Associated PressNationwide Vigils Call for End of Iraq War By ANGELA K. BROWN,
Associated Press WriterThu Aug 18,11:58 AM ET
Hundreds of candlelight vigils calling for an end to the war in Iraq lit up the night Wednesday, part of a national effort spurred by one mother's anti-war demonstration near President Bush's ranch.
The vigils were urged by Cindy Sheehan, who has become the icon of the anti-war movement since she started a protest Aug. 6 in memory of her son Casey, who died in Iraq last year.
Sheehan says she will remain outside the president's ranch until he meets with her and other grieving families, or until his monthlong vacation there ends.
Bush has said he sympathizes with Sheehan but has made no indication he will meet with her. Two top Bush administration officials talked to Sheehan the day she started her camp, and she and other families had met with Bush shortly after her son's death.
More than 1,600 vigils were planned Wednesday from coast to coast by liberal advocacy groups MoveOn.org Political Action, TrueMajority and Democracy for America. A large vigil was also planned in Paris.
As the sun set in Crawford, about 200 protesters lit candles and gathered around a wooden, flag-draped coffin at Sheehan's growing camp, about a mile from the Bush ranch.
"For the more than 1,800 who have come home this way in flag-draped coffins, each one ... was a son or a daughter, not cannon fodder to be used so recklessly," Sheehan told the crowd, which then sang "Amazing Grace."
Before the vigil, Gary Qualls, of Temple drove to Sheehan's camp site and removed a wooden cross bearing his son's name. He said he supports the war and disagrees with Sheehan.
"I don't believe in some of the things happening here," Qualls said. "I find it disrespectful."
Near Philadelphia's Independence Hall, a few hundred people strained to hear the parent of another soldier killed in Iraq. "This war must stop," said Al Zappala, 65, whose 30-year-old son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, died in an explosion in Baghdad in April 2004.
Karen Braz, 50, held a pink votive cup and a sign reading "Moms for Peace" as she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with about 150 other people outside the New Hampshire statehouse in Concord.
"My son is 26. It could've been him," she said
Some critics say Sheehan is exploiting her son's death to promote a left-wing agenda supported by her and groups with which she associates.
Before the Crawford vigil began, Gary Qualls, of Temple, walked to the protesters' memorial to fallen U.S. soldiers and removed a wooden cross bearing his son's name. Qualls said he supports the war effort even though his 20-year-old son Louis was killed in Fallujah last fall serving with the Marine Reserves.
"I don't believe in some of the things happening here," he said. "I find it disrespectful."
Those backing Sheehan, though, voiced their support across the country.
In Minnesota, about 1,000 war protesters stood on a bridge linking Minneapolis and St. Paul. "This war has been disgraceful, with trumped-up reasons," Sue Ann Martinson said. "There were no weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqis didn't have anything to do with 9-11."
Nearly 200 people gathered on the courthouse steps in Hackensack, N.J., with many saying they were angry about the war but were supporting U.S. troops.
"I'm a 46-year-old woman who, in my lifetime, has never seen the country so split," said Lil Corcoran. "My heart is broken."
In Charleston, W.Va., a banner bearing the name, age, rank, hometown and date of death of all Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was unrolled — stretching the length of a city block.
Kenny Jones brought his 6-year-old daughter, Scouten, to a vigil in Portland, Ore.
"I was raised to believe that war is no solution," Jones said. "Her mother and I are raising her that way, too. This war is illogical."
Meanwhile, a group called FreeRepublic.com held a pro-Bush rally in the same Washington, D.C., park where 300 people had gathered for a candlelight vigil. At one point, members of the two sides had a heated exchange over who was more patriotic.
"If they don't want to support it, they don't have to support it," said Iraq war veteran Kevin Pannell, who had both legs amputated after a grenade attack last year in Baghdad. "That's the reason I lost my legs."
___
On the Net:
http://www.moveon.org/
http://www.freerepublic.com/home.htm
Reuters (via Yahoo News)In U.S. Heartland, Anxiety over Iraq, Oil By Alan Elsner
Thu Aug 18,11:16 AM ET
In the solidly Republican state of Nebraska, voters are expressing deep anxiety about rising gasoline prices and the war in Iraq, a possible early warning sign for President George W. Bush in one of his most reliable strongholds.
When Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record) traveled around his home state this week, citizens at every stop brought up Iraq policy and the inexorable rise in fuel prices.
"Is there anything the United States can do to get some stability in crude oil prices in the world, because it affects everything we do?" Larry Ahlers, a manager at medical device manufacturer Becton and Dickinson in Broken Bow, asked Hagel in one of dozens of such encounters.
Hagel, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2008, responded that gasoline prices were likely to stay high for the foreseeable future because of rising world demand and the U.S. failure to develop new energy sources and conserve.
Earlier the same day in Lincoln, an elderly woman asked about Iraq. "Why are we there in the first place?" she asked.
On Tuesday in the central Nebraska town of Lexington, after a meeting with law enforcement officials on drug problems, three sheriffs expressed serious doubts about what the United States was doing in Iraq and whether it could succeed.
Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, acknowledged the U.S. military presence was becoming harder and harder to justify. He believes Iraq faces a serious danger of civil war that would threaten Middle East stability, and said there is little Washington can do to avert this.
"We are seen as occupiers, we are targets. We have got to get out. I don't think we can sustain our current policy, nor do I think we should," he said at one stop.
UNCERTAINTY, NOT PANIC
In an interview, Hagel said uncertainties over Iraq and oil prices fed off and reinforced each other.
"The mood is one of a certain sense of unsteadiness," he said. "I have sensed that since September 11, 2001. Our people have still not found an equilibrium and when you get these shocks, like gasoline at $2.50 a gallon and projecting natural gas costs doubling and tripling from what they paid last year, that further shakes them."
"I don't think there's panic, I don't think there's cynicism. I think there's this steady unsure sense about where is this all leading -- the constant daily reports on Iraq, our people being killed there, the money being spent there," he added.
Nebraska has been a solid Republican state in presidential elections for decades. Republicans dominate state politics and hold most elective offices.
But Hagel said even some who had previously backed Bush strongly on Iraq now felt deep unease.
"The feeling that I get back here, looking in the eyes of real people, where I knew where they were two years ago or a year ago -- they've changed," he said. "These aren't people who ebb and flow on issues. These are rock solid, conservative Republicans who love their country, support the troops and support the president."
Hagel said Bush faced a growing credibility gap. "The expectations that the president and his administration presented to the American people 2 1/2 years ago is not what the reality is today. That's presented the biggest credibility gap problem he's got," he said.
"I hope he has some sense that something's going on out in the country, that there's a lack of confidence that has developed in our position."
AFP NewsUS to send 700 extra troops to Iraq to reinforce prisons, Thu Aug 18,10:43 AM ET The United States is to send an extra 700 troops to Iraq to strengthen its forces guarding US-run prisons, a Defence Department spokesman said.
The extra troops will come from the 82nd Airborne Division.
"The battalion is being deployed to Iraq. They are going to assist in detention operations," said the spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable.
The Washington Post said the number of prisoners in US-run detention centres in Iraq has doubled in the past 11 months from 5,400 to 10,800.
Venable said the deployment was not linked to "any force level adjustment associated with the elections period" in Iraq. A referendum is scheduled to be held in October on a new constitution and if it is passed a national election would be held in December.
With an insurgency claiming a mounting toll, the United States plans to increase its troop levels in Iraq for the votes. There are currently about 138,000 US troops in Iraq.
From
YubaNet.comNorman Solomon: Blaming the Antiwar MessengersAuthor: Norman Solomon
Published on August 17, 2005, 07:20
The surge of antiwar voices in U.S. media this month has coincided with new lows in public approval for what pollsters call President Bush's "handling" of the Iraq war. After more than two years of a military occupation that was supposed to be a breeze after a cakewalk into Baghdad, the war has become a clear PR loser. But an unpopular war can continue for a long time -- and one big reason is that the military-industrial-media complex often finds ways to blunt the effectiveness of its most prominent opponents.
Right now, the pro-war propaganda arsenal of the world's only superpower is drawing a bead on Cindy Sheehan, who now symbolizes the USA's antiwar grief. She is a moving target, very difficult to hit. But right-wing media sharpshooters are sure to keep trying.
The Bush administration's top officials must be counting the days until the end of the presidential vacation brings to a close the Crawford standoff between Camp Casey and Camp Carnage. But media assaults on Cindy Sheehan are just in early stages.
While the president mouths respectful platitudes about the grieving mother, his henchmen are sharpening their media knives and starting to slash. Pro-Bush media hit squads are busily spreading the notions that Sheehan is a dupe of radicals, naive and/or nutty. But the most promising avenue of attack is likely to be the one sketched out by Fox News Channel eminence Bill O'Reilly on Aug. 9, when he declared that Cindy Sheehan bears some responsibility for "other American families who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous."
That sort of demagoguery is on tap for the duration of the war. Military families will be recruited for media appearances to dispute the patriotism of antiwar activists -- especially those who speak as relatives of American soldiers and shatter media stereotypes by publicly urging withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
So far, during this war, President Bush is leaving the defamation chores to his surrogate media fighters. But loud noises coming from the right wing today are echoes of key themes that other presidents eagerly voiced.
During the mid-1960s, as President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, he grew accustomed to trashing Americans who expressed opposition. They were prone to be shaky and irresolute, he explained -- and might even betray the nation's servicemen. "There will be some Nervous Nellies," he predicted on May 17, 1966, "and some who will become frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain. And some will turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men."
Delivering a speech in mid-March 1968, President Johnson contended that as long as the foe in Vietnam "feels that he can win something by propaganda in the country -- that he can undermine the leadership -- that he can bring down the government -- that he can get something in the Capital that he can't get from our men out there -- he is going to keep on trying."
LBJ's successor Richard Nixon was quick to brandish similar innuendos. "Let us be united for peace," Nixon said early in his presidency. "Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that."
Martin Luther King Jr. found that former allies could become incensed when he went out of his way to challenge the war. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, he said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
That kind of talk drew barbs and denunciations from media quarters that had applauded his efforts to end racial segregation. Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post warned that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
When the Gulf War began, snappy phrases like "blame America first" were a popular way to vilify dissenters. "What we cannot be proud of, Mr. Speaker, is the unshaven, shaggy-haired, drug culture, poor excuses for Americans, wearing their tiny, round wire-rim glasses, a protester's symbol of the blame-America-first crowd, out in front of the White House burning the American flag," Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon said on Jan. 17, 1991.
During a typical outburst in early 2003 before the Iraq invasion, Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience: "I want to say something about these antiwar demonstrators. No, let's not mince words, let's call them what they are -- anti-American demonstrators." Weeks later, former Congressman Joe Scarborough, a Republican rising through the ranks of national TV hosts, said on MSNBC: "These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn't it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views, which could hurt American troop morale?"
Such poisonous sludge is now pouring out of some mass media -- and we should expect plenty more in response to a growing antiwar movement.
This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com. © Copyright 2005 by
YubaNet.comSend your letters to the editor to:
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A project of the
Nation InstituteTomDispatch.comTomgram: David Morse on Darfur as a Resource WarThe pieces are all there. No one reading the business pages of the papers these last weeks could ignore oil prices that briefly surged to a once-inconceivable $67 dollars a barrel of crude before falling back; no one driving a car on any highway could possibly avoid pump prices that, for unleaded regular, are now hovering around $2.50 a gallon (making inflation jump and consumer confidence drop); those with sharp eyes might have noticed less than a week ago that Lee R. Raymond, the chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corporation for the last 12 years (whose total compensation for 2004 was a modest $38.1 million but could have been a billion dollars without his company taking much of a hit) is reportedly planning to step down soon. As the head of possibly the most successful and "efficient" corporation on the face of our planet, he primed the Exxon Mobil pump to the tune of $25.3 billion dollars in profits in 2004, and upped that in the first half of 2005 by socking in another $15 billion (give or take the odd million); oh yes, and does anybody not know that somewhere in a place called Darfur in Sudan a genocide is underway?
But the connections between surging oil price levels, pump prices, oil company mega-profits, and mass murder in distant Africa are something you're far less likely to read about in your local paper; and yet, under the pressure of growing global energy demand and peak-oil fears, oil companies from many nations are now scouring the Earth, buying governments, tribal leaders, warlords, and anyone else who might lead them to any untapped new reserves of black gold. As the Washington Post said politely in its article on Raymond, Exxon Mobil "operates in more than 200 countries or territories -- as diverse as Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela and the Russian Far East." Diverse indeed. Sudan is "diverse" too and it has been swept up in the global oil sweepstakes with horrific consequences as journalist David Morse makes vividly clear below. Tom War of the Future
Oil Drives the Genocide in DarfurBy David Morse
A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.
No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.
This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of the oil.
This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare's book,
Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible war.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
'Peace Mom' Leaves Camp, Her Mother Ill By Angela K. Brown
The Associated Press Thursday 18 August 2005
The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush's ranch nearly two weeks ago said Thursday she was leaving because her mother had a stroke.
Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital.
"I'll be back as soon as possible if it's possible," she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Deedee Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.
Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq, said the makeshift campsite off the road leading to Bush's ranch would continue. The camp has grown to more than 100 people, including many relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq.
Sheehan had vowed to remain there until Bush met with her or until his month-long vacation ended. Her protest inspired candlelight vigils across the country Wednesday night.
Bush has said he sympathizes with Sheehan. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said earlier Thursday that the president said Sheehan had a right to protest but that he did not plan to change his schedule and meet with her.
Two top Bush administration officials talked to Sheehan the day she started her camp, and she and other families met with Bush shortly after her son's death and before she became a vocal opponent of the war.
Michelle Mulkey, a spokewoman for Sheehan, who lives in Vacaville, Calif., said Sheehan hoped to be back in Texas within 24 to 48 hours. Mulkey said Sheehan's mother, Shirley Miller, was in a hospital emergency room and Sheehan didn't yet know how serious her condition was.
The Associated Press
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www.nytimes.comAugust 17, 2005
Biking Toward NowhereBy MAUREEN DOWD
How could President Bush be cavorting around on a long vacation with American troops struggling with a spiraling crisis in Iraq?Wasn't he worried that his vacation activities might send a frivolous signal at a time when he had put so many young Americans in harm's way?
"I'm determined that life goes on," Mr. Bush said stubbornly.
That wasn't the son, believe it or not. It was the father - 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush's frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a month to play around when he had started sending American troops to the Persian Gulf only three days before.
On Saturday, the current President Bush was pressed about how he could be taking five weeks to ride bikes and nap and fish and clear brush even though his occupation of Iraq had become a fiasco. "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life," W. said, "to keep a balanced life."
Pressed about how he could ride his bike while refusing to see a grieving mom of a dead soldier who's camped outside his ranch, he added: "So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so."
Ah, the insensitivity of reporters who ask the President Bushes how they can expect to deal with Middle East fighting while they're off fishing.
The first President Bush told us that he kept a telephone in his golf cart and his cigarette boat so he could easily stay on top of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. But at least he seemed worried that he was sending the wrong signal, as his boating and golfing was juxtaposed on the news with footage of the frightened families of troops leaving for the Middle East.
"I just don't like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation," the usually good-natured Bush senior barked at reporters on the golf course. "So I hope you'll understand if I, when I'm recreating, will recreate." His hot-tempered oldest son, who was golfing with his father that day, was even more irritated. "Hey! Hey!" W. snapped at reporters asking questions on the first tee. "Can't you wait until we finish hitting, at least?"
Junior always had his priorities straight.
As W.'s neighbors get in scraps with the antiwar forces coalescing around the ranch; as the Pentagon tries to rustle up updated armor for our soldiers, who are still sitting ducks in the third year of the war; as the Iraqi police we train keep getting blown up by terrorists, who come right back every time U.S. troops beat them up; as Shiites working on the Iraqi constitution conspire with Iran about turning Iraq into an Islamic state that represses women; and as Iraq hurtles toward a possible civil war, W. seems far more oblivious than his father was with his Persian Gulf crisis.
This president is in a truly scary place in Iraq. Americans can't get out, or they risk turning the country into a terrorist haven that will make the old Afghanistan look like Cipriani's. Yet his war, which has not accomplished any of its purposes, swallows ever more American lives and inflames ever more Muslim hearts as W. reads a book about the history of salt and looks forward to his biking date with Lance Armstrong on Saturday.
The son wanted to go into Iraq to best his daddy in the history books, by finishing what Bush senior started. He swept aside the warnings of Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell and didn't bother to ask his father's advice. Now he is caught in the very trap his father said he feared: that America would get bogged down as "an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land," facing a possibly "barren" outcome.
It turns out that the people of Iraq have ethnic and religious identities, not a national identity. Shiites and Kurds want to suppress the Sunnis who once repressed them and break off into their own states, smashing the Bush model kitchen of democracy.
At long last, a senior Bush official admits that administration officials can no longer cling to their own version of reality. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning,"
the official told The Washington Post.They had better start absorbing and shedding a lot faster, before many more American kids die to create a pawn of Iran. And they had better tell the Boy in the Bubble, who continues to dwell in delusion, hailing the fights and delays on the Iraqi constitution as "a tribute to democracy."
The president's pedaling as fast as he can, but he's going nowhere.
E-mail:
liberties@nytimes.comThomas L. Friedman is on vacation.
www.nytimes.com
From:
The New York TimesAugust 18, 2005
Blood Runs Red, Not BlueBy BOB HERBERT
You have to wonder whether reality ever comes knocking on George W. Bush's door. If it did, would the president with the unsettling demeanor of a boy king even bother to answer? Mr. Bush is the commander in chief who launched a savage war in Iraq and now spends his days happily riding his bicycle in Texas.This is eerie. Scary. Surreal.
The war is going badly and lives have been lost by the thousands, but there is no real sense, either at the highest levels of government or in the nation at large, that anything momentous is at stake. The announcement on Sunday that five more American soldiers had been blown to eternity by roadside bombs was treated by the press as a yawner. It got very little attention.
You can turn on the television any evening and tune in to the bizarre extended coverage of the search for Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba in May. But we hear very little about the men and women who have given up their lives in Iraq, or are living with horrific injuries suffered in that conflict.
If only the war were more entertaining. Less of a downer. Perhaps then we could meet the people who are suffering and dying in it.
For all the talk of supporting the troops, they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frolicking at his ranch for the entire month of August. He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in.
Instead, Mr. Bush is bicycling as soldiers and marines are dying. Dozens have been killed since he went off on his vacation.
As for the rest of the nation, it's not doing much for the troops, either. There was a time, long ago, when war required sacrifices that were shared by most of the population. That's over.
I was in Jacksonville, Fla., a few days ago and watched in amusement as a young woman emerged from a restaurant into 95-degree heat and gleefully exclaimed, "All right, let's go shopping!" The war was the furthest thing from her mind.
For the most part, the only people sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families, and very few of them are coming from the privileged economic classes. That's why it's so easy to keep the troops out of sight and out of mind. And it's why, in the third year of a war started by the richest nation on earth, we still get stories like the one in
Sunday's Times that began:
"For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents."
Scandalous incompetence? Appalling indifference? Try both. Who cares? This is a war fought mostly by other people's children. The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughters off to Iraq.
The president has never been clear about why we're in Iraq. There's no plan, no strategy. In one of the many tragic echoes of Vietnam, U.S. troops have been fighting hellacious battles to seize areas controlled by insurgents, only to retreat and allow the insurgents to return.
If Mr. Bush were willing to do something he has refused to do so far - speak plainly and honestly to the American people about this war - he might be able to explain why U.S. troops should continue with an effort that is, in large part at least, benefiting Iraqi factions that are murderous, corrupt and terminally hostile to women. If by some chance he could make that case, the next appropriate step would be to ask all Americans to do their part for the war effort.
College kids in the U.S. are playing video games and looking forward to frat parties while their less fortunate peers are rattling around like moving targets in Baghdad and Mosul, trying to dodge improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture.
If the war in Iraq is worth fighting - if it's a noble venture, as the hawks insist it is - then it's worth fighting with the children of the privileged classes. They should be added to the combat mix. If it's not worth their blood, then we should bring the other troops home.
If Mr. Bush's war in Iraq is worth dying for, then the children of the privileged should be doing some of the dying.
E-mail:
bobherb&nytimes.comDavid Brooks is on vacation.
The New York Times
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Please CLICK HERE: for continuously updated reports and the latest videos from t r u t h o u t"The president says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here. Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq." -- Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas
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t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand
Who Are the Real Puppets? By Scott Galindez
Thursday 18 August 2005
As I flip my television from network to network, they sound like a broken record when they talk about Cindy Sheehan. They all seem to claim that she is a puppet of the left, the anti-war movement etc...
I am in Crawford and am spending a lot of time near Cindy. I promise you that Cindy is not the puppet in Crawford, but the puppet master. There is a media team working on her scheduling, but they are not telling her what to say.
The allegations that the left is exploiting Cindy couldn't be further from the truth. I see millions of people following Cindy, not the other way around. I got an e-mail from Cindy that she was going to go to Crawford, not from MoveOn.
The real question here is who is behind these allegations? Who are the real puppets here?
Read the complete article. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand
Why Bush Can't Answer Cindy By Marjorie Cohn
Thursday 18 August 2005
11:00 AM
Cindy Sheehan is still in Crawford, Texas, waiting for Bush to answer her question: What noble cause did my son die for? Her protest started as a small gathering 13 days ago. It has mushroomed into a demonstration of hundreds in Crawford and tens of thousands more at 1,627 solidarity vigils throughout the country.
Why didn't Bush simply invite Cindy in for tea when she arrived in Crawford? In a brief, personal meeting with Cindy, Bush could have defused a situation that has become a profound embarrassment for him, and could derail his political agenda.
Bush didn't talk with Cindy because he can't answer her question. There is no answer to Cindy's question. There is no noble cause that Cindy's son died fighting for. And Bush knows it.
Read the complete article. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/1331246More Than 1,500 Antiwar Vigils Held Across the US
Last night, people across the United States participated in more than 1,500 candlelight vigils calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq. The vigils were called by Cindy Sheehan who is continuing her antiwar protest outside of President Bush's property near Crawford, Texas. Here is the mother of a soldier who was wounded in Iraq, speaking at a vigil in Washington DC. Gilda, mother of soldier wounded in Iraq:"What is unforgivable is that you betrayed our idealistic American sons and daughters who trustingly placed their lives in your hands. we, their mothers, will not let you move on with your life."
One mother of a soldier who served in Iraq, speaking in Washington DC. Meanwhile, in Crawford Cindy Sheehan has been joined by a growing number of people at her protest and has now begun setting up camp on the property of one of President Bush's neighbors who offered his land to Sheehan. Among the people joining her are several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq, as well as Minnesota State Senator Becky Lourey, whose son died in Iraq, as well as FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley--who is running for Congress in Minnesota. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is also in Crawford and many more people are expected to pour in for a rally planned for Thursday evening.
Cindy Sheehan:"Our spirits are always good here at Camp Casey 'cause we feel the support of everybody around the world."
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www.democracynow.org
Conyers Calls For Investigation Into Ashcroft's Role In CIA Leak CaseThursday, August 18th, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/1331249 Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is calling for an investigation into the role of former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Conyers' call comes after a new report by investigative journalist Murray Waas that a special prosecutor was appointed in the case in large part because FBI investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by Karl Rove. We speak with Conyers and Waas. [includes rush transcript]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We begin today looking at the latest in the investigation into who within the Bush administration outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is calling for an investigation into former Attorney General John Ashcroft's role in the case.
Ashcroft initially refused to recuse himself from the investigation despite his longtime association with Karl Rove who was being questioned over the leak by the FBI. At the time, Ashcroft was being personally briefed about the investigation. Conyers described this as a "stunning ethical breach that cries out for an immediate investigation."
Conyers' call comes after a new report by investigative journalist Murray Waas that Justice Department officials decided to appoint a special prosecutor in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by Karl Rove.
When first questioned by the FBI, Rove failed to tell investigators that he had talked to Time reporter Matthew Cooper about Wilson's wife. In addition, Rove claims that he learned of Valerie Plame's identity during a conversation with a journalist. But according to Waas, Rove was unable to recall virtually anything to investigators about the circumstances about that conversation including who the journalist was or whether it took part in person or on the phone.
