long
visa application process and were given permission to come to the United
States under a little-known program called significant public benefit
parole, which allows for expedited entry to the United States. The
program has been used to bring foreign witnesses into the country to
testify in trials and in other instances when the government feels it
serves a public interest. When contacted, Mr. Reilly said he was not
authorized to be interviewed for this article. The father and son could
hardly contain themselves when they landed in New York on Wednesday
night.
In Times Square, Ali's eyes lingered on every building, every
storefront, every glowing billboard.
"So much electricity," Ali said.
They quickly figured out what American things they liked (grilled
cheese) and what they did not (escalators).
Over Afghan kebabs on Wednesday night, Mr. Easley shared the plan for
their two-week visit. To restore his full sight, Ayad would undergo a
cornea transplant on his right eye at Johns Hopkins hospital in
Baltimore next week, which doctors agreed to perform free. To help
rebuild his self-esteem, he would have the bomb fragments and the scars
removed from his face with laser treatment at Dr. Alster's clinic, also
at no cost, which would begin Friday. The first step was to treat a few
spots on his right ear and his right hand and then have Ayad return in
10 days for more extensive laser surgery.
Most of the visit's expenses, including hotels and interpreters, have
been covered by donations, except for the airfare, which cost Mr. Easley
around $6,000. On Thursday afternoon, Ayad and his father, along with
Mr. Easley, boarded an Amtrak train in Manhattan bound for Baltimore.
The next day the two joined a stream of well-coifed women heading into
Dr. Alster's clinic - the W Hotel of dermatology, with slim leather
couches, New Age art and a medical staff decked out in black scrubs.
After his father wrestled Ayad's sunglasses off, Dr. Alster began
zapping a few spots on his ear to see how his skin responded.
They had come a long way for this, pain and all.
Ayad looked in the mirror at his ear. It hurt, so he kept rubbing it.
But already the first of the ugly freckles were gone.
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 in a Japanese Jungle manner.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted ((C) ) material the use of
William Wagner
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: July 31, 2005
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands - By jogging at sunset on the white
sands of a palm-fringed beach here, 17-year-old Audrey O. Bricia is
doing more than toning up for her next try in this island's Miss
Philippines contest. She is getting in shape for United States Army boot
camp.
Everett Kennedy Brown/EPA, for The New York Times
Audrey O. Bricia, 17, on a Northern Marianas beach, sees the Army as a
way to nursing school.
To gain an edge on the competition for enlistment, she reserved a seat
two days in advance to take Army's aptitude test on a recent Saturday
morning here. Safely ensconced in her seat, she watched an Army
recruiter turn away 10 latecomers, all new high school graduates.
"I am scared about Iraq, but I am going to have to give something in
return for those benefits I want," said Ms. Bricia, a daughter of
Filipino immigrants whose ambition is to attend nursing school in
California.
From Pago Pago in American Samoa to Yap in Micronesia, 4,000 miles to
the west, Army recruiters are scouring the Pacific, looking for high
school graduates to enlist at a time when the Iraq war is discouraging
many candidates in the States.
The Army has found fertile ground in the poverty pockets of the Pacific.
The per capita income is $8,000 in American Samoa, $12,500 in the
Northern Marianas and $21,000 in Guam, all United States territories. In
the Marshalls and Micronesia, former trust territories, per capita
incomes are about $2,000.
The Army minimum signing bonus is $5,000. Starting pay for a private
first class is $17,472. Education benefits can be as much as $70,000.
"You can't beat recruiting here in the Marianas, in Micronesia," said
First Sgt. Olympio Magofna, who grew up on Saipan and oversees Pacific
recruiting for the Army from his base in Guam. "In the states, they are
really hurting," he said. "But over here, I can afford go play golf
every other day."
Here, where "America starts its day," the Army recruiting station in
Guam has 4 of the Army's top 12 "producers." While small in real terms,
enlistments from Guam, Saipan, and American Samoa are the nation's
highest per capita. Saipan, with a population of about 60,000 American
citizens and green card holders, has 245 soldiers in Iraq.
[American Samoa, population of 67,000, has lost six soldiers in Iraq,
most recently Staff Sgt. Frank F. Tiai of Pago Pago on July 17. Guam has
lost three. Saipan has lost one.]
"I see yellow ribbons everywhere," Staff Sgt. Levi Suiaunoa said by
telephone from the Army recruiting station in Pago Pago, capital of the
territory. " 'Come home safely' signs almost litter the streets."
Despite the casualties, poverty and patriotism fuel enlistments.
"I buried at least one myself, but it hasn't stopped the number of
recruits going in," said the Rev. J. Quinn Weitzel, bishop of the
Catholic Diocese of Samoa-Pago Pago. "They still feel like they want to
do something special for the United States."
In Guam and Saipan, the letters U.S.A. are emblazoned on license plates,
as if to educate tourists that these territories are American.
"There is a very strong sense of patriotism throughout the U.S.
territories," David B. Cohen, deputy assistant secretary of the Interior
for Insular Affairs, said. "How else can you explain someone like Ray
Yumul, a sitting Northern Marianas congressman who has spent a year
serving in Iraq? He's certainly not someone who needed the military as a
ticket out."
In the Marianas, the tradition of American military service stretches
back three generations, starting with the defeat of Japanese rule here
in the summer of 1944.
"We support our Liberation Days, our Memorial Days, our Flag Days," said
Ruth A. Coleman, military and veterans affairs director for the Northern
Marianas. A retired Air Force officer, she said: "Look at me: my father,
husband and I were in the service. My youngest son is an M.P. His wife
is an M.P. commander. My middle son is in the Air Force."
The tie between military service and economic advancement is clear to
many young people here.
"It's the benefits," said Arnold Balisalisa, who took the aptitude test
here in late June. Taking a break from his $3.25-an-hour job at a
McDonald's, he said: "It is better than staying on this island. There's
nothing going on here. I'm 19, and I have never even been to Guam."
His friend Ms. Bricia spent a year at a high school in California, and
she can see the difference.
"People in the states have the higher pay, the residency," she said,
referring to residency requirements to attend a state university at
lower rates. "A lot of people in Saipan are joining the Army for the
higher pay, the benefits."
Clouding Saipan's economic future, Japan Airlines, the carrier for
one-quarter of Saipan's tourists, is to suspend service here in October.
