 First occupying U.S. soldier killed by resistance forces in Afghanistan January 4, 2002 |
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Veterans die by own hands
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A military base 'on the brink' By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times reporting from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. December 26, 2011
Mary Coghill Kirkland said she asked her son, 21-year-old Army Spc. Derrick Kirkland, what was wrong as soon as he came back from his first deployment to Iraq in 2008.
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Mom, I'm a murderer
He had a ready answer: "Mom, I'm a murderer."
He told her how his team had kicked in the door of an Iraqi house and quickly shot a man inside.
With the man lying wounded on the floor, "my son got ordered by his sergeant to stand on his chest to make him bleed out faster," Kirkland said.
"He said, 'We've got to move, and he's got to die before we move.'"
Not long after, Derrick told her, he had fallen asleep on guard duty, awakening as a car was driving through his checkpoint.
So my son shot up the car
He yelled for it to stop, but the family in the car spoke no English.
"So my son shot up the car," she said.
Summing up her son's mental state after that deployment, Kirkland said: "What's a nice word for saying that he was completely [messed] up?"
Kirkland relates the remaining years of her son's life as if reading a script: He was depressed by his wife's request for a divorce.
On a second deployment in Iraq, he was caught putting a gun in his mouth and evacuated on suicide watch to Germany.
There, he tried to overdose on pills.
He was flown back to his home base here in Washington state.
After a brief psychiatric evaluation, he was left alone in his room.
He hanged himself with a cord in his closet.
In the closet, dead
Apparently worried that no one would notice, Spc. Kirkland left a note on the door of the locker in his room.
"In the closet, dead," it said.
Wars have always sent many of their practitioners home with lingering emotional scars, but the growing toll of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts is catching up not only with the U.S. military, but with communities like this.
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"It's very much a local issue," said Democratic state Rep. Tina Orwall, who led a hearing in December on how state and local officials can help returning soldiers land on their feet.
Around Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a major staging base for the wars, the working-class suburbs are almost indistinguishable from the base itself.
Towns like Lakewood, DuPont, Spanaway and Parkland are home not only to military families, but to thousands of veterans who over the years have stayed on after their enlistments.
Among them are many with mental health issues.
More than 13% of the Army, which has borne the brunt of the fighting, now meets the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Senior officers point out that today's soldiers are under unique stresses.
Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli said in a report last year:
"At 24 years of age, a soldier, on average, has moved from home, family and friends and has resided in two other states; has traveled the world (deployed); been promoted four times; bought a car and wrecked it; married and had children; has had relationship and financial problems; seen death; is responsible for dozens of soldiers; maintains millions of dollars worth of equipment; and gets paid less than $40,000 a year,"
At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, described by the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes last year as "the most troubled base in the military," all of these factors have crystallized into what some see as a community-wide crisis.
A local veterans group calls it a "base on the brink."
In a recent series of community meetings, the group warned that the trauma of multiple deployments had begun to show up in troubling numbers outside the base.
Murders, fights, robberies, domestic violence, drunk driving, drug overdoses
The recent reports of suicides — seven confirmed and five under investigation, with a total of 62 since 2002 — parallel those of murders, fights, robberies, domestic violence, drunk driving and drug overdoses.
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The local crime wave became apparent as early as 2004, when three elite Army Rangers were among a group of five men who stormed into a Bank of America in Tacoma armed with AK-47s, took over the branch and walked out with $54,011.
Over the last two years, an Iraq veteran pleaded guilty to assault after being accused of waterboarding his 7-year-old foster son in the bathtub.
Another was accused of pouring lighter fluid over his wife and setting her on fire.
One was charged with torturing his 4-year-old daughter for refusing to say her ABCs.
A Stryker Brigade soldier was convicted of the kidnap, torture and rape or attempted rape of two women, one of whom he shocked with cables attached to a car battery.
An Iraq war sergeant was convicted of strangling his wife and hiding her body in a storage bin.
In April, 38-year-old combat medic David Stewart, who had been under treatment for depression, paranoia and sleeplessness, led police on a high-speed chase down Interstate 5 before crashing into a barrier.
As police agents watched, he shot himself in the head
As officers watched, he shot himself in the head. His wife, a nurse, was found in the car with him, also shot to death.
Police later found the body of their 5-year-old son in the family home.
Said Jackie Baleto, who lives nearby:
"My daughter played with the little boy, and even now when they're playing outside, the kids are screaming, 'Jordan lived in there. Jordan died in there.' So it affects everybody, even the kids."
Lakewood Police Chief Bret Farrar:
"I can tell you that in the last two years, we have had 24 instances in which we contacted soldiers who were armed with weapons."
"We've had intimidation, stalking with a weapon, aggravated assault, domestic violence, drive-bys."
The military is redoubling efforts to provide suicide hotlines and counseling.
The flagship effort is the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, designed to make troops healthy and resilient before they go to war.
Col. Michael Brobeck, commands the 555th Engineer Brigade at Lewis-McChord, about a fourth of whom are currently in Afghanistan:
"We teach them about patience, about maturity, about how it's OK to have issues, because everybody has issues."
The local Madigan Army Medical Center this year opened a $52-million "warrior transition" barracks for 408 wounded or stressed soldiers and their families.
The center has seen a big increase in behavioral health visits — more than 118,000 this year.
Brobeck thinks all this is helping.
Over the last two years, he said, the number of his soldiers exhibiting an extremely high risk of mental health problems has declined.
"Out of 4,000 [troops] when I started doing it about two years ago, we were in the 70s. Now I'm down in the 50s or low 60s."
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Yet in the tough warrior culture of Lewis-McChord, some say soldiers who go to counseling or say they aren't emotionally prepared to go back to war can be humiliated or ignored.
As soon as he walked in the door they called him a coward
Kirkland, when he returned to Lewis-McChord after his first two suicide attempts, was set upon by the unit's acting first sergeant, said Kevin Baker, who served with Kirkland in Iraq and was in the office that day.
"As soon as he walked in the door, [one of the sergeants] called him a coward" and worse, recalled Baker, who recently left the Army.
Ashley Joppa-Hagemann of Yelm, Wash., a mother of two young children, said her husband, 25-year-old Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann, begged Army commanders this year not to have to return for what she said would be a ninth deployment overseas.
There was just hatred in his eyes
She said she went herself to the base commander, all to no avail.
"He was always drinking, and he became very violent and aggressive.
There was just hatred in his eyes."
Joppa-Hagemann went to court on June 27 to get a restraining order to keep her husband away from her and the children, telling the court that her husband had threatened to kill himself "and take as many folks down with him as possible."
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The order couldn't be served, as it turned out.
Hagemann's body was found the next day in a training field at Lewis-McChord, shot through the head.
"We told them.
We told everybody there was something wrong."
"Nobody would listen."
San Diego naval hospital testing unusual PTSD treatment
Psychic trauma and its aftermath
Soldiers' brains bear scars of emotional wounds
Ruling ordering better VA mental health treatment is withdrawn
I will never quit on life
Over my dead body
Demons in your mind
Copyright 2011 Los Angeles Times |
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Osama bin Laden interview with the Daily Ummat in Urdu on September 28 2001
Translation into English by BBC Worldwide Monitoring September 29 2001
click here |
It was the US military and US government scientists such as those connected with NIST who had access to highly energetic nano-thermite.
click here |
Psychological Price of Fighting for Empire
click here |
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Kewe |
Hail all those who seek to open Illuminati treasured secrecy
What great courage this man, this young man, has!
A great hero of his generation!
What great tribute we pay to those who break with Illuminati authority!
How foul those who imprison this young man!
How I pray they will be brought to account for their traitorous action!
Kewe |
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Purple Heart For Moral Convictions
Pain so deep it cries a silent weep
Camouflaged in fear afraid to speak
In desperate hope a wounded heart revealed
In Bradley Manning's courageous light no longer concealed |
Bradley Manning's heroic fightclick here |
Bradley Manning Support Networkclick here |
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52 innocents killed by US NATO air strikes Afghanistan 34 innocents injured by US NATO air strikes Afghanistan Trapped Children and families, US inhumane terrorists mercilessly took their lives by dropping bombs from helicopters on the houses and surrounding areas. Scores of innocent lives were taken by Western Nations, NATO US bombing, including the families of Pir Mohammad, Hajji Habeebullah, Faiz Kaka and several more children and women. 6:00 pm local time, as many as 40 innocent non-combatant civilians were martyred and 34 more were seriously injured in Rigi area of Sngin, Helmand. The deadliest incident occurred while several dozens defenseless villagers including children and women, fearing the US savage invaders’ air strikes, gathered in Hajji Mohammad Husain house. |
Afghanistan — Western Terror States: Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, Italy Photos of Afghanistan people being killed and injured by NATO |
From Western propaganda news media reports on this massacre
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By Chris Floyd |
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America calls its soldiers who fought in World War II "the greatest generation."
They are hymned by Hollywood, celebrated by publishers and politicians, hailed at every turn.
Heroes from lost golden age
And for their troubled descendants, whose military misadventures stretch from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, the clean-limbed victors of the "last good war" do indeed shine out like heroes from a lost golden age.