Rep. John Conyers, a longtime Congressmember from Detroit. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
Murray Waas, veteran investigative journalist who writes for a number of publications. Among them, American Prospect magazine and Salon.com. He has broken a number of stories on the saga of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. He maintains a blog at WhateverAlready.blogspot.com.
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AMY GOODMAN: Murray Waas joins us on the phone from Washington, D.C., veteran investigative reporter who writes for a number of publications, among them, American Prospect magazine and Salon.com. He maintains a blog at WhateverAlready.blogspot.com. We are also joined on the line by Michigan Congressmember John Conyers, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Congressmember Conyers. Can you talk about exactly what you are asking the Inspector General to do?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Thank you, and good morning. The Inspector General has a responsibility, from our perspective, because they oversight the activities of the Department of Justice, to find out whether or not the Attorney General at that time, John Ashcroft, violated explicit rules of conflicts of interest when he failed to immediately recuse himself from the investigation, and not only did he not recuse himself, he was briefed on it about the Valerie Plame C.I.A. leak. And he did this knowing that a person of interest to the investigators was Karl Rove. Now, as it turns out, Karl Rove had been a political consultant for John Ashcroft. As a matter of fact, he had promoted his name for nomination for Attorney General and had a very close business relationship with him earning nearly $750,000 plus, obviously, a very clear political interest.
So, we're asking that that be examined right away. There's also usual bar rules of professional conduct that are operative here for the District of Columbia, that state: Without consent a lawyer shall not represent a client if the lawyer's professional judgment may be adversely affected by the interests of a third party in the matter. So, we're merely asking, this very late recusal of Ashcroft, which was too little and too late, be very clearly investigated. The last point is, of course, that it ties in with the requirement that all memoranda, evidence, telecommunications, email, be preserved in a matter like this, and we don't know what's being done in the Department of Justice about that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Congressman Conyers, what specifically are the regulations in the Justice Department for officials and what they -- what investigations they may or may not participate in?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, they're pretty standard, because the federal law requires that every department create them, and obviously, the Department of Justice would be one of the first places that we would know that that would happen, and it couldn’t -- it's very unlikely that not only Mr. Ashcroft didn't know about it at the time, or certainly his aides did. The federal law requires the Attorney General to promulgate rules mandating the disqualification of any officer or employee in the Department of Justice from participating in any investigation or prosecution, if such participation may result in personal, political conflict of interest, or even the appearance thereof. And those rules have been around for quite a while. So, the fact that Mr. Ashcroft did ultimately recuse himself, to me, demonstrates, of course, that there was a conflict of interest that had existed there all the time that would prevent any impartiality.
AMY GOODMAN: How much support do you have in calling for this investigation? Congressmember Hinchey, but anyone else?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, actually, the letter went out just recently, and the gentleman from New York, Congressman Maurice Hinchey, has been working on this matter, and we were able to have him join me immediately. It will be gaining attention to the members who are in recess as we go on today. But I think for here, you almost don't need a number of members to ask that a law as clear and obvious as this, under the circumstances that we have before us, Amy, that we need a particularly long list of members. I can’t imagine many members that would have any reservations about this kind of a communication.
AMY GOODMAN: Murray Waas, you write in your blog, WhateverAlready, that you’ve learned, according to law enforcement officials, that Attorney General Ashcroft was personally briefed on the Rove interview. What exactly do you understand?
MURRAY WAAS: Well, we first, to take a couple of steps back, the Attorney General, according to, at some point when I wrote about this last year, the Director of Communications for the Department of Justice, Mark Corello, confirmed what I had learned from sources inside the Department of Justice, and that’s that Ashcroft got almost regular briefings, if not one a day, one every second or third day about virtually everything going on in the investigation.
I had one senior official tell me that whatever the F.B.I. knew, the Attorney General was able to know or did know within days. And the briefings were conducted by Christopher Wray, who was then head of the Criminal Division, and then John Dion -- I hope I'm pronouncing his name right -- or Dion, who was the former counterintelligence expert, 30-year veteran at the department, who was conducting the day-to-day investigation of the Plame allegations before they relented and then appointed the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. So, this was almost -- he involved himself in a very direct and personal way as Attorney General, and in a way that, you know, if this happened in the Clinton Department of Justice on Whitewater or something similar, there would have been an extraordinary outcry. But, essentially, they admitted that much.
What I learned new for this last piece is that the threshold event or the straw that broke the camel's back, essentially, was that Ashcroft was personally briefed about an F.B.I. interview with Karl Rove in which the investigators believe that Karl Rove withheld crucial information from them, which he talked about earlier, namely that he had spoken with Matthew Cooper about Valerie Plame. He didn't disclose that at all. And so, the Attorney General, a good friend of Karl Rove, a close political associate of Karl Rove, was told that a person of interest, a subject of the investigation, had lied and wanted to continue to be briefed and wanted to continue to be involved and essentially set aside, as Congressman Conyers was talking about earlier, the bar standards, the Department of Justice guidelines, virtually every standard for a lawyer in this country that should be met.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But, Murray, at a certain point, the Attorney General did recuse himself. What have you been able to discern in your reporting? What led to that, and also you do indicate that other members of the Justice Department were increasingly worried about the Attorney General's interest in the case?
MURRAY WAAS: Well, after the Ashcroft -- after the Karl Rove interview, in which the investigators had a strong belief that they were being misled or lied to by Rove, or that he was omitting information, namely the Matt Cooper discussion, but also just this -- it's a little, I don't want to call it far-fetched, but it would seem on its face a little bit implausible that Karl Rove learned this information from a journalist, but he couldn't recall the journalist’s name, he couldn't recall whether it was on the telephone, he couldn't recall whether it was in person. He didn't have any memos or notes about it, even though he's a meticulous notekeeper and has a very good memory. You know, it's quite possible that Karl Rove is telling the truth. But, once the suspicions reached the level that they did, the career officials, the lot of them just said, ‘Enough is enough.’
And at that point, as well, Congressman Conyers, Senator Schumer of New York, had already been calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor in this matter, but James Comey, who’s the Deputy Attorney General, who just left last week, he was coming into his new position. He had had been confirmed by the Senate. And he was asked quite doggedly by Senator Schumer and others about this issue, and he had personally pledged, given his word, that the investigation wouldn't be compromised, that it wouldn't be tainted. And so the recusal by the Attorney General, the appointment by the special prosecutor came three weeks after he began his job, and it also shortly -- it also happened shortly after the Rove interview in which investigators thought that Rove withheld information.
So, all this gave a lot of ammunition and a lot of power to those making the case that Ashcroft recuse himself, but assuredly, he should have done it earlier. From the initial moment of the investigation, I mean, Rove was somebody who was going to be under suspicion, and the two of them were -- you know, as Congressman Conyers was pointing out, the two of them were close political and personal associates, and the standards are that you recuse immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: Murray Waas, we'd like to ask you to stay with us and thank Congress member John Conyers for joining us. When we come back from break, we’ll also be joined by Michael Wolff, who has written a piece in the September issue of Vanity Fair, talking about the greatest irony of Rovegate, that the press was part of the cover-up.
www.democracynow.org
From:
Information Clearing HouseViolations of international law being committed by the occupiers of Iraq
Culminating Session TestimonyBy Dahr Jamail
06/25/05 Istanbul, Turkey - -Thank you very much for inviting me to the Culminating Session of the World Tribunal on Iraq. I first went to Iraq in November of 2003 as an American citizen both frustrated and horrified by what my unelected government was doing. I went to report on the situation because I was deeply troubled by the “journalism” being provided by the corporate media. At the time, as a frustrated mountain climber from Alaska working as a journalist in Iraq, I never would have believed I would be providing testimony to the World Tribunal on Iraq. I want to thank the organizers for this opportunity. I am honored to be here in solidarity with the Iraqi people.
In May of 2004 I interviewed a man who had just been released from Abu Ghraib. Like so many I interviewed from various US military detention facilities who’d been tortured horrifically, he still managed to maintain his sense of humor.
He began laughing when telling me how CIA agents made him beat other prisoners. He laughed, he said, because he had been beaten himself prior to this, and was so tired that all he could do to beat other detained Iraqis was lift his arm and let it drop on the other men.
Later, he laughed again as he told me what else had been done to him, when he said, “The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.”
But this testimony is not about the indomitable spirit of the Iraqi people. About the dignity and strength of Iraqis, we need no testimony. This testimony is about ongoing violations of international law being committed by the occupiers of Iraq on a daily basis in regards to rampant torture, the neglect and obstruction of the health care sector and the ongoing failure to allow Iraqis to reconstruct their infrastructure.
To discuss torture, there are many stories I could use here, but I’ll use two examples indicative of scores of others I documented while in Iraq.
Ali Abbas lives in the Al-Amiriyah district of Baghdad and worked in civil administration. So many of his neighbors were detained that friends urged him to go to the nearby US base to try and get answers for why so many innocent people were being detained. He went three times.
On the fourth he was detained himself. Within two days he was transferred from the military base to Abu Ghraib, where he was held over three months without charges before being released.
“The minute I got there, the suffering began,” said Abbas about his interrogator, “I asked him for water, and he said after the investigation I would get some. He accused me of so many things and asked me so many questions. Among them he said I hated Christians.”
He was forced to strip naked shortly after arriving, and remained that way for most of his stay in the prison. “They made us lay on top of each other naked as if it was sex, and beat us with a broom,” he said. In addition to being beaten on their genitals, detainees were also denied water and food for extended periods of time, then were forced to watch as their food was thrown in the trash.
Treatment also included having a loaded gun held to his head to prevent him from crying out in pain as his hand-ties were tightened.
“My hands were enlarged because there was no blood because they cuffed them so tight,” he told me, “My head was covered with the sack, and they fastened my right hand to a pole with handcuffs. They made me stand on my toes to clip me to it.”
Abbas said soldiers doused him in cold water while holding him under a fan, and oftentimes, “They put on a loudspeaker, put the speakers on my ears and said, “Shut Up, Fuck Fuck Fuck!” In this manner Abbas’s interrogators routinely deprived him of sleep.
Abbas said that at one point, “Two men came, one a foreigner and one a translator. He asked me who I was. I said I’m a human being. They told me, ‘We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell. We will take you to Guantanamo.’”
A female soldier told him, “Our aim is to put you in hell so you will tell the truth. These are the orders we have from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell.”
Abbas added, “They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us.”
He told me, “Saddam Hussein used to have people like those who tortured us. Why do they put Saddam into trial, but they do not put the Americans to trial?”
But unlike Saddam Hussein, the US interrogators also desecrated Islam as part of their humiliation.
Abbas was made to fast during the first day of Eid, the breaking of the fast of Ramadan, which is haram (forbidden).
Sometimes at night when he would read his Koran, Abbas had to hold it in the hallway for light. “Soldiers would walk by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it,” he said.
Abbas did not feel this was the work of a few individual soldiers. “This was organized, it wasn’t just individuals, and every one of the troops in Abu Ghraib was responsible for it.”
Accounts by human rights groups support this. According to an April 2005 Human Rights Watch report, “Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg, it’s now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over—from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners. And probably quite a few other places we don’t even know about.”
The report adds, “Harsh and coercive interrogation techniques such as subjecting detainees to painful stress positions and extended sleep deprivation have been routinely used in detention centers throughout Iraq. An ICRC report concluded that in military intelligence sections of Abu Ghraib, ‘methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information.’”
Amnesty International has also released similar findings.
Other human rights groups report that US military doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures such as those administered to Sadiq Zoman.
55 year-old Zoman, detained from his home in Kirkuk in a raid by US soldiers that produced no weapons, was taken to a police office in Kirkuk, to the Kirkuk Airport Detention Center, the Tikrit Airport Detention Center and finally to the 28th Combat Support Hospital, where he was treated by Dr. Michael Hodges, a Lt. Col.
Lt. Col. Hodges’ medical report listed Zoman’s primary condition as hypoxic brain injury (brain damage caused by lack of oxygen) “with persistent vegetative state,” myocardial infarction (heart attack), and heat stroke.”
After one month in custody, Zoman was dropped off in a coma at the General Hospital in Tikrit by US soldiers. Zoman’s last name was listed as his first name on the report, despite the fact that all of his identification papers were taken during the raid on his home. Because of this, it took his desperate family weeks to locate him in the hospital.
Hodges’s medical report did not mention the fact that the back of Zomans’ head was bashed in, nor that he had electrical burn marks on the bottoms of his feet and genitals, or why he had lash marks across his back and chest.
Today he lies in bed still in a coma, and there has been no compensation provided to his now impoverished family for what was done to Sadiq Zoman.
Another aspect I shall discuss is the catastrophic situation of the health system in Iraq. I’ve recently released a report on the condition of Iraq’s hospitals under occupation.
Although the Iraq Ministry of Health has supposedly gained its sovereignty and received promises of over $1 Billion of US funding, hospitals in Iraq continue to face ongoing medicine, equipment, and staffing shortages under the US-led occupation.
During the 1990’s, medical supplies and equipment were constantly in short supply because of the sanctions against Iraq. The war and occupation brought promises of relief from effects of the sanctions, yet hospitals have had little chance to recover and re-supply: instead, the occupation has closely resembled a low-grade war since its inception. In addition, allocation of resources by occupation authorities has been dismal. Thus, throughout Baghdad there are ongoing shortages of functional equipment and medicines of even the most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anesthetics and insulin. Surgical items and even basic supplies like rubber gloves, gauze and medical tape are running out.
In April 2004, an ICRC report stated that hospitals in Iraq are overwhelmed with new patients, short of medicine and supplies and lack both adequate electricity and water, with ongoing bloodshed stretching the hospitals’ already meager resources to the limit.
Ample testimony from medical practitioners confirms this crisis. A general practitioner at the prosthetics workshop at Al-Kena Hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman, said, “Eleven months ago we submitted an emergency order for prosthetic materials to the Ministry of Health, and still we have nothing.” After a pause he added, “This is worse than even during the sanctions.”
Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the chief manager at Chuwader General Hospital, one of the two hospitals in the sprawling slum area of Sadr City, Baghdad and home to 3 million people, added that they, too, faced a shortage of most supplies and, most critically, of ambulances. But for his hospital, the lack of potable water was the major problem. “Of course we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones…but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E…and it has become common in our area,” said al-Nuwesri, adding that they never faced these problems prior to the invasion of 2003.
Chuwader hospital needs at least 2000 liters of water per day to function with basic sterilization practices. According to Dr. al-Nuwesri, they received 15% of this amount. “The rest of the water is contaminated and causing problems, as are the electricity cuts,” added al-Nuwesri, “Without electricity our instruments in the operating room cannot work and we have no pumps to bring us water.”
At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Ahmed, who asked that only his first name be used because he feared US military reprisals said of the April 2004 siege that “the Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital. They prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications.” He also said that Marines kept the physicians in the residence building several times, intentionally prohibiting them from entering the hospital in order to treat patients.
In November, shortly after leveling Nazzal Emergency Hospital, US forces entered Fallujah General Hospital, the city’s only healthcare facility for trauma victims, detaining employees and patients alike. According to medics on the scene, water and electricity were “cut off,” ambulances targeted or confiscated by the US military, and surgeons, without exception, kept out of the besieged city.
Hospital raids by US military and US-backed Iraqi forces now appear to be standard operating procedure. On the 18th of this month, doctors at the main hospital in Baquba went on strike, saying they are fed up with constant abuse at the hands of aggressive Iraqi police and soldiers.
Dr. Mohammed Hazim in Baquba, pleaded for his governor to protect he and his colleagues from “organized terrorism of the police and army.”
When wounded Iraqi security forces showed up demanding treatment, Dr. Hussein told one of them he would require an x-ray. The doctor was told to go to hell by the policeman he was treating and was then beaten. The same policeman then ordered another police officer to put a bag over the doctor’s head and take him away.
“Our security guards tried to stop them, telling them I was a doctor, but they didn't listen and beat the security guards too,” he said, “Then one of them put a gun to my head and threatened me.”
Similar behavior has been reported during the recent US-Iraqi military operations in Haditha and Al-Qa’im. Doctors also recently went on strike at the large Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad in a very similar incident.
Many doctors in Iraq believe that the lack of assistance, if not outright hostility, by the US military, coupled with the lack of rebuilding and reconstruction by foreign contractors has compounded the problems they are facing.
The former ambassador of Iraq Paul Bremer admitted that US led coalition spending on the Iraqi Health system was inadequate when he said, “It’s not nearly enough to cover the needs in the healthcare field.”
When asked if his hospital had received assistance from the US military or reconstruction contractors, Dr. Sarmad Raheem, the administrator of chief doctors at Al-Kerkh Hospital in Baghdad said, “Never ever. Some soldiers came here five months ago and asked what we needed. We told them and they never brought us one single needle…We heard that some people from the CPA came here, but they never did anything for us.”
At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Mohammed said there has been virtually no assistance from foreign contractors, and of the US military he commented, “They send only bombs, not medicine.”
International aid has been stymied by the horrendous security situation in Iraq. After the UN headquarters was bombed in Baghdad in August 2003, killing 20 people, aid agencies and NGOs either reduced their staffing or pulled out entirely.
With senior Iraqi doctors fleeing Iraq en masse for fear of being kidnapped, interns and younger doctors are left to deal with the catastrophic situation. The World Health Organization last year warned of a health emergency in Baghdad, as well as throughout Iraq if current conditions persist. But despite claims from the Ministry of Health of more drugs, better equipment, and generalized improvement, doctors on the ground still see “no such improvement.”
In conclusion, a quick summary of the overall situation on the ground in Iraq is in order. Over two years into the illegal occupation, while Iraq sits upon a sea of oil, ongoing gasoline shortages plague Iraqis who sometimes wait 2 days to fill their cars. In a country where a long gas line once meant a one-car wait, Iraqis who are lucky enough to afford it now purchase black market petrol and hope that it is not watered down.
Electricity remains in short supply. Most of Iraq, including the northern region, receives on average 3 hours of electricity per day amidst the nearly non-existent reconstruction efforts. Even the better areas of Baghdad receive only 6-8 hours per day, forcing those who can afford them to use small generators to run fans and refrigerators in their homes. Of course, this is only for those who’ve been able to obtain the now rarefied gasoline.
The security situation is, needless to say, horrendous. With over 100,000 Iraqis killed thus far and the number of US soldiers killed approaching 2,000, the violence only continues to escalate.
Since the new Iraqi so-called government was sworn in two months ago, well over 1,000 Iraqis and over 165 US soldiers have died in the violence. These numbers will only continue to escalate as the failed occupation grinds on. As the heavy handed tactics of the US military persist, the Iraqi resistance continues to grow in its number and lethality.
As I mentioned before, potable water remains in short supply. Cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases are rampant even in parts of the capital city as lack of reconstruction continues to plague Iraq’s infrastructure. Raw sewage is common across not just Baghdad, but other cities throughout Iraq.
With 70% unemployment, a growing resistance and an infrastructure in shambles, the future for Iraq remains bleak as long as the failed occupation persists. While the Bush Administration continues to disregard calls for a timetable for withdrawal, Iraqis continue to suffer and die with little hope for their future. With each passing day, the catastrophe in Iraq resembles the US debacle in Vietnam more and more.
Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University who was invited to this tribunal, told me last winter, “It will take Iraqis something like a quarter of a century to rebuild their country, to heal their wounds, to reform their society, to bring about some sort of national reconciliation, democracy and tolerance of each other. But that process will not begin until the US occupation of Iraq ends.”
And it is now exceedingly clear that the only way the Bush Administration will withdraw the US military from Iraq in order for Iraqis to have true sovereignty is if they are forced to do so.
Copyright: Dahr Jamail [Reposted here with kind permission by Dahr Jamail] http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000257.php
Bush's unhappy holidays
The presidential vacationer is being besiegedSidney Blumenthal
Thursday August 18, 2005
Guardian UnlimitedHome on the range more than the deer and the antelope play. Near a drainage ditch by the road leading to Prairie Chapel, President Bush's Texas ranch, the mother of a dead soldier has pitched a tent. Cindy Sheehan has refused to leave until she is granted an audience with the president. Her son, 24-year-old Army Spc Casey Sheehan, a Humvee mechanic, was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4 2004, and she calls her makeshift vigil in memorial "Camp Casey".Her previous meeting with Bush has only impelled her to seek the satisfaction of another one. "He didn't even know Casey's name. Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject."
Bush has sent out emissaries, including his national security adviser Stephen Hadley, to reason with her, but she remains adamant. Her emotional drama and outspoken opposition to the Iraq war have become daily news. Every twist in her standoff provides grist for expanded coverage.
Other bereaved parents of dead soldiers have suddenly begun speaking out and receiving respectful media attention. In Ohio, Paul Schroeder, father of Lance Corporal Edward Schroeder II, killed two weeks ago with 16 other troops from Ohio, called a press conference in front of his Cleveland home. "Our comments are not just those of grieving parents," he said. "They are based on anger, Mr President, not grief. Anger is an honest emotion when someone's family has been violated. Before Sheehan's vigil, public support of Bush's Iraq policy plummeted to 34%.
From the administration comes conflicting statements about strategy in Iraq. The recent fiasco over the attempted rebranding of the "war on terrorism" as the "global struggle against violent extremism" reflects internal tension. While Bush proclaims that he will "stay the course," military sources leak stories that the vaunted objectives of the Iraq war - democracy and civil order - are chimerical. Pentagon briefings suggest that US forces may be drawn down soon, but the projections do not flow from any new strategy.
Iraq's confounded constitution-writing has further illuminated its centrifugal forces and the visible hand of Iran. It is becoming undeniable that the outcome of the war will be an Islamic republic closely allied with Iran.
For the American public this news melds in their daily lives with the rise of oil prices. The Iraq invasion was supposed to guarantee perpetual cheap oil. While the price boost has erased wage gains and flattened consumer demand, this oil crisis is more than a tale of statistics. Like oil crises in the past, it strikes at American feelings of independence, mobility and exceptionalism. Not since the oil crisis of 1979 that provoked President Carter's "malaise" speech have such frustrations surfaced.
Sandstorms by the banks of the Euphrates swirl to the Waco River, and the presidential vacationer, besieged by marches, has turned querulous. As his crusade is being overtaken by a sense of futility, Bush explained why he would not meet Sheehan: "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life." This week he's planned a bicycle ride with Lance Armstrong.
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Warssidney_blumenthal@yahoo.comGuardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Media Channel.orgMission of Former Marine: Arab TVSubmitted by editor on August 18, 2005 - 1:50pm.
By Nick Madigan and Annie Linskey
Source:
Baltimore SunDuring the early battles of the invasion of Iraq, a Marine lieutenant named Josh Rushing became one of the salient faces of America's war, a man with a conscience who supported the mission but also understood the enemy's cause. As a military spokesman at Central Command in Doha, Qatar, Rushing achieved unlikely cult status in a documentary about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war, Control Room. His verbal sparring with the controversial Arab network's reporters showed him to be sensitive to the conflict's contradictions and injustices, a rare example of an American military man to whom some in the Arab world could relate.
Now, Rushing, who left the Marines last year after saying he had been silenced for his outspokenness, stands poised to join Al-Jazeera when it debuts its expanded international service early next year.
Reached on his cell phone yesterday, Rushing said he could not "confirm or deny who I'll be working with."
But Mike Holtzman, executive vice president of Brown Lloyd James, a public relations firm that represents Al-Jazeera International, confirmed that the network and Rushing were discussing a role for him.
"He'll be operating in some capacity," said Holtzman. "We're talking, we're interested. We're talking in terms of a staff position."
Holtzman declined to be specific about what Rushing might do, saying it was "still up in the air," but on one thing he was clear: "I wouldn't categorize him as an anchor."
"We don't know what role he's going to fill on the editorial side," Holtzman said. "It remains to be seen as how he would fit into a news structure. He will not be sitting in a news bureau saying, 'And this is up next.' That is not the role that is envisioned for him.