The garment industry, the island's largest source of employment, laid
off thousands of workers after the recent liberalization of American
import rules for clothing made in China.
To a tourist, Saipan may look like a paradise. For a restless teenager,
it may look like a dead end. On the eastern flank of Mount Tapochao,
Ross Delarosa, 18, looked beyond the cows and chickens near his front
yard and seethed with ambition.
"There's hardly any life on this island," Mr. Delarosa said. The son of
Filipino immigrants, he confronts a society where land ownership and
government jobs are largely the preserves of the indigenous Chamorro and
Carolinean groups. A self-taught mechanic, he said: "Here it is not what
you know, but who you know."
For teenagers who think they are invincible, the brakes often come from
their mothers. Ms. Bricia's mother, Mira, kept her arms crossed during
most of her daughter's interview.
"I heard about that Jessica Lynch, and I thought, 'My daughter? No way!'
" she said, recalling the American private who was briefly captured
early in the war. In the end, she signed the Army authorization papers
for her daughter, a minor.
Potential recruits say that Iraq weighs heavily in their decision.
"The scary part is, what if you go to Iraq, and someone shoots you?" Mr.
Balisalisa during his break at work. But soon he was worrying about how
he fared on the Army's aptitude test. Turning to Audrey Bricia, he said:
"He's called you. Why hasn't he called me?"
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 in a Japanese Jungle manner.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (© ) material the use of
William Wagner
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/07/mom.protest/
International Edition |
Soldier's mom digs in near Bush ranch
Senator sees 'echoes of Vietnam' in vigil to meet president
Sunday, August 7, 2005; Posted: 5:31 p.m. EDT (21:31 GMT)
CRAWFORD, Texas (CNN) -- A mother whose son was killed in Iraq says she
is prepared to continue her protest outside President Bush's ranch
through August until she is granted an opportunity to speak with him.
Later, in a TV interview, a Democratic senator from California said the
episode evokes images that were commonplace during the Vietnam War.
Cindy Sheehan's 24-year-old son -- Army Spc. Casey Sheehan of Vacaville,
California -- was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004. The
Humvee mechanic was one of eight U.S. soldiers killed there that day by
rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. (Full story)
They are among the 1,829 American troops, including 31 this month, who
have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
The president -- who is spending a nearly five-week-long working
vacation at his Texas ranch -- said in a speech Wednesday that the
sacrifices of U.S. troops were "made in a noble cause." (Full story)
Sheehan said she found little comfort in his comments.
"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son?" Sheehan told
reporters. "He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him
what that noble cause is."
Sheehan said hers was one of a group of about 15 families who each met
separately with the president one day last June.
"He wouldn't look at the pictures of Casey. He didn't even know Casey's
name," she told CNN Sunday. "Every time we tried to talk about Casey and
how much we missed him, he would change the subject."
Sheehan said she was so distraught at the time that she failed to ask
the questions she now wants answered.
"I want him to honor my son by bringing the troops home immediately,"
Sheehan told reporters Saturday. "I don't want him to use my son's name
or my name to justify any more killing."
Sheehan, who co-founded the anti-war group Gold Star Families for Peace,
led about 50 demonstrators near the Bush ranch Saturday. Some protesters
were with the group Veterans for Peace, which was holding a convention
in Dallas.
The protesters stopped their bus miles from the ranch in Crawford, and
walked less than a half-mile before being stopped by local law
enforcement officials.
A message on the Gold Star Families Web site says, "We want our loved
ones' sacrifices to be honored by bringing our nation's sons and
daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this
war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions.
"Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families
to suffer the same pain and devastation?"
The message also urges Bush to send his twin daughters, Jenna and
Barbara, to Iraq "if the cause is so noble."
The site says the group is made up of families of soldiers who have died
as a result of war, primarily in Iraq.
Joe Hagin, White House deputy chief of staff, and Stephen Hadley,
national security adviser, met with Sheehan for about 45 minutes
Saturday, according to White House spokesman Trent Duffy.
Sheehan said that the two men "were very respectful."
"They told me the party line of why we are in Iraq," she said. "I told
them that I don't believe that they believed that."
Duffy said Saturday that "many of the hundreds of families the president
has met with know their loved one died for a noble cause and that the
best way to honor their sacrifice is to complete the mission."
Bush has refused to provide a time frame for U.S. troop withdrawal from
Iraq, saying American forces will return home when Iraqis can take care
of their own security.
"President Bush wants the troops home as soon as possible, but the U.S.
will not cut and run from terrorists," Duffy said.
Sheehan elicited sympathy from both sides of the political spectrum on
Sunday.
"What you're seeing with that mom trying to meet with President Bush is
echoes of Vietnam," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat.
"Because no one is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel."
"I think the president ought to meet with this mother," said Sen. George
Allen, a Virginia Republican. "What I would say to her is her son will
always be remembered as a great hero and a patriot, advanced freedom in
Iraq and the Middle East, has made this country more secure."
Boxer said her own message would be different: "I would tell her to do
everything she could to spare other families this grief, to get us off
this cycle of violence."
Recent surveys have shown decreasing public support for the war.
In a Newsweek poll released Sunday, 64 percent of those asked said they
do not believe the war in Iraq has made Americans safer, and 61 percent
said they disapprove of the way the president is handling the war.
The telephone poll of 1,004 adults was taken from Tuesday to Thursday
last week and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
CNN's Elaine Quijano contributed to this story.
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 in a Japanese Jungle manner.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
-- Aldo Leopold
This article is posted under fair use rules in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and is strictly for the educational and informative purposes.
William Wagner
"zee" <outr...@despammed.com> wrote:
> Read the last sentence:
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/hiroshima/
"There is no mention of the lives lost in the attack."
Dam faceless enemy
Do not they realize god is on our side
Why don't they just die and give us their resources!
I like my SUV
I like what we got
What is up with our infrastructure?
Why do our cities look like slums?
Tell me George?
Health care is way up on your priorities
No child left behind so only the poor can consider what the military
has to offer as a good thing. The only way out.
Disgruntled....You Bet
Look for oil and blood becoming a common relationship.
Heard Cuba sent 2000 Doctors to Venezuela for oil.
Sounds like we can't have that!
Bill
Robert
"William Wagner" <Nonsence_he...@Snip.net> wrote in message
news:Nonsence_here_B2wagner...@news.supernews.com...
> In article
I think you are eating too much of the yellow snow.