Yet despite the vast tonnage of celluloid and printer's ink devoted to their praise, what is perhaps the truest, highest measure of their worth has been almost universally neglected.
And what is this hidden glory, which does more honor to the people of the United States than every single military action ordered by their corruption-riddled leaders during the past 50 years?
It's the fact that in the midst of history's most vicious, all-devouring, inhuman war, only about 15 percent of U.S. soldiers on the battlefield actually tried to kill anyone.
Never fired their weapons
In-depth studies by the U.S. Army after the war showed that between 80 percent and 85 percent of the greatest generation never fired their weapons at an exposed enemy in combat, military psychologist Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman reports in Christianity Today.
Many times they had the chance, but could not bring themselves to do it.
They either withheld their fire altogether or else shot into the air, to the side, anywhere but at the fellow human beings — their blood kin in biology, mind and mortality — facing them across the line.
This reluctance is even more remarkable given the incessant demonization of the enemy by the top brass, especially in the Pacific, where the Japanese — soldiers and civilians — were routinely portrayed by military propaganda as simian, subhuman creatures fit only for extermination.
Yet even with official license given to the most virulent prejudice, even with the sanction of a just cause (self-defense against aggression), even with the incitements of mortal fear, of grief and anger over slain comrades, even with all the moral chaos endemic to warfare, U.S. soldiers killed only with the greatest reluctance, in the direst extremity.
These were not stripped-down brains with cauterized souls
These were not "warriors," bloodthirsty automatons with stripped-down brains and cauterized souls, slavering in Pavlovian fury at the bell-clap of command. No, they were real men, willing, as Grossman notes, to stand up for a cause, even die for it, but not willing, in the end, to transgress the natural law (implanted by God or evolution, take your pick) that says: Do not kill your own kind — and every person of every race and nation is your own kind.
You would think that this apotheosis of human transcendence, achieved, in the best democratic fashion, by ordinary conscripts — farmboys and dock workers, factory hands, bank clerks, guitar players, teachers, cab drivers, hobos, card sharks, college men — would have been inscribed on plates of gold and fixed to the walls of the Capitol for all time, a blazon of national greatness.
Just think of it: Soldiers who hated to kill, who went out of their way to avoid killing or even firing their weapons, who held on to their essential humanity in the face of the severest provocations — and yet still won battle after battle, marching to victory in history's greatest war.
Break the next generation of recruits
But far from celebrating this example of genuine glory, the military brass were horrified at the low "firing rates" and anemic "kill ratios" of U.S. soldiery. They immediately set about trying to break the next generation of recruits of their natural resistance to slaughtering their own kind.
Incorporating the latest techniques for psychological manipulation, new training programs were designed to brutalize the mind and habituate soldiers to the idea of killing automatically, by reflex, without the intervention of any of those "inefficient" scruples displayed by their illustrious predecessors.
And it worked.
The dehumanization process led to a steady rise in firing rates for U.S. soldiers during subsequent conflicts.
In the Korean War, 55 percent were ready to pump hot lead into enemy flesh.
And by the time the greatest generation's own children took the field, in Vietnam, the willingness to slaughter was almost total: 95 percent of combat troops there fired with the intent to kill.
Today, in the quagmire of occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on.
"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it's like it pounds in my brain," a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week.
Another shrugged at the sight of freshly killed bodies.
"It doesn't bother me at all," he said. "I'm a warrior."
Said a third: "We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way ... but it's like I can't stop.
I'm worried what I'll be like when I get home."
Now high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment
A few military officials are beginning to worry, too, noting the high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat veterans.
But the warlords of the White House — notorious battlefield shirkers who prefer to do their killing by remote control — have little regard for the cannon fodder they churn through in their quest for dominance and loot.
"Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers," said Colonel Thomas Burke, Pentagon director of mental health policy.
Any efforts to mitigate the moral schizophrenia induced by this training would undermine "effectiveness in battle," he added.
Yet strangely enough, this "warrior ethos" has singularly failed to produce the kind of lasting victories won by those 15-percenters of yore.
Could it be that the systematic degradation of natural morality and common human feeling — especially in the service of dubious ends — is not actually the best way to achieve national greatness?
Annotations
Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, kill 'em
Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004 Trained to Kill Christianity Today, Aug. 10, 1998 In Anbar Province, Change of Course Rankles Many Soldiers Knight-Ridder, July 20, 2004 © Copyright 2004, The Moscow Times. All Rights Reserved. |
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Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans
A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans NEW YORK, Nov. 13, 2007
(CBS) They are the casualties of wars you don’t often hear about — soldiers who die of self-inflicted wounds. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military.
But a five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively.
“I just felt like this silent scream inside of me,” said Jessica Harrell, the sister of a soldier who took his own life.
"I opened up the door and there he was," recalled Mike Bowman, the father of an Army reservist.
"I saw the hose double looped around his neck,” said Kevin Lucey, another military father.
"He was gone,” said Mia Sagahon, whose soldier boyfriend committed suicide.
Keteyian spoke with the families of five former soldiers who each served in Iraq — only to die battling an enemy they could not conquer. Their loved ones are now speaking out in their names.
They survived the hell that's Iraq and then they come home only to lose their life.
Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of this parents’ home — where his father, Kevin, found him.
"There's a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way,” Kevin Lucey said.
Kim and Mike Bowman’s son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.
"His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn't there anymore," Kim Bowman said.
Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.
Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He died jumping off a bridge at 27.
"Going to that morgue and seeing my baby ... my life will never be the same," she said.
Beyond the individual loss, it turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military.
There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Bowman said.
Why do the families think that is?
"Because they don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known," Lucey said.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.
"If you're just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who've committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.
CBS News’ investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years.
Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides.
That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.
CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health.
"There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem," he said.
Why hasn't the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?
"That research is ongoing,” he said.
So CBS News did an investigation — asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995.
Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.
And what it revealed was stunning.
In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces.
That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.
Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.
It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets.
(Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)
One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror.
They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age.
(The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)
"Wow! Those are devastating," said Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group Veterans For Common Sense.
 Eye to Eye: Watch more of Keteyian's interview with Sullivan.
 Read the Investigative Unit's Data and Methodology behind this story.
Read part 2 of the investigative series.An update: The chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, responded to the CBS News story Tuesday.
“The report that the rate of suicide among veterans is double that of the general population is deeply troubling and simply unacceptable.
I am especially concerned that so many young veterans appear to be taking their own lives.
For too many veterans, returning home from battle does not bring an end to conflict.
There is no question that action is needed."
©MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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US Military Keeping Secrets About Female Soldiers’ ‘Suicides’?
The demographics of those Army women who allegedly committed suicide are as intriguing as the circumstances of their deaths The Death of Lavena Johnson |
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Ron Paul: After ‘CIA coup,’ agency ‘runs military’
By Raw Story
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
US House Rep. Ron Paul says the CIA has in effect carried out a "coup" against the US government, and the intelligence agency needs to be "taken out."
Speaking to an audience of like-minded libertarians at a Campaign for Liberty regional conference in Atlanta this past weekend, the Texas Republican said:
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Dark Alliance — The Story Behind the Crack Explosion The "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong
Profoundest suspicions of white malfeasance were true |
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BBC — Monday, 11 June 2007
US veterans 'high suicide risk'
US war veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide than ordinary civilians, a study has found.
Researchers examined data on 320,890 men, of which a third served in the US military between 1917 and 1994.
Men who were white, better educated and older than the other men appeared to be at higher risk, as did those with a physical or emotional disability.
Researchers say the findings emphasise the need for mental health care for those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, included men who had served in World War Two, the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the Gulf war.
'Inadequate screening'
It said the rate of suicide among men who had taken military service was 2.13 times higher than those who had never served in the armed forces.
War veterans were also twice as likely to use a firearm to kill themselves, it said.
Disabled veterans, or those who had experienced emotional or psychological trauma during their service were identified as the highest risk group.
Interestingly, overweight veterans were less likely to have committed suicide than those of normal weight, the study found.
Although the research did not include data from men returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, authors said the findings had strong implications for them.
Lead researcher Mark Kaplan, of Portland State University in Oregon, said doctors should "scrutinise veterans for signs of suicidal behaviour or thoughts and, if needed, they should intervene to make sure these patients do not have access to firearms".
He said in general "there is inadequate mental health screening, and many of the doctors outside the VA (Veterans Affairs) system are not trained to deal with these sorts of problems and don't have the time to treat them". |
After Pat's Birthday
By KEVIN TILLMAN
It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.
It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.
He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.
How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.
How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.
How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice... until we get out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice: Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
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Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.
Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.
It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense. Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
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Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people.
So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.
Most likely, they will come to know that "somehow" was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy.
People still have a voice.
People still can take action.
It can start after Pat's birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman |
An Iraqi woman cries as U.S. troops raid the Iraqi city of Najaf, August 12, 2004. U.S. Marines, backed by tanks and aircraft, seized the heart of the holy Iraqi city of Najaf Thursday in a major assault on Shia resistance. |
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Times corrects a minor error, ignores the big one
A report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 6, 2007
Reviewing the London-based anti-Iraq War play Fallujah, New York Times reporter Jane Perlez wrote (5/29/07),
"The denunciations of the United States are severe, particularly in the scenes that deal with the use of napalm in Fallujah, an allegation made by left-wing critics of the war but never substantiated."