"There are a hundred things he could possibly do. He could be a military analyst; he could do all sorts of things."
Rushing's musings will not, apparently, be served up on the network's Arabic-language service, regardless of sympathetic image in the Middle East. He will appear on the new, English-language Al-Jazeera International, designed as a global competitor to such 24-hour operations as CNN and the BBC. Al-Jazeera International plans to have about 30 bureaus worldwide, with headquarters in Doha.
"The heritage of Al-Jazeera is to do things that are out of the box," Holtzman said. "They were the first to have an Israeli on an Arab news channel. They tore down all kinds of barriers. You'll see a lot of hiring decisions that will be out of the box."
The international service's audience will be primarily "a younger demographic, not Muslim audiences - the English-speaking world," Holtzman said.
Rushing's apparent move to a network that some in the United States see as inexcusably anti-American is likely to raise some hackles, particularly among those who resist the notion of a collaborative relationship with entities in the region, such as Al-Jazeera, that have in the past given voice to videotaped diatribes by Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk.
However, the powers at Al-Jazeera have recently taken pains to display their objectivity.
Matthew T. Felling, media director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, said there had been a marked improvement in the network's performance in what he called "capital-J journalism."
"They would allow gossip and hearsay and unsubstantiated rumors about American troops to run unfettered across the Arab world, anywhere from women and children being shot in a mosque by U.S. troops to the use of daisy cutters on Iraqi civilians," Felling said. "It wasn't true, but there it was."
With Rushing's potential hiring and the launch of the English-language service, Felling said, the network is taking another step into global respectability.
"I can't think of a single more powerful arrow in their credibility quiver than an all-American, straightforward and reasonably well-known military professional joining their news-reporting team," he said.
It should not come as a surprise that Rushing, a 32-year-old Texan, may be joining the news crew at Al-Jazeera. In an interview in the Village Voice in May 2004, he said, "People don't understand what a complex organization Al-Jazeera is. They say it's all Islamists, or Baathists, or Arab nationalists. You have all that, but you have really progressive voices too. Al-Jazeera shows it all. It turns your stomach, and you remember there's something wrong with war."
In an Oct. 30 interview on National Public Radio's Weekend All Things Considered, he responded to a question about his post-military plans by saying he hoped to become "involved with the media in terms of being a spokesperson or in some other capacity."
"But I'm really looking for an organization that I believe in as much as I believe in the Marine Corps," he said.
In Control Room, which focused on the emerging network's philosophy and war coverage, Rushing is shown developing a friendship with an Al-Jazeera reporter, Hassan Ibrahim.
But Al-Jazeera has not always treated Rushing fairly. During an interview with the network while he was still serving in Doha, a correspondent asked him whether Saddam Hussein should have abided by the terms of the Geneva Convention, but showed some unrelated footage on the screen.
"There's a split screen and they're showing a market bombing in Baghdad that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, and I have no idea that they're showing it," Rushing said in an October 2004 interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. "But if you watch the TV on mute, it clearly looks like I'm responding to the attack in downtown Baghdad.
"I always believe in holding Al-Jazeera accountable," he said. "When you go on and you do the interviews with them, you tell them why you're holding them accountable."
All the same, Rushing said access to the channel should not be curtailed. "There's really one voice that reaches so much of the Arab population, and I look at the invasion of Iraq as not just about Iraq, but about this clash of civilizations that really created 9/11," he told Gross. "I mean, the root to 9/11 is the Arab perspective, and the best way to reach those who hold that perspective is through Al-Jazeera."
Media Channel.orgPolitics as TheaterSubmitted by editor on August 18, 2005 - 2:16pm.
By Jim Hoagland
Source:
The Washington PostAs metaphor, Cindy Sheehan's peaceful siege of George W. Bush's Texas ranch is pitch perfect. Like Iraq, the ranch was easy to go into. But the president pays a price either for staying or exiting while Sheehan and television cameras perch on the road outside.Once at the ranch, Bush can hide, but he can't run.
Unfortunately, Sheehan's personal tragedy is degenerating into farce or worse. She has become a celebrity whose divorce proceedings hit the wires this week to reverberate in the great national echo chamber. That "news" was quickly topped by a barbarian driving a pickup truck through a makeshift memorial of white crosses honoring fallen soldiers in Iraq.
Sheehan may have anticipated that her family's quarrels over the meaning of her son's death in Iraq, her angry statements blaming Israel for pushing the United States into Iraq and her vituperative Web postings would become grist for the celebrity mills. If she didn't, we should feel her pain even more.
But her vigil risks becoming political theater disconnected from its larger purpose. This is an increasingly unsettling phenomenon in the Internet age, as political parties, lobby groups, the media and other institutions concentrate on spin more often than substance in politics.
Sheehan says she wants to see the president again to demand answers -- answers that she says he did not provide in their previous meeting and that she suggests, in advance, that she knows he does not have.
On that she is right: If Bush had answers on Iraq, he would shower her with them. The insufficient or partial statements he would make at this point would certainly not satisfy a woman who has already said that Bush is "spewing . . . lying filth" about Iraq to cover up a strategy of personal enrichment.
It is not so disturbing that the national political discourse has become detached from civility. That has been true, and not fatal, at other periods in American history. Moreover, this case involves a grieving mom who is entitled to vent, to petition her president publicly for redress or both.
What is disturbing is that the national political discourse is increasingly detached from reality. The emotionalism and character assassination practiced by both sides -- the clamor in the echo chamber around Sheehan is only one example -- is mistaken for "politics."
Instead of turning out more engineers or scientists, American society seems at times more geared to forming consumers, producers and critics of a particularly bombastic kind of political theater, which comes in entertainment and information flows that are increasingly hard to distinguish.
Historians will credit the New York Times with both influencing and reflecting this trend by assigning its dominant weekend political opinion space to Frank Rich, its former theater critic. If political theater's the thing, as Shakespeare might have said, who better to cast a lively if withering eye to answer the question, "How is this playing?"
Too often we now get more of our information from stories or broadcast clips about television ads on issues than stories or clips about those issues themselves. Think of John Kerry's war record, or Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts's opinions and papers. They are then followed by news stories and columns that spin the spin -- that hash out how effective, or not, the presentational values were.
Bush neither needs nor deserves defending on this score. He, too, has contributed to the national political discourse becoming more superficial, more coarse, and more driven by images and drama. That he is now hoist -- in opinion polls at least -- by the conditions he helped create at home also seems a metaphor for his dilemma in Iraq.
There the president gropes his way uncertainly through a nightmarish period in which he is necessarily a seeker rather than a provider of the answers that, in reality, only Iraqis will be able to provide for their country.
The shock-and-awe tactics of the speedy battlefield victory in Iraq created changed conditions there that the Bush team failed to perceive and to master in time. It is possible to see a parallel in his uncompromising approach to political campaigns and legislative fights at home and the plunge his standing has taken in the polls.
A vigil by a war victim's mother should be an act of devotion that transcends political theater. Bush owes Sheehan the respect of the meeting she seeks -- if she demonstrates that she will show him the respect any elected president deserves.
jimhoagland@washpost.com For this article, go to: mediachannel.org/blog/node/684
Media Channel.orgWatching the Gazan Fiasco: The Shame of It AllSubmitted by editor on August 18, 2005 - 1:08pm.
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Source: CounterPunch
A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.There was never the slightest reason for Israel to send in the army to remove these settlers. The entire operation could have been managed, without the melodrama necessary for a media frenzy, by providing them with a fixed date on which the IDF would withdraw from inside the Gaza Strip. A week before, all the settlers will quietly have left with no TV cameras, no weeping girls, no anguished soldiers, no commentators asking cloying questions of how Jews could remove other Jews from their homes, and no more trauma about their terrible suffering, the world's victims, who therefore have to be helped to kick the Palestinians out of the West Bank.
The settlers will relocate to other parts of Israel and in some cases to other illegal settlements in the West Bank handsomely compensated for their inconvenience. Indeed, each Jewish family leaving the Gaza Strip will receive between $140,000 and $400,000 just for the cost of the home they leave behind. But these details are rarely mentioned in the tempest of reporting on the "great confrontation" and "historical moment" brought to us by Sharon and the thieving, murderous settler-culture he helped create.
On ABC's Nightline Monday night, a reporter interviewed a young, sympathetic Israeli woman from the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim - a girl with sincerity in her voice, holding back tears. She doesn't view the soldiers as her enemy, she says, and doesn't want violence. She will leave even though to do so is causing her great pain. She talked about the tree she planted in front of her home with her brother when she was three; about growing up in the house they were now leaving, the memories, and knowing she could never return; that even if she did, everything she knew would be gone from the scene. The camera then panned to her elderly parents sitting somberly amid boxed-up goods, surveying the scene, looking forlorn and resigned. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher, we are told. She knew just about all of the children who grew up here near the sea.
In the 5 years of Israel's brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, I never once saw or heard a segment as long and with as much sentimental, human detail as I did here; never once remember a reporter allowing a sympathetic young Palestinian woman, whose home was just bulldozed and who lost everything she owned, tell of her pain and sorrow, of her memories and her family's memories; never got to listen to her reflect on where she would go now and how she would live. And yet in Gaza alone more than 23,000 people have lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers and bombs since September 2000 -- often at a moment's notice on the grounds that they "threatened Israel's security." The vast majority of the destroyed homes were located too close to an IDF military outpost or illegal settlement to be allowed to continue standing. The victims received no compensation for their losses and had no place waiting for them to relocate. Most ended up in temporary UNRWA tent-cities until they could find shelter elsewhere in the densely overcrowded Strip, a quarter of whose best land was inhabited by the 1% of the population that was Jewish and occupying the land at their expense.
Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost their homes again in a single night's raid, able to retrieve nothing of what they owned? Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators killing 14 of them including two children? Where have they been for the past five years when the summer heat of Rafah makes life so unbearable it is all one can do to sit quietly in the shade of one's corrugated tin roof -- because s/he is forbidden to go to the sea, ten minutes' walking distance from the city center? Or because if they ventured to the more open spaces they became walking human targets? And when their citizens resisted, where were the accolades and the admiring media to comment on the "pluck," the "will" and "audacity" of these "young people"?
On Tuesday, 16 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that more than 900 journalists from Israel and around the world are covering the events in Gaza, and that hundreds of others are in cities and towns in Israel to cover local reactions. Were there ever that many journalists in one place during the past 5 years to cover the Palestinian Intifada?
Where were the 900 international journalists in April 2002 after the Jenin refugee camp was laid to waste in the matter of a week in a show of pure Israeli hubris and sadism? Where were the 900 international journalists last fall when the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza lay under an Israeli siege and more than 100 civilians were killed? Where were they for five years while the entire physical infrastructure of the Gaza Strip was being destroyed? Which one of them reported that every crime of the Israeli occupation from home demolitions, targeted assassinations and total closures to the murder of civilians and the wanton destruction of commercial and public property- increased significantly in Gaza after Sharon's "Disengagement" Plan - that great step toward peace - was announced?
Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be covering the many non-violent protests by Palestinians and Israelis against the Apartheid Wall? Non-violent protesters met with violence and humiliation by Israeli armed forces? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be reporting on the economic and geographic encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem and of the bisection of the West Bank and the subdivision of each region into dozens of isolated mini-prisons? Why aren't we being barraged by outraged reports about the Jewish-only bypass roads? About the hundreds of pointless internal checkpoints? About the countless untried executions and maimings? About the torture and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
Where were these hundreds of journalists when each of the 680 Palestinian children shot to death by Israeli soldiers over the last 5 years was laid to rest by grief-stricken family members? The shame of it all defies words.
Now instead report after report announces the "end to the 38 year old occupation" of the Gaza Strip, a "turning point for peace" and the news that "it is now illegal for Israelis to live in Gaza." Is this some kind of joke?
Yes, it is "illegal for Israelis to live in the Gaza Strip" as colonizers from another land. It has been illegal for 38 years. (If they wish to move there and live as equals with the Palestinians and not as Israeli citizens they may do so.)
Sharon's unilateral "Disengagement" plan is not ending the occupation of Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to patrol under Israel's watchful eye and according to Israel's strictest terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim. Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.
The World Bank reported in December 2004 that both poverty and unemployment will rise following the "Disengagement" even under the best of circumstances because Israel will retain full control over the movement of goods in and out of Gaza, will maintain an enforced separation of the West Bank and Gaza preventing the residents of each from visiting one another, and will draw up separate customs agreements with each zone severing their already shattered economies-- and yet we are forced to listen day in and day out to news about this historic peace initiative, this great turning point in the career of Ariel Sharon, this story of national trauma for the brothers and sisters who have had to carry out the painful orders of their wise and besieged leader.
What will it take to get the truth across to people? To the young woman of Neve Dekalim who can speak her words without batting an eyelash of embarrassment or shame? As the cameras zoom in on angry settlers poignantly clashing with their "brothers and sisters" in the Israeli army, who will be concerned about their other brothers and sisters in Gaza? When will the Palestinian history of 1948 and 1967, and of each passing day under the violence of dispossession and dehumanization, get a headline in our papers?
I am reminded of an interview I had this summer in Beirut with Hussein Nabulsi of Hizbullah an organization that has had nothing to do with the movement for Palestinian national liberation whatsoever, but one that has become allied with those it sees as the real victims of US and Israeli policies and lies. I remember his tightly shut eyes and his clenched fists as he asked how long Arabs and Muslims were supposed to accept the accusations that they are the victimizers and the terrorists. "It hurts," he said in a whispered ardor. "It hurts so much to watch this injustice every day." And he went on to explain to me why the Americans and the Israelis with their monstrous military arsenals will never be victorious.
- Jennifer Loewenstein will be a visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University beginning this fall. She can be reached: amadea311@earthlink.netFor this article, go to:
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/670--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Christian Science Monitor posted August 18, 2005 at 12:00 p.m.
London police chief, shoot-to-kill policy, under fire
Leaked report: Brazilian mistakenly killed by police wasn't wearing 'padded jacket' or running away when shot.By Tom Regan |
csmonitor.comCalls for London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to resign over the shooting of a young Brazilian are growing after a leaked document and photos from the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) inquiry into his death showed that most of the claims made by police and some witnesses about Jean Charles de Menezes were false, the Daily Mail reports.
...former Cabinet Minister Frank Dobson piled the pressure on Sir Ian, saying his position was 'very difficult' as he was partly responsible for people being misled. Tony Blair would have been unlikely to give the police such firm backing in the way he did if the truth had been known, Mr Dobson said. Police 'have allowed the false impression, the misleading impression that this man was behaving suspiciously' which was 'very disturbing,' he added.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the leaked document and photos show that Mr. de Menezes was actually wearing a denim jacket, not a padded one, that he was not running from the police nor had he "vaulted" the Stockwell Underground turnstiles, as was originally reported.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the evidence now shows that de Menezes walked into the Stockwell Underground station, used a farecard to pay for his ride, picked up a newspaper and sat down in a train car before he was rushed by undercover police and shot eight times, including seven shots in the head. The police had originally said he had only been shot five times. The evidence also shows that the police had pinned his hands behind his back before he was shot.
In an editorial Thursday, the Daily Telegraph says that "This business has the makings of one of the worst blunders in the history of the Metropolitan Police." The BBC reports on the discrepancies between what the London police originally said, or allowed people to believe about the incident and what really happened.
The Guardian reported Wednesday that the police made several key mistakes, starting from the moment de Menezes left his apartment on Scotia Road in London.
One member of the team, using the call sign Tango Ten, began watching the flat at 6.30am. A soldier who had been with the Met for a year, he was equipped with a mini-DV camera which was not permanently recording in order to conserve its batteries. His job was to film people entering and leaving and then compare them against photographs of the suspects.
The crucial point came at 9.33am, when he made these notes in his log book: "I observed a U/I [unidentified] male IC1 [white] 5'8" dark hair beard/stubble, blue denim jacket, blue jeans and wearing trainers exit the block, he was not carrying anything and at this time I could not confirm whether he was or was not either of our subjects." When Jean Charles de Menezes left the block, the soldier was relieving himself and unable to turn on his camera.
The renewed controversy into the shooting of de Menezes has also led to calls for more oversight of the London police's "shoot-to-kill" policy. An editorial in The Herald of Scotland says it's still important to support the police, changes have to be made to assure people that this kind of incident will not happen again.
In the aftermath of the London bombings, the home secretary, Charles Clarke, told a news conference: "The human right to travel on the Underground on a Thursday morning without being blown up is an important human right." Nobody could argue with him. However, he would do well to add that the human right to travel on the Underground on a Friday morning without being shot by a policeman is also important. In a bid to protect innocent people, an innocent man has been shot. How can we best minimise the chance of another such tragic mistake?
Meanwhile the Scotsman reports that Sir Ian Blair also tried to block an inquiry into the shooting of de Menezes "just hours after the innocent Brazilian's death." The Daily Mail writes that the decision by Blair has the "whiffs of a coverup."
Writing in the Guardian, Simon Hattenstone goes through a list of recent cases where the British police shot innocent people and then tried to cover it up. He says history shows that the London police "cannot be taken at their word" in this kind of case.
Few deaths at the hands of the police have been as clear-cut as that of Jean Charles de Menezes. None has been as high profile. But the subsequent police distortion is all too familiar. So how should a responsible media treat these official statements or unofficial "police sources" that invariably excuse police actions or vilify victims? With caution, at the least. We know that the reality is so often complex and multidimensional. The police should be regarded as one player in the story. Just as witnesses are "reported" or "alleged" to have seen an incident, so should the police - rather than being allowed to issue reports (often anonymously) as if they were objective purveyors of the truth.
The Times of London reports Thursday that the lawyers for the family of de Menezes met for an hour and a half with the IPCC, and expressed "their anger at what they believe has been an insufficiently independent and unnecessarily slow inquiry." CNN reports de Menezes' cousin Allessandro Pereira is now says that the police officers who shot him should "be jailed for life."
An editorial in the Guardian calls for people to wait for the full report of the IPCC before taking an actions. "Until the IPCC publishes its report it is hard to say precisely what happened and why. We do not really know if the armed response was a flawed policy faithfully carried out with tragic consequences or whether it was an defensible policy carried out in a flawed manner."
The Christian Science Monitor
Go to OriginalAugust 18, 2005
Turning Out to Support a Mother's ProtestBy
ELISABETH BUMILLERCRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 17 - Supporters of Cindy Sheehan held more than 1,500 candlelight vigils across the country on Wednesday night in solidarity with this mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who has set up a protest encampment down the road from President Bush's ranch here.The vigils, coordinated by the advocacy group MoveOn.org, were held in places from Lafayette Park across from the White House to Rockefeller Center to Clover Park in Santa Monica, Calif.
MoveOn.org organizers said that they had received 50,000 R.S.V.P.'s via e-mail by midday Wednesday and that they expected the turnout to be double that.
Organizers said the response showed how Ms. Sheehan had become a catalyst for an antiwar movement that had been relatively unfocused since the 2004 presidential campaign.
"She's like a herald, waking everybody up," said Tom Matzzie, the Washington director for
MoveOn.org.At the vigil here at Camp Casey, named for Ms. Sheehan's dead son, about 200 supporters marched along the roadside in the prairie dusk with lighted candles, read aloud the names of dozens of dead over a coffin drapped with a flag, then sang "Amazing Grace." Ms. Sheehan, her voice breaking, said she had pretended that she was holding her son's hand as she had walked hand-in-hand with a supporter at the vigil.
"I'll never get to see him again," she said. "I'll never get to hear his voice again. I'll never to get to hug him or kiss him or joyfully welcome my grandchildren. This is about flesh and blood. This is what we're here for."
At another vigil in Union Square in New York, about 300 supporters of Ms. Sheehan gathered, holding placards critical of Mr. Bush and the Iraq war, and one protester dressed like a hooded prisoner in the infamous photos from the Abu Ghraib prison.
In Lafayette Park, a crowd gathered with litghted candles and signs that read "Tell Cindy the Truth!" and "Get Off the Lazy W Ranch."
Viola Lucero, who was visiting from Oakland, Calif., said she decided to participate because she had followed Ms. Sheehan's protest since it began.
"It's probably the most respectful thing she could do in honor of her son - trying to get answers," Ms. Lucero said.
Some 250 supporters gathered for a vigil in Somerville, Mass., north of Boston, while 150 people turned out in White Plains and 200 people assembled in a field next to the expressway west of downtown Chicago. In New York, people gathered at 106th Street and Broadway, and in Riverside Park.
She also said that she would move her encampment closer to the president, to pastureland adjacent to a Secret Service checkpoint about a mile from the Bush ranch. That pasture was offered to her by a local landowner, Fred Mattlage.
Lakiesha R. Carr contributed reporting for this article from Washington. NYTimes.com Copyright 2005
The New York Times Company
t r u t h o u t / Issues Bad Iraq War News Worries Some in GOP on '06 Vote By Adam Nagourney and David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times Thursday 18 August 2005
Washington - A stream of bad news out of Iraq - echoed at home by polls that show growing impatience with the war and rising disapproval of President Bush's Iraq policies - is stirring political concern in Republican circles, party officials said Wednesday. Some said that the perception that the war was faltering was providing a rallying point for dispirited Democrats and could pose problems for Republicans in the Congressional elections next year.
Republicans said a convergence of events - including the protests inspired by the mother of a slain American soldier outside Mr. Bush's ranch in Texas, the missed deadline to draft an Iraqi Constitution and the spike in casualties among reservists - was creating what they said could be a significant and lasting shift in public attitude against the war.
The Republicans described that shift as particularly worrisome, occurring 14 months before the midterm elections. As further evidence, they pointed to a special election in Ohio two weeks ago, where a Democratic marine veteran from Iraq who criticized the invasion decision came close to winning in a district that should have easily produced a Republican victory.
"There is just no enthusiasm for this war," said Representative John J. Duncan Jr., a Tennessee Republican who opposes the war. "Nobody is happy about it. It certainly is not going to help Republican candidates, I can tell you that much."
Representative Wayne T. Gilchrest, a Maryland Republican who originally supported the war but has since turned against it, said he had encountered "a lot of Republicans grousing about the situation as a whole and how they have to respond to a lot of questions back home.
"I have been to a lot of funerals," Mr. Gilchrest said.
The concern has grown particularly acute as lawmakers have returned home for a Congressional recess this month. Several have seen first-hand how communities are affected by the deaths of a group of local reservists.
In Pennsylvania, Bob Casey Jr., a Democratic challenger to Rick Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, attacked Mr. Santorum on Wednesday for failing to question the management of the war. Mr. Casey said that would be a major issue in what is quite likely to be one of the most closely watched Senate races next year.
Republicans said they were losing hope that the United States would be effectively out of Iraq - or at least that casualties would stop filling the evening news programs- by the time the Congressional campaigns begin in earnest. Mr. Bush recently declined to set any timetable for withdrawing United States troops.
Grover Norquist, a conservative activist with close ties to the White House and Mr. Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, said: "If Iraq is in the rearview mirror in the '06 election, the Republicans will do fine. But if it's still in the windshield, there are problems."
Given the speed with which public opinion has shifted over the course of the war and the size of the Republican majority in the Senate and House, no one has gone so far as to suggest that war policy could return Democrats to power in the House or the Senate.
Representative Thomas M. Reynolds, chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign, said he believed that the war would fade as an issue by next year and that even if it did not the elections would, as typically the case, be decided by local issues.
"I'm not concerned," Mr. Reynolds said. "Fifteen months away is a long time, and I don't see it. It's going to get back to the important issues of what's going on in the district. When it gets down to candidates, it's what's going on in the street that matters."
Some Republicans suggested that the White House was not handling the issue adroitly, saying its insistence the war was going well was counterproductive.
"Any effort to explain Iraq as 'We are on track and making progress' is nonsense," Newt Gingrich, a Republican who is a former House speaker, said. "The left has a constant drumbeat that this is Vietnam and a bottomless pit. The daily and weekly casualties leave people feeling that things aren't going well."
Republicans, Mr. Gingrich said, should make the case for "blood, sweat and toil" as part of a much larger war against "the irreconcilable wing of Islam."