William Wagner
"Robert" <Rober...@hotmail.com> wrote:
I think the yellow snow is better than what our young folks are dealing
with. This my last post on this topic. ( At This time). Hate this
stuff. Words require action. Write your reps and speak from your
heart.
Bill
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/movies/09wint.html?hp
Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: August 9, 2005
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a
distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter
Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any
moment.
Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter
samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible
to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical
release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of
Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford
and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)
Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film
as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily
prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so
many years.
When it was made at a three-day gathering in 1971 of Vietnam veterans
telling of the atrocities they had seen and committed, major news
organizations sent reporters but published and broadcast next to nothing
of what they filed - prompting the veterans to organize what would be a
pivotal antiwar demonstration in Washington a few months later.
When the film was finished a year later, it was shown at the Cannes and
Berlin film festivals, at theaters in France and England, and on German
television. But in the United States, the television networks would not
touch it, the film never found a distributor, and it disappeared for
decades after playing a week at a single New York theater and a one-time
airing on Channel 13.
When one of the veterans - John Kerry, who was seen on screen for less
than a minute - ran for president last year, the old film turned up as
propaganda on both sides of the partisan divide: Mr. Kerry's friend, the
filmmaker George Butler, used footage from "Winter Soldier" to lionize
him in a biographical film underwritten by Democrats called "Going
Upriver." His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web
site called Wintersoldier.com and made a film of their own, "Stolen
Honor," to assail him as a traitor and a fraud.
"The context is why we wanted to do it," said Amy Heller, co-owner with
her husband, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films, perhaps best known for
re-releasing Marcel Ophuls's 1971 masterpiece on the Nazi occupation of
France, "The Sorrow and the Pity."
"We have a 9-year-old son," Ms. Heller said, "but if he were 19 and
wondering what he should do with the next stage of his life, I sure
would want him to see this film before considering going into the
military."
The relevance of this grainy, ancient documentary comes from
descriptions of abuse that could have been ripped from contemporary
headlines, notwithstanding the changes in today's professional soldiers
and their evolved, high-tech methods of warfare.
Listen, for instance, to the former Army interrogator as he describes
using "clubs, rifle butts, pistols, knives" to extract information -
"always monitored" by superiors or military police, he says - and
recounts his superiors' overriding directive: "Don't get caught."
Or hear the former Marine captain, speaking of "standard operating
prtocedure," describe how easily individual transgressions, overlooked
by superiors, became de facto policy: "The general attitude of the
officers was - I was a lieutenant at the time - 'Well, there's somebody
senior to me here, and I guess if this wasn't S.O.P., he'd be doing
something to stop it.' And since nobody senior ever did anything to stop
it, the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was
right."
Mr. Doros said he hoped the film would be shown on cable television,
where anyone could see it, particularly today's troops and tomorrow's.
"They should see that war isn't always what they imagine from movies and
books and modern media," he said. "That the atrocities, the gore, the
daily horror of bombs bursting out and bullets riddling your friends'
bodies next to you, have been glossed over."
What gives "Winter Soldier" its power, he and Ms. Heller said, is not
merely what is said on screen - accounts of Vietnamese women being raped
or mutilated, children being shot, villages being burned, prisoners
being thrown alive from helicopters - but who is saying it, and how they
are shown.
It introduces us to Rusty Sachs, a handsome, curly-haired former Marine
helicopter pilot, who recalls with an ironic smirk how his superiors
instructed him not to "count prisoners when you're loading them on the
aircraft - count them when you're unloading them," because, he says
flatly, "the numbers may not jibe." He describes contests to see "how
far they could throw the bound bodies out of the airplane."
And it introduces us to the gentle-sounding, Jesus-like Scott Camil, a
former Marine scout and forward artillery observer, who in a whispery
voice relates his personal journey from rah-rah patriot to trained
killer to medal-winner to self-preservationist Angel of Death. "If I had
to go into a village and kill 150 people just to make sure there was no
one there to kill me when we walked out, that's what I did," he says.
Like other veterans, Mr. Camil - whose testimony at the Winter Soldier
Investigation inspired Graham Nash's song "Oh, Camil!" - conveys how
desensitized they became, and how dehumanized the Vietnamese became in
their eyes. "Whoever had the most ears, they would get the most beers,"
he says of his comrades' corporeal trophies. "It became like a game."
This was being filmed, it should be emphasized, before the advent of rap
groups and the confessional culture, before people routinely unburdened
themselves on television or an Oprah granted absolution every afternoon.
And it was happening at a stage in the war when the invasion of Laos was
still a secret, when Agent Orange was unheard of, and when the public
was still struggling to make sense of My Lai.
Yet the decidedly low-tech film does nothing to explicate what it
records. It has no narration, except for an opening quotation from
Thomas Paine, whence its title: "These are the times that try men's
souls. The summertime soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this
crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it
now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
Nor is there any clue given to who made this film. And yet it was the
product of an extraordinary collective of 18 unknown but up-and-coming
documentarians, several of whom would have distinguished film careers:
Barbara Kopple, who went on to direct the Oscar-winning documentaries
"Harlan County, U.S.A." and "American Dream"; Nancy Baker, editor of the
Oscar-winner "Born Into Brothels" and of "Vanya on 42nd Street"; Lucy
Massie Phenix, editor of the Oscar-nominated "Regret to Inform," about
widows of the Vietnam War; Bob Fiore, co-director of "Pumping Iron"; and
David Grubin, for many years the directing partner of Bill Moyers.
Working with borrowed equipment and donated stock - much of it "short
ends" left over from low-budget pornographic films - the group shot more
than 100 hours over a three-day weekend, then spent six months editing
it into what remains a raw and unadorned artifact, allowing the camera
to gaze patiently as each witness tells his story.
But the group effort, Mr. Fiore said, meant no one could claim to be its
auteur. "So it didn't have anybody pushing it, the way Michael Moore
goes around," he said. "At the time, it seemed really important, it was
a political statement. I wanted the film to be for and about the vets.
But as a filmmaking and distributing ploy, it was a failure."
Though "Winter Soldier" was invited to Cannes and shown at several other
film festivals, the group's efforts to have it shown on American
television went nowhere. "We did a screening at NBC," said Fred Aronow,
one of the filmmakers. "We got the reply back that this was incredibly
interesting material that the American public should see, and it's
unfortunate that NBC cannot broadcast it. They did not give a reason."