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She followed that complaint by reporting that the play's writer and director, Jonathan Holmes, "makes no pretense of objectivity," paraphrasing him as saying that he "strove for authority more than authenticity."
Unfortunately for the Times, which does make a pretense of objectivity, the U.S. government did use the modern equivalent of napalm in Iraq. In a 2003 interview in the San Diego Union-Tribune (8/5/03), Marine Col. James Alles described the use of Mark 77 firebombs on targets in Iraq, saying, "We napalmed both those approaches."
While the Pentagon makes a distinction between the Mark 77 and napalm — the chemical formulation is slightly different, being based on kerosene rather than gasoline — it acknowledged to the Union-Tribune that the new weapon is routinely referred to as napalm because "its effect upon the target is remarkably similar."
"You can call it something other than napalm, but it's napalm," military analyst John Pike told the paper.
In a column that appeared before his play premiered (London Guardian, 4/4/07), Fallujah playwright and director Jonathan Holmes referred to it as a "napalm derivative."
But the major controversy over the use of incendiary weapons in Fallujah involved not napalm but white phosphorus.
As with napalm, U.S. officials initially denied that white phosphorus had been used as a weapon there.
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In London, U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle told the Independent (11/15/05) that "U.S. forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons," only "as obscurants or smoke screens and for target marking."
After it was discovered that the military journal Field Artillery (3-4/05) had quoted veterans of the Fallujah campaign boasting that white phosphorus was such "an effective and versatile munition" that they "saved our WP for lethal missions," however, the U.S. government was forced to backtrack.
"Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants," Col. Barry Venable told the BBC (11/15/05).
As Seth Ackerman documented (Extra!, 3-4/06), the New York Times had accepted the initial denials of the use of white phosphorus as a weapon.
An article about U.S. intelligence monitoring the foreign press (11/13/05) cited such claims as examples of the flimsy anti-American charges in the overseas media, noting that "the mainstream American news media" had "largely ignored the claim," since its "reporters had witnessed the fighting [in Fallujah] and apparently seen no evidence” of white phosphorus weaponry.
After the Pentagon admitted using white phosphorus, however, the Times ran a strong editorial (11/29/05) calling for a ban on its use. "All of us, including Americans, are safer in a world in which certain forms of conduct are regarded as too inhumane even for war. That is why...the United States should stop using white phosphorus."
Independent correspondent Dahr Jamail, whose reporting from Fallujah inspired one of the play's characters, wrote to the New York Times to take issue with Perlez's dismissal of the play's references to napalm. Jamail pointed out that the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah was an "'allegation'...confirmed by the Pentagon itself nearly one year after it was initially reported by myself, as well as other outlets in the Middle East."
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Jamail also noted out that Perlez had incorrectly described him as Canadian, when he is actually a U.S. citizen. The Times ran a correction (6/7/07) on the nationality mistake, but declined to correct the more serious error of dismissing the U.S.'s incendiary weapons attacks as an "allegation" that was "never substantiated."
If Perlez meant to say that the U.S. military had only confirmed the use of a napalm-like weapon elsewhere in Iraq, not in Fallujah, while the only incendiary weapon admitted to have been used in Fallujah was white phosphorus, then that's a very slender technicality with which to call into question the "objectivity" and "authenticity" of a playwright.
It was good of the Times, in its November 2005 editorial, to condemn the use of inhumane weapons that burn their victims alive. But it's too bad that its reporter didn't recall that editorial when presenting the use of similar weaponry as an unsubstantiated left-wing charge.
And it's especially unfortunate that, even when this lapse was pointed out to the paper, it couldn't bring itself to correct the record, choosing to be fastidious only when it comes to secondary details like nationality.
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If you feel compelled to take action regarding this issue, click here
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at June 11, 2007 10:44 PM |
US used white phosphorus chemical and thermobaric fuel-air weapons War Crimes — Fallujah — Graphic Images |
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Friday, 1 October, 2004
Family's plea after soldier's suicide
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The parents of a soldier who killed himself while on leave from Iraq have called for more support for servicemen returning from duty.
Private Gary Boswell, 20, from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, was found hanging in a playground in July.
John and Sarah Boswell said army personnel should be offered counselling when they return from active service.
An MoD spokesman said there were mechanisms within the armed forces which gave "support" to soldiers.
Mr Boswell joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers two and a half years ago.
He had been on a mechanics course at Pembrokeshire College but, seeing the financial problems faced by his family because his father was out of work, he abandoned that course and joined up.
At first he was trained in Britain, then Germany and for a time in Canada but for the last six months he had been serving in Basra in southern Iraq.
Mr and Mrs Boswell, who have three daughters, said their son had suffered depression on returning home but had never spoken of his experiences.
They said he had been on anti-depressants and had received counselling but that they still had no idea what drove him to take his life, but feel that it may have been because he felt unable to talk about Iraq.
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Mrs Boswell said: "I have to say, he did not get counselling from the army, not that we're aware of, unless he had it before he came home - this is something we don't really know much about.
"I do believe soldiers, particularly young ones like my son, should get counselling as a matter of course when they return to Britain on leave.
"We cannot know what they see and experience in Iraq and we never suspected how deeply he had been touched."
She added: "All young soldiers in Iraq should have counselling so they can speak more freely about it.
"I think they are not able to speak about things, there are probably a lot of young men out there now who are feeling like Gary did."
Suicide verdict
An inquest in Milford Haven last week recorded a verdict of suicide .
A MoD said: "We realise Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a very serious condition and we have robust systems in place to deal with mental health conditions.
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"Prior to deployment all UK service personnel are fully briefed regarding all operational matters.
"Whilst in the theatre, they have access to a range of services which includes access to medical staff and welfare officers.
"They can speak to psychiatric staff, people in their unit and there are also chaplains."
A spokeswoman added that all service personnel returning from Iraq spend one week among colleagues in the UK where they are scrutinised for signs of PTSD.
She said that family members are given leaflets on how to spot signs of PTSD and that there are also post-deployment briefings on how to deal with friends and family.
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There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.The law of unintended consequences: Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under Carter, acknowledged in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur that the Carter administration began funding the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviets invaded (a statement corroborated by former CIA director Robert Gates). Brzezinski: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. Question: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today? Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."At this point in history, one need hardly elaborate on the short-sightedness of a policy which sought to give the Soviets their own Vietnam at the small cost of a few "stirred up Muslims". But for the rare, obtuse reader, let's state it flat out: there's a direct line leading from this ill-conceived decision to the events of September 11, 2001. Tom Tomorrow June 26, 2005 http://www.thismodernworld.com/
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One of the most effective ways I found was to follow the bulldozers and construction machinery.
I was in Iraq to research the so-called reconstruction.
And what struck me most was the absence of reconstruction machinery, of cranes and bulldozers, in downtown Baghdad.
I expected to see reconstruction all over the place.
I saw bulldozers in military bases.
I saw bulldozers in the Green Zone, where a huge amount of construction was going on, building up Bechtel's headquarters and getting the new U.S. embassy ready.
There was also a ton of construction going on at all of the U.S. military bases.
But, on the streets of Baghdad, the former ministry buildings are absolutely untouched.
They hadn't even cleared away the rubble, let alone started the reconstruction process.
The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard.
One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy.
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Baghdad occupation
In Baghdad, at least 26 people were killed and 90 wounded in fighting pitting US troops against Mahdi Army resistance fighters in Sadr City.
One mortar round landed near the Ashtar Sheraton and Palestine Meridien hotels.
The Sadr General Hospital said 18 bodies had been brought in and in addition to 73 injured people, including two women and four children.
In the Al-Shuader hospital, eight people were reported killed and 17 wounded.
Two other hospitals reported 10 wounded. |
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Thursday 5th May 2005
In the face of a full-scale civil war in Iraq, says a source close to the U.S. military, Bush intends to go it alone.
"Our policy is to make Iraq a colony," he says. "We won't let go."
According to U.S. officials, the resistance attacks are being aided by an extensive network of informers.
Insurgents, apparently making use of engineers and former insiders, have been able to hit oil installations and power plants expertly, foiling U.S. efforts to sustain Iraqi oil exports and to provide electricity and water to Iraqi cities.
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"They have tentacles that reach all through the new government and the new military," Lt. Gen. Walter Buchanan, who commands U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf, admitted recently.
The new government is not only powerless to stop the attacks by insurgents, it is dominated by the same clique of warlords and exiles who lobbied the Pentagon to go to war in the first place, many of whom have close ties to the warring camps that control vast parts of the country.
"In the Arab world, Iraq is seen as a zone of chaos in a pre-civil-war situation, held together only by the U.S. occupation," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush's father.
A brief survey of the three major forces in Iraq — Shiites in the south, Sunnis in the center and Kurds in the north — makes clear the sharp divisions that threaten to blow the country apart:
The Shiites: The Bush administration's plan for reconstruction envisioned the Shiites — the majority population long oppressed by Saddam Hussein — as the chief power in a democratic Iraq.