Over the considerably longer term, the Iraqi turmoil raises a possibility that the war could again help shape a presidential nominating contest. Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant with ties to two potential candidates for 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, predicted that there would be a Republican equivalent of Howard Dean, a Republican candidate opposing the war. He also predicted that such a candidate would not succeed.
Pollsters and political analysts pointed to basic opinion shifts that accounted for the political change. Daniel Yankelovich, a pollster who has been studying attitudes on foreign affairs, said: "I think what's changed over the last year is the assumption that Iraq would make us safer from terrorists to wondering if that actually is the case. And maybe it's the opposite."
Richard A. Viguerie, a veteran conservative direct mail consultant, said that Mr. Bush "turned the volume up on his megaphone about as high as it could go to try to tie the war in Iraq to the war on terrorism" last year and argued that the White House could no longer do that.
"I just don't think it washes after all these years," Mr. Viguerie said.
The other changing factor is the continued drop in Mr. Bush's job approval rating that could make him less welcome on the campaign trail.
"If this continues to drag down Bush's approval ratings, Republican candidates will be running with Bush as baggage, not as an asset," Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said. "Should his numbers go much lower, he is going to be a problem for Republican candidates in 2006."
The near success in Ohio by Democrats was achieved after the party had enlisted an Iraq veteran, Paul L. Hackett, who nearly defeated Jean Schmidt.
The chairman of the Democratic Congressional campaign committee, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, said he was talking to four or five other Iraq veterans to run in open seats or against weak Republican incumbents.
The chairman of the Senate Democratic campaign committee, Charles E. Schumer of New York, said, "There is no question that the Iraq war, without any light at the end of the tunnel apparent to the American people, is becoming more and more a ball and chain rapidly weighing down the administration."
Mr. Schumer, reflecting continued Democratic nervousness at being portrayed as being disrespectful of troops, added, "I have been more supportive of the president's war on terror than many Democrats."
This week in Rhode Island, Secretary of State Matthew A. Brown, a Democratic challenger to Senator Lincoln Chafee next year, called on Mr. Bush to set a six-month deadline to bring American troops home from Iraq.
"You owe it to the American people to get this job done and bring our men and women home to their families," Mr. Brown said on Wednesday.
Mr. Chafee's spokesman, Stephen Hourahan, responded by noting that Mr. Chafee had voted against the war, though he said he did not know whether Mr. Chafee would support the type of deadline urged by Mr. Brown.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Casey, the prospective challenger to Mr. Santorum, said he would press the incumbent on why he had not taken a lead in raising questions about the war.
"Most people want to know what is the situation with training the Iraqi forces?" Mr. Casey said. "Where are we? Where are we with getting armor to our troops?"
Mr. Santorum's spokesman, Robert Traynham, said Mr. Santorum would not be hurt by supporting the war.
Mr. Traynham read a statement from Mr. Santorum that said, "Doing what is best for this country is always good politics in terms of protecting us from evil dictators such as Saddam Hussein."
Even apart from these problems, the party of the president in power traditionally loses seats in the midterm election of a second term.
"It's tough," Mr. Murphy, the consultant, said. "The press will try to make Iraq the cause of whatever historical problems we would normally have in an off-year election."
Representative Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican who initially supported the war but has begun calling for a pullout, said, "If your poll numbers are dropping over an issue, and this issue being the war, than obviously there is a message there - no question about it."
"If we are having this conversation a year from now," Mr. Jones added, "the chances are extremely good that this will be unfavorable" for the Republicans.
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washingtonpost.comWhen the War Won't Stay at Bay
With Bush and the public insulated from Iraq, Cindy Sheehan has moral authority.By Peter Beinart
Thursday, August 18, 2005; A21
Why has Cindy Sheehan -- the bereaved mother camped outside President Bush's Crawford ranch -- transfixed the nation?
Partly because she captures something profound about the war in Iraq. Vietnam was a mass-participation war: Nearly 3 million Americans fought; more than 58,000 died. And it provoked a mass antiwar movement: Year after year in the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Americans traveled to Washington to protest. The assumption was that everyone would serve. It was that assumption, and the fear it created, that drew so many demonstrators into the streets. And it was the betrayal of that assumption -- as children of the elite evaded service -- that ripped America apart.
In Iraq, by contrast, the government never assumed mass participation. In this era of the professional military, the war has affected many fewer people. And it is exposing cultural fissures not because Americans were asked to serve and refused, but because this time few Americans were even asked.
So a surrogate war has produced a surrogate antiwar movement. This time, mass protests would only cloud the issue. As the parent of a dead soldier, Sheehan has so much moral authority precisely because so few Americans (including so few of us who supported the war) risk sharing her plight.
But if Sheehan's vigil says something important about Iraq, it also says something important about President Bush. Sheehan, after all, has only one demand: She wants to confront the president face to face. The demand is so provocative because one of George W. Bush's defining qualities is his aversion to exactly this sort of challenge. Former administration officials portray a president carefully shielded from unpleasant or dissonant information. According to former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman, "There is a palace guard, and they want to run interference for him." Former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill described Bush as "caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything."
And while this cocoon may be partly the work of zealous aides, there's reason to believe it is exactly what Bush wants. In 2004 the president told a Washington Times reporter that he doesn't watch news on TV or even read the newspaper except to scan the front page. "I like to have a clear outlook," he explained. "It can be a frustrating experience to pay attention to somebody's false opinion or somebody's characterization, which simply isn't true."
Bush clearly dislikes being challenged by reporters. In his first term, he held fewer individual news conferences than any president in almost a century. And he dislikes being challenged by his political competitors -- as the country learned during last year's first presidential debate, when Bush repeatedly scowled during John Kerry's answers. In fact, Bush aides were so scrupulous in shielding him from criticism during the campaign that they routinely expelled people wearing Kerry paraphernalia from ostensibly public rallies.
On Iraq, officials bearing bad news have been similarly expelled. When Gen. Eric Shinseki suggested the occupation might require several hundred thousand troops, the Pentagon hastily announced his replacement, rendering him a lame duck. National Economic Council director Lawrence Lindsey lost his job soon after telling the Wall Street Journal that the war could cost up to $200 billion. Had the Bush administration heeded these warnings -- rather than punishing the people delivering them -- America would be far better off today.
When Cindy Sheehan first met with Bush, and tried to discuss her slain son, she encountered this self-protective filter firsthand. "He didn't want to hear anything about Casey," she told CNN. "He wouldn't even call him 'him' or 'he.' He called him 'your loved one.' Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject."
Politically, Sheehan wants another meeting because she wants Bush to bring the troops home. (A request he is right to refuse, since it would be a disaster for national security and a betrayal of our responsibility to Iraq.) But emotionally, she is seeking something more primal: to rattle him. She wants to shake the president's famed self-assurance, a self-assurance that comes from rarely having to confront the consequences of his actions.
Another politician -- think Bill Clinton or John McCain -- probably would have met with Sheehan long ago. After all, her request isn't that hard to grant. But for this president, it clearly is. Which is partly how we got into this mess in the first place.
The writer is editor of the New Republic and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He writes a monthly column for The Post.© 2005
The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.comIn Iraq, Carnage, Anger and Grief
After Bombs Kill 43 in Baghdad, Broadcasters Air Citizens' FrustrationBy Ellen Knickmeyer and Khalid Saffar
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 18, 2005; A01
BAGHDAD, Aug. 17 -- In the hours after a triple car bombing in the Iraqi capital Wednesday, state television broadcast a montage of faces of random children -- some appearing solemn, some smiling, some slyly glancing up at the camera. In the background, mournful music swelled, and the faces gave way to the bright flash of a car bomb, shown in slow motion.
"They were young but were turned to pieces of flesh," the singers lamented, as the network then broadcast footage of previous attacks showing limp children, wailing men and distraught women dressed in black abayas pushing through crowds. "Oh, oh Iraq, the land of bloodshed."
The deaths of at least 43 Iraqis in the three car bombings Wednesday brought an outpouring of grief and anger rarely shown on state television, as broadcasts for the first time focused solely on the violence and call-in shows allowed citizens to voice their sorrow and frustration. The attacks targeted a police station, a crowded bus terminal and a hospital where many of the victims had been taken. Most of the victims were civilians.
"When will Iraqi blood stop being spilled?" asked a caller identified only as Um Hassan, or Mother of Hassan. As she spoke, the footage from the bombings hours earlier showed a man raising the arm of a lifeless boy.
The killings were among 54 reported across the country Wednesday, including the deaths of two U.S. soldiers in separate attacks.
In Baghdad, weeping families drove away from morgues with the coffins of loved ones killed in the blasts strapped to the rooftops of their cars. Other families searched burned hulks of buses for signs of the missing. As Iraqiya TV broadcast the scene, angry, weeping callers dialed in to the station, using the country's now ubiquitous cell phones. Call-waiting signals beeped on-air through their sobs. Martial footage of Iraq's new military and music videos of past bombings played throughout the day.
Coming in the middle of high-stakes talks among Shiite Arab, Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders over the country's new constitution, reaction to the bombings quickly became politicized.
"We put responsibility on the occupation forces," Jaleel Musawi, a spokesman for Moqtada Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric and political leader, said in a statement. It accused U.S.-led forces of failing to turn over full intelligence responsibility to Iraqi forces and for allowing detained insurgents to go free.
The Iraq Islamic Party, representing the mainstream of the Sunni minority from which many insurgents are drawn, condemned the bombings, as did Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was in Baghdad to review the U.S.-led effort to quell the revolt against the U.S. presence and the government it supports.
The bombings targeted a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad where an open-air bus terminal is located, a place where crowds gather to travel to and from the predominantly Shiite south.
Witnesses said the bombs went off in the space of a half-hour. The first, a suicide car bomb, went off outside a police station across the street from the bus terminal, witnesses said.
Ten minutes later, another suicide attacker drove a car into the terminal and blew it up, according to Capt. Ibaa Abdul Hakim of the Iraqi army. Most of the deaths occurred there, Hakim said.
As policemen and bystanders scrambled to take the dead and wounded to Kindi hospital, only 200 yards away, a third car loaded with explosives detonated along the curb near the hospital's side entrance, Hakim said. The fatalities there included people wounded in the first two bombings.
"This was a well-concerted, triple-bomb attack," Hakim said.
Space in the morgue soon ran out, and emergency workers lined up corpses on the ground. When no more sheets were available to cover the dead, workers split open cardboard boxes and placed them over bodies in pools of gelling blood or dangling from gurneys.
"This is the most cowardly attack anywhere," Kassim Abdul Hadi, 47, a teacher who was traveling by bus to Baghdad on Wednesday, said from the hospital where he was being treated for wounds to his leg and abdomen. "Do they call this holy war, killing civilians in a bus terminal? They are simply criminals."
Passengers speculated that the terminal was targeted because it served mostly Shiite passengers.
"But how can we stop these attacks?" asked a woman who identified herself as Um Karim, a passenger in a bus that had just turned out of the terminal onto a main street when the third bomb exploded. "We have a saying in Arabic: 'It's hard to catch the thief if he is a member of the family.' That's our predicament."
A separate bombing in the heavily Sunni city of Fallujah killed three people, including two children, news agencies reported.
Near the northern city of Kirkuk, gunmen killed six military recruits, all cousins, authorities said.
The U.S. military reported the deaths of two soldiers. One was killed Tuesday when a roadside bomb exploded near his patrol in Baghdad. The other was hit by insurgent gunfire Monday in northern Iraq.
The bombings in Baghdad were the deadliest in weeks, and the first resulting in high casualties in days, after five months in which attacks killed thousands.
Baghdad residents, accustomed to endless cycles of attacks and lulls, had been nervously expecting a surge of bombings timed to coincide with the last stages of negotiations to craft a constitution. On Wednesday, the waiting ended.
State television for the first time cleared the day's programming and devoted morning and afternoon airtime solely to footage of the day's victims and rescue efforts, to new videos of mourning and violence, and to the call-in shows. A black band signifying mourning sliced across one corner of the screen throughout the day.
With the heat, fuel rationing and violence keeping many Iraqis off the streets this summer, the programming found a rapt and responsive audience. "These men that kill 100, 50 and 70 men a day -- have they been put to death?" a caller who identified himself as Abu Abbas asked. "How many have been put to death? How many? The National Assembly is supposed to represent the Iraqi people. All I hear is we will do this and we will do that."
Later in the day, the network interrupted the program to broadcast the arrest of four suspects in the bombings. The suspects were found with remote-control triggering devices and other materials, according to the government.
At one point during the broadcast, the anchorman sought to reassure viewers that the haggling of the parallel political talks was constructive. "It is a dialogue. They did not pull out guns and shoot each other," he said of Iraq's politicians.
At times, the state-televised outpouring of emotions seemed aimed at the country's Shiite majority, now the dominant political force. The song bewailing the killing of children closed with a mention of the 680 killing of the prophet Muhammad's grandson, Hussein, on the plains of Karbala in southern Iraq, commemorated each year in a traditional Shiite holiday of grief.
"By what right are they slaughtered?" the singers asked. "All the wounds gathered in my country. Oh, every day we have Karbala."
Special correspondent Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.
© 2005
The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.comPrewar Memo Warned of Gaps in Iraq Plans
State Dept. Officials Voiced Concerns About Post-Invasion Security, Humanitarian AidBy Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2005; A13
One month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three State Department bureau chiefs warned of "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance" in a secret memorandum prepared for a superior.
The State Department officials, who had been discussing the issues with top military officers at the Central Command, noted that the military was reluctant "to take on 'policing' roles" in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The three officials warned that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally."
The Feb. 7, 2003, memo, addressed to Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, came at a time when the Pentagon was increasingly taking over control of post-invasion planning from the State Department. It reflected the growing tensions between State Department and Pentagon officials and their disparate assessments about the challenges looming in post-invasion Iraq.
The question of whether the United States planned adequately for the post-invasion occupation echoes today, as the insurgency continues to challenge U.S. policy in Iraq. Many senior State Department officials are still bitter about what they see as the Pentagon's failure to take seriously their planning efforts, particularly in the "Future of Iraq" project.
The memo was one of several documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and made public yesterday by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group. Other documents detail the specifics of the Future of Iraq project, which brought together Iraqi exiles and U.S. experts in an attempt to plan for such things as a new banking system, a new military and a new constitution.
In the memo, the three bureau chiefs offered to provide technical assistance to help the Central Command develop new plans to ensure law and order as well as humanitarian aid after the invasion. They said they had also raised the potential problems with retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who was the first U.S. official to take charge of post-invasion Iraq.
The memo was submitted by Lorne W. Craner, then the assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, who is now at the International Republican Institute; Arthur E. Dewey, assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration; and Paul E. Simons, then acting assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs and now deputy assistant secretary for energy, sanctions and commodities.
The three senior officials said it was "crucial" that the State Department leadership become "strong advocates" for the issues in planning discussions within the administration. "Responsibility must remain with coalition military forces until these functions can be turned over to an international public security force or other mechanism to be defined," the memo said.
But the specific gaps in planning that they identified in the memo were not declassified.
A senior State Department official said yesterday that the memo provided no new information. "This isn't a new story," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of department rules. "There's been no shortage of revisiting of decisions made and actions taken."
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
© 2005
The Washington Post Company
Scotsman.com Thu 18 Aug 2005
Cells from the umbilical cord of newborn babies may be used to derive stem cells.Picture: Gareth Easton. Alternative to embryo research found LOUISE GRAY
Key points
• UK scientists find new method of deriving stem cells from umbilical cord
• Discovery may end the need to clone human embryos to combat disease
• Alternative method sidesteps ethical dilemma over destruction of embryos
Key quote
"We had a major breakthrough in finding embryonic like cells in cord blood and growing them in large enough numbers to do something interesting. For the first time we have a way of harvesting cells that have a lot of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells but do not come from embryos, so we do not have any ethical problems" - DR COLIN MCGUCKIN Story in fullSCIENTISTS have found a way of deriving stem cells from umbilical cords which may end the need to clone human embryos in an attempt to cure diseases. The discovery of stem cells in umbilical cord blood with the potential to transform into a wide range of other cell types - in the same way as those in an embryo - could allow scientists to sidestep the ethical issues that surround the creation and destruction of embryos.
The British scientists behind the work have also found a way of multiplying the new cells using NASA technology to ensure there are enough to repair tissue damage caused by injury or disease, such as spinal cord injuries and Alzheimer's disease.
They said the breakthrough could enable doctors to repair liver damage without the need for an organ transplant within ten years. The research team has already managed to create liver tissue in the laboratory.
Pro-life and religious groups have argued that human life should not be created and then destroyed to provide new ways of treating patients, but this method avoids this ethical dilemma completely.
However, specialists warned the research was still at an early stage and pointed out cloning still has a role helping scientists to understand the development of life and how to treat genetic diseases.
The new technique was a result of a study at Kingston University in London funded by the Department of Trade and Industry.
Dr Colin McGuckin, one of team leaders, said: "We had a major breakthrough in finding embryonic like cells in cord blood and growing them in large enough numbers to do something interesting.
"For the first time we have a way of harvesting cells that have a lot of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells but do not come from embryos, so we do not have any ethical problems.
"Also because there are 100 million babies born every year you have a much higher chance of finding a stem cell to match you."
Stem cells are immature cells that can go on to develop into different kinds of tissue. There are two kinds - embryonic and adult.
Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have the potential to become any part of a human being. But human embryos are destroyed in the process of obtaining the ESCs.
Adult stem cells present none of these ethical difficulties, but they have much more limited potential.
The umbilical cord cells discovered by the Kingston team are adult stem cells that appear to behave like embryonic stem cells.
An advantage of using these cells in treatments is that they are relatively plentiful. Around the world there are public and private "banks" storing an estimated one million units of umbilical cord blood containing stems cells that could theoretically match many different patients.
Dr McGuckin said the discovery also supported the need to bank a child's umbilical cord blood if possible when it is born for future in stem cell treatment.
"If I had a child, I would be doing it," he added.
Four or five millilitres of cord blood will yield about 10,000 of the stem cells, but that is nothing like enough to be of any use as treatments. First they must be reproduced in the laboratory, to generate cultures of millions of cells.
The second major breakthrough by the team was to use a "bioreactor" developed by NASA to mass produce cells.
Cells produced by the Kingston team have already spontaneously formed into pieces of liver tissue.
"The idea is there is enough cord blood stored across the planet you should be able to find a match to your body, then we can take the blood, find the early cells we have discovered, expand them into enough cells for an adult and grow them into the tissue we need," Dr McGuckin said. "If you can do that it has amazing consequences for replacing organs and curing disease like diabetes."
A collaborating team at the University of Texas in the United States is also growing pancreatic tissue. "My estimation is that within ten years somebody will have benefited from this big-time," said Dr McGuckin.
"We are now closer than we have ever been to finding a real clinical use for human stem cells. We have for the first time the possibility of reversing the impact of organ damage as we get older."
Dr McGuckin said cloning would still be useful for researching genetic disease, but adult stem cells, using the new technique, were a more viable option for future treatment.
However, Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of genetics, at the National Institute of Medical Research, said: "To make claims that these adult stem cells are like embryonic stem cells requires much more evidence than this paper provides. There are a whole range of questions that they didn't ask and claims that they didn't prove.
"The claim that they can get cells that just look a bit like liver cells is not evidence that they can do the same as embryonic stem cells."
Dr Calum MacKellar, the director of research at the Scottish Council on Bioethics, said: "We would welcome any procedure that would sidestep the ethical controversy. The problem with embryonic stem cells is they destroy embryos and for a lot of people in the UK this is considered as unethical."
This article:
http://www.scotsman.com/?id=1801832005 Cloning & stem cell research:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=10 Websites:
Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority
http://www.hfea.gov.uk/ Cambridge University Stem Cell Institute
http://www.stemcells.cam.ac.uk/ Comment On Reproductive Ethics
http://www.corethics.org/ European Consortium for Stem Cell Research
http://www.eurostemcell.org/index.htm Institute of Stem Cell Research, Edinburgh University
http://www.iscr.ed.ac.uk/ Nuffield Council on Bioethics
http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/go/ourwork/stemcells/introduction Roslin Institute
http://www.roslin.ac.uk/
A Challenge to Reporters: It's Time to Hawk the Chickens
Published on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 by
CommonDreams.org A Challenge to Reporters: It's Time to Hawk the Chickens by Linda Milazzo
George W. Bush decrees again and again that every American killed in Iraq was killed for a noble cause. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Melanie Morgan fill the airwaves with bellicose testimonials to the righteousness of the war. Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Rick Santorum, Elizabeth Dole and Kay Bailey Hutchison profess that the war is necessary for the safety and strength of America, and freedom and democracy in Iraq. Chickenhawk after chickenhawk forcefully proclaim the legitimacy of this war. Yet in appearance after appearance on NBC, NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, CSPAN, PBS, et al, I have yet to hear a media host or reporter ask any one of them the most relevant question of all: 'Who in YOUR family is fighting in this war?' If this question were mandatory for those who tout the war, then its most vocal defenders would be silenced. For aloft in the bloggesphere, one can't fabricate for long. And so, in the never-ending quest for truth, justice and the anti-war way, I launch this challenge to all media hosts and reporters. From this point forward everyone interviewed who supports the war must answer the question: 'Who in YOUR family has fought it?' If it's noble for one, then it's noble for all!
I know this is a lot to ask of hosts and journalists who've been spineless for five years, but allow me to offer an inspiration for their renewed attempt at courage: Cindy Sheehan. Thanks to Cindy and the whirlwind that surrounds her, the wimpy political press has been rescued from the customary news abyss of August, and awarded the biggest 'he said/she said' of our most recent time. Indeed, were I the political press, I would drop to my knees, kiss the hallowed ground of Camp Casey, and gratefully salute Cindy Sheehan. Then in her honor, and in honor of all men and women in service in this war, pose Cindy's poignant question to those who deploy them and to those who destroy them: 'Who in YOUR family is fighting and dying for YOUR war?'
True, Cindy has her detractors, but regardless of their disagreement with her 'tactics,' even her critics agree she has guts. Cindy's an inspiration, and a reminder to journalists that fierce independence, courage, and dedication to one's principles are not only admirable, but attainable. Cindy's individualism should remind today's reporters of the gumshoe days of old, when members of the press had guts, integrity and balls.
But a glimmer of hope is emerging. Due to the steady weakening of the Bush Administration, some reporters show signs of independence. The recent actions of NBC's Chief White House Correspondent, David Gregory, are actually borderline bold. For several days Gregory aggressively challenged Bush's spokespigeon Scott McClellan for his negligence in the case of Valerie Plame. Also assailing McClellan was the brash Terry Moran, Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News, along with several angry members of the dismal White House press.
David Gregory's boldness at those pugnacious White House briefings bolstered his profile at NBC. A month later he pinched hit for Hardball's lead batterer, Chris Matthews. While Gregory is little match for Matthews' bi-polar guest-fencing (advance, advance, retreat, advance, lunge, retreat...), Gregory did engage Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris in an animated dialog on August 10, 2005. Gregory treaded through fiery waters, asking Senate candidate Harris if the Bushes discouraged her run for the Senate because she's so controversial. Then, in an obvious reference to the 2000 Presidential election, Gregory asked bluntly, "Does the President owe you?" seeming to insinuate quid pro quo for Harris' partisan role. Pretty ballsy, Mr. Gregory.
Later in the interview, Gregory asked Harris this question on Iraq: "Do you support a date certain for the withdrawal of American troops?" Harris responded, "I want our troops home as soon as possible. But I feel very strongly that we can't leave before they have secured Iraq and helped the Iraqis stand up for themselves." Voila! The perfect opportunity to meet my challenge. Since Katherine Harris supports the military action in Iraq, and since military service is for a 'noble cause,' host Gregory should have stepped up and asked, 'Who in YOUR family is fighting in Iraq?' Now, doesn't this question make perfect sense?? And isn't it long overdue?