The film languished largely unseen, except for private and classroom
viewings, until a retrospective at Berlin early last year. When Mr.
Butler paid for rights to use footage from it, Mr. Fiore said, the
filmmakers hoped that his lawyers would prevent anyone from using it to
assassinate Mr. Kerry's character. But the producers of "Stolen Honor,"
an attack on Mr. Kerry that was shown on Sinclair Broadcasting stations
last fall, did use excerpts from "Winter Soldier," and a veteran who
testified, Kenneth J. Campbell, is suing them for defamation.
As polarizing as the film has proven to be, the filmmakers say they hope
that a year removed from the context of a campaign, "Winter Soldier"
will be seen the way it was originally intended.
First, of course, they are hoping it will get an audience, at all.
"It's not any fun to see," Ms. Phenix conceded, in an understatement.
"But the whole society needs to hear about that part of us, because
that's part of us, too. The whole society includes these people who are
having to kill and be killed, and maim and be maimed."
liaM
Thanks for posting this material. Every little bit helps.
And even he-men will weep.
By chance two nights ago I saw Oliver Stone's film
"Born the 4th of July" with Tom Cruise in the lead role
about a gung-ho kid returning home from Vietnam to a wheelchair.
I hadn't realised Tom Cruise capable of such acting.
No doubt he was inspired by the intensity and the truth
of the story as lived by its real-life hero, Ron Kovic.
http://myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=Kovic
see ya..
liaM
William Wagner
liaM <cud...@mindless.com> wrote:
Hello Liam!
Take a peak here http://www.brucespringsteen.net/devilsanddust.html
Some music dealing with this off topic.
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html
"When Bruce Springsteen toured with John Kerry last fall, he offered up
a wistful take on American politics that has continued with his
ambiguous Iraq song, "Devils & Dust."
The Rolling Stones apparently prefer a less subtle approach. As Newsweek
and Drudge are reporting, the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band is out
with a new album next month, and it includes a love song in reverse for
the Bush administration. It's called "Sweet Neo Con," and it goes
something like this: "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a
hypocrite. You call yourself a patriot, well I think you're full of
shit. How come you're so wrong, my sweet neo-con?""
I wonder if our college folks will rise to the occasion? After 911 it
surly is difficult to understand our world. Study history..Study what
you love. Intrinsic humanity may flower in its own time.
Please hurry!!
Bill
liaM
> I wonder if our college folks will rise to the occasion? After 911 it
> surly is difficult to understand our world. Study history..Study what
> you love. Intrinsic humanity may flower in its own time.
>
> Please hurry!!
>
> Bill
>
Bill,
thanks for the interesting springfield track. it seems we gotta preserve
our way of life even tho' it's already the end of the world ;)
liaM
William Wagner
liaM <cud...@mindless.com> wrote:
May be just a new opportunity for a new beginning. Stupid aging
hippie stuff. Perhaps.
So easy to post but with children in Niger dying for lack of
sustenance. Forgiving debts on the world scale is really asking me to
do less impact on the planet.
So am I powerless? These days as a dad and a son issues take my
attention from large issues. But I believe our daily choices effect
us all.
Keep on chipping away at things you feel hurt folks in other locations
on the planet. What else is there to do except remove the dead tree
leaning over my kitchen.
Bill
PS Mary Martin said it best with "I won't grow up...I don't wanna be
a man." I'd post the mp3 here but is a no no.
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 S Jersey USA in a Japanese Jungle Manner.39.6376 -75.0208
William Wagner
<Nonsence_here_B2wagner...@news.supernews.com>,
William Wagner <Nonsence_he...@Snip.net> wrote:
If you take a peak here you can find a Video that was on US TV.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/08/07.html#a4349
Look for below. This may go away but I was able to download the WMV
file. No problems.
Cindy Sheehan on Late Edition
By popular demand ( many requests ) Cindy was on with Wolf and talked
about her son, her first visit with President Bush, and her trek to
Crawford in an effort to see President Bush again.
Video-WMP
She was highly critical of her first meeting with President Bush about
her son's death and talked a little bit about yesterday's events.
..........
One video may equal more than a thousand words.
Bill
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 S Jersey USA in a Japanese Jungle Manner.39.6376 -75.0208
William Wagner
From: ale...@truemajorityaction.org
Subject: Bush Is On the Run; Let's Dog His Steps
Date: August 10, 2005 8:48:10 PM EDT
To: b2wa...@snip.net
Reply-To:
notice-reply-w...@ga-mail.action.truemajority.org
Your Help is at Work Right Now Fueling Unfolding Anti-War
Efforts
We Are Doubling Our Goal To Pour it On Now that Bush is on the
Defensive
Dear William,
Yesterday, TrueMajorityACTION members were given the chance to
support families of fallen soldiers. These families are
demanding an explanation from President Bush. Our goal was to
raise $50,000 to help these families challenge the president
wherever he goes, and draw attention to their cause at every
public appearance. I am happy and humbled to report that the
TrueMajorityACTION community really came through. Not only did
you dedicate money, but you blanketed us with messages urging us
to do more. So we're doubling the goal to $100,000 to expand
our campaign for peace.
Please click on this link to contribute to help bring an end to
the war in Iraq.
https://secure.ga3.org/03/gold_star/njpAOfVY1DXxL?
The $50,000 raised yesterday is at work supporting the most
effective spokespeople for bringing the troops home-- the
mothers, fathers and family members of soldiers killed in Iraq.
We have already worked with our partners to make sure that
President Bush is met today, and every day he is out in public
this summer, by people asking him to tell Cindy Sheehan why her
son had to die. Cindy Sheehan's 24-year-old son Casey was killed
last year in Sadr City. She has drawn international media
attention with her brave vigil outside Bush's ranch in Crawford,
Texas [1], on behalf of Gold Star Families for Peace.
Media relations professionals from the respected progressive
agency Fenton
Communications(http://action.truemajority.org/ct/m1AOfVY1gzX2/)
are en route to Crawford to help Cindy coordinate the crush of
press interest. Meanwhile, their press agents in Washington work
the national, White House and international press corps on
behalf of Cindy and her powerful story.
Gold Star Families for Peace is not the only powerful group
speaking out against the war. With your support we can reach out
to groups of returning soldiers and help them to tell their
stories through the media. We can continue to find ways to bring
pressure to bear on Congress to stop funding this war without
end, and bring the troops home.