The United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite party backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, won a majority in the new national assembly.
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But a militant bloc of fundamentalist Shiites has been using its newfound strength — and its street thugs — to forcibly impose Islamic law throughout the southern half of Iraq.
Militias loyal to rival Shiite factions are blowing up liquor stores and movie theaters, forcing women to wear ultraconservative Islamic dress and assassinating secular officials and other opponents.
...The Mahdi, which battled U.S. forces during two major uprisings last year, is fiercely loyal to the charismatic and fanatical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the scion of a leading fundamentalist Shiite family.
Al-Sadr's militia, hammered in last year's clashes, is quickly rebuilding with new recruits armed with machine guns, rocket launchers and rocket-propelled grenades.
It now controls a big chunk of Basra, Iraq's only port and second-largest city, along with Kut, Amarah, Nasariyah and the huge eastern district of Baghdad known as Sadr City.
In April, al-Sadr organized a rally of 300,000 people to demand that U.S. troops leave Iraq.
The Mahdi Army's main rival for power among the Shiites is the Badr Brigade, which has an estimated 20,000 men under arms.
Badr is run by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and trained by his Revolutionary Guards.
SCIRI's leaders still have close ties to Iran, even though many of its officials have been elected to the new Iraqi parliament.
The hard-line group is powerful in Iraq's two holy cities, Najaf and Karbala, and controls another chunk of Basra.
Other Shiite forces include the Dawa Islamic Party, whose chieftain, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is Iraq's new prime minister. Dawa was an underground terrorist organization in Iraq from the 1960s through the 1980s, and militants linked to the group attacked the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983.
While the State Department says it has no evidence to connect al-Jaafari himself to any terrorist acts, those who study the group suspect that Dawa also gets support from Iran.
"They've been spreading money to everyone," says Juan Cole, an expert on Shiism at the University of Michigan.
The Sunnis: In central Iraq, millions of formerly dominant Sunnis opted out of the elections for the new government, which they see as being almost entirely in the hands of southern Shiites and northern Kurds.
There are now several dozen Sunni organizations fighting the U.S. occupation, broadly divided into two camps: mainstream, secular Arab nationalists who served as military officers and Baath Party leaders under Saddam, and Islamist fundamentalists, including extremists associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi.
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Most of the attacks on American forces — the roadside IEDs, mortar strikes and full-scale assaults — have been conducted by the mainstream resistance, who are intent on driving out the U.S.
They have brought down helicopters, destroyed at least eighty of the Abrams tanks that are the mainstay of the U.S. occupation, and mounted large-scale actions involving scores of fighters, such as the April attacks on the Abu Ghraib prison and at Al Qaim near the Syrian border.
In one recent incident, car bombs exploded simultaneously in front of and behind a U.S. convoy, which then came under intense fire from automatic weapons wielded by snipers inside abandoned buildings along the route.
To make matters worse, the Kurds have set their sights on Kirkuk, a multi-ethnic city that sits atop Iraq's vast northern oil fields.
Even though the city lies outside of Kurdistan, Talabani calls it "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan," and Barzani says, "We are ready to fight and to sacrifice our souls to preserve its identity."
The Kurds are already engaging in some brutal expulsions of Arabs from the city.
"They're doing their own ethnic cleansing, and it's dirty stuff," says Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraq.
A full-scale Kurdish takeover, however, would be resisted by Arabs and Turks in Kirkuk.
...Even Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that was virtually obliterated in a U.S. blitz last fall, is quietly re-emerging as a center of resistance.
Fallujah's mayor, in the circumspect language of one U.S. official, is "doing some things not positive in nature."
Meanwhile, the city of Mosul has become the newest hotbed of the insurgency.
Last fall, during an attack by insurgents there, thousands of Iraqi police melted away at the first sign of violence.
"I went from 2,000 police to 50," a U.S. commander on the scene told reporters.
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Robert Fisk correspondent for London's Independent newspaper.
This article printed in Arab News August 1, 2004
Can't Bush and Blair See Iraq Is About to Explode?
BAGHDAD — The war is a fraud.
I'm not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.
Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda which didn't exist.
Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war.
I'm talking about the new lies.
For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist.
Much of Iraq has fallen outside the control of America's puppet government in Baghdad but we are not told.
Hundreds of attacks are made against US troops every month.
But unless an American dies, we are not told.
This month's death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 — the worst month since the invasion ended.
But we are not told.
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Published on Friday, October 20, 2006 by Reuters
United States Numb to Iraq Troop Deaths: Experts by Michelle Nichols
NEW YORK — In a small box titled "Names of the Dead" on page 10, The New York Times recorded the passing of Cpt. Mark Paine this week, who died after a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Iraq.
His local California newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, ran more than 700 words on Paine's death, including interviews with his mother, father and even his old Scoutmaster, while the San Francisco Chronicle ran a 500-word obituary.
This local coverage of U.S. military deaths "actually has a bigger affect on public opinion than the overall trends," said Matt Baum, an associate professor of politics at University of California, Los Angeles.
But with the U.S. military death toll hitting 2,787 Friday, and with 73 deaths so far in October, it is shaping up to be the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the Falluja offensive two years ago.
Analysts said even local media coverage struggles to overcome the numbing affect of the steady flow of deaths.
"In Iraq, certainly while we were losing relatively small numbers of soldiers early on, I think that was a huge shock," said Max Boot, a senior fellow of national security studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"But now that it's kind of accumulated it doesn't have as much of a shock value. This is reminiscent of (Soviet dictator Joseph) Stalin's phrase about how 'one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.' There's some truth to that."
Boot and Baum both said threshold moments — like the U.S. death toll reaching a key figure — garner the greatest media coverage, but the spotlight on Iraq was likely to burn a little brighter now because of the impending U.S. congressional elections on November 7.
"You have got a heated election campaign underway and you are going to have lots of candidates highlighting it again and again and again," Baum said. "You are going to have a huge echo chamber effect that you wouldn't have in other months."
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U.S. PUBLIC NUMB
The U.S. military said 10 U.S. soldiers were killed on Tuesday in one of the sharpest spikes of attacks on U.S. forces battling sectarian violence.
"I think it is true that when the numbers rise then it becomes less of a special case, we do become somewhat numb to it," said Paul Levinson, chair of the Fordham University Department of Communication and Media Studies.
"That said, I think the media have been reporting all that has been going on in Iraq so aggressively that by and large I think that people are still very tuned in to what's going on."
Boot said the U.S. deaths in Iraq were not having the same impact on society as the Vietnam War casualties because the U.S. forces in Iraq are all volunteers, unlike many of the troops in Vietnam who were drafted.
"So it had more of an impact across all of society, whereas the impact here is more isolated because so many of the soldiers come from military communities which are clustered in a handful of states," he said.
The number of U.S. forces killed in Vietnam and Korea were also much higher. The Pentagon puts the number killed in from 1964-1973 at over 58,000, and in the Korea War from 1950-1953, at over 36,000.
Yahya Kamalipour, head of the communications department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, said that if the media showed footage of the actual U.S. military deaths in Iraq then it would reduce some of the public numbness.
"Whether we are talking about the U.S. casualties, Iraqi casualties, or Afghanis. We are not thinking of them, whoever they are, as people — they are faceless, they are just simply numbers and that is troublesome," he said.
© Copyright 2006 Reuters Ltd
Common Dreams © 1997-2006 |
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Lies cost lives in Iraq.
Remember the reasons given by the US military and puppet interim Iraqi government for Operation Phantom Fury against Fallujah?Just prior to the November, 2004 assault on that city, the primary reasons given for the massacre in Fallujah were: to provide “security and stability” for the upcoming January 30 “elections” and to rid Fallujah of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
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Let us judge the success or failure of this massacre by their own yardstick.
The “security and stability” generated for the elections on January 30, 2005 by the siege of Fallujah looked like roughly 40 dead Iraqi bodies and 200 wounded, on that day alone.
As for Zarqawi, since not one resident of Fallujah has seen or reported evidence of this individual in their city before, during or after said siege, his existence at all in Iraq remains in question…aside from living large in US military propaganda which is happily trumpeted by corporate media outlets in the US.
Yesterday morning on NPR (National Pentagon Radio) their reporter in Baghdad was asked if he felt what Mr. Bush said in a recent speech was true-was the US military strategy in Iraq working?
He replied that he felt what Mr. Bush said was true in some cases, like in Fallujah.
The NPR reporter referred to Fallujah as “pacified.”
“Pacified” Fallujah looks like a dead six year-old child in that city, shot by a US sniper in the Al-Dubbat neighborhood on December 1st, according to Al-Sharqiyah.
“Pacified” Fallujah looks like:
“Two US soldiers were killed by sniper fire on Wednesday [30 November] in the city of Al-Fallujah, [60 kilometers] west of Baghdad, according to eyewitnesses.
A tense atmosphere prevailed in the city after the US forces besieged some of its quarters and blocked the main street, while National Guard forces closed shops and asked the residents to stay in their homes.”
