Kicking GWI victims to the curb - Chris Hedges (We know)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Kicking GWI victims to the curb - Chris Hedges (We know)
Date: Jan 4, 2010 3:48 PM
GWI victims kicked to the curb
(Below, Chris Hedges):
http://www.youtube.com/user/KMDickson#p/u/4/Zj36pTGvo4A
Part V- Chronic Fatigue, Pain in joints and muscles, insomnia, damage
to major organs shipped to Saddam Hussein. Saddam had a great idea.
Fired 24 scud missiles. Exploded over the skies. What was happening?
Those scuds were made up of Brucellosis and Mycoplasma can
contaminated 600 square miles. 100,000 soldiers affected. Nurse from
Canada saw scud explode next AM could not get out of bed become
chronically ill. Gubbamint BS = "Stress. Take up line dancing."
Second Attack contained ANTHRAX, would have been 70,000 dead allied
soldiers in the first week. When the scuds exploded, the alarms were
going off all over the place, signaling biological or chemical attack.
Notified the president. At 1:30 AM, he called General Schwartzkopf.
Told to stop. Bush Senior said "STOP, DONT MOVE ANOTHER FOOT!" And
they started withdrawing the troops.
They cant say to the public "We know hes got it because we gave it to
him" (This is also what British say) 100,000 became ill.
Some of them had Chronic Fatigue and some had Gulf War Illness
(identical diseases). Sam Donta got a 8 million dollar grant to study
GWI as if it were Chronic Lyme/Lyme-AIDS/Chronic Fatigue.
======================================
Shipped to Saddam Hussein, Congressional
Minutes:
http://www.actionlyme.org/PIIB.htm
--------------------------------------
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/04-1
Published on Monday, January 4, 2010 by TruthDig.com
The Pictures of War You Aren’t Supposed to See
by Chris Hedges
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual
heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an
instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people,
who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons
is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks
in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish
villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The
wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness,
amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from
such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human
rights is a farce.
In Peter van Agtmael's "2nd Tour Hope I don't Die" and Lori Grinker's
"Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict," two haunting books of
war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden
from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to
and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but
they are at least an attempt to unmask war's savagery.
"Over ninety percent of this soldier's body was burned when a roadside
bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other
soldiers to death," reads the caption in Agtmael's book next to a
photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room.
"His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the
medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had
peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and
out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he
was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy,
Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,' then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.'
There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera
over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The
soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.' Those were
his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months
later," Agtmael writes, "and the scene of his death is never far from
my thoughts."
"There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," Israeli
soldier Yossi Arditi, quoted in Grinker's book, says of the moment
when a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. "The fuel tank was
full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and
face-but I didn't lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help
me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted
to take my gun, but I couldn't touch it because my hands were
burning." [To see long excerpts from "Afterwar" and to read an
introduction written by Chris Hedges, click here.]
Arditi spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or
three months, about 20 operations, over the next three years.
Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-
pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the
battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element
of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn.
Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy
cases of beer and watch movies like "Platoon," movies meant to
denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of the
weapons shown. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed
by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It
leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.
Chronicles of war, such as these two books, that eschew images and
scenes of combat begin to capture war's reality. War's effects are
what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work
hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young
minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we
had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren
killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their
parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the
women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. This is
why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's
perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's
consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and
entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood. During the
start of the Iraq war, television reports gave us the visceral thrill
of force and hid from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron
fragmentation bombs and artillery rounds. We tasted a bit of war's
exhilaration, but were protected from seeing what war actually does.
The wounded, the crippled and the dead are, in this great charade,
swiftly carted off stage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them.
We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float
around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The
message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to
celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myth of glory,
honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in combat become empty and
meaningless. And those whom fate has decreed must face war's effects
often turn and flee.
Saul Alfaro, who lost his legs in the war in El Salvador, speaks in
Grinker's book about the first and final visit from his girlfriend as
he lay in an army hospital bed.
"She had been my girlfriend in the military and we had planned to be
married," he says. "But when she saw me in the hospital-I don't know
exactly what happened, but later they told me when she saw me she
began to cry. Afterwards, she ran away and never came back."
The public manifestations of gratitude are reserved for veterans who
dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The
veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and
palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those who are
willing to go along with the lie that war is about patriotism and is
the highest good. "Thank you for your service," we are supposed to
say. They are used to perpetuate the myth. We are used to honor it.
Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his
parent's home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks
in Grinker's book of feeling like "a prisoner of war" even after the
war had ended.
"Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself,"
he says in the book. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought
our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I
believed it was in my contract, that if you're maimed or wounded
during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I'm
angry."
I went back to Sarajevo after covering the 1990s war for The New York
Times and found hundreds of cripples trapped in rooms in apartment
blocks with no elevators and no wheelchairs. Most were young men, many
without limbs, being cared for by their elderly parents, the glorious
war heroes left to rot.
Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed
suicide after the war than were killed during it. The inhuman
qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in
peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in "The Iliad," the great book
on war, and "The Odyssey," the great book on the long journey to
recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot
connect again with wives, children, parents or friends, retreating
into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage.
"They program you to have no emotion-like if somebody sitting next to
you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up,"
Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falklands War, says to
Grinker. "When you leave the service, when you come back from a
situation like that, there's no button they can press to switch your
emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don't
deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the
carpet."
"To get you to join up they do all these advertisements-they show
people skiing down mountains and doing great things-but they don't
show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or
burning to death," he says. "They don't show you what really happens.
It's just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give
you all the training in the world, but it's never the same as the real
thing."
Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are
often those they fought.
"Nobody comes back from war the same," says Horacio Javier Benitez,
who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker's
book. "The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn't exist
anymore. It's hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much
seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression."
"Many who served in the Malvinas," he says, using the Argentine name
of the islands, "committed suicide, many of my friends."
"I miss my family," reads a wall graffito captured in one of Agtmael's
photographs. "Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be
happy if I don't go home again."
Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and
written in thick, black marker "Fag!!!"
Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the
seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond
Barack Obama's ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting
terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the
annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation.
It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages
and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt
all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human
deformities-warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the
Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers-who can speak only in the
despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is
industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and
children who know it.
© 2010 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of
many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle.
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