This is a crucial moment. Polls already show a majority of
Americans don't support this war. Now let's take the campaign to
the next level. Please click on the following link to contribute
to help reach TrueMajorityACTION's goal of $100,000, and keep
the campaign for peace rolling.
https://secure.ga3.org/03/gold_star/njpAOfVY1DXxL?
In hope and thanks,
Duane Peterson
TrueMajority Coordinator
[1]Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother's Loss Becomes a
Problem for the President,
http://action.truemajority.org/ct/mdAOfVY1gzXw/
This message was sent to b2wa...@snip.net. To modify your email
communication preferences or update your personal profile, visit
your subscription management page at:
http://action.truemajority.org/truemajorityaction/smp.tcl?nkey=w3s77u7915
58itb&
To stop ALL email from TrueMajorityACTION, reply via email with
"remove" in the subject line, or use the following link:
http://action.truemajority.org/truemajorityaction/remove-domain-direct.tc
l?ctx=center&nkey=w3s77u791558itb&
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 S Jersey USA in a Japanese Jungle Manner.39.6376 -75.0208
William Wagner
I'm struck by the lack of young people and Music folks so quiet.
No lessons learned from Vietnam.
One of my favorite quotes.
"There can not be any foreign intervention unless there is tyranny at
home.
Walpole ~ 1800's
Bill
..................................
http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2005/08/11/20050811wacs
heehan_profile.html
Mother of slain soldier in Crawford draws international attention
By Thaddeus DeJesus, Tribune-Herald staff writer
Thursday, August 11, 2005
CRAWFORD From 5 a.m. to midnight over the last few days, Cindy Sheehan
has donned a headset amid the Central Texas prairie to speak to
reporters from New York to New Zealand.
łWe've got to find a way to stop them from calling,˛ she told an
assistant after a Tuesday afternoon radio interview was interrupted by
16 calls. Sheehan later got up from her folding chair to talk to a CNN
camera crew waiting nearby. They were among the countless other
journalists waiting to interview the woman who has chosen to make a
symbolic stand a few miles from the President Bush's ranch house.
Sheehan, 48, has become an international cause clŻÂ?bre for demanding to
meet with Bush during his monthlong vacation, most of which will be
spent at his Crawford retreat. Specifically, Sheehan has said she wants
to ask the president why her son died in Iraq in a war she believes is
built on lies. She also wants to ask the president to end the occupation
and bring home the troops.
Although she has met with Bush's national security adviser and deputy
chief of staff, Sheehan has vowed to stay on a roadside near the
president's compound for the duration of the month until she meets with
Bush.
On Wednesday, the fifth day of her vigil, exhaustion began to affect
Sheehan. A fever and a sore throat prompted her to scrap her Wednesday
morning interviews, which were scheduled to begin before sunrise. After
a brief rest, she resumed her media blitz and greeted well-wishers, some
of whom came to Crawford from as far away as California and North
Carolina.
łI'm not the sort of person that runs away from hardship,˛ Sheehan said.
łI don't want pain and hardship, of course. I wish Casey wouldn't have
died, but I'm the kind of person that wants to help other people. If my
pain can help anybody else from going through the same kind of pain,
then it's worth it. I can feel Casey's spirit urging me on.˛
According to Sheehan's writings, which are posted on the Internet, Casey
Sheehan was the perfect son.
He rarely quarreled with his other siblings. He never talked back to his
parents. He was an altar boy, a Boy Scout and later an Eagle Scout.
His was an upbringing that played out in the suburbs of California's two
largest cities, first in Los Angeles, then in San Francisco.
łWe were a regular American family chasing the dollar, chasing the
buck,˛ Sheehan said. łWe tried to raise the best kids we could raise and
we always tried to do the right thing in my family by raising good
citizens.˛
Casey Sheehan surprised his family when he announced in May 2000 that he
enlisted in the Army. Why he joined remains a subject of debate for the
family, though the money to pay for education could have been a strong
lure. Casey, who studied theater arts, wanted to be a teacher.
łI think they caught him at a vulnerable time,˛ said Dede Miller,
Casey's aunt and Cindy's sister.
On April 4, 2004, Palm Sunday, the devout Catholic was killed along with
seven other U.S. military personnel in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City. In
memory of the slain 24-year-old, the Fort Hood Knights of Columbus
chapter was renamed in honor of Casey Sheehan.
In the months after Casey's death, the Sheehans sought solace from other
military families who suffered the same ordeal. Cindy Sheehan helped
co-found Gold Star Families for Peace. The organization is comprised
primarily of people who have lost a relative in the Iraq war.
Her activism has brought her elbow-to-elbow with everyday people and
heads of anti-war groups. To people outside of Texas and beyond Bush
Country, Sheehan is somewhat of a familiar face. She has criss-crossed
the nation speaking against the Iraq war. During the 2004 presidential
election, a tearful Sheehan recounted her son's death for a television
ad that aired in battleground states.
It was a TV spot produced by MoveOn.org, one of the anti-war groups that
is currently giving financial support to Sheehan's latest stand, she
said. Military Families Speak Out, Air America and wealthy individuals
also are lending help, she said.
Her relationships to such groups and access to donors enabled her to go
to Crawford on short notice. Sheehan was attending a peace conference in
Dallas last week when she said she got the idea for her protest.
Sheehan's stances have made her fodder for conservative commentators,
who have accused her of being a pawn for leftist and anti-Bush forces.
Sheehan's vigil has been pilloried on talk radio and in online blogs.
Kristinn Taylor, co-leader of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the
FreeRepublic.com, which has held pro-troop rallies, said Sheehan's
actions are misguided and hurt troop morale.
"She has a political agenda that goes way beyond her son's death in
combat," Taylor said.
In one radio segment, noted TV and radio host Bill O'Reilly suggested
that Sheehan's actions were łtreasonous.˛
Sheehan said that she expects such criticism, even if she says is it is
unwarranted.
łWhat bothers me is these people, if they disagree with my politics, or
if they disagree with my views on the war, is why do they personally
attack me? I think Bill O'Reilly's show, it's obscene what they're doing
to me. But I know why they're doing it because I'm telling the truth.˛
O'Reilly's criticism stems from a post on the Drudge Report, an
influential blog whose claim to fame was first publishing the details of
then-President Bill Clinton and his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
The Web site cited a June 2004 article from Sheehan's hometown newspaper
that included glowing comments from Sheehan after a brief meeting with
the president about two month after her son's death.