“Pacified” Fallujah looks like 10 Marines killed and 11 wounded by a roadside bomb while on a “foot patrol near Fallujah” on Thursday December 1st, which was the deadliest attack on American troops in nearly four months.
So if you want to keep thinking there is peace in Fallujah, you’d better ignore the facts on the ground and keep listening to NPR “presstitutes” talking on the radio from their hotel rooms in Baghdad.
Surprised to hear this about NPR? Don’t be.
According to Robert McChesney, president of Free Press, a national, non-profit, media reform group in the US which works to support a diverse and independent media, our public broadcasting outlets are already infiltrated by Bush Administration ideologues.
“White House loyalists inside the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have launched a crusade to remake PBS, NPR and other public media into official mouthpieces.
Kenneth Tomlinson’s tenure at the CPB was characterized by targeting journalists like Bill Moyers who dared to air dissenting voices or prepare investigative reports on the administration.
Tomlinson’s goal was clearly to fire a shot across the bow of all public stations so managers would shy away from the sort of investigative journalism that might expose Bush administration malfeasance.
Tomlinson resigned in disgrace but left behind a cast of cronies to carry out his partisan crusade.
And we still don’t know the extent to which Karl Rove and others at the White House orchestrated his efforts.”
Free Press also accuses the Bush Administration of bribing journalists, lying about the Iraq War, eliminating dissent in the mainstream media, gutting the Freedom of Information Act, consolidating media control, and manufacturing fake news.
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We’ve recently had a nice example of a bright and shining lie with regards to manufacturing fake news in Iraq. A secret military campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media has been uncovered. Exposed is Washington-based Lincoln Group, which has contracts with the military to “provide media and public relations services.”
Meanwhile, failed US propaganda campaigns are not hiding the fact that military planners in Iraq estimate that there are as many as 100 resistance groups now fighting against the Anglo-American occupiers of their country.
Nor have the propagandists managed to hide the fact that two more members of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, Bulgaria and Ukraine, have announced they will begin withdrawing their combined 1,250 troops by the middle of this month.
Most likely, Bulgaria and Ukraine want to get their folks out of Iraq before more of the country becomes “pacified” like Fallujah.
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at December 2, 2005 |
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www.democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: First I want to offer my condolences and the whole team, the whole staff here at Democracy Now! we are very moved by the fact that you were willing to come in to talk about Jeff. Can you tell us when he went to Iraq?
KEVIN LUCEY: He went to-he was deployed over to Camp Pendleton in late January of 2003 and he was shipped out to Iraq, I believe it was mid February of 2003.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did he go into the military?
KEVIN LUCEY: He signed up for the Marine Reserves because he wanted the training and he wanted to go to college.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you feel about that?
KEVIN LUCEY: Both of us, I think, were in a state of shock.
JOYCE LUCEY: At the time? He was 18.
AMY GOODMAN: 18 years old. Did he tell you about this decision when he was still in high school?
JOYCE LUCEY: No. He might have mentioned it a couple of times, but I would never have taken him seriously at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: Where did Jeff grow up?
JOYCE LUCEY: Belcher Town.
AMY GOODMAN: Here in Massachusetts. So he went off to Iraq. And he served there how long?
KEVIN LUCEY: Well, he was there for the [beginning of the] war. He celebrated his 22nd birthday over in Iraq. In fact, the war started the day after his 22nd birthday. And then he returned back to this country July 14 of 2003.
JOYCE LUCEY: When he first came home, he was happy to be home. He had a couple of weddings to attend. But his girlfriend, they went away to the Cape right after they came back and she said he was vague...he was distant. You know. You really wouldn't notice it unless you knew Jeffrey.
His unit never saw anything coming. They thought he was smiling all the time, he was cooperative. Never, never saw the pain that was underneath.
KEVIN LUCEY: And then there was Christmas Eve that we really became, aware of the problem when he was drunk and he told his younger sister that he was a murderer.
And his behavior broke.
He usually would be at family events but he refused to come with us Christmas Eve down to his grandparents and our daughter went to check on him and we went rushing back home Christmas Eve and we knew that something was going on.
We didn't understand. |
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| Son commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: He was in the battle of Nazaria? JOYCE LUCEY: Yes. He went in with Special Opps. He was with the, with the ones that need self truckers to drive them in and Jeff went in with them. And then he went into the city itself. And he was in the alleyways, he said they were firing from the top of buildings down at them and he thought he was going to die there. He really... and he said we would never understand. And we don't. I can't put myself in the position he was in. |
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| AMY GOODMAN: Was your son political when he went to Iraq? KEVIN LUCEY: As time went on, he really started watching various news programs and he started speaking up against the war and why it was being fought, why innocents were being killed. He just couldn't...he couldn't merge his life with what he had seen and what he had gone through. And he started telling us, as time went on, a lot more of what he saw, what he saw Americans do. And...just...he just had some really heavy trauma. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: So when he came back, what kind of help did he get? What date did he return home? JOYCE LUCEY: July 13 or 14 [2003] AMY GOODMAN: What help did he get in the summer? This was last— JOYCE LUCEY: He didn't seek any help at that time. AMY GOODMAN: And you realized something was wrong already at Christmas? JOYCE LUCEY: Around Christmas. AMY GOODMAN: Six months later. JOYCE LUCEY: Around Christmas eve. AMY GOODMAN: Then what happened? JOYCE LUCEY: Yep, he would have a good day and a bad day. It was nothing...we didn't even understand that he was going through something. He went back it school, he seemed to focus again on his work. In fact, he had his midterms in March and he did very well. It was around April he started feeling anxious, felt hike there were people watching him, like when he would walk into a class classroom. He felt all eyes were on him. Even Though he said he knows they aren't. [He said] I never felt like this before. If somebody would slam a door, he would drop his school books down and he said he would turn real quick and was embarrassed. It was a startle reflex. He didn't quite understand what was going on. He was having trouble sleeping, he was having night sweats, the nightmares were starting to occur. He was agitated, restless. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: Did the military veteran’s hospital say this is what could happen? KEVIN LUCEY: Well we had not hooked up with a V.A. yet. What it happened was that during a family day that people were told you should try to get your vet some help. And one of the things was that Jeff didn't want help. Because he thought he could manage everything on his own. And then when we got into may, well even late April, both of us started encouraging him to go to his open private therapist. He was tremendously worried about the military finding out that he was, quote, and ‘weak.’ We did it privately. We hooked him up with a therapist over in Amherst and he immediately trusted Mark because he knew Mark from earlier and what had happened was we thought things were working out. Mark was giving him phone consultation and seeing him once or twice a week. But then when May came, things really started exploding. He started talking about how we could never understand and he would average maybe three or four or five hours' worth of sleep. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide JOYCE LUCEY: He wasn't eating. KEVIN LUCEY: He wasn't eating. JOYCE LUCEY: And when he returned, he was almost phoning on a daily bases when he first came home and it kind of continued. He went to see the internist at the time and he really, he didn't find anything wrong with Jeff at that point. AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever seek V.A. help? JOYCE LUCEY: Yes. KEVIN LUCEY: We did go out to the V.A. We were trying to get him to do it voluntarily. So about three weeks in May, we kept encouraging him and he said “OK, tomorrow, I’ll go. Tomorrow I’ll go.” Well finally on May 28, Memorial Day weekend, I came home and I said, ‘Jeff, today is the day.’ And he, his girlfriend and myself, brought him up to the V.A. hospital. We left at 3:00 on May 28, Friday. We got there at 4:00 and they tried to talk him into a voluntary. Jeff was medicating himself with the alcohol. No, he had not drank anything from 3:00 on and about 7:00 or 7:30 when they took a breathalyzer and he blew a .238. He was functioning very well except very angry. Finally, I had to ask them to involuntarily commit him. And that resulted in his being chased by the V.A. police and male nurses tackled, restrained, and he was committed against his will until June 1, Tuesday. And then they discharged him. One of the things about that that upsets me is that on Saturday, I called and a nurse went down and asked them, Jeff, because of Hippocratic Oath, I can't speak to your dad. And he said, “No, it's ok. Talk to him.” So she came back and told us how he had the night before, but during his stay, he had mentioned, we got the medical records afterwards, he had mentioned three ways that he was thinking about committing suicide. Overdose, suffocation or hanging. And at his discharge meeting, which we thought possibility someone would contact us, Jeff called his mom and said I’ve been discharged. Come and get me. So we were never told that he had these kinds of really construct plans. And.... |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: What date did he die? KEVIN LUCEY: He died June 22, 2004. Yeah. He died Tuesday, five weeks ago today. AMY GOODMAN: At home? KEVIN LUCEY: Yes. He...I came home at 6:45 and I went to look for Jeff and I couldn't find him in the house. His Iraqi dog tags were on his bed: two men that he was ordered to shoot unarmed. And when I saw those, it didn't strike me right away, but as I walked back, I saw the cellar door open, cellar light on, family pictures put in a crescent. I went downstairs looking at the pictures and all of a sudden from the corner of my eye, I saw my son Jeff hanging there from a hold. And I immediately went over and cradled him on my knee, took the hose from his neck and made a pillow out of a thing and rested him down and called the police. And that was that. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: You said he put dog tags on his bed of Iraqis? JOYCE LUCEY: WHe wore them on...he had them in Iraq and when he came home, he started wearing them. And the psychologist that was dealing with Jeff said Jeff wore them to honor these men, not as a trophy, but to honor them because he took their lives. AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean he was ordered to shoot them and they were unarmed? JOYCE LUCEY: They were prisoners. AMY GOODMAN: They were prisoners? JOYCE LUCEY: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Where did he kill them? In Nazariah? KEVIN LUCEY: We don't know. JOYCE LUCEY: We don’t have the whole story. He would just give bits and pieces. You would never get the full. But he told his sister that he was just like five feet away from one of them. That he had to kill. And he watched him die. And.... |