What's so simple about this challenge are the countless opportunities to meet it. Just Monday morning, war devotee Danielle Pletka, Vice President of Defense Policy at AEI, appeared on C-Span's Washington Journal. In defending the war, Ms. Pletka stated, "We gain a great deal from the spread of liberty throughout the world... but the fruits will be slow in coming...." Again, a perfect opening to meet the challenge. Ms. Pletka obviously deserved to be asked, 'Who in YOUR family is spreading that liberty and helping to gather those fruits?' It's appropriate. It's easy. And it's long, long overdue.
So for all you reporters who carried the drum as it banged its way to Iraq, it's time for courage and integrity to enfold you. The unchallenged chickenhawks abound. Laura Ingram, David Frumm, Richard Perle, Jeb Bush and Condi Rice are ripe for the question. Step up to the challenge and ask: 'Who in YOUR family is fighting the war in Afghanistan or Iraq?' If you don't want to ask it for Cindy, then ask it for Casey. There's no doubt he deserves it. And besides, if war's noble for one, then it's certainly noble for all!
Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer/educator/activist and a member of CodePink.
###
**
Bravo, Linda Milazzo! Indeed, it's high time reporters ask this question from all 'chicken-hawks', "Who in YOUR family is fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan"? --- Annamarie
Battle Fatigue is Setting In, by Robert Kuttner
Reposted from
Common Dreams.orgPublished on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 by the
Boston Globe Battle Fatigue is Setting In by Robert Kuttner
US public opinion on the Iraq war is nearing a tipping point. The question is how elites -- the White House, the military, Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- will now respond.
The public has grasped that the Bush Iraq policy has made the Middle East more dangerous for US armed forces and US national interests. This reality is widely sinking in, except to a narrowing circle of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and a compliant George W. Bush.
Not a day goes by without some surprise attack in Iraq showing the insurgency gaining, not on the run. Civil society for ordinary Iraqis is getting more dangerous, not more orderly. The enterprise of ''nation-building," an idea ridiculed in 2000 by candidate Bush, has become the disaster he warned about. It took the founders of the United States more than a decade from the failed Articles of Confederation to the 1789 Constitution. The Iraqis, far more divided and under siege, face unrealistic orders to complete their process in a few weeks.
Voters have no appetite for an indefinite occupation. The most recent CNN-USA Today Gallup poll shows Americans consider the war a mistake by a 54-44 percent margin, and 56 percent want some or all US troops withdrawn.
Bush's inept response to Cindy Sheehan's encampment outside his ranch has begun to catalyze the administration's worst nightmare -- a revived antiwar movement led by the loved ones of GIs killed and Iraq veterans themselves.
But now what? Many legislators of both parties, such as Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican John McCain, who have been scathingly critical of the war but can't quite bring themselves to discuss withdrawal, also insist that America must ''stay the course,"
This is muddled thinking. There are exit strategies more likely to produce tolerable stability than the present course.
One approach, promoted by the former minister of electricity in Iraq's interim government, Aiham al-Sammarae, would pursue a political solution to what is plainly becoming a civil war. Sammarae, long a prominent opponent of Saddam Hussein, has conferred with a range of US officials. He proposes bringing in most excluded groups that now fuel the armed insurgency.
Sammarae ties this process to a phased US withdrawal, a reduction of Iranian influence, and a political settlement, with major armed resistance groups participating, except the minority of foreign Jihaddists and terrorists of the al-Zarkawi network, who would then be politically isolated.
As part of a stabilization process, US troops could be replaced by a multinational constabulary and reconstruction force. The US occupiers, now a resented lightning rod, would exit Iraq, sparing thousands of young Americans likely to be killed or maimed, and reducing the level of daily violence menacing Iraqis.
In the meantime, there is growing independence among GOP members of Congress who got a wakeup call last month when Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran highly critical of Bush, nearly won an upset special election in Ohio's most Republican congressional district. Republican Jean Schmidt won, 52-48, down from a 72 percent win in 2004 by incumbent Rob Portman, who stepped down to become US trade representative.
As Bush becomes a lamer duck by the day, Republicans now worry more about saving their own seats in 2006. Unlike Bush, they must listen to public opinion.
As support for withdrawal grows, so it grows in Congress. In May, five House Republicans, along with 123 Democrats, supported Representative Lynn Woolsey's amendment to the defense authorization bill calling on Bush to submit a withdrawal plan -- up from last January, when only 35 members of Congress, all Democrats, supported Woolsey's similar resolution. Woolsey plans hearings next month.
In the Senate, Republicans such as John McCain and Chuck Hagel have become more effective opponents of the Bush policy than their Democratic counterparts. The most prominent Democratic foreign policy spokesmen are fearful of seeming irresolute, and reluctant to embrace anything smacking of withdrawal.
A June op-ed column in The New York Times by Senator John Kerry criticized Bush, but proposed mainly better planning and training of Iraqis, and creation of a multinational force to secure Iraq's borders -- all smart variants on Bush's policy, but none likely to hasten America's withdrawal.
Public opinion is fast outflanking Bush's war. It remains to be seen which party will lead in cleaning up his mess.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect.
© 2005
Boston Globe
Left Behind, by Thomas Lynch
Reprinted from
Common Dreams.org Published on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 by the
New York Times Left Behind by Thomas Lynch
President Bush, I enjoy clearing brush in August. We both like quittance of the suit and tie, freedom from duty and detail and to breathe deeply the insouciant air of summer.
He makes for his ranch in Crawford, Tex., a town with no bars and five churches. I come to my holdings near Carrigaholt, here in County Clare, where there are six bars and one church and the house my great-grandfather left more than a century ago for a better life in America.
Of course, we have our differences - the president and I. He flies on Air Force One with an entourage. I fly steerage with hopes for an aisle seat. His ranch runs to 1,600 acres. My cottage sits on something less than two. He fishes for bass stocked in his private lake. I fish for mackerel in the North Atlantic. He keeps cattle and horses. I have a pair of piebald asses - Charles and Camilla I call them, after the sweethearts on the neighboring island.
I suppose we're just trying to reconnect with our roots and home places - Mr. Bush and I. He identifies as a Texan in the John Wayne sense as I do with the Irish in the Barry Fitzgerald sense. And we're both in our 50's, white, male, Christian and American with all the perks. We both went into our fathers' businesses: he does leadership of the free world; I do mostly local funerals. Neither of us went to Vietnam, and we both quit drink for all of the usual reasons. I imagine we both pray for our children to outlive us and that we have the usual performance anxieties.
The president works out a couple of hours a day. I go for long walks by the sea. We occupy that fraction of a fraction of the planet's inhabitants for whom keeping body and soul together - shelter, safety, food and drink - is not the immediate, everyday concern. We count ourselves among the blessed and elect who struggle with the troubles of surfeit rather than shortfall.
So why do I sense we are from different planets?
"The same but different" my late and ancient cousin Nora Lynch used to say, confronted by such mysteries and verities.
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
It was in August 1931 when W. B. Yeats wrote "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," which includes this remarkable stanza. Yeats had witnessed the birthing of a new Irish nation through insurgency and civil war. He had served as a Free State senator, and, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, was the country's public man of letters. An Anglo-Irishman who had ditched high-church Christianity in favor of swamis and Theosophists and his wife's dabblings in the occult, he was torn between the right-wing politics of between-wars Europe and the romantic, mythic past of Ireland.
His poem confesses and laments that reason and breeding, imagination and good intentions are nonetheless trumped by the contagion of hatred and by the human propensity toward extreme and unquestioning enthusiasm for a cause - whatever cause. It is what links enemies, what makes terrorists "martyrs" and "patriots" among their own - the fanatic heart beating in the breast of every true believer.
Yeats' remorse was real, and well it should have been. The century he wrote this poem in became the bloodiest in the history of our species. Wars and ethnic cleansings, holocausts and atom bombings - each an exercise in the god-awful formula by which the smaller the world becomes, by technologies of travel and communications, the more amplified our hatreds and the more lethal our weaponries become. Great hatred, little room, indeed.
So far this century proceeds apace: famines and genocides, invasions, occupations and suicide bombers. Humankind goes on burning the bridges in front and behind us without apology, our own worst enemies, God help us all.
And maybe this is the part I find most distancing about my president, not his fanatic heart - the unassailable sense he projects that God is on his side - we all have that. But that he seems to lack anything like real remorse, here in the third August of Iraq, in the fourth August of Afghanistan, in the fifth August of his presidency - for all of the intemperate speech, for the weapons of mass destruction that were not there, the "Mission Accomplished" that really wasn't, for the funerals he will not attend, the mothers of the dead he will not speak to, the bodies of the dead we are not allowed to see and all of the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been irretrievably lost or irreparably changed by his (and our) "Bring it On" bravado in a world made more perilous by such pronouncements.
Surely we must all bear our share of guilt and deep regret, some sadness at the idea that here we are, another August into our existence, and whether we arrived by way of evolution or intelligent design or the hand of God working over the void, no history can record that we've progressed beyond our hateful, warring and fanatical ways.
We may be irreversibly committed to play out the saga of Iraq. But each of us, we humans, if we are to look our own kind in the eye, should at least be willing to say we're sorry, that all over our smaller and more lethal planet, whatever the causes, we're still killing our own kind - the same but different - but our own kind nonetheless. Even on vacation we oughtn't hide from that.
Thomas Lynch, a funeral director, is the author of
"The Undertaking" and
"Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans."© 2005 New York Times, Inc.
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t r u t h o u t: The Mother of All Battles, by Joan Walsh
t r u t h o u t EditorialGo to Original
The Mother of All Battles By Joan Walsh
Salon.com Tuesday 16 August 2005
Cindy Sheehan has almost single-handedly launched an American antiwar movement. And in the process, she's exposed a president's feet of clay. The smearing may continue, but it's already too late: Cindy Sheehan has launched an American antiwar movement. Maybe, as Matt Drudge blared over the weekend, she's said controversial things about Israel. Maybe the IRS will chase her for tax evasion, since she's reportedly announced that she won't pay taxes for 2004, the year her son Casey died in Iraq. Maybe her family has been shaken by her activism. Maybe the smears will even work, and cost Sheehan some of her mainstream political credibility. It doesn't matter: Someone else will take her place.
Sheehan's central demand -- that the president meet with her and explain why her son died -- has immense power in a country that's beginning to understand it was lied to about the reasons for the Iraq war, at a time when the carnage seems not only endless but futile. To build on that power, the antiwar movement being born at Camp Casey must understand and hold onto the source of Sheehan's moral authority: her authentic grief over her son's death and her fearless demand to talk honestly about it, even with supporters of the war.
Bush backers are clearly spooked by Sheehan, and they're shifting their stories as fast as they can get away with it. Early last week, you'll remember, she was a naive flip-flopper who supposedly changed her mind about the war and President Bush, because she'd had some mild words of praise for the president after they met last June. That line of attack didn't work, so this week she's a hardened left-wing agitator, plotting alongside the likes of Michael Moore, Medea Benjamin and Viggo Mortensen to help America's enemies. Need some proof? She's got Fenton Communications doing her media, for God's sake!
There's actually a tiny shard of truth in the latest right-wing attack on Sheehan, but it serves to underscore how dangerous she is to their cause. Sheehan has in fact been active in opposing the war since just after Casey died -- she starred in anti-Bush ads last year. (She was the lead in Michelle Goldberg's Salon feature on the ads last September.) Almost a year later, Sheehan has managed to break through to the American public, in a way that she obviously didn't in the Real Voices ads. But it's not because of the help of Code Pink and Fenton (which joined her after she was already in Crawford, by the way). It's because Americans are souring on the war and ready to hear what she has to say.
After more than two years of denial, the war is coming home to the American people. It's a journalistic cliché; to talk about what you learned on summer vacation, but indulge me: With mostly network news and USA Today to provide my news-junkie fix, I learned this August that the war is finally a mainstream news story. I'm just old enough to remember grim footage from Vietnam on the nightly news, and it's starting to look familiar -- maps of the latest attacks, the dead and wounded soldiers, the grieving families and, now, Cindy Sheehan and antiwar protesters. If there's anybody still eating dinner watching the "CBS Evening News," now with Bob Schieffer and not Walter Cronkite, it's unsettling suppertime fare.
But the news is following public opinion, not leading it. The percentage of people who support the president's handling of the war has been sinking, as the number of casualties, and the apparent power of the insurgency, continue to rise. The other thing that's starting to break through is the president's cluelessness and callousness, his tin ear when it comes to the war and to Cindy Sheehan's appeal. Bush is such a polarizing force in American politics that it's hard to objectively describe either his personal political assets or his flaws. Most of his opponents can't even imagine his appeal to his supporters -- the regular Texan, the man's man, the guy you'd prefer to have a beer with over John Kerry -- and of course his admirers can't see what enrages his detractors, the smirking shiftless bully behind the regular-guy veneer.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but it felt to me as if with Bush's latest remarks about Sheehan over the weekend, the clownish lightweight his critics know and despise was beginning to shine through for all to see. If you haven't already, take a moment to ponder what he told Cox News about why he could find time for a bike ride on Saturday but not to meet with Sheehan:
"I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say. But I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life ... I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy. And part of my being is to be outside exercising. So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so."
You don't have to be Cindy Sheehan to think that yammering on about "staying healthy" and living a "balanced life" while so many are suffering and dying in Iraq is unthinkably cruel, as well as unbelievably politically tone deaf. When I read Bush's quote -- I read it over and over -- I found myself wondering not just about his character but about his fundamental emotional health. It's as if he's confessing he couldn't stay "balanced" if he had to confront Sheehan's grief, and even worse, her questions about why her son died.
And yet, even as Sheehan's public relations victories give people reason to be optimistic about the administration's unraveling in Iraq, liberals and war opponents have to be careful not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It's important to understand why Sheehan matters, and how she's gained traction on the war. Yes, it's the uptick in violence in Iraq, and the decided downturn in optimism, even among war supporters, who are continually defining success downward. Sunday's Washington Post had a great account of how the war architects are ready to declare victory -- not a Democratic Iraq but "some form of Islamic republic" -- and get out of Vietnam, I mean, Iraq. And yes, it's also true that August is a slow news month, giving Sheehan more room to tell her story. (I'd add that karma required that the president's stubborn monthlong vacation in Texas -- whether it's after he got a warning about terrorists using airplanes as weapons in 2001, on the eve of 9/11, or during one of the bloodiest months yet in Iraq -- would come back to bite him.)
But mainly it's the sincerity and humanity of Sheehan's core message. The anecdotes coming out of Camp Casey tell the story: Sheehan's quiet discussion with a soldier who opposes her views, which ended in a hug. Another Camp Casey activist had a respectful talk with a trucker who supports the war but stopped by to see if his dead son was listed among the casualties there. (He was, and the visit reportedly ended with him declaring his love for Sheehan.) Against the backdrop of an administration that refuses to acknowledge the dead, that prohibits photos of coffins and flies the wounded home under cover of darkness, that lets the president vacation and "stay healthy" instead of talking to the mother of a dead veteran, Sheehan and Camp Casey can get attention and win converts just by bearing witness to the violence and despair of a war whose goal nobody really understands anymore, in which victory seems less and less likely.
To build on her success it's important that organizers understand her appeal. Sheehan doesn't have all the answers -- she's smart enough to know she doesn't need to provide them. By simply asking why her son died, she's starting a dialogue about a war in which we've been lied to from the outset.
Moving forward and coming up with a broader message that can unify an antiwar movement will be tougher. Even war opponents aren't sure whether the message should be "Out now," or "Out soon," or "A lot of us out now and the rest asap." But if the goal is to build a big-tent antiwar movement, the messages must be simple, inclusive and from the heart.
The right will continue to use Sheehan's more controversial statements against her, of course. And it could, conceivably, hurt her appeal with the American people -- especially if antiwar allies choose to play up those positions. While I think there's plenty of room to blame the pro-Israel Project for a New American Century for helping lead us to war on false pretenses, as Sheehan does, let's remember that we won't end the war by requiring a litmus test on Israel and Palestine. Too often antiwar organizers have driven away supporters by leading with their most divisive views -- and by failing to communicate with those who hold different views.
Sheehan is outspoken -- and like all Americans, she has the right to be outspoken -- but she hasn't made that mistake. Camp Casey has become an outpost of grief and dialogue, and that's what gives it worldwide recruiting power. In Kentucky, the Republican grandmother of Marine Lance Cpl. Chase Johnson Comley, killed in Amiriyah, Iraq, earlier this month, told local media she wished she could join Sheehan in Crawford because she's "on a rampage" against Bush and the war. "When someone gets up and says, 'My son died for our freedom,' or I get a sympathy card that says that, I can hardly bear it," 80-year-old Geraldine Comley told the Lexington Herald-Leader. "And it irritates me no small amount that Dick Cheney, in the Vietnam War, said he had 'other priorities.' He didn't mind sending my grandson over there" to Iraq.
Michael Moore couldn't have put it any more harshly. Smart organizers will make sure the Geraldine Comleys of the world are always welcome at Camp Casey. Because, sadly, their ranks are growing by the day.
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Joan Walsh is Salon's editor in chief.
t r u t h o u t: Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over, by Norman Solomon
Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Wednesday 17 August 2005
On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is Over." The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration's lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.
Comparing today's war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush with those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist writes: "On March 31, 1968, as LBJ's ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire." And Rich extends his Vietnam analogy: "What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam."
But Rich does not linger over the actual meaning of the "plan for retreat" and the "long extrication" - which meant five more years of massive US military assaults in Vietnam, followed by two more years of military aid to the Saigon government while fighting continued. The death toll during that period in Vietnam? Tens of thousands of Americans, perhaps a million Vietnamese people. That "extrication" was more than merely "long."
Rich's narrative does not just skitter past five years of horrific carnage inflicted by the US government in Vietnam - and elsewhere in Indochina - after the spring of 1968. His storyline is also, in its own way, a complacent message that stands in sharp contrast to the real situation we now face: a US war on Iraq that may persist for a terribly long time. For the Americans still in Iraq, and for the Iraqis still caught in the crossfire of the occupation, the experiences ahead will hardly be compatible with reassuring forecasts made by pundits in the summer of 2005.
Mocking President Bush's assertion on August 11 that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Rich concludes: "The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there."
But of course Americans are not outta there. And President Bush reasserted last Thursday that withdrawal of US troops is contingent on the US-allied Iraqi forces achieving standards of performance and self-sufficiency that are little more than mirages.
Yes, eventually, US troops may leave Iraq. But, in the summer of 2005, for commentators to declare the withdrawal of US troops from Washington's latest imperial war to be a virtual fait accompli makes about as much sense as it would have in the spring of 1968.
Even after the commander in chief gives an order to begin systematic withdrawal of US troops - and we're very far from such a presidential order today - there is likely to be continuation of massive US military actions in Iraq. And even an actual sharp reduction of American troop levels on the ground hardly ensures a drop-off of Pentagon-inflicted violence. During the three years after July 1969, when President Nixon announced that the burden of fighting Communist forces would shift to Washington's South Vietnamese ally, the White House cut US troop levels in Vietnam by more than 85 percent. During that same period, the tonnage rate of US bombs falling on Vietnam actually increased.
Today, while the US warfare in Iraq continues unabated, the message that "we're outta there" is pernicious. It looks past the ongoing need to demand complete US withdrawal (if "we're outta there," why bother to protest?) and stands aloof from the very real political battles that will be fought to determine just how long or short the bloody "extrication" process will last.
We're not "outta there" - until an antiwar movement in the United States can grow strong enough to make the demand stick. And we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.
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Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
Go OriginalSheehan Feeling the Glare of the SpotlightSome Are Focusing Anger on Protester
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 17, 2005; A03
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 16 -- Cindy Sheehan rode into town 10 days ago, a forlorn mother with a question for her president: Why did my son die in Iraq? But now the same wave of publicity and political anger that she rode to become a nationally known symbol of the antiwar movement threatens to crash down on Sheehan herself.
Conservative commentators and Web sites are taking aim at Sheehan with the same ferocity she has aimed at President Bush. In part, they are using her own words against her -- reciting such controversial comments as her vow to refuse to pay taxes to a government waging an "illegal" war and her desire to see Bush impeached.
The backlash is becoming a new object lesson in how saturation media coverage and the instinct for personal attack are shaping political debate. Some independent commentators said the pushback on the right has succeeded at scuffing the public sympathy and deference she had earned as the mother of a fallen soldier, and has shown how virtually any subject relating to the Iraq war and Bush's presidency is viewed through a partisan lens.
"Cindy Sheehan has emboldened the progressives who oppose the war and caused the conservative diehards who are behind the war to go into a defensive mode," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade publication for talk radio. "Cindy Sheehan is going to be a target, and they'll probably go through her past to find what they can to discredit her."
Since her son, Casey, 24, was killed in Iraq last year, Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., has traveled the country trying to drum up opposition to the war in Iraq. She has participated in peace conferences, demonstrations and a mock congressional hearing about the "Downing Street memo" -- notes of a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers that said the Bush administration had decided to go to war and molded intelligence findings to support that decision.
In that time, Sheehan, 48, a soft-spoken woman who says she was radicalized by her son's death, has engaged in her fair share of inflammatory rhetoric.
"It's obvious Cindy Sheehan has become a political player, whose primary concern is embarrassing the president," Fox Television personality Bill O'Reilly wrote Tuesday in an online column. "She is no longer just a protester."
Bush, Sheehan said, lied to the American people about the war and should be impeached. She is refusing to pay taxes in hopes that the Internal Revenue Service will come after her to collect. "I'm not supporting a government that wages an illegal, immoral war," she said. "I want them to come after me, so I can put the war on trial."
Still, she said some of the statements attributed to her are distortions. Contrary to a letter attributed to her that is circulating widely on the Internet, she asserts that she has never said that the United States is waging the war in Iraq to protect Israel.
"I have said a lot of strong things, and I'll stand by everything I said," Sheehan said, adding that she thought the document had been altered. "But I didn't say that."
The scrutiny that has accompanied Sheehan's quick rise to prominence has extended to her family. Several in-laws have publicly criticized her protest -- announcing their displeasure in a release to the Drudge Report. News that Sheehan's husband, Patrick, has filed for divorce has been trumpeted by some bloggers as evidence of her extreme views.
Sheehan acknowledges that some of her views are becoming a distraction. Also, she said, some groups that have aided her protest have agendas -- including conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and some vaguely anti-Semitic theories about the cause of the war -- that she says she does not share.
Consequently, she has asked that her campsite near Bush's ranch be restricted only to organizations of military families, or those who have lost loved ones in the war.
"Attention got focused on the messenger and not the message," Sheehan said. "My thing is ending the war in Iraq. But there are a lot of people who want to attach their horse to my wagon, because of the exposure I'm getting."
The increased scrutiny of Sheehan is coming as some residents here are growing irritated with the stream of antiwar protesters drawn to her vigil.
On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Sheehan announced plans to move the camp from the drainage ditches next to the winding road about two miles from Bush's 1,600-acre spread to a field on a ranch offered by one of Bush's neighbors. The new camp would be about a mile from the president's ranch. All that would be left behind at the original site would be three tents and hundreds of white wooden crosses bearing the names of troops killed in Iraq.
The move followed complaints by about 60 of Bush's neighbors, who petitioned McLennan County officials to expand a no-parking zone around the camp, in an effort to avert the traffic tie-ups that have become commonplace as the protest has grown. Also, Monday night a truck dragging chains and a pipe demolished some crosses; the driver, Larry Northern, 46, of Waco, Tex., was charged with criminal mischief.
Sheehan has promised to remain encamped throughout Bush's five-week stay here and to return whenever the president does. She also announced plans for a series of nearly 1,000 candlelight vigils Wednesday night across the country. Liberal advocacy groups MoveOn.org Political Action and Democracy for America are organizing the protests.
"All of this other BS just clouds my message," Sheehan said. "My message is that of a brokenhearted mom sitting down in front of George Bush's ranch, wanting to know why my son died."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
www.washingtonpost.com
t r u t h o u t / IssuesReality Check for Bush Administration in Iraq By Tom Regan
The Christian Science Monitor Monday 15 August 2005
White House wants to lower expectations about model democracy, US military victory in Iraq. The Bush administration is "significantly" lowering expectations about what it can achieve in Iraq, finally admitting that its prewar plans were "unrealistic," the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry, or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, US officials say.