The Drudge Report seemed to contradict Sheehan's latest stand. However,
the Drudge Report post lifted quotes without context, which included
discussion between Sheehan and her husband, Pat, on whether they should
ask Bush critical questions about the war. In the end, they demurred out
of respect for the office of the president.
In subsequent interviews, Sheehan has said she was angered by how the
president wouldn't refer to her by name, but by calling her łMom,˛ and
that he acted as if he were at łtea party˛ at an event that featured
other families who had lost children in Iraq.
On Tuesday, the editor of the Vacaville Recorder invited people to read
the original article before rushing to judgment. Editor Diane Barney in
an op-ed piece dismissed the notion that Sheehan has flip-flopped on her
opinion of Bush or the war.
łWe don't think there has been a dramatic turnaround,˛ Barney wrote.
łClearly, Cindy Sheehan's outrage was festering even then.˛
After Aug. 31, Sheehan said she and others will move the vigil to
Washington, D.C. Sheehan hopes to continue applying pressure on the
president amid what she sees as a łturning tide˛ on popular sentiment on
the war. One poll released last week indicated that the majority of
Americans disapprove of the Bush's handling of the war.
While Sheehan is accustomed to some media coverage, she said she is
taken aback by the week's events. She has spoken on national morning
shows, and her story has been featured in newspapers around the world.
łI'm just in a state of shock,˛ Sheehan said. łThis one little idea I
had has just snowballed.˛
The remainder of the month in Crawford, though, won't be easy. Sheehan
and her cohorts have already endured the heat, stretches of rain and
fire ants.
Sheehan's friend, Bill Mitchell, joined others in Crawford on Wednesday.
His 25-year-old son, Mike, was killed in the same ambush that claimed
the life of Casey Sheehan. Mike Mitchell died three months from his
wedding day, his father said.
Mitchell, of Atascadero, Calif., said he admires Sheehan for her
dedication. While some deal with grief by becoming absent and withdrawn,
others like Sheehan become active and involved, he said.
łCindy is the ultimate,˛ Mitchell said. łCindy is my hero. I can't do
what Cindy's doing. I do lots of interviews, I do lots of speaking, but
I check out every so often.˛
tdej...@wacotrib.com | 757-5755
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 S Jersey USA in a Japanese Jungle Manner.39.6376 -75.0208
This article is posted under fair use rules in accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and is strictly for the educational
and informative purposes. This material is distributed without profit.
William Wagner
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/15/mother.bush.tm/
International Edition |
A mother and the president
By AMANDA RIPLEY
Monday, August 15, 2005; Posted: 4:56 p.m. EDT (20:56 GMT)
A woman lost her son in Iraq and won't leave George W. Bush alone until
he sees her. Who is she, and why is she stirring such emotion?
Cindy Sheehan, 48, is not a natural-born revolutionary. She speaks in a
high, almost childlike voice. She says like as often as any teenager, as
in, "This whole thing was like so freaking spur of the moment."
When her supporters gather to discuss strategy, Sheehan is not to be
found in the circle of beach chairs; she is 50 yards up the road, doing
yet another interview, hugging yet another stranger. But here she is,
the mother of Casey, 24, who died in Iraq last year, and now the central
character in the strange, swirling protest she initiated two miles down
the road from President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Sheehan is unflinching about why she's here. She says George W. Bush
killed her son. She demands that U.S. troops come home now, and she
insists on telling that to Bush personally. She speaks without caveat.
"I'm not afraid of anything since my son was killed," she says.
But she has never been one to move quietly through life. Father Michael
McFadden, a priest she once worked for, calls her "very defiant, very
stubborn, very strong willed" when dealing with authority. When a
soldier from the local base comes by to argue with her, she asks him to
go for a walk. She puts her arm around him. Soon they are hugging. Her
friends call her Attila the Honey.
Back home in California, her family is imploding under its grief.
Sheehan lost her job at Napa County Health and Human Services because of
all her absences, she says. Husband Pat, 52, couldn't bear having
Casey's things at home and put most of them in storage. "We grieved in
totally different ways," Cindy says. "He wanted to grieve by distracting
himself. I wanted to immerse myself." A car tinkerer, he added two 1969
VW Bugs to his collection recently and diverted some of his sorrow into
them. The couple separated in June.
Daughter Carly, 24, wrote a poem that begins, "Have you ever heard the
sound of a mother screaming for her son?" Surviving son Andy, 21,
supports his mother in principle but recently sent her a long e-mail
imploring her "to come home because you need to support us at home," he
says. Casey's aunt Cherie Quartarolo e-mailed a California radio station
last week to rebuke Cindy, writing, "She appears to be promoting her own
personal agenda at the expense of her son's good name."
Outside her family circle, Sheehan's crusade has been just as divisive.
Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has called the protesters
"terrorist-sympathizing agitators." But at a time when 56% of the
respondents in a CNN poll say they think the war is going poorly, this
wandering mother has tapped into a national well of worry: Are our
troops dying in vain? "People were looking for something to do," says
Sheehan. Now they are calling to see whether they can sign over their
Social Security checks to her.
Still, it is hard to know when a flash-fire protest in a prairie will
turn into something more. Surely it didn't happen when Martin Sheen
called (which was on Day 5). Nor did it when the police donned riot
gear, as they did on Day 7, when the President's motorcade came within
100 feet of Sheehan's ramshackle encampment. (Riot gear is casual
fashion for police at protests these days, after all.) Attendance
figures -- about 100 by midweek -- did not break any records either.
But the people who did come made it seem different from other antiwar
spasms. A retired postal worker drove from San Diego for 26 hours. A
local soldier who had just returned from Iraq appeared with his mom. And
a truck driver -- a former Marine who had never been to an antiwar
protest before -- decided to pull his 18-wheeler full of frozen pizzas
into Crawford just to shake Sheehan's hand.
At her roadside uprising, Sheehan feels only muted satisfaction. Sitting
in a van, momentarily insulated from followers and other reporters, she
says more than once that she feels like a failure. Even if the troops
came back tomorrow, it would still be too late for her son.