| 23 year old commits suicide KEVIN LUCEY: He never shot a squirrel before. In his life. AMY GOODMAN: He's the middle son? You have a daughter are older and younger? JOYCE LUCEY: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: He's the middle son? You have a daughter are older and younger? JOYCE LUCEY: Difficult. Very difficult. We just had my husband's birthday and we went out so that we wouldn't be at home, because it's too many memories at home. And just going into a place to eat, my older daughter are kept tearing up because Jeff’s not there anymore. So, you know, it's going to be hard for a while. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: Nancy Lessin as you listen to the Lucey's, Military Families Speak Out, your organization, you are dealing with many people who have lost loved ones. And you are dealing also with another story right now of a young man who like Jeff was horrified at what he saw. Please tell us the story. NANCY LESSIN: You know Amy, we are not hearing nearly enough about those who die in the battle field. We are hearing virtually nothing about the growing number of troops who died in their souls because of what they saw and what they did. And we hear these every day. But this one in particular is one that we heard last week. A mom wrote us. Her son served in Iraq. He came back. Was suffering nightmares and night sweats. Got redeployment orders and he told his mother he could not go back and kill innocent people. She encouraged him to talk with his command, with his chaplain. He did that. They told him to suck it up, get back to his unit, and do his damn job. Instead of going on deployment, he went AWOL for several months and then he turned himself in. Back into his command he was put in the brig where he sits now in Camp Pendleton. He's being held without charges and incommunicado from his family. |
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| 23 year old commits suicide AMY GOODMAN: His parents can't talk with him? NANCY LESSIN: No. They have not been able to. We are trying to get legal intervention here, but clearly this is just yet another story that illustrates a trend that it's really military policy that is limiting and preventing proper evaluation diagnosis and treatment of PTSD. We have heard— AMY GOODMAN: Post-traumatic stress disorder. NANCY LESSIN: How much the post traumatic stress disorder. We have heard so much about what this military learned in Vietnam and how they are doing it differently now. And we don't see that at all. We see the same mistakes happening, mistakes that are, in fact, not mistakes at all. It's really a way of denying this issue so that they can keep as many warm bodies on the front, deployed and redeployed. And that's the policy. |
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23 year old commits suicide
AMY GOODMAN: Kelly Dougherty, you served in Iraq for about a year?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: Yes. With the Colorado National Guard.
AMY GOODMAN: You were in Nazariah like Jeff?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: But did you know him?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: No. When our unit went, it was after the majority of the fighting had stopped. So....
AMY GOODMAN: Were you opposed to the invasion?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: I was opposed to the invasion and the more I have learned and what I saw, it's just reinforced what I felt.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you join the Colorado National Guard?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: I joined out of high school to get money for college and also to get some medical training.
I was served as a medic and then I went to Iraq as a military police officer.
AMY GOODMAN: So you've come home, I met you at the Boston Public Library at the closing of the Veterans for Peace Conference. And learned that a small group of you, veterans from Iraq, have formed this organization Iraq Veterans Against the War. Why?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: We formed it just to give returning Iraqi veterans who are disillusioned and angry with the government and with this war in Iraq a way to come together and organize a voice.
Because we think it's powerful to have returning veterans especially who have seen what it is like over there, speak against it.
And we are working with Nancy and Military Families Speak Out and with Veterans for Peace to organize.
We have members of our group who dealt with similar situations like she was talking about and what their son went through with depression and PTSD and getting no help from the government and from the military.
And we have people there that have experienced it.
AMY GOODMAN: If people want to get in touch with Iraq Veterans Against the War, where can they go?
KELLY DOUGHERTY: Yes, we are at www.ivaw.net.
And we plan to get together and speak out, try to make our voices heard.
We have several members, our membership has already tripled since we announced this three days ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin lucey, do you think that this would have helped your son?
KEVIN LUCEY: I believe it would have helped him and would have given him a lifeline.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all very much for being with us and we hope to be in touch with you as you go through your recovery and your mourning and to find out how Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out are doing and how you are organizing in this election year.
www.democracynow.org |
US Military Keeping Secrets About Female Soldiers’ ‘Suicides’?
The demographics of those Army women who allegedly committed suicide are as intriguing as the circumstances of their deaths The Death of Lavena Johnson |
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Vietnam — National Security Agency officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes.
Communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.
Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview last week that he believed the intelligence reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.
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Demons of past stalk Tiger Force veterans
For Barry Bowman, the images return at night.
The elderly man praying on his knees. The officer pointing a rifle at the man's head.
The shot.
That piercing shot.
Before it's over, the old man drops to the ground — his body twitching in the blood-soaked grass.
Over and over, Mr. Bowman relives the execution of the Vietnamese villager known as Dao Hue.
Despite years of therapy, the former Tiger Force soldier is still deeply troubled by the brutal shooting he witnessed as a young medic in the Song Ve Valley.
He's not alone.
Of the 43 former platoon members interviewed by The Blade in an eight-month investigation of Tiger Force, a dozen expressed remorse for committing or failing to stop atrocities.
They share some of the same symptoms — flashbacks or nightmares — and over the past 36 years have sought counseling, they said.
Nine have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a psychiatric condition that can occur following life-threatening experiences.
To this day, they wrestle with memories of Tiger Force's rampage through more than 40 hamlets in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967....
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John Kerry's 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War Before the United States Senate.
JOHN KERRY: Several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.
Not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels of
command.
It's impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit.
The emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam.
But they did.
They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told the stories of times that they had personally raped.
Cut off the ears.
Cut off heads.
Taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power.
Cut off limbs.
Blown up bodies.
Randomly shot at civilians.
Razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.
Shot cattle and dogs for fun.
Poisoned food stocks.
And generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
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We called this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation.
The term ‘winter soldier’ is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the “sunshine patriot and summertime soldiers” who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. |
| I have photographed many items left at the ' Wall ' in Washington, D.C. and also at the ' Moving Wall ' in different locations around the Pacific Northwest. But, the Crisco can left at the ' Moving Wall ' in Albany, Oregon was the most profound statement of any picture I have taken. I have taken many grief images, but the Crisco can tells the absolute truth about the Vietnam War. It cuts through all the bull shit and the thousands of books written about that war. The entire Vietnam War was a fucking lie!! The U.S. Government fucked every soldier who served in Vietnam, but at least they were decent enough to use Crisco. Betrayal was the ultimate wound that was inflicted on every Vietnam Veteran, whether they know it or not. We were used like pawns in a chess game, and discarded like paper cups after a movie. When I left Vietnam, guys were burning their uniforms, and writing hateful graffiti about Richard Nixon on the walls of the trancient barracks. That is what we brought home to America, and thousands of Vietnam Veterans have committed suicide because they were brutally betrayed by their own government. The Crisco can says it all. The veteran who left that truth at the " Wall," validated me to the max. It forced me to see all the anger I was still hiding. It was a powerful moment in my life. It helped me to see I wasn't crazy. I did not serve in Vietnam for the cause of freedom, I served Big Business in America for the cause of profit. Mike Hastie Vietnam Veteran "Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty." Tim O'Brien — The Things They Carried |
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John Kerry's 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War:
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.
We could come back to this country and we could be quiet.
We could hold our silence.
We could not tell what went on in Vietnam.
But we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, not red coats, but the crimes which we are committing are what threaten it, and we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam.
The country doesn't know it yet, but it's created a monster.
A monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.
Men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it.
We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country. |
The Vietnam turnout was good as well
No amount of spin can conceal Iraqis' hostility to US occupation
Sami Ramadani
Tuesday February 1, 2005 The Guardian On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading "US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", the paper reported that the Americans had been "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting". A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam". The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny. |
With the past few days' avalanche of spin, you could be forgiven for thinking that on January 30 2005 the US-led occupation of Iraq ended and the people won their freedom and democratic rights.
Occupation, martial law, a US-appointed election commission and secret candidates
This has been a multi-layered campaign, reminiscent of the pre-war WMD frenzy and fantasies about the flowers Iraqis were collecting to throw at the invasion forces.
How you could square the words democracy, free and fair with the brutal reality of occupation, martial law, a US-appointed election commission and secret candidates has rarely been allowed to get in the way of the hype.
If truth is the first casualty of war, reliable numbers must be the first casualty of an occupation-controlled election.
Overwhelming majority of Iraqis participated?
The second layer of spin has been designed to convince us that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis participated.