Meanwhile on Friday, in an analysis for the Post, Peter Baker wrote that "Administration officials have given up all hope of militarily defeating the insurgents with US forces, instead aiming only to train and equip enough Iraqi security forces to take over the fight themselves."
While the Post article notes that the White House still feels it has accomplished a great deal in Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware, Sunday accused the Bush administration of trying to lower expectations as part of an exit strategy. "They have squandered about every opportunity to get it right," Sen. Biden told NBC's "Meet the Press".
Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona also told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that any talk of a significant US troop withdrawal from Iraq is premature.
"The day that I can land at the airport in Baghdad and ride in an unarmed car down the highway to the Green Zone is the day that I'll start considering withdrawals from Iraq," said McCain, referring to the heavily fortified area where US and Iraqi government headquarters are located.
"We not only don't need to withdraw, we need more troops there," he said on Fox News Sunday.
But in an interview late Sunday on CNN, Senator Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana, the head of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, said that even while there are not enough US troops in Iraq to keep insurgents out, it was extremely unlikely more soldiers would be sent there. "We have to train the Iraqis faster and harder," said Sen. Lugar.
John Farmer, the national political correspondent of the Newark Star-Ledger, writes in an opinion piece on Monday that the White House's decision to lower expectations in Iraq and float talk of troops withdrawal has more to do with the 2006 midterm elections in the US than the reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq.
A clear GOP defeat next year would constitute a repudiation of Bush's Iraq policy. Congressional Republicans, especially in the House, have the jitters. They've seen the polls and fear they'll get caught in any backlash against the war. Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother camping outside the ranch to protest the war while Bush hides within, is their worst nightmare.
The word in Washington is that the same House Republicans who only yesterday were the war's chief cheerleaders are now said to be pressuring Bush to throw them a rope - something that can pass for an exit strategy or, failing that, a commitment to bring at least some of the boys home before the 2006 elections.
Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, writes in an opinion piece for Bloomberg News that public pessimism about Iraq is having another effect - depressing optimism about the positive news about the US economy.
The explanation I favor is that the negative news about Iraq and the failure to stop the attacks in London have overwhelmed the good economic news. It's easy to assert that, but the fact is the data resoundingly support this view, poll data concerning attitudes toward President Bush's foreign policy and his handling of the economy. There is clearly a striking positive (and statistically quite significant) relationship between the two. Even the blips move together.
While correlation is not causality, the strong common down trend during a period of economic expansion convincingly supports the view that the turmoil in Iraq is affecting answers to economic questions. It's hard to imagine the effect going the other way.
Knight Ridder reports on the changing public attitudes towards the war in Iraq and how that is being handled by the Bush administration.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that Henry Kissinger, an "architect of the US war in Vietnam more than 30 years ago," says that he has an "uneasy feeling" that some of the same factors that undermined support for that war are beginning to surface in relation to the war in Iraq. Kissinger said the US should remove any troops that are not necessary for stabilizing Iraq, but that "we cannot begin with an exit without having first defined what the objective is."
"If a radical government emerges in Baghdad or if any part of Iraq becomes what Afghanistan used to be, a training ground for terrorists, then this will be a catastrophe for the Islamic world and for Europe, much as they may - reluctant as they may be to admit it - and eventually for us."
Finally, The Los Angeles Times reports on another issue that confronting the Bush administration - the establishment of permanent US bases in Iraq, requiring as many as 50,000 US troops for not just years, but perhaps decades. And experts say it's likely that while the establishment of US bases in Iraq will stoke the fires of the insurgency, it's "probably too much to hope that it will burn out without them."
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t r u t h o u t / Issues'Wash Post' Cuts Ties to Pentagon Event after Protests Editor & Publisher Monday 15 August 2005
New York - The Washington Post announced tonight that it will cease its co-sponsorship of the Pentagon-organized Freedom Walk next month. The paper's involvement had drawn heat from within and outside the paper, with a guild committee today calling for the link to end.
The newspaper told the Department of Defense that it was pulling back on its offer of free ads for the event - a march up the mall ending with a concert by pro-war country singer Clint Black.
"As it appears that this event could become politicized, The Post has decided to honor the Washington area victims of 9/11 by making a contribution directly to the Pentagon Memorial Fund," said Eric Grant, a Post spokesman. "It is The Post's practice to avoid activities that might lead readers to question the objectivity of The Post's news coverage."
E&P was first to report on the internal dissent at the paper on Friday. Antiwar groups and liberal blogs joined in the protest in the days since.
The Pentagon expressed disappointment with the decision. It has called the event a memorial to 9/11 victims and a salute to our troops.
"Post news employees are subject to disciplinary action for participating in political activities that may be perceived as revelatory of personal opinions or bias," said a resolution passed Monday by leaders of The Post unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. "The Washington Post itself should be held to the same high standard. . . . The Guild supports The Post's stated intention of honoring the nation's veterans, including those who have served in Iraq. But the Post undermines this goal by lending its support to a political event that links the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to the war in Iraq - a link that The Post, in its reporting, has shown to be false."
The unit represents more than 1,400 Post employees.
In a related move, Post media writer Howard Kurtz noted his opposition to the Post sponsorship in an online chat with readers today. "I wish The Washington Post were not co-sponsoring this event. It is an operation by the Pentagon - a place that we devote substantial resources to covering - and therefore subject to all kinds of interpretations," he said in response to a reader question. "It is not the same, in my view, as the corporate side of The Post handing out awards to the best teachers or other kinds of nonpartisan civic activities."
Publisher Bo Jones did not return calls seeking comment on the resolution Monday, but told E&P on Friday that he would remove the Post as a sponsor of the "Freedom Walk" if the event turned out to be "partisan. "
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Please CLICK ON HERE:
t r u t h o u t / for continuing updates and video reports of Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey vigil."The president says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here. Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq.
-- Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas"--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand By Scott Galindez
Wednesday 17 August 2005
11:36 AM
Today is MoveOn day - tomorrow is moving day. There are over 1,500 vigils scheduled around the country. Over 35,000 people have signed up online to attend the vigils.
Tomorrow Camp Casey will move to the farmer's land. It will be closer to Bush's ranch and safer for the campers.
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On the Net: MoveOn.org Event List:
http://www.moveonpac.org/event/events/index.html?action_id=24.
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t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand By Cindy Sheehan
Tuesday 16 August 2005
10:23 PM
Putting out Fires
Day 10
The Peaceful Occupation of Iraq
The right wingers are really having a field day with me. It hurts me really badly, but I am willing to put up with the crap, if it ends the war a minute sooner than it would have. I would like to address some specific concerns that have been raised against me.
The first one is about my divorce. I addressed this on my blog the other night. My divorce was in the works way before I came out to Crawford. My husband filed the papers before this all started. It just recorded last Friday. My husband didn't know that it would become public record, and public knowledge. He had told his lawyer not to serve me with the paperwork or even bother me while I was at Camp Casey. He was trying to do the right thing. He didn't want me to find out. Enough about that.
Another "big deal" today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that. I had supposedly said it in a letter that I wrote to Ted Koppel's producer in March. I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a Nightline Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted Bettag and cc'd a copy to the person who gave me Ted's address. I believe he (the person who gave me the address) changed the email and sent it out to capitalize on my new found notoriety by promoting his own agenda. Enough about that.
I didn't blog about the cross incident last night. I was at the Peace House when there was a big commotion and people started saying that someone had run over our Arlington Crawford display. I know this is old news because I have seen great posts about it today. This is how I feel. The right wingers are emailing me and spewing filth about me on the radio and on the television saying that I am dishonoring my son's memory. This man who ran over the crosses thinks he is a better American than we are. He thinks we are more patriotic than we are. Does he really believe that he is honoring the memories of the fallen and his country by running down 500 crosses and about 60 American flags? The Iraq Veterans Against the War who were here were also very offended. Those crosses represented their buddies who didn't make it home. And they are so aware of the fact that one of those crosses could have their name on it.
Yesterday, we had a counter protestor who played his guitar across the way from us and sang (very terribly!!!) a song that loosely went like this:
Aiding and abetting the enemy.
How many ghosts did you make today?
Google me this, Google me that,
How many ghosts did you make today? I find it so ironic that he was singing it to me, and not to George Bush. We named the song: The Ballad of George Bush. He came back out today, but blessed be to God, he didn't bring his guitar, and he didn't sing.
We are moving to a place that doesn't have much shade and I put out an appeal for tarps and a soldier from Ft. Hood brought some to us that he "borrowed" from Ft. Hood for us to use. I have had a lot of soldiers from Ft. Hood come out and tell me to keep it up and that I am doing a good thing. We are doing this to honor Casey and the other fallen heroes in their memories. But we are doing it FOR the people of Iraq and the other soldiers who are in harm's way right now. Right after we heard about the crosses last night, a Camp Casey volunteer found out that a pen pal she had in Iraq was KIA on August 12th. This has to stop, now. We will stop it.
**
http.www.truthout.org/cindy.shtml
Desecration of the Dead By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Tuesday 16 August 2005
His name is Larry Northern, and he is a wretch. The Arlington West cemetery has been growing for more than a year. Begun in California by activists seeking to honor those soldiers killed in Iraq, and also seeking to highlight in an unavoidably searing way the price we are paying for the invasion of Iraq, the cemetery is made up of small grave markers made of simple wood. There are crosses, and crescents, and stars of David. Each one represents a dead American soldier.
When word got out that the mother of a fallen soldier had camped herself out in front of the Bush "ranch" in Crawford with a demand to see the president, the Arlington West cemetery was packed up and sent to Texas. This was no small job, as there are now nearly 2,000 grave markers - each bearing a name - that make up the cemetery.
I was in Crawford last week when Arlington West arrived, and I watched as the demonstrators prepared it. The land available to the protesters in Crawford is essentially little more than a series of long, narrow, muddy ditches by the sides of the road. The grave markers were set up along the entire length of the road leading to the site.
This was no mean, haphazard setup. I watched family members of fallen soldiers take tape measures to carefully map out plots of land, making sure each cross was given its own respectful distance from the others. The assembly of Arlington West in Crawford took more than a full day, and was done under the glare of the hot Texas sun. By the end, the cemetery stretched the better part of a mile down the road, each marker bearing a name.
Some markers were surrounded by flowers and American flags. The flowers were placed there by loving relatives of that soldier, relatives who came to Crawford to stand in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan and the other military families, relatives who want to know why their loved ones were spent by the man who would not come out to speak with them.
Some time around 10:00 p.m. on Monday night, Larry Northern of Waco, Texas, drove his pickup truck down to the Crawford protest site. He got out, went around back to the tailgate, and attached a pipe and a chain to the rear of the truck. He got back in and proceeded to drive his truck through the Arlington West cemetery, grinding and smashing through the grave markers. Five hundred of them were knocked down, and 100 of them were totally destroyed.
The harassment of the activists in Crawford has been growing by the day. Last Thursday, I watched a guy on a motorcycle, wrapped from head to boot in black leather and helmet, with a Rebel flag handkerchief tied around his neck, roar into camp and yell something at the people setting up the grave markers before fleeing down the road. That morning, a caravan of Secret Service SUVs blasted through camp at high speed, leaning on their horns the whole way. One local guy in a pickup truck roared down the road and sideswiped a parked car, narrowly missing a couple of people. And then, of course, there was Larry Mattlage, who got sauced on Keystone beer before firing his shotgun into the air a few times near the demonstration.
One could say this is to be expected. Cindy Sheehan and the military families who have joined her have touched a raw nerve among the slowly dwindling ranks of Bush supporters. They are angry, and more than a little scared of the fact that one grieving mother has managed to throw a couple of torpedoes into the side of their battleship.
But the Arlington West cemetery is something else entirely. Truthout reporter Scott Galindez was on the scene after the attack. "Respect for this country's dead is not a partisan issue," he wrote afterwards. "Putting up memorials of our country's fallen is not a 'liberal' act. It is an American act. Even a group of counter-protestors from Dallas last week draped flags and flowers over many of the gravemarkers, and many were moved to tears at the sight of the long line of dead soldiers. It's too bad that someone else who disagrees with Cindy felt they needed to wipe out the memory of our fallen in such an obscene manner."
"Obscene" is the proper word. Among the comments from Bush supporters that have appeared on a variety of forums and blogs, many have taken the line that Casey Sheehan would be appalled at what his mother is doing to his memory. Leave aside for a moment the audacity of those who think they'd know the mind of a man more than his own mother, and focus on this bit about desecrating his memory: A Bush supporter drove a truck through a line of grave markers with the names of dead American soldiers inscribed on them. It is difficult to imagine a more profound desecration. Once upon a time, soldiers returning from Vietnam were spit on. Larry Northern spit on our soldiers when he did this thing. Period.
Mr. Northern was arrested and charged with criminal mischief. Ironically, he was apprehended because one of the crosses he destroyed punctured the tire on his truck. Some have argued in the aftermath of the attack that he should be charged with a hate crime. However that shakes out, it was hate that motivated him. His hate was so strong that it motivated him to destroy crosses and stars and crescents bearing the names of soldiers he almost certainly has said he "stands for."
A man who owns property near Bush's "ranch," and right across the street from his church, has offered the protesters an acre of his land for their campsite. This was welcome news, because the county commissioner was preparing to hold a vote on closing Prairie Chapel Road and evicting the demonstrators. "We can fit more people and we will be closer to the ranch," reported Cindy Sheehan after this offer was made. "Miracles, miracles."
They are out of the ditch now, and will shortly rebuild the Arlington West cemetery. They will do so with love and respect. The memorial will be safe from hatred and attack. The vigil goes on.
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To see the photos with this article, please click on here: t r u t h o u t / Perspective
t r u t h o u t IssuesThe Exodus of Grief and Anger to Crawford By Steve Duin
The Oregonian Tuesday 16 August 2005
When the three Army officers finally tracked Michelle DeFord down at her Colton home last September, she didn't believe their story: "I kept thinking to myself, while the soldiers were talking to me, 'They're going to straighten this out, I know it's a mistake, David calls home every Monday.' "
And his message was always the same. "He kept telling me he wasn't doing anything dangerous," DeFord said. "He kept telling me he was safe." That gunfire in the background? "That was just Iraqis celebrating another soccer victory." Thus, when the Army said she had 24 hours to notify her family before her son's death became public, DeFord didn't reach for the phone: "I just kept thinking that I don't want to get everyone upset, because I know this is wrong."
Almost a year after Spc. David W. Johnson, a 37-year-old cook turned machine gunner, was killed by a roadside bomb on a supply run to Taji, Michelle DeFord still thinks something is irrevocably wrong. That's why she and Lynn Bradach will fly to Texas on Wednesday, drive to "Camp Casey" and join Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside the Crawford ranch of President George W. Bush.
The nation is at war, the president is on an extended vacation, and DeFord and Bradach are the mothers of dead soldiers. Bradach's son, Marine Cpl. Travis J. Bradach-Nall, 21, of Portland, died in July 2003 while clearing a Karbala minefield.
In the months following her son's death, DeFord was too numb to wrestle with her pain in public. "I didn't speak out for a while," she said, "because I felt I'd be viewed as a grieving mother who was misguided."
But she has been inspired by Sheehan and her ability to energize the anti-war movement from a dusty outpost outside the president's 1,600-acre ranch. Sheehan has pledged to maintain her vigil in Crawford until Bush sits down to speak with her directly about the death of her son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist who died in an Iraqi rocket attack.
DeFord first met Sheehan in Florida last October when both worked on a get-out-the-vote campaign. Since Sheehan formed Gold Star Families for Peace, the two women have grown quite close, staying in each other's homes when DeFord travels to the Bay Area or Sheehan journeys to the Pacific Northwest.
"I have never met anyone so determined, so calm, so rational and so well-spoken under these circumstances," DeFord said.
Sheehan makes no bones about her anger that Bush describes the death of her son as "noble." Her determination to keep that outrage and her anguished opposition to the war in public view, even as the president enjoys mountain biking and fundraising on his five-week August recess, has been particularly cathartic to other parents who count their sons and daughters among the 1,850 Americans who have died in Iraq.
"I'm so proud of Cindy," Lynn Bradach said. "I've had a really tough time this spring. I got to the point where I couldn't handle the news anymore." She was fleeing media coverage of the deaths of 19 Marine reservists from the same Cleveland battalion when she was swept away by the story of Sheehan's arrival in Crawford.
"The minute I read the article, I said I should be there to support her," Bradach said. "There should be many more mothers there."
This pair will tote backpacks and a tent into the sauna of summer in Texas and onto the firing range of those who scream these families aren't "supporting the troops."
"We're in Bush country," Bradach said. "There will be a lot of detractors, people saying we aren't patriots. I'd like to know what they've given up.
"There is no way our children died in vain, not if we pay attention, not if we learn. I'm proud of my son. I love the Marines. And I'm very much against this war and always have been.
"I guess our children went and were sacrificed for us to take a look at what we let happen. We let this war happen. If nothing else, this is a huge lesson. Watch who you vote for. Watch what they're telling you. Don't be so afraid."
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The Nation / BLOG | Posted 08/16/2005 @ 1:27pm People's Petition for a Way Out of Iraq by Katrina Vanden Heuvel
A campaign is being launched this week by a host of groups including Progressive Democrats of America, Peace Action and others to demand an exit strategy from Iraq. A central part of these efforts is a new petition which lays out a way to get out of Iraq and will be presented to Congress in mid-September. This comes at what could be a tipping point moment. The country is waking up to the truth that Bush's decisions have led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 1,800 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis, while making the US, the world and Iraq less secure. A majority of Americans now understand that we were deliberately misled into war; a majority recognize that the US made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq; and a majority believe that no matter how long US troops remain there, they will not be able to establish a stable, democratic government.
Cindy Sheehan's dignified and defiant stance in Crawford has highlighted the callousness of a President who lacks the compassion to grieve or mourn for those he sent into battle. As E.L. Doctorow wrote last year, "I fault this president for not knowing what death is...He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be."
President Bush should meet with Sheehan. But, even more important, he should listen to the grieving mother, and to the growing number of military families and citizens who are demanding an end to the disastrous occupation of Iraq. Bush should also listen to those who will testify at informal Congressional hearings--now expected on the eve of the September 24 to 26 antiwar demonstrations--designed to explore possible exit strategies. It is anticipated that leading US academics, opposition politicians, civil society activists and Iraqi parliamentarians seeking an end to US occupation will testify.
And for those interested in an honorable and speedy exit strategy, please read, circulate and sign the petition published below. The petition is a response and challenge to the charge that peace and security advocates have no plan. The truth is that Secretary Rumsfeld has no exit strategy--only a "victory strategy." The truth is that the leadership of the Democratic Party has offered no alternative to Bush's policies beyond invading Falluja, adding more American troops, training more Iraqis and providing better body armor. All these policies are failing and will continue to fail. But there is another option: adopting a framework of conflict resolution as the alternative to permanent war and occupation.
Last August, we lived through the filth of the Swift Boat Veterans' mendacious attacks on John Kerry. One year later, America's attention is riveted by the moral protest emanating from Camp Crawford. What was once considered "marginal" is now at the center of our national conversation. Perhaps most significant, a large majority of people in this country agree with Sheehan that some or all US troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. If you're one of them, read the petition below and
click here to add your name to this growing antiwar effort. A Petition for an Iraqi Peace Process "For Mr. Bush, questions about an exit strategy in Iraq have become especially delicate as a crowd of anti-war protestors has expanded at the edge of his ranch, rallying around Cindy Sheehan, the California woman whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004."--New York Times, Aug. 12, 2005. Like our friend Cindy Sheehan, we are tired of waiting for our troops to come home. We are tired of the bloodshed, tired of tax dollar waste, tired of torture cover-ups, tired of contractor scandals, tired of deceit and fabrication. We are tired of elected officials with profiles in compromise rather than courage.
It is dishonest to admit there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, only to invent new reasons for inflicting mass destruction on that country.
It is dishonorable to fix the facts around the policy.
It is unacceptable to admit that going to war was a mistake, only to claim that the mistake must be perpetuated.
Because we cannot wait for our government to lead, we shall become leaders in ending the war ourselves. We shall propose an exit strategy from Iraq and demand that our government listen and follow. Because we cannot wait for our government to plan for peace, we call on civil society to make our government pay attention.
There are simply no military solutions to this bloodshed. The American military presence, threatening to Iraqi nationalism, religion and culture, is the main cause of the violent response from Iraqis. US policies are pushing Iraq toward civil war, with our government funding and arming Shiites and Kurds against Sunnis. Nearly half of the Iraqi national assembly has called for the "departure of the occupation". The State Department's own internal surveys show that a majority of Iraqis feel less safe in the presence of the American occupying forces. Since the invasion and occupation, the status and safety of women in Iraq have declined precipitously.
Iraqis themselves are calling for the end of occupation. One million recently signed a petition demanding the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq. Initial peace talks among Iraqis are already underway. Our government is deaf to these Iraqi voices for peace.
It is time to shift from a military model to a conflict-resolution model aimed at a peace process and negotiated political settlement.
We propose the following principles as essential to ending the war in Iraq:
First, as a confidence-building measure, the US government must declare that it has no interest in permanent military bases or the control of Iraqi oil or other resources.
Second, as a further confidence-building measure, the U.S. government must set goals for ending the occupation and bringing all our troops home - in months, not years, beginning with an initial withdrawal of troops by the end of this year.
Third, the US government must request that the United Nations monitor the process of military disengagement and de-escalation, and organize a peaceful reconstruction effort. The US must accept its obligation to fairly compensate Iraqis for damages, assist Iraqi reconstruction, cease the imposition of privatization schemes, and end the dominance of US contractors in the bidding process.
Fourth, the US government should appoint a peace envoy independent of the occupation authorities to underscore its commitment to an entirely different mission, that of a peace process ending the occupation and returning our soldiers home.
Fifth, the peace envoy should encourage and co-operate in talks with Iraqi groups opposed to the occupation, including insurgents, to explore a political settlement. The settlement must include representation of opposition forces and parties, and power-sharing and the protection of women's rights as core principles of governance and economic and energy development. We believe such an initiative will reduce, though not eliminate, violence by lessening any rationale for Jihadist or sectarian conflict.
We send this message to all Americans in civil society, to our elected officials, and to the global peace movement. We demand that Congressional hearings begin to define an exit strategy now. We demand that members of Congress, reflecting the will of the people, adopt policy and budget initiatives that call for an exit strategy based on the above principles. We demand a peace envoy, peace talks with the opposition, reconstruction, the closure of US bases, and the safe return home of all US troops.
Tomgram: Mike Davis on the Monster at Our Door"Follow that chicken" is not one of the more inspiring lines in the history of detective fiction, nor one of the more frightening in the genre of horror. It's perhaps on the level of that classic grade-Z sci-fi film, Night of the Lepus, in which the giant, rampaging, mutant rabbits were just... well, big bunnies. And yet, don't be fooled, the chicken, probably first domesticated in Southeast Asia some 8,000 years ago, might prove the death of many of us, and for its possible depredations, we are painfully unprepared. In 1918, a flu epidemic emerged from the trenches of World War I's Western Front -- essentially the war‘s equivalent of the slums -- and swept across the world (twice) ridding it of somewhere between 25 million and 100 million human beings (the equivalent in today's population terms of possibly upwards of a billion people). There have been flu pandemics since, but none faintly on such a scale. For nearly a decade, epidemiologists, public health officials, and veterinary researchers -- by now, in fact just about the whole global medical/scientific community -- have been warning that such a new pandemic is a frightening possibility, if not a near certainty. At the same time, some of them have been performing prodigious genetic detective work as a mutant flu virus, H5N1, has lodged in the systems of wild fowl in southern China, moved into massed domestic fowl populations nearby, and begun to spread to human beings; all the while still genetically evolving in birds (domestic ! and wild), swine, and even perhaps people, "looking for" the means to leap not just from bird to bird, or bird to swine, or even from bird to human, but from human to human at a staggering rate.
Nothing could more quickly remind us that we humans are part of nature than a flu pandemic; yet three quite unnatural changes in our world have drastically increased the danger of such a pandemic. A livestock revolution has gathered domestic birds together -- think Tyson chickens -- onto giant corporate farms in prodigious numbers, clustering them into what are essentially giant bird slums, where any new disease is guaranteed to spread more easily. Meanwhile, throughout the third world, impoverished human beings have been gathering in far greater urban concentrations than anything imaginable a century ago, and any of these are potential hatcheries for a pandemic. Finally, globalization and global air travel have made the spread of a pandemic, once started, almost instantaneous. In the meantime, H5N1, spreads by an older set of air paths -- avian migration routes -- having just made it to Russia. A! nd we wait.
What makes this an especially dangerous situation in the U.S. is that the Bush administration has largely chosen to redirect its public-health budget to preparations for "biowar" possibilities -- smallpox, Ebola Fever, and the like -- which may never endanger us, while scanting the kind of biowar (think Hitchcock's The Birds, not Osama bin Laden) that is actually likely to do so. Between the administration's priorities and Big Pharma's urge to go for the profits -- flu shots are unprofitable products -- America's public health structure is in increasingly woeful shape and certainly, despite endless warnings about what might come, in no shape at all to deal with a nationwide flu pandemic.
All of this, by the way, I know only because Mike Davis has just published a must-read, brief new book,
Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a scientific detective story, a tale of potential horror, and a sociological thriller about our 21st century world. This is a situation with which we should all be acquainted. Even the President evidently belated agrees. Along with Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (about which I won't even speculate) and a history of salt, he's taken John M. Barry's account of the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza off to Crawford to read. Maybe I should send a copy of the Davis book down to Crawford as well and Cindy Sheehan could present it to him at their meeting.
Recently, avian flu, which for some years had flown below the headlines and nested on the inside pages of our newspapers, has hit the front-page. (On this issue, as Davis points out, the New York Times has been especially good.) The latest headlines -- about a potential vaccine for this possible pandemic -- undoubtedly caused a collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, relief is not actually in sight as Mike Davis explains below, offering his latest update on the monster at our door. Tom
Has Time Run Out?
The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic
By Mike Davis
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
The Independent UKITV claims to show 'police blunders' in Brazilian's shooting By Geneviève Roberts
Published: 17 August 2005
Documents obtained by ITV News have revealed contradictions in evidence after the killing of an innocent Brazilian during the height of terror fears in London. According to ITV, a catalogue of police failures led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, who was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by police on 22 July
Secret documents and photographs from the independent investigation into the shooting were obtained by the broadcaster, revealing how the Brazilian came to be mistaken for a suicide bomber.
They claim to show Mr de Menezes - an electrician whose only connection with the failed bombers was living in the same block of flats - "behaved normally" when he entered Stockwell Tube station - contradicting rumours that he had bolted from police officers.
According to ITV, the CCTV footage confirmed Mr de Menezes was not wearing a padded jacket, something that police had initially announced.
The documents suggest, Mr de Menezes walked calmly through the barriers at Stockwell station, using his Oyster card, and paused to pick up a free newspaper. The report, if corroborated, could add weight to the de Menezes family's legal fight against the police over the shooting and death of Jean.
The death caused embarrassment to police at the time, with Sir Ian Blair apologising to the family. .
Last night, the documents allegedly highlighted the catastrophic mistakes made in the surveillance operation. On the morning of 22 July, officers were in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill watching a flat they believed contained would-be bombers who had tried to blow up the Tube.
The investigation is believed to say that the firearms unit of the police had been told "unusual tactics" may be required and, if officers were deployed, they should intercept a subject and - if there was an opportunity - they should challenge him. But if the subject was non-compliant, "a critical shot may be taken".
One firearms officer is quoted by ITV as saying: "The strategy around the address was: No subject coming out of the address would be allowed to run and an interception should take place as soon as possible away from the address trying not to compromise it."
ITV also claims the report shows officers wrongly believed Mr de Menezes could have been one of two bombing suspects who they thought were in the building.
The report says: "De Menezes was observed walking to a bus stop and then boarded a bus, travelling to Stockwell Tube. During this, his description and demeanour was assessed and it was believed he matched the identity of one of the suspects ... the information was passed to the operations centre and Gold Command made the decision and gave appropriate instructions that he was to be prevented from entering the Tube system. At that stage, the operation moved to Code Red tactic, responsibility was handed over to SO19."
According to ITV, the firearms officers were given clearance to kill Mr de Menezes but he seemed completely unaware he was being tailed.
In contrast to a witness statement that said Mr de Menezes tripped as he was boarding the train, CCTV footage apparently shows he only started running when he got to the concourse, perhaps to catch a train. He entered the carriage and sat in an available seat.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is assessing the contradictory evidence. Last night, Scotland Yard said it was unable to make a comment because of the investigation.
Documents obtained by ITV News have revealed contradictions in evidence after the killing of an innocent Brazilian during the height of terror fears in London.
According to ITV, a catalogue of police failures led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, who was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by police on 22 July
Secret documents and photographs from the independent investigation into the shooting were obtained by the broadcaster, revealing how the Brazilian came to be mistaken for a suicide bomber.
They claim to show Mr de Menezes - an electrician whose only connection with the failed bombers was living in the same block of flats - "behaved normally" when he entered Stockwell Tube station - contradicting rumours that he had bolted from police officers.
According to ITV, the CCTV footage confirmed Mr de Menezes was not wearing a padded jacket, something that police had initially announced.
The documents suggest, Mr de Menezes walked calmly through the barriers at Stockwell station, using his Oyster card, and paused to pick up a free newspaper. The report, if corroborated, could add weight to the de Menezes family's legal fight against the police over the shooting and death of Jean.
The death caused embarrassment to police at the time, with Sir Ian Blair apologising to the family. .
Last night, the documents allegedly highlighted the catastrophic mistakes made in the surveillance operation. On the morning of 22 July, officers were in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill watching a flat they believed contained would-be bombers who had tried to blow up the Tube.
The investigation is believed to say that the firearms unit of the police had been told "unusual tactics" may be required and, if officers were deployed, they should intercept a subject and - if there was an opportunity - they should challenge him. But if the subject was non-compliant, "a critical shot may be taken".
One firearms officer is quoted by ITV as saying: "The strategy around the address was: No subject coming out of the address would be allowed to run and an interception should take place as soon as possible away from the address trying not to compromise it."
ITV also claims the report shows officers wrongly believed Mr de Menezes could have been one of two bombing suspects who they thought were in the building.
The report says: "De Menezes was observed walking to a bus stop and then boarded a bus, travelling to Stockwell Tube. During this, his description and demeanour was assessed and it was believed he matched the identity of one of the suspects ... the information was passed to the operations centre and Gold Command made the decision and gave appropriate instructions that he was to be prevented from entering the Tube system. At that stage, the operation moved to Code Red tactic, responsibility was handed over to SO19."
According to ITV, the firearms officers were given clearance to kill Mr de Menezes but he seemed completely unaware he was being tailed.
In contrast to a witness statement that said Mr de Menezes tripped as he was boarding the train, CCTV footage apparently shows he only started running when he got to the concourse, perhaps to catch a train. He entered the carriage and sat in an available seat.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is assessing the contradictory evidence. Last night, Scotland Yard said it was unable to make a comment because of the investigation.
The Independent UK
The Independent UKFamilies of British soldiers begin court bid to force war inquiry By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent
Published: 17 August 2005
Families of British soldiers killed in Iraq are to go to the High Court today to demand an independent inquiry into the war. The legal battle is being waged by 17 families, including Rose Gentle, whose son, Gordon, 19, was killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in June last year, and Reg Keys, father of Tom Keys, one of six Redcaps killed by an Iraqi mob in June 2003.
Legal documents to be lodged at the court in London set out the case for a full independent inquiry into the legality of the war and the circumstances that led to the deaths of the soldiers. Lawyers for the families argue that under the Human Rights Act the Government has a duty to establish such an inquiry.
But ministers have refused the families' request, arguing that the war was legal. The families now intend to rely on the advice given by the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to ministers in the run-up to the conflict. The Attorney General's advice was leaked to the media during this year's general election campaign.
The families want the inquiry to cross-examine the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Defence Secretary at the time, Geoff Hoon, and the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. They want the inquiry to establish why Lord Boyce, the former chief of defence staff, was given an unequivocal assurance that the war was legal.
Mrs Gentle said: "I now know that we are closer to establishing the truth about the war in Iraq and the dishonest way in which we were led to war."
Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families, said he hoped the courts would hear the application for judicial review as quickly as possible. "Given the numbers involved and that the deaths occurred some considerable time ago, the families' lawyers will be requesting that the case be dealt with urgently," he said. "If that request is granted, there could be a hearing of this application before the end of 2005."
Last month, Mr Keys claimed that the London bombings were an "inevitable" consequence of the war. Mr Keys stood as an anti-war candidate in Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency in the election. He said: "I've always been of the firm belief that you cannot go to a war at this scale [and] kill over 100,000 innocent civilians without there being a price to pay."
He called for a staged withdrawal from Iraq, and said there could be more attacks if it did not happen.
The case is being supported by the Stop the War Coalition and Military Families Against the War.
Families of British soldiers killed in Iraq are to go to the High Court today to demand an independent inquiry into the war.
The legal battle is being waged by 17 families, including Rose Gentle, whose son, Gordon, 19, was killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in June last year, and Reg Keys, father of Tom Keys, one of six Redcaps killed by an Iraqi mob in June 2003.
Legal documents to be lodged at the court in London set out the case for a full independent inquiry into the legality of the war and the circumstances that led to the deaths of the soldiers. Lawyers for the families argue that under the Human Rights Act the Government has a duty to establish such an inquiry.
But ministers have refused the families' request, arguing that the war was legal. The families now intend to rely on the advice given by the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to ministers in the run-up to the conflict. The Attorney General's advice was leaked to the media during this year's general election campaign.
The families want the inquiry to cross-examine the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Defence Secretary at the time, Geoff Hoon, and the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. They want the inquiry to establish why Lord Boyce, the former chief of defence staff, was given an unequivocal assurance that the war was legal.
Mrs Gentle said: "I now know that we are closer to establishing the truth about the war in Iraq and the dishonest way in which we were led to war."
Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families, said he hoped the courts would hear the application for judicial review as quickly as possible. "Given the numbers involved and that the deaths occurred some considerable time ago, the families' lawyers will be requesting that the case be dealt with urgently," he said. "If that request is granted, there could be a hearing of this application before the end of 2005."
Last month, Mr Keys claimed that the London bombings were an "inevitable" consequence of the war. Mr Keys stood as an anti-war candidate in Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency in the election. He said: "I've always been of the firm belief that you cannot go to a war at this scale [and] kill over 100,000 innocent civilians without there being a price to pay."
He called for a staged withdrawal from Iraq, and said there could be more attacks if it did not happen.
The case is being supported by the Stop the War Coalition and Military Families Against the War.
The Independent UK
The Independent UKIraqi brothers say they were beaten and abused by British soldiers published: 16 August 2005
British troops in Iraq are facing new allegations of abusing prisoners in the weeks after the 2003 invasion.
Two brothers have claimed they were beaten with sticks and deprived of water and sleep. One of the men also alleges a British soldier urinated on his head.In tonight's BBC Newsnight programme, the brothers Marhab and As'ad Zaaj-al-Saghir allege they were abused by British soldiers who raided their home in Basra two years ago. They say troops stole their family car and cash, before taking them to a British base where they were denied water and sleep. They say they were later they were beaten and abused.
In the programme, Marhab says: "They lowered me down ... while I was tied up, threw me on the floor and hit me with a stick. You couldn't draw breath afterwards and I lost consciousness. I thought they would throw water over us but he got his penis out and urinated on my head." He added: "If I'd had a weapon I'd have killed myself."
The brothers have yet to make an official complaint, and the only corroboration of their allegations are forms issued by the US Army, which show they were eventually released without charge from the Umm Qasr camp. But their account is similar to other allegations contained in a confidential Red Cross report. The report said inmates at the camp were "routinely treated by their guards with general contempt, with petty violence". One man said he was held without charge for more than two months, during which he was punched by troops, and forced to make animal noises.
The Ministry of Defence told the programme it had investigated 177 complaints against British troops. Most involved shootings in which troops said they were returning fire.
Meanwhile, the enforced return of failed asylum-seekers to Iraq is due to begin within weeks despite the continuing security crisis. Refugee groups said more than 40 Iraqis have been picked up and sent to detention centres to await their repatriation to the Kurdish-run north of Iraq.
The Home Office said last night that no one would be returned to areas considered dangerous, but the planned removals fly in the face of United Nations advice.
For several years Iraqi Kurds have been among the largest ethnic groups claiming refuge in Britain, and a handful have voluntarily returned home since the 2003 invasion. Although David Blunkett, the former home secretary, said nearly two years ago that he wanted to start enforced returns shortly, no one has so far been sent back against their will. Over the past week, however, Iraqi Kurds have been rounded up in raids around the country.
A Home Office spokes-woman declined to say how many were being held but confirmed that deportations would begin within weeks. "We will implement enforced returns to areas assessed as suitable and where individuals are assessed as not being at risk."
British troops in Iraq are facing new allegations of abusing prisoners in the weeks after the 2003 invasion.
Two brothers have claimed they were beaten with sticks and deprived of water and sleep. One of the men also alleges a British soldier urinated on his head.
In tonight's BBC Newsnight programme, the brothers Marhab and As'ad Zaaj-al-Saghir allege they were abused by British soldiers who raided their home in Basra two years ago. They say troops stole their family car and cash, before taking them to a British base where they were denied water and sleep. They say they were later they were beaten and abused.
In the programme, Marhab says: "They lowered me down ... while I was tied up, threw me on the floor and hit me with a stick. You couldn't draw breath afterwards and I lost consciousness. I thought they would throw water over us but he got his penis out and urinated on my head." He added: "If I'd had a weapon I'd have killed myself."
The brothers have yet to make an official complaint, and the only corroboration of their allegations are forms issued by the US Army, which show they were eventually released without charge from the Umm Qasr camp. But their account is similar to other allegations contained in a confidential Red Cross report. The report said inmates at the camp were "routinely treated by their guards with general contempt, with petty violence". One man said he was held without charge for more than two months, during which he was punched by troops, and forced to make animal noises.
The Ministry of Defence told the programme it had investigated 177 complaints against British troops. Most involved shootings in which troops said they were returning fire.
Meanwhile, the enforced return of failed asylum-seekers to Iraq is due to begin within weeks despite the continuing security crisis. Refugee groups said more than 40 Iraqis have been picked up and sent to detention centres to await their repatriation to the Kurdish-run north of Iraq.
The Home Office said last night that no one would be returned to areas considered dangerous, but the planned removals fly in the face of United Nations advice.
For several years Iraqi Kurds have been among the largest ethnic groups claiming refuge in Britain, and a handful have voluntarily returned home since the 2003 invasion. Although David Blunkett, the former home secretary, said nearly two years ago that he wanted to start enforced returns shortly, no one has so far been sent back against their will. Over the past week, however, Iraqi Kurds have been rounded up in raids around the country.
A Home Office spokes-woman declined to say how many were being held but confirmed that deportations would begin within weeks. "We will implement enforced returns to areas assessed as suitable and where individuals are assessed as not being at risk."
The Independent UK
I find this obvious political publicity ploy by Rumsfeld highly objectionable, outrageous, distasteful and exploitative of the 9/11 tragedy. That the corporate mainstream media commentators are not voicing disdain, adds insult to the injury. Having 'country star' Clint Black center-stage, singing his idiotic "I Raq and Roll" (or some similar drivel), makes this an even more disgusting 'event'. With Bush's ratings at an all-time low, this administration is obviously grasping at all straws, showing how disconnected they are from reality. When all else fails, they shamelessly use 9/11 as a 'uniter'. This lack of good taste and common decency is the trade mark of Bush's disingenuousness. Just when I think I have seen it all, this administration comes up with more offensive machinations. Re-igniting public sympathy in order to inflate those sagging polls! What will they think of next? In my humble opinion, a simple non-denominational prayer service would have been de rigueur. But before that, Bush should personally speak with Cindy Sheehan. Sending his emissaries will not suffice. ----- Annamarie www.democracynow.orgRumsfeld Planning 9-11 Party/Country Music ConcertFor many, the upcoming September 11th anniversary will be a time for somber reflection. Apparently not for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This week, he announced the Pentagon will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11. Rumsfeld is calling the event the "America Supports You Freedom Walk." The march will start at the Pentagon and end at the National Mall with a show by country star Clint Black. Black is the man behind the song "I Raq and Roll," a song that conflates Saddam Hussein with "the devil" who attacked the United States on 9/11. One verse of the song goes, "We can't ignore the devil, he'll keep coming back for more ... If they won't show us their weapons, we might have to show them ours. It might be a smart bomb -- they find stupid people, too. And if you stand with the likes of Saddam, one just might find you." The announcement of this 9/11 celebration and concert outraged victim's family groups and veterans organizations.
Democracy Now!
Common Dreams.orgPublished on Monday, August 15, 2005 by the
Philadelphia Inquirer Dust Devils and Grief in Crawford by Celeste Zappala and Dante Zappala
We are in Crawford, Texas. We are sunk down into the soil of our country, digging in for a few days near the President's ranch. Our friend Cindy Sheehan has been entrenched here for a week, demanding a meeting with the President.
We've come to speak up for a man who is now forever silent. Sgt. Sherwood Baker, our Sher, was a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard. He was killed in Baghdad last year. He was on duty for the Iraq Survey Group. He was looking for weapons of mass destruction.
We came to bear witness to this event and to share our story. As we hover beneath the surface of the drama between Cindy and the President, we've rediscovered the real cause of the antiwar movement. We have been gathering with other military families from around the country. Some have loved ones in Iraq now. Others are Gold Star families who share in our sad fellowship of grief.
We sit together in the searing sun, on a tiny strip of roadside, two miles from the comforts of the President's ranch. We've camped in thunderstorms and been attacked by fire ants.
We have now in Crawford an invaluable collection of ordinary Americans who can speak a plain and irrefutable truth about the reality of the Iraq War. If the President, and the rest of America, had the patience for these stories, we might find the capacity to stop this unending tragedy.
We're here with moms like Sherry Glover. She came in from Houston with her daughter, Katie, and her 3-month-old granddaughter, Dakota. Katie enlisted in the Army. Stationed in Korea, she met her husband. He's in Iraq now. Katie is on Immediate Ready Reserve, and it is within the realm of possibility that she, too, could be activated when her maternity leave is over.
Soldiers visit the Glover house regularly. When they come, Katie peeks fearfully out of the window to study their clothes. She knows a class A Army uniform could be the messenger there to say, "We regret to inform you... " She sighs with relief when she realizes that they are merely recruiters who have come, yet again, to talk to Sherry's 19-year-old twin sons.
Phil and Linda Waste came from Hinesville, Ga., to support their three children and two grandchildren, all active-duty military. Between them, they've served 57 months on tours of duty in Iraq. The Wastes say they would like to know how much more they must give to a war in which they don't believe.
Mary Sapp, age 8, came from Massachusetts with her mom and big sister. She says she'd like to know why her dad, a National Guardsman, can't return home from Iraq.
We're humbled by their struggles. We realize that our story is, in many ways, complete. Sherwood will never return to us. For these families, and more than 100,000 like them, every day involves another bargain with God.
The President vacations nearby, using the readily available press corps to tell these families that their loved ones will come home when things get better in Iraq. To these families, this statement pulls hope from under their feet. They know from the phone calls, the e-mails and the return visits home that things aren't getting better in Iraq. They're getting worse.
The President offers them the guarantee that he cares. And then he reiterates his plan for success in Iraq: More of the same. That's a tough sell to the folks here at the encampment. More of the same has a unique meaning to them. It means redeployments to a war zone, increased vulnerability to physical and mental injury and a guarantee of family hardships.
And so we sit together in our spontaneously created community of peace. Reporters and huge broadcasting trucks navigate the muddy ditches to cover the sensationalism of this event. We stare out toward the ranch, wanting to tell a simple story with the hope that it can end a terrible war.
Celeste Zappala is the mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. Dante Zappala is the brother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker.© 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer
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The casualties of the senseless, terrible Iraq war are not merely those soldiers who were flown home in flag-draped coffins. They are also the tens of thousands of badly wounded, some life-alteringly so. Here is the story of one soldier, Bobby Rosendahl, and the plight of his desperate mother to help save her son. Lives Blown Apart By Bob Herbert
The New York Times Monday 15 August 2005
Sema Olson was in the living room watching television when the phone rang. It was the Department of the Army calling. A voice asked if she'd heard from her son in the past 24 hours. Ms. Olson tried to ward off the panic. "Is he still alive?" she asked.
After verifying her identity, the man on the phone assured her that her son, Bobby Rosendahl, who was stationed in Iraq, was still alive. But he'd been badly wounded.
With that Saturday night phone call, life as Ms. Olson had known it came to an end. Her family's long, long period of overwhelming sacrifice was under way.
Bobby Rosendahl, a 24-year-old Army corporal (and avid golfer) from Tacoma, Wash., was literally blown into the air last March 12 when an improvised explosive device detonated beneath his Stryker armored vehicle. He remembers landing on his back, with fuel spilling all around him and insurgents firing at him from the roof of a mosque.
Ms. Olson, during an interview in Washington, D.C., where Corporal Rosendahl is being treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, quietly cataloged her son's wounds:
"Both of his heels and ankles were crushed. He had a compound fracture of his femur in two places. Three-quarters of his kneecap was missing. His thigh was blown away. He had many, many open wounds, which all have closed except four right now."
She paused, sighed, then went on: "His left leg was amputated three weeks after he arrived here. He's not willing to give up his right leg. He's hoping to save it. All he wants to do is golf again. But we don't know. He's had 36 surgeries so far."
When you talk to close relatives of men and women who have been wounded in the war, it's impossible not to notice the strain that is always evident in their faces. Their immediate concern is with the wounded soldier or marine. But just behind that immediate concern, in most cases, is the frightening awareness that they have to try and rebuild a way of life that was also blown apart when their loved one was wounded.
Ms. Olson, who is 45 and divorced, gave up everything - her work, her rented townhouse, her car - and moved from Tacoma to a hotel on the grounds of Walter Reed to be with her son and assist in his recovery.
"He was still in a coma when I got here," she said. "He didn't have his eyes open, and he was hooked up to all the machines. When he did open his eyes a couple of days later, he didn't respond. His eyes didn't follow me. That was a scary moment. But the following day his eyes started following me."
Corporal Rosendahl has improved a great deal since those days and recently has been allowed to go with his mother on brief excursions away from the hospital. "It's difficult for him," Ms. Olson said. "But in those first weeks here he couldn't move a finger. So this gives me so much hope."
Ms. Olson is a paralegal who did work for several lawyers in Tacoma. She also worked as a claims analyst for the city's transit system. With that work gone, she is now living on the $48 per diem she receives from the Army for food and lodging, along with money that she has reluctantly been drawing from her son's Army pay, and assistance she is receiving from another son, Keith, who is 27.
She has also received help from charitable organizations that assist military families.
"My son is the most important thing," she said, "and I knew that if I was going to be with him, I wouldn't be able to meet my financial obligations."
So she gave up the townhouse and "turned in" a Honda Accord that she had purchased just a year earlier. "Voluntary repossession," she said.
There is nothing unusual about Ms. Olson's situation. Families forced to absorb the blow of a loved one getting wounded frequently watch other pillars of their lives topple like dominoes. What is unusual with regard to this war is the absence of a sense of shared sacrifice. While families like Ms. Olson's are losing almost everything, most of us are making no sacrifice at all.
Ms. Olson said she is neither angry nor bitter about her son's plight or the misfortune that has hit her family. "I feel blessed that Bobby's still alive," she said. "To dwell on why it happened, or why it happened to him - well, I can't waste my time on that. I have to look forward."
She said she plans to find work in D.C., and "hopefully, get a place close to the hospital," where she'll stay until her son "is ready to go on with his life."
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For more excellent articles, please go to:
www.truthout.org [t r u t h o u t]
Cindy Sheehan's Message Repudiates George Bush - And Howard Dean By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 15 August 2005
In 1972, after many years of US involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote: "In that time, I have seen it first as a problem; then as a stalemate; then as a crime." That aptly describes three key American perspectives now brought to bear on US involvement in Iraq.
The moral clarity and political impacts of Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford are greatly enhanced by a position that she is taking: US troops should not be in Iraq.
Sheehan's position not only clashes directly with President Bush's policy, which he reiterated on Thursday: "Pulling the troops out would send a terrible signal to the enemy." Her call for complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq also amounts to a firm rejection of the ongoing stance of Howard Dean, the head of the national Democratic Party, who told a Minneapolis audience on April 20: "Now that we're there, we're there and we can't get out."
Loyal supporters of the Bush policy in Iraq may express misgivings, but they have an outlook that views the faraway war as a fixable "problem."
Dean, the Democratic National Committee chair, has opted to stick to a calibrated partisan line of attack that endorses the essence of the war in real time. "The president has created an enormous security problem for the US where none existed before," Dean said in Minneapolis. "But I hope the president is incredibly successful with his policy now that he's there."
Of course, the idea that Bush could be "incredibly successful with his policy now" in Iraq is the stuff of fantasy. But it's the kind of politician-speak that makes a preposterous statement because it seems like a good media tactic. That's what most Democratic Party officials on the national stage, and some activists who should know better, are still doing. They're the rough equivalent of those who, like Ellsberg for a time four decades ago, mainly regretted that the war was "a stalemate." Objections to the war along that line depict it as a quagmire.
But the US war effort in Iraq is not a quagmire. It is what Daniel Ellsberg came to realize the Vietnam War was: "a crime."
Cindy Sheehan - and many other people who have joined her outside the presidential gates in Crawford, and millions of other Americans - understand that. And they're willing to say so. They have rejected not only the rabid militarism of the Bush administration but also the hollowed-out pseudo-strategic abdication of moral responsibility so well articulated by Howard Dean.
On Thursday, in his transparent attempt to halt the momentum of the vigil led by Cindy Sheehan, the president spoke to journalists and repeated his usual rationales. Along the way, Bush provided a sing-song catch phrase of the sort that political consultants are paid big bucks to script: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." It all added up to insistence on war and more war. "Pulling troops out prematurely," he said, "will betray the Iraqis." But Bush got his scripted syntax inverted when he made the mistake of saying something that rang true: "Obviously, the conditions on the ground depend upon our capacity to bring troops home."
While Bush sees the war as a problem and Dean bemoans it as a stalemate, Sheehan refuses to evade the truth that it is a crime. And the analysis that came from Daniel Ellsberg in 1972, while the Vietnam War continued, offers vital clarity today: "Each of these perspectives called for a different mode of personal commitment: a problem, to help solve it; a stalemate, to help extricate ourselves with grace; a crime, to expose and resist it, to try to stop it immediately, to seek moral and political change."
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Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
Truthout.org A Constitution That Means Nothing to Ordinary Iraqis By Robert Fisk
The Independent UK Monday 15 August 2005
Behind ramparts of concrete and barbed wire, the framers of Iraq's new constitution wrestled yesterday to prevent - or bring about - the federalisation of Iraq while their compatriots in the hot and fetid streets outside showed no interest in their efforts. Today is supposed to be "C" day, according to President Bush and all the others who illegally invaded this country in 2003. However, in " real" Baghdad - where the President and Prime Minister and the constitutional committee never set foot - they ask you about security, about electricity, about water, about when the occupation will end, when the murders will end, when the rapes will end.
They talk, quite easily, about the "failed" Jaafari government, so blithely elected by Shias and Kurds last January. "Failed" because it cannot protect its own people. "Failed" because it cannot rebuild its own capital city - visible to it between the Crusader-like machine-gun slits in the compound walls - and because it cannot understand, let alone meet, the demands of the "street".
In the Alice-in-Wonderland Iraq of Messrs Bush and Blair - inhabited, too, by the elected government of Iraq and its constitutional drafters and quite a few Western journalists - there are no such problems to cope with. The air-conditioners hiss away - there are generators to provide 24-hour power - and almost all senior officials have palatial homes in the heavily protected "Green Zone" which was once Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace compound. No power cuts for them, no petrol queues, no kidnaps and murders.
As an Iraqi academic just returned from Paris and Brussels told me yesterday: "Europeans understand politics through the Green Zone level. They have no idea that the rest of Iraq - save for Kurdistan - is a place of anarchy and death. One asked me: 'Do you think federalism is really a danger to the Sunni?' I answered him: 'Do you think the fear of constant death is not a danger to Sunnis, Shia and Kurds?' His eyes glazed over. It was not what he wanted to talk about. But it is what we talk about."
Those few Iraqis who bother to read the government press in Baghdad - their low circulation mirrors the same phenomenon of disbelief that existed under Saddam's regime - are told every nuance of the constitutional debate. The name of the state has been agreed (The Iraqi Republic), the distribution of financial resources according to demographic areas rather than provinces (bad news for the Kurds), and that Islam should be "one" of the sources of legislation (bad news for those who want an Islamic republic).
There is a "constitutional committee" and a "constitutional commission" (comprising 55 elected parliamentary deputies) with 15 unelected Sunnis (because the Sunni population largely boycotted last January's election), each committee divided into five sub-committees, each one studying one chapter in the constitution. The actual writers of this massive document - they allegedly include at least two professors - remain anonymous for "security reasons". And all live in the heavily guarded Green Zone, safe - more or less - from the insurgents and, more importantly, safer from ordinary Iraqis who have to endure the violence of the American occupation, the oppression of the insurgents and the daily threat of mass, organised crime.
Everyone knows the real issue behind the constitution: will it allow Iraq's three principle communities - the Shias, the Sunnis and the Kurds - to form their own federal states? And if so, will this mean the breakup of Iraq? The Sunnis, the only one of the three whose homes do not sit on oil reserves, are naturally against such a division which would, incidentally, allow the Americans and the other Western nations, who still claim to have liberated Iraq for "democracy", to reach oil deals with two weakened entities rather than a potentially united Iraqi nation.
Add to all this Kurdistan's demand that the future demography of Kirkuk - the Arab population injected by Saddam, the Kurdish population of the city exiled by Saddam and its minority Turkomans - be settled before the constitution is written, and you get a good idea why even the Americans are beginning to lose patience. The Kurds want oil-rich Kirkuk to be the capital of Kurdistan - a state which already exists although no Iraqi seems to be prepared to admit this - and thus further cut away at the frontier between " Arab" Iraq and "Kurdish" Iraq.
The problem is that all these issues are played out not in Iraq but in the Alice-in-Wonderland world already described. This is a unique place in which Saddam's trial is always being predicted to start in two months' time - on at least four occasions this has happened - in which Iraqi reconstruction is always about to restart and in which insurgent strength is always weakening. In fact, Iraqi guerrillas are now striking at the Americans 70 times a day and so fearful are senior American officers of an increase in attacks that this has become their principle reason for trying to prevent the release of 87 further photographs and videotapes of the Abu Ghraib prison torture and abuses.
In Real Iraq, it makes no difference. For the "street", Saddam is history, there is no reconstruction and the filth of Abu Ghraib causes no great surprise - because most Iraqis knew all about it months before the West opened its horrified eyes to the pictures.
As for the constitution, I asked an old Iraqi friend what he thought yesterday. "Sure, it's important," he said. "But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I'm too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can't even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can't eat federalism and you can't use it to fuel your car and it doesn't make my fridge work."
What the Rivals Want
Iraq's elected leaders are locked in marathon negotiations inside Baghdad's Green Zone. Washington hopes a timely deal will undermine the insurgency and bridge the gap between the main communities.
Kurds - They want guarantees of existing freedoms in the north, they want self-government and they oppose Islamic law being imposed
Shias - Islamists from the long-oppressed Shia Muslim majority are pushing for Islamic law and the prospect of a Shia autonomous region in the south. They want oil revenues distributed evenly throughout the country
Sunnis - Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam Hussein, fear losing a share of northern and southern oilfields. They oppose federalism which they claim will break up the state
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Cindy's Victory By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 15 August 2005
This thing, the wheels are coming off it. - Gen. Barry McCaffrey, after returning from an inspection of Iraq, 08/12/2005. They are sunburned and storm-lashed. They sleep in tents that sit along the muddy earth of drainage ditches by the side of the road. They have been heckled by "counter-demonstrators" who chanted "We don't care!" during a rendition of "God Bless America." They have been attacked by fire ants and hassled by local health inspectors. On Thursday morning, at about 5:30am, they were blasted awake by a fourteen-car convoy of Secret Service SUVs which roared through the camp at high speed while leaning on their horns the whole time.
They have been jolted with fear when a local resident fired his weapon into the air several times to make them go away. When the shooter, one Larry Mattlage, was asked why he was firing his gun, he said, "We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law. We're going to do whatever it takes." It is safe to say, therefore, that their lives have been threatened.
The thing is, they've already won.
Cindy Sheehan and her ever-growing band of supporters intend to stay in those ditches outside Bush's Crawford "ranch" until he comes out to talk or until August 31st, whichever comes first. If he does not come out by the end of the month, she intends to follow him to Washington and camp out in front of the White House. She and the others have been there for more than a week now, garnering more and more attention from the national and international press. Yes, they are tired. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they have already won.
The nearly 2,000 crosses, crescents and Stars of David that make up the Arlington West cemetery, erected by the demonstrators a few days ago to represent all the fallen American soldiers in Iraq, stretch almost a mile down the country road. Bush had to drive past that on Friday when he went to his fundraising shindig at the Broken Spoke Ranch. 54 crosses have been added to the cemetery since he first showed up for his vacation at the beginning of August. It takes a while to drive past them all. This man, who cannot abide hearing or seeing anything in the way of dissent or disagreement, saw those crosses whistle past his window. That is a victory.
August 10,2005 / A portion of Arlington West in Crawford
(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) Over the weekend, as the camp prepared for the arrival of the counter-demonstrators, a huge diesel pickup truck rumbled into camp with its nose menacingly pointed towards the tents. It sat for a while, and everyone waited to see what would happen. Ann Wright, the main organizer of camp activities, finally approached the truck and met the driver. He was a father, Wright discovered, and his son had been killed in Iraq.
He did not agree with this protest, he said, but wanted to know if his son's name was on one of the crosses in the Arlington West cemetery. Ann Wright invited the man to walk the rows of crosses and find his son's name. They found it. Ann and the man from the truck sat down in front of the cross, wrapped their arms around each other, and wept. Later, the man shared a beer with Cindy Sheehan and told her he loved her. That is a victory, one that surpasses any sort of mean politics.
August 10, 2005 | The grave of Casey Sheehan, who died in Iraq, from the Arlington West cemetery.
(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) For three years now, both before the invasion of Iraq began and then after it was unleashed, millions of people have marched and screamed and stomped in order to try to put a stop to this disaster. The Bush administration was not pushed off its tracks even an inch in all this time. Discussions and debates on why we are there and whether or not we should leave have been bunted aside.
Half a dozen reasons for the invasion and occupation have been put forth - weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda terrorism, the building of a democracy, Hussein was a bad man - but in the end, the debate is halted by the kind of brainless thinking that left us in Vietnam for far too long: "We are there, so we have to stay." This was the accepted wisdom.
Not anymore.
All the protests, all the articles, all the books, all the whistleblowers, all the criticism combined have not packed the kind of punch that one mother in a ditch has delivered to this administration's carefully crafted fantasy vision of what is happening in Iraq. Suddenly, Bush has been forced to go before cameras and try to explain why staying in Iraq is the only option available. Suddenly, the accepted wisdom isn't so accepted anymore. A majority of Americans, according to every available poll, agree with the lady in the ditch and not with the president.
Bush isn't doing a very good job of explaining his side of things, and his people seem unable to keep their stories straight. After the fourteen Marines from Ohio were killed in Iraq, Bush got up and stated that it would be unreasonable for him to lay down a timetable for withdrawal. Yet at the same time, his generals were bent over maps and logistics notebooks, trying to do exactly that.
The Los Angeles Times on Saturday took a look at the mixed messages coming from the war party. "Are the president and the Pentagon on the same page over the war in Iraq?" asked the Times. "That question is percolating in Washington after President Bush twice in the last 10 days tried to clarify a message sent by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military leaders. After Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials indicated their desire to shift away from discussing the struggle against terrorism as a 'war' - saying it placed too much emphasis on military solutions to terrorism - Bush repeatedly used the word 'war' in an Aug. 3 speech to conservative state legislators."
"Then," continued the Times article, "on Thursday, Bush dismissed as 'rumors' and 'speculation' reports that U.S. commanders were contemplating significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq next year. His comments came after Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, and Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander, had publicly raised exactly that possibility."
Hm.
On Sunday, out of nowhere, the Washington Post published a page-one story titled "US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq." The story stated, "The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months. The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges."
The article goes on to describe how any "democracy" will have to bend itself around the laws of Islam, a fact that chucks the secular-government talking points into the round file. Iraqi women, should not get their hopes up about being granted significant rights of any kind. The kicker came in the third paragraph, which quotes an unnamed US official saying, "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
In other words, the whole thing was a Charlie Foxtrot from soup to nuts. There are no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists connected to 9/11 were not there (though there are plenty there now learning how best to kill Americans with bombs), and democracy is not to be found anywhere on the menu. The hearts and flowers we were promised have not come, and are not coming. Sure, Hussein is still a bad man, but that rationale for this war is an outright laugher when compared to the cost of getting rid of him. Though Bush clings desperately to his canned lines to defend his actions, the facts speak for themselves. This whole bloody enterprise has been a colossal, expensive, murderous failure.
August 10, 2005 | Wearing a hat with supporting messages from friends, Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, California, takes a moment's rest in the ditch on Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, she was contacted by Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks.
(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) The funny part is that Bush almost certainly could have maintained the public fantasy with one simple act. He could have jumped into his pickup truck last Saturday, when Cindy Sheehan was alone except for her sister in that ditch, and driven down to see her. He could have invited her into the shotgun seat and driven her around the neighborhood for a few minutes. He could have then gone back up to the "ranch" and told the press corps that he met with her, and that they had looked into each other's hearts. That would have been the end of it.
He did not do that. Now, his generals are at loggerheads with the public line coming from the White House about getting out of Iraq. Unnamed officials are going on the record to state that the whole plan was hare-brained from the word "go," and that the entire deal sits now in the ashes of its own utterly ruined failure. Bush has to keep explaining why we have to stay, why rearranging the deck chairs on this Titanic is a noble and worthwhile process. Meanwhile, the whole world mocks him for hiding from one woman and her broken heart.
Cindy Sheehan has done this with one act of conscience. She has managed to do what no other protest or action or statement has been able to do. She has knocked the wheels right off this absurd applecart. She has called the man to account. She can hang her own "Mission Accomplished" banner above her tent in that ditch. She has already won.
Her son would be very, very proud.
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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
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"The president says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here," Sheehan said. "Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq."
-- Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand By Scott Galindez
Monday 15 August 2005
1:37 PM
Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace held a press conference where they announced they are inviting George Bush and all the neighbors in Crawford to a prayer vigil at noon Friday. They are also requesting a moment of silence at noon Friday around the world to correspond with the prayer vigil.
The famous Texas 10 minute rain storms are visiting today, it doesn't take too long to dry out in this sun.
There is still a spirited crowd of about 75 demonstrators from around the country at any time in the camp.
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t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand
By Cindy Sheehan
Monday 15 August 2005
3:44 AM
I apparently am the sacrificial lamb of the peace movement. I don't care about myself. Putting myself in the forefront and daring to challenge the president on his lies left myself open to the attacks. Which are, of course, half truths and distortions.
When they start sliming my home life and my family, that's where I draw the line. Yes, my husband has filed for divorce and yes he filed before I left for the VFP Convention and this trip to Crawford and yes IT IS BETWEEN MY HUSBAND AND I.
Having Casey murdered in Iraq by George Bush's reckless policies has been hard enough on my family, but me setting off on my holy war to bring the troops home, my constant absences, and all of the media attention has put additional stresses on my family.
I chose my path after Casey died. The rest of the family has chosen theirs. We all still love each other and support each other in anything that we do. We didn't want Casey to join the Army, but once he made that decision, we supported him and even encouraged him through boot camp.
We are a normal American family who have had good times, bad times, and terrible times. We hope the good times will come back. We hope that we will be able to laugh with abandon together like we used to one day. We hope that the troops come home and no other families have to go through what we are going through.
It isn't about politics for us. No one asked Casey what political affiliation he was before they sent him off to die in Iraq and no one asked us who we voted for in 2000 before we were handed a folded flag from Casey's flag-draped coffin.
I am not perfect and I never even claimed to be perfect. My family isn't perfect, but we are pretty special ... especially the children. We all miss Casey so much and it is George Bush and his neocon cabal who is at fault. The people who are dragging my family through the mud need to grow up and look at themselves. The Christ said: "He who is without sin, cast the first stone."
If everyone followed Jesus's advice, the world would be a much better place.
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t r u t h o u t | One Mother's Stand
By Tim Goodrich
Sunday 14 August 2005
11:50 PM
Good things come in small packages. Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas may not have the people of a 500,000 strong anti-war march, but its making at least as powerful a statement. This is only my first day here outside the ranch, but this has already been one of the most moving events I have attended.
Almost immediately, I recognized the standard tactics of the right wing; deceit and hatred. Upon waking up at the Crawford Peace House, I noticed a news van for the local AM radio station sitting outside. I watched him for a while, but he never bothered to step outside of the van. Later on, I heard the radio station reporting that the people at the Crawford Peace House had chased him away by throwing bottles and rocks at him. This was obviously a lie; designed to paint us, who have gathered peacefully, as militants.
Upon arrival at Camp Casey one of the first new people I met was a Gulf War Marine veteran who now works driving a truck out of Augusta, Georgia. While listening to his satellite radio, he heard about the encampment here in Crawford. Since he was running ahead of schedule and didn't have to be to San Antonio until the next morning, he took a detour to investigate. As a few of us veterans had a good conversation with him, I realized one important thing: He gets it. This former marine was just another of countless veterans across the United States that realize the war in Iraq is a tremendous waste of life and resources.
The weather is very hot and humid here, as evidenced by the few who succumbed to heat stroke. Despite the lack of most creature comforts, the spirit and will of the people here amazes me. In the end the world will know the truth, but in the meantime, I have a request for my former Commander-in-Chief. Come meet with us who served in your imperial war. Come meet with the military families who have loved ones serving in Iraq. Come meet with Cindy and the other Gold Star families. It's about time you're honest with the American people.
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**Please CLICK ON HERE:
http://www.truthout.org/cindy.shtml for a continuing update of Sheehan's Camp Casey vigil. Here you will also find the latest videos of this momentous event.**
In 'Liberated' Iraq, It's Back to the Burka, by Maureen Dowd
From The International Herald Tribune Maureen Dowd: In 'liberated' Iraq, it's back to the burka The New York Times MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2005
WASHINGTON President George W. Bush has done so much for women. Not at home, of course. Women in jeans in America may have their rights eroded by an administration where faith trumps science, but women in burkas? Bush can't talk enough about how important their rights are.
And in the administration's diplomacy-free foreign policy, five of its top spokesmen on the Muslim world are women: Condi Rice; Laura Bush; Liz Cheney, No. 2 in the Near East bureau of the State Department and head of the Middle East democracy project; Karen Hughes, the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy; and her deputy, Dina Powell.
W. thinks so highly of Hughes, his longtime Texas political nanny, spinner, speechwriter and ghostwriter, that he put his Lima Green Bean, as he called her when she prodded him about the environment, in charge of the critical effort to salvage America's horrendous image in the Islamic world - even though what she knows about Islam could fit in a lima green bean. Why get any Muslims involved in reaching out to Muslims? That would be so matchy.
The real role for the newly minted ambassador hasn't been defined yet, but so far it looks as if Hughes's first priority will be to take her spinning skills, honed for W. in 2000 and 2004, to improve his image, and his policies' image, on a global scale.
Just as she retooled Bush as "a reformer with results" and a "compassionate conservative," Hughes plans to inundate Muslims with the four E's: "engagement, exchanges, education and empowerment."
On Thursday, when Bush came out of his Crawford ranch with Rice, he once again justified the war in Iraq by talking about the treatment of women.
The way to defeat our enemies' "hateful ideology," he said, is to offer an ideology "that says to young girls, you can succeed in your society, and you should have a chance to do so." He also said, "Hopefully, the drafters of the constitution understand our strong belief that women ought to be treated equally."
Hopefully? Is that the best America can do for a country that it broke, owns and is sacrificing young men and women every day to keep?
Americans like it when the president talks up women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he does it often. It helped him sell the invasions of those two countries. But W. the fundamentalist Taliban are recrudescing in Afghanistan, young girls in Iraq are afraid to leave the house because there are so many kidnappings and rapes, and women's groups in Iraq are terrified that the new constitution will cut women's rights to a Saudiesque level.
Some Shiite politicians are pushing to supplant civil courts with religious courts operating on Shariah, or Islamic law. One of the crucial articles in various drafts of the constitution is: "The followers of any sect or religion have the right to abide by their religion or sect in their personal affairs, and a law should organize this."
That little provision could jeopardize any chance for women's equality. Clerics running religious courts based on the Koran could legitimize polygamy, honor killings, stonings and public beheadings of women charged with adultery, and divorce by "talaq" - where all a husband has to do is declare, "I divorce thee," three times.
Saddam Hussein repressed Islamic politics, so under him, Iraq was one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. It has become far more fundamentalist since the United States took over.
The back-to-burka trend has been widely reported throughout Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, and young women activists told The Los Angeles Times that their mothers had more freedom in the '60s. Najla Ubeidi, a lawyer in the Iraqi Women's League, agreed: "During the 1960s, there was a real belief in improving women's conditions. We could wear what we liked, go out when we liked, return home when we liked, and people would judge us by the way we behaved."
If W. liked exercising his mind as much as his body, he could see that his mission to modernize Muslim countries is backfiring on women. The most painless way for Muslim men to prove that they have not abandoned Arab culture and adopted Western ways is to tighten the burka.
To us, the "liberated" but repressive Iraq is a paradox. To the women, it's a prison.
Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com
TomDispatch.comTomgram: Cindy Sheehan's WarCindy, Don, and George
On Being in a Ditch at the Side of the Road
By Tom Engelhardt
Retired four-star Army General Barry McCaffrey to Time Magazine: "The Army's wheels are going to come off in the next 24 months. We are now in a period of considerable strategic peril. It's because Rumsfeld has dug in his heels and said, I cannot retreat from my position." Cindy Sheehan testifying at Rep. John Conyers public hearings on the Downing Street Memo: "My son, Spc Casey Austin Sheehan, was KIA in Sadr City Baghdad on 04/04/04. He was in Iraq for only 2 weeks before [Coalition Provisional Authority head] L. Paul Bremer inflamed the Shi'ite Militia into a rebellion which resulted in the deaths of Casey and 6 other brave soldiers who were tragically killed in an ambush. Bill Mitchell, the father of Sgt. Mike Mitchell who was one of the other soldiers killed that awful day is with us here. This is a picture of Casey when he was 7 months old. It's an enlargement of a picture he carried in his wallet until the day he was killed. He loved this picture of himself. It was returned to us with his personal effects from Iraq. He always sucked on those two fingers. When he was born, he had a flat face from passing through the birth canal and we called him ‘Edward G' short for ! Edward G. Robinson. How many of you have seen your child in his/her premature coffin? It is a shocking and very painful sight. The most heartbreaking aspect of seeing Casey lying in his casket for me, was that his face was flat again because he had no muscle tone. He looked like he did when he was a baby laying in his bassinette. The most tragic irony is that if the Downing Street Memo proves to be true, Casey and thousands of people should still be alive."
Donald Rumsfeld testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in March, 2005: "The world has seen, in the last 3 1/2 years, the capability of the United States of America to go into Afghanistan . . . and with 20,000, 15,000 troops working with the Afghans do what 200,000 Soviets couldn't do in a decade. They've seen the United States and the coalition forces go into Iraq. . . . That has to have a deterrent effect on people." (