"I really failed Casey. I really did," she says, tearing up. Throughout
his childhood in California, Casey and his mother were close. An altar
boy for 10 years, Casey enlisted in 2000 hoping to make a career as a
military chaplain's assistant. He had decided to wait to have sex until
he was married. "He took lots of heat for that in the Army. Pat and I
always wondered why he would even tell anyone he was still a virgin,"
Sheehan wrote on TruthOut.org "but he did."
Casey Sheehan was killed in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, less than a
month after he arrived in Iraq as a humvee mechanic. He had gone out on
a voluntary mission to rescue injured soldiers when his unit was
ambushed. Six other soldiers died with him. Says his brother Andy: "He
lived to help people, and he died helping people." On the day he died,
Cindy saw a burning humvee on CNN and says she knew instinctively that
her son was among the dead.
Sheehan's impulsive decision to come to Crawford -- with five people,
some chairs and no flashlights -- has spawned a small phenomenon. A
busload of counterprotesters, organized by a conservative radio
personality in Dallas, arrived to sing God Bless America. A Japanese
peace-activist group donated money for Porta Potties. Chad Griffin, a
Los Angeles-based p.r. agent who worked in the Clinton White House, came
up with the idea of cutting an ad featuring Sheehan's plea to speak with
Bush. With $12,000 in donations, the ad is running in Crawford.
That's exactly the kind of move the White House hopes will play into its
hands. Once Sheehan starts acting like a politician, say some
Republicans and even some Democrats, she will become just another voice
in the debate -- easy, in other words, to neutralize.
But until then, Bush's team cannot fire back hard, as it usually does
when it is criticized. Sheehan must be handled, as an adviser to the
President put it, "very carefully." And that's what it has been
struggling to do. Top officials went out to talk to Sheehan but failed
to appease her.
The President acknowledged her obliquely last week in response to a
question about Iraq, saying he shared her pain. The White House,
quantifying his compassion, put out a list of the meetings Bush has held
with families. (He has met with the relatives of 272 deceased U.S.
soldiers so far.) A senior aide who was present at many of the meetings
estimates that a little less than 10% of the relatives tell Bush their
loved ones died in vain.
"He's had a couple wives who were very upset," says the aide. "They
didn't yell at him or hit him or anything like that. But on more than
one occasion, they've made very clear their position."
And the White House noted that Bush met with Sheehan too, two months
after Casey died. She had always had misgivings about the war, and she
says she had mixed feelings about Bush's demeanor at the meeting, but
she kept quiet. When more information came out about the planning for
the war, however, she started to feel utterly betrayed.
But White House aides say they worry about the precedent, should Bush
see Sheehan again. "If the President meets with her, does he have to
meet with every protester who camps out in Crawford or in Lafayette Park
[in Washington]?" asks a Bush aide. "Does he have a second meeting with
every mother or wife who asks for one?"
A fair question. There is a risk, though, that Sheehan's ideas will
never stop spreading down the road. In 1965 a group of just 25 antiwar
protesters demonstrated outside President Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch.
Within a few years, the handful had turned into a movement.
--With reporting by Amanda Bower/San Francisco, Jay Carney/Washington
and Hilary Hylton/Crawford
Copyright 2005 Time Inc.
William Wagner
from the August 16, 2005 edition
The Iraq war and the politics of grief
By Brendan O'Neill
LONDON In America and Britain, the grief of parents who lost sons or
daughters in Iraq has become a potent political weapon - much more so
than in other recent wars.
In my view, these moms and dads have been badly let down by both sides
of the war debate. The war's authors have offered little justification
for the sacrifices made by loved sons and daughters in Iraq, which has
allowed the families' raw grief to fester into public anger - and the
war's opponents have sought cynically to exploit the families' sorrow
for political ends.
Currently, Cindy Sheehan is camped outside President Bush's ranch in
Crawford, Texas. And she's determined to stay put until the president
tells her exactly what "noble cause" her 24-year-old son Casey died for
in Iraq. Before that, Michael Moore devoted the second half of his
blockbuster documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" to Lila Lipscomb's quest to
find out why her son, Michael, died in Iraq.
Here in Britain, Rose Gentle took Tony Blair to task after the death of
her son Gordon in Basra last year. She told the newspapers that "my son
was just a bit of meat to them." Reg Keys, whose son Tom died in
southern Iraq when he was 20 years old, ran against Mr. Blair in his
constituency of Sedgefield, northeastern England, in the general
election in May. One of the most memorable moments of election night was
when Mr. Keys made a passionate speech about Iraq with Tony and Cherie
Blair standing just yards behind him. He and others have set up a
campaign group called Military Families Against the War.
How has the grief of families become, in the words of a Scottish
newspaper columnist, a "significant political force on both sides of the
Atlantic"? In wars gone by, the sorrow felt by parents was no less
intense than that experienced over Iraq, yet it was rare for personal
grief to go so public.
Today, doubt and uncertainty - and even shame - about the Iraq war from
the top of society down has turned families' grief into bitterness, and
even public rage. In the past, bereaved families took comfort in the
belief that their son or daughter died for a greater cause; traditional
notions of honor, patriotism, and duty would have given their loved
one's death on the battlefield some meaning.
Now, families have few ways to make sense of the deaths in Iraq. The
casus belli that their sons and daughters gave their lives for - the
need to get rid of Saddam Hussein's deadly WMD - turned out to be false.
And how could such deaths be seen as a source of pride, as they might
have been in earlier periods, when even our leaders seem embarrassed by
the Iraqi debacle? The Pentagon ban on releasing photographs of
returning military coffins suggested it is ashamed of the war dead,
seeking to sneak them through the back door and hurry them into the
earth without anybody noticing. (That policy was changed last week -
more than two years after the war began - in a settlement of a Freedom
of Information suit.) President Bush has been criticized for failing to
attend the funerals of slain servicemen and women.
Ceremonies that in earlier times might have given meaning to death in a
war zone were explicitly avoided this time around. Blair said the
coalition's victory in Iraq would not be celebrated "in any spirit of
elation, still less of triumphalism." There was no postwar victory
parade in Britain, after everyone from the prime minister to the queen
to even the chief of defense staff agreed that it might appear "arrogant
or patronizing [toward] the Iraqi people."