The initial claim of 72% having voted was quickly downgraded to 57% of those registered to vote.
So what percentage of the adult population is registered to vote?
The Iraqi ambassador in London was unable to enlighten me.
In fact, as UN sources confirm, there has been no registration or published list of electors — all we are told is that about 14 million people were entitled to vote.
As for Iraqis abroad, the up to 4 million strong exiled community (with perhaps a little over 2 million entitled to vote) produced a 280,000 registration figure.
Of those, 265,000 actually voted.
First step to kicking out the occupiers
The Iraqi south, more religious than Baghdad, responded positively to Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani's position: to call the bluff of the US and vote for a list that was proclaimed to be hostile to the occupation.
Sistani's supporters declared that voting on Sunday was the first step to kicking out the occupiers.
The months ahead will put these declarations to a severe test.
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Meanwhile Moqtada al-Sadr's popular movement, which rejected the elections as a sham, is likely to make a comeback in its open resistance to the occupation.
The big vote in Kurdistan primarily reflects the Kurdish people's demand for national self-determination.
The US administration has hitherto clamped down on these pressures.
Kissinger
Henry Kissinger's recent proposal to divide Iraq into three states reflects a major shift among influential figures in the US who, led by Kissinger as secretary of state, ditched the Kurds in the 70s and brokered a deal between Saddam and the Shah of Iran.
George Bush and Tony Blair made heroic speeches on Sunday implying that Iraqis had voted to approve the occupation. Those who insist that the US is desperate for an exit strategy are misreading its intentions.
Install and back long-term puppet regime
The facts on the ground, including the construction of massive military bases in Iraq, indicate that the US is digging in to install and back a long-term puppet regime.
For this reason, the US-led presence will continue, with all that entails in terms of bloodshed and destruction.
In the run-up to the poll, much of the western media presented it as a high-noon shootout between the terrorist Zarqawi and the Iraqi people, with the occupation forces doing their best to enable the people to defeat the fiendish, one-legged Jordanian murderer.
In reality, Zarqawi-style sectarian violence is not only condemned by Iraqis across the political spectrum, including supporters of the resistance, but is widely seen as having had a blind eye turned to it by the occupation authorities.
Negroponte backing terror gangs in central America in the 80s
Such attitudes are dismissed by outsiders, but the record of John Negroponte, the US ambassador in Baghdad, of backing terror gangs in central America in the 80s has fuelled these fears, as has Seymour Hirsh's reports on the Pentagon's assassination squads and enthusiasm for the "Salvador option".
An honest analysis of the social and political map of Iraq reveals that Iraqis are increasingly united in their determination to end the occupation.
Whether they participated in or boycotted Sunday's exercise, this political bond will soon reassert itself — just as it did in Vietnam — despite tactical differences, and despite the US-led occupation's attempts to dominate Iraqis by inflaming sectarian and ethnic divisions.
· Sami Ramadani was a political refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 |
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John Kerry's 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War:
In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, “Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms which those misfits abuse.
And this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, his boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement as a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today.
It's a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the best men of this country.
Because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to.
Because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam.
Because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees and they lie forgotten, in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country, which fly the flag, which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol.
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen, that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos, but linking such loss to the preservation of freedom which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy. |
John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War:
And it's that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War: And they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, or American. We found also that all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs, as well as by search-and-destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism. Yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War: We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free-fire zones. Shoot anything that moves. And we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States falsification of body counts. In fact, the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against ‘oriental human beings’ with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater or let us say a non-third-world-people theater. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War And so, we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for the reoccupation of the North Vietnamese. Because — because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were “Hamburger Hills” and “Khe Sanhs” and “Hill 881's” and “Fire Base 6s” and so many others. And now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War: Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows. So that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.” We are asking Americans to think about that. Because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that. And we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly that: “The issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism.” And the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people. But the point is, they aren't a free people now under us. They are not a free people. And we cannot fight communism all over the world and I think we should have learned that lesson by now. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War: But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem. Because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says “I Want You.” And a young man comes out of high school and says “That's fine. I'm going to serve my country.” And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job, or maybe he doesn't kill. Maybe he just goes and he comes back. And when he gets become to this country, he finds that he isn't really wanted. Because the largest unemployment figure here in the country, it varies depending on who you get it from, the Veterans' Administration 15%, various other sources 22%, but the largest figure of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war. And of those veterans, 33% of the unemployed are black. That means one out of every 10 of the nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam. The hospitals across the country won't or can't meet their demands. It's not a question of not trying. They haven't got the appropriations. |
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John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War:
A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California.
Not because of the operation but there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death.
Another young man just died in a New York V.A. Hospital the other day.
A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him.
But he couldn't.
They rang a bell and there was no one there to service that man.
And so he died of convulsions.
57%, I understand, 57% of all those entering V.A. Hospitals talk about suicide.
Some 27% have tried.
They try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care.
Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in this country because there's no moral indignation.
And if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignancies and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me.
The country has seemed to have lain down and accepted something as serious as Laos just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.
We are here as veterans to say that we think we are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all times now.
Because they are still dying over there.
And not just Americans, Vietnamese. |
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And we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years to come.
Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans.
And they have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a President for statistics to prove that we were winning this war to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in South Vietnam.
We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has not been able to see that there's absolutely no difference between a ground troop and a helicopter crew.
And yet, people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration.
No ground troops are in Laos, so it's alright to kill Laotians by remote control.
But believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian country side as anyone else.
The President is talking about allowing that to go on for many years to come.
And one can only ask if we will really be satisfied when the troops march into Hanoi. |
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John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War
In the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the
torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.
That's what we are trying to say.
It’s part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives on the Indian nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly.
He told me how as a boy on the Indian reservation he watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians.
And then suddenly, one day, he stopped in Vietnam and he said my God, I'm doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people.
And he stopped.
And that's what we are trying to say.
That we think this thing has to end.
We are also here to ask — we are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently: Where are the leaders of our
country?
Where is the leadership? |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War We are here to ask: Where are McNamara, Bundy, Kilpatrick and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In their blindness and fear, they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in ‘Nam.’ We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves, we wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service. As easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission. To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war. To pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country the last 10 years and more. |
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| John Kerry 1971 Speech Against the Vietnam War And so when 30 years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why? We will be able to say “Vietnam.” And not mean a desert, not a filthy, obscene memory, but mean, instead, the place where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. Thank you. |
August 8, 2007
No Wonder He Didn't Condemn Torture During His 2004 Campaign
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? |
N aïve Americans who think they live in a free society should watch the video filmed by students at a John Kerry speech September 17, Constitution Day, at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
At the conclusion of Kerry's speech, Andrew Meyer, a 21-year old journalism student was selected by Senator Kerry to ask a question.
Meyer held up a copy of BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse, and asked if Kerry was aware that Palast's investigations determined that Kerry had actually won the election.
Why, Meyer asked, had Kerry conceded the election so quickly when there were so many obvious examples of vote fraud?
Why, Meyer, went on to ask, was Kerry refusing to consider Bush's impeachment when Bush was about to initiate another act of military aggression, this time against Iran?
At this point the public's protectors-the police-decided that Meyer had said too much.
They grabbed Meyer and began dragging him off.
Meyer said repeatedly, "I have done nothing wrong," which under our laws he had not.
He threatened no one and assaulted no one.
But the police decided that Meyer, an American citizen, had no right to free speech and no constitutional protection.
They threw him to the floor and tasered him right in front of Senator Kerry and the large student audience, who captured on video the unquestionable act of police brutality.
Meyer was carted off and jailed on a phony charge of "disrupting a public event."
Why did Kerry just stand there while the student was being tortured ?
The question we should all ask is why did a United States Senator just stand there while Gestapo goons violated the constitutional rights of a student participating in a public event, brutalized him in full view of everyone, and then took him off to jail on phony charges?
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Kerry's meekness not only in the face of electoral fraud, not only in the face of Bush's wars that are crimes under the Nuremberg standard, but also in the face of police goons trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens makes it completely clear that he was not fit to be president, and he is not fit to be a US senator.
Usually when police violate constitutional rights and commit acts of police brutality they do it when they believe no one is watching, not in front of a large audience.
Clearly, the police have become more audacious in their abuse of rights and citizens.
What explains the new fearlessness of police to violate rights and brutalize citizens without cause?
The answer is that police, most of whom have authoritarian personalities, have seen that constitutional rights are no longer protected.
President Bush does not protect our constitutional rights.
Neither does Vice President Cheney, nor the Attorney General, nor the US Congress.
Just as Kerry allowed Meyer's rights to be tasered out of him, Congress has enabled Bush to strip people, including American citizens, of constitutional protection and incarcerate them without presenting evidence.
How long before Kerry himself or some other senator will be dragged from his podium and tasered?
How long before Kerry himself or some other senator will be dragged from his podium and tasered?
The Bush Republicans with complicit Democrats have essentially brought government accountability to an end in the US.
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The US government has 80,000 people, including ordinary American citizens, on its "no-fly list."
No one knows why they are on the list, and no one on the list can find out how to get off it.
An unaccountable act by the Bush administration put them there.
Airport Security harasses and abuses people who do not fit any known definition of terrorist.
Nalini Ghuman, a British-born citizen and music professor at Mills College in California was met on her return from a trip to England by armed guards at the airplane door and escorted away.
A Gestapo goon squad tore up her US visa, defaced her British passport, body searched her, and told her she could leave immediately for England or be sent to a detention center.
Professor Ghuman, an Oxford University graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, says she feels like the character in Kafka's book, The Trial.
"I don't know why it's happened, what I'm accused of. There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely powerless."
Over one year later there is still no answer.
The Bush Republicans and their Democratic toadies have, in the name of "security," made all of us powerless.
While Senator John Kerry and his Democratic colleagues stand silently, the Bush administration has stolen our country from us and turned us into subjects.
*The video of Andrew's Mayer's arrest may be found at
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?filmID=601 Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions |
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Threatened with death threats if they proceed, Luke Radowski and fellow 9/11 truth activists demand answers on collapse of towers
Giuliani, how do you sleep at night?
Steve Watson Infowars.net Wednesday, February 21, 2007 An intrepid group of Infowars reporters confronted Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani at a fundraiser he was attending in New York today to demand answers to unanswered questions surrounding the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings on 9/11.
One activist, the relative of a firefighter killed in the collapses, asked the former NYC mayor, for an explanation as why no steel framed building in history has ever collapsed from fire damage except for on 9/11 and why people in the buildings including rescuers were not given warnings they were going to collapse when he was.
She then asked Giuliani "How do you sleep at night?"
Watch the video here
Previously Giuliani has previously admitted in interviews that he was given prior warning that the twin towers were going to collapse, something no one could possibly have known was going to happen. Yet firefighters and police were not given the same warnings.
INFOWARS.net Copyright © 2002-2007 Alex Jones All rights reserved. |
Published on Thursday, November 2, 2006 by truthdig
Turning the Corner Into Madness by Robert Scheer |
Every time I hear President Bush railing against those who would “cut and run” in Iraq instead of pursuing “victory,” as he does almost daily, I think back to similar claims being made for the Vietnam debacle when I reported from Saigon in the mid-’60s.
Back then, the U.S. troop presence was lower and casualties fewer than now in Iraq, but the carnage, on all sides, would escalate for the next decade, as we waited miserably for the corner to be turned.
Then, as now, calls for setting a timetable for an orderly withdrawal were rejected as emboldening our enemy to attack America.
Instead of a dignified withdrawal, we plunged ever deeper into the quagmire, leaving 59,000 U.S. troops and 3.4 million Indochinese dead as tribute to our stupidity.
Finally, there was nothing to do but “cut and run” in the most ignominious fashion.
With our U.S. personnel being lifted by helicopter from roofs near our embassy, it seemed like a low point for U.S. influence, and there were dire predictions of communism’s global dominance — just as there is today for the “Islamo-fascist” bogeyman the president has seized upon.
Those predictions, however, proved dead wrong.
Communism did not advance as a worldwide force after our defeat in Vietnam.
On the contrary, a victorious communist-run Vietnam soon went to war with the China-backed communists of Cambodia—overthrowing Pol Pot’s evil Khmer Rouge—and with communist China itself, in a bloody border war.
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Today communist Vietnam is still battling communist China—but now it is for shelf space in Wal-Mart and Costco.
US now dependent upon China
The United States, meanwhile, spending itself silly under the haplessly irresponsible President Bush, is now dependent on China both to carry its debt and contain communist North Korea’s nuclear threat.
So why accept the president’s shrill insistence that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster?
Surely our departure would compel Iraq’s neighbors in Iran, Syria and Jordan to get serious about quelling the civil war that they have abetted and which, in the absence of the U.S. occupation, would threaten to breach Iraq’s borders.
Iraqis best qualified to make their own history
Why not assume, as turned out to be the case with Vietnam, that the Iraqis are best qualified to make their own history?
The astounding arrogance that underwrites Bush’s smug determination to keep killing and maiming tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people is no different than that of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Both knew the war was a failure but determined to “stay the course” for a decade out of a misguided belief in protecting an image of American infallibility that was paired with shameful political motives.
Now, as in Vietnam, our arrogance has created disaster in Iraq.
Our soldiers continue to kill and die, at enormous cost to the U.S. taxpayers and in international influence and moral standing, but the cause is already lost, doomed by the ignorance, lies and bad faith that launched it.
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Fierce nationalism since long before the United States existed as a nation
Astonishingly, considering our history and the stakes, our leaders show not the slightest interest in understanding the fierce nationalism and deep religious divisions that have marked the Mideast since long before the United States existed as a nation.
And thus we have repeated the decisive folly of Vietnam, where our “experts” ignored a thousand-year history of Chinese occupation in assuming that the fierce nationalist Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of masters in Red Beijing.
This time, we are led by a false warrior who insists on playing the simpleton, ignoring his prestigious education at Andover and Yale in favor of what he presumes are the prejudices of Middle America.
Or is this giving Bush, the son of a president, too much credit?
After all, we know from the various insider memoirs that Bush was unaware that Islam is roughly divided into two rival sects, Sunni and Shiite, while just last week he bizarrely announced that our Iraq policy had never been “stay the course” — as if he was unaware of the invention of video-recording equipment that had captured him saying just that countless times.
Whatever you call it, his approach is a sham and a disaster.
It is long past time to let pragmatic realpolitik find a patchwork solution that the region and Iraqis can accept, peacefully.
That is the expected advice from Bush family consigliere and troubleshooter James Baker and his Iraq Study Group, which is to report soon after the election.
Truly frightening on this Day of the Dead, though, is that Bush probably won’t listen to reason, unless the voters first soundly repudiate him in next week’s election.
Common Dreams © 1997-2006 |
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Shoe Thrower — the Story of My Shoe Mass death returns to Ishaqi THE SCIENCE OF EVIL
ITS USE FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES |
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EndGame — Alex Jones, you have done the world a great favor
It has taken me until now to view this great masterpiece that chronicles the planet's true history
But I am glad for this delay as my awareness of reality, and the events that seemingly must unfold to educate humankind, have come from sentience off planet — now with this movie the circles merge
A movie par excellence, it will likely be considered the most significant in the downfall of the rich and powerful who control the world and rising politicians already in their pocket — the imprisonment of all those who seek to bring forth this horror, this enslavement of 'New World Order'
Kewe |
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Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.
The lesson is clear.
Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.
Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.
She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.
She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.
Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.
She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.
And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.
The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.
The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
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Bush v. Gore Appointment of U.S. President by the U.S. Supreme Court — Raw political clout exercised by US Supreme Court |
Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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Nanci Pelosi — U.S. House Democratic leader — Congresswoman California, 8th District
Speaking at the AIPAC agenda May 26, 2005
There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.
In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.
The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.
For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....
In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'
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The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever.
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Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying — Lest we forget |
Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures What CNN never shows you |
Israel, chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces Undetectable poison-needle gun for 'clean' assassinations |
| Legendary Historian, Attorney & Peace Activist Staughton Lynd on War Resisters, the Peace and Prison Movement Applied for conscientious objector status in 1952 Watch listen www.democracynow.org |
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Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans Photos of Iraq children being born deformed
He was a young boy and he spent three days in the detainee facilities World War Two soldiers did not kill Kill ratio Korea, Vietnam. Iraq. More atrocities — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying The House of Saud and Bush December 2004 photos All with U.S. Money: US and Israel War Crimes November 2004 photos al-Sadr City All with U.S. Money: Israel agents stole identity of New Zealand cerebral palsy victim. (IsraelNN.com July 15, 2004) The Foreign Ministry will take steps towards restoring relations with New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark today announced she was implementing diplomatic sanctions after two Israelis were sentenced on charges of attempting to obtain illegal passports. Despite Israeli refusal to respond to the accusations, the two are labeled in the New Zealand media as Mossad agents acting on behalf of the Israeli intelligence community. Foreign Ministry officials stated they will do everything possible to renew diplomatic ties, expressing sorrow over the "unfortunate incident". Darfur pictures and arial views of destruction — 2003 — 2005 October 2004 photos Suicide now top killer of Israeli soldiers Atrocities files — graphic images 'Suicide bombings,' the angel said, 'and beheadings.''And the others that have all the power — they fly missiles in the sky.They don't even look at the people they kill.' The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa Photos September 2004 Follow the torture trail... Photos August 2004 Should the dam break, as attempts are being made in Saudi Arabia Photos July 2004 US Debt Photos June 2004 Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying Photos May 2004 American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture — London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures Photos April 2004 The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza, and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months Photos March 2004 The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images Photos February 2004 US missiles — US money — and Palestine Photos January 2004 Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert Photos December 2003 Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003 Photos November 2003 Atrocities — graphic images... Photos October 2003 Aljazeerah.info Photos September 2003 |
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All young soldiers in Iraq should have counselling so they can speak more freely about it
Sarah Boswell
Whether we are talking about the U.S. casualties, Iraqi casualties, or Afghanis, we are not thinking of them, whoever they are, as people.
They are faceless.
They are just simply numbers.