What are families to make of this? When even our leaders seem uncertain
about the war - when they turn shamefaced from the dead and refuse to
recognize their sacrifices with any kind of parade - it is not
surprising that the families feel bereft, confused, and angry. Without
those old crutches of duty, victory, or pride, the death of their loved
ones must seem as meaningless as if they'd died in a car accident or in
a brawl outside a bar. That is why mothers such as Cindy Sheehan ask
Bush a very simple question: "Well, why did my son die?"
There's another reason grief has become a "significant political force"
- some in the antiwar movement are exploiting it. As the Los Angeles
Times said of Sheehan's camp-out in Crawford, "leading liberal and
antiwar activists [are] parachuting in to try to make her their
long-sought voice." Michael Moore made Lila Lipscomb's grief into an
international issue. Antiwar author Naomi Klein has described the image
of a grieving mom or dad as "the mother of all antiwar forces."
There is something deeply cynical and morbid - and I say this as one who
was implacably opposed to the war - about these attempts to further
publicize and politicize the families' grief. It's almost as if some in
the antiwar lobby want the families of the dead to do their dirty work
for them, as if it is enough to point to a weeping mom to make the case
against war. They are relying on images of hardship and sorrow rather
than making the hard political case against Western military
intervention abroad.
On one side, warmakers have left military families to work through their
grief alone and confused, and on the other, antiwar forces push these
families further into the spotlight. This is a sorry substitute for a
serious political debate about Iraq - and it is likely only to
exacerbate families' grief.
€ Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of the online magazine
spiked-online.com .
--
Garden Shade Zone 5 S Jersey USA in a Japanese Jungle Manner.39.6376 -75.0208
This article is posted under fair use rules in accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and is strictly for the educational
and informative purposes. This material is distributed without profit.
William Wagner
William Wagner
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725143.800&feedId=online-ne
ws_rss20
Trauma of war hits troops years later
25 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie
Risks of combat
IN INTERNET chat rooms, veterans ask if anyone else is having a similar
experience. "I had an incident where a small Iraqi boy had his leg blown
off. His screams haunt my thoughts. Is what I am experiencing normal?"
asks IraqCowboy. "They gave me sleeping pills, but it doesn't stop the
nightmares," says Chucky. "The doctor says my husband has PTSD," posts
Sam. "Does that count as a combat-related illness?"
What is now known as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, was called
shell shock back in the days of the first world war. Sufferers have
harrowing flashbacks, and alternate between emotional numbness and
outbursts of rage, guilt and depression. Previously well-adjusted
soldiers suffer impaired memory and attention, insomnia and anxiety, and
are more likely to take drugs and alcohol later in life. That much is
well recognised.
What is less well known is that PTSD can trigger physical as well as
psychological ill health. And as the US agonises over how long its
soldiers should stay in Iraq, New Scientist has pieced together evidence
showing that veterans will be paying the price of combat for decades to
come. Recent and soon-to-be published research reveals that soldiers who
fought in theatres as diverse as Vietnam and Lebanon are not only more
likely to die from an accident on their return, but are also twice as
likely to develop cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even cancer later
in life. And these problems are particularly likely to afflict troops
who experience the close-quarters fighting taking place in Iraq.
Last year researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) revisited more than 18,000 Vietnam veterans who had
been subjects of a detailed health survey in 1985, to see who had died
and how. For the first five years after their return home, men with
combat experience appeared more likely to have died of accidents,
overdoses and the like. After that, they seemed no more at risk than
comrades who had spent the war in non-combat roles (Archives of Internal
Medicine, vol 164, p 1908).
The CDC study took no account of whether the soldiers were suffering
from PTSD. But now Joseph Boscarino of the New York Academy of Medicine
has re-analysed the 1985 data to assess which men were suffering from
the condition. That analysis, to be published in Annals of Epidemiology,
reveals stark differences in death rates persisting 30 years after the
end of the Vietnam conflict. All men with PTSD, whether from combat
experience or not, were more likely to die from "external causes" such
as accidents, drugs or suicide. But men who developed PTSD as a
consequence of combat were also more likely to die of heart disease and,
surprisingly, various kinds of cancer.
The link between combat stress and cancer risk surprised us, and it
isn't explained by differences in smoking
"Other studies have found a link between heart disease and stress, but
this is the first time there has been such a direct association with
PTSD so many years later," Boscarino told New Scientist. "The cancer
surprised us, and it isn't explained by differences in smoking."
People with PTSD may experience long-term changes in various immune
reactions, and in levels of the stress hormone cortisol and chemicals
such as adrenalin and dopamine that underlie fight-or-flight reflexes,
Boscarino says. He found a direct relationship between the amount of
combat exposure and the reduction in cortisol levels. "The excess deaths
in both PTSD groups show that stress can kill," he says. "But the much
greater effect among the combat veterans shows there is something
especially bad about that."
He is not alone in his conclusion. In March this year Yael Benyamini and
colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel reported that among Israeli
veterans of fighting in Lebanon in 1982, those who developed PTSD are
now twice as likely to have high blood pressure, ulcers and diabetes,
and five times as likely to have heart disease and headaches, as those
who did not develop the disorder (Social Science and Medicine, vol 61, p
1267). "PTSD is the key mechanism that leads from the trauma to poorer
health," they say.
Other studies have found clear associations between war-related PTSD and
cardiovascular disease in veterans of the second world war, the Korean
war, and recent conflicts in Croatia and Lebanon.
Last year, a study by US army scientists at the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, concluded that some 18 per cent of US
veterans from Iraq could be affected by PTSD, which would translate to
around 60,000 people so far (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol
351, p 13). And the more firefights Iraq veterans experienced, the more
likely they were to have PTSD.
Boscarino is a Vietnam veteran, and he predicts that levels of PTSD in
Iraq veterans will be similar to those seen in troops who fought in
Vietnam. "It's a similar war, with the roadside bombs, ambushes and the
civil insurgency."
Iraq is similar to Vietnam, with roadside bombs, ambushes and the civil
insurgency
Timely psychological help might mitigate the problem. Yet The Walter
Reed group found only a third of Iraq veterans with PTSD were getting
help from a mental health professional a year after their return.
British soldiers get no routine mental health screening before or after
deployment, though 1 in 10 troops airlifted out of Iraq for medical
reasons had mainly psychological problems.
In February, the General Accounting Office of the US congress reported
that the Department of Veterans Affairs had not fully met any of the
recommendations its own advisers have been making, in some cases since
1985, for improving treatment of PTSD, such as checking whether
screening and counselling are being implemented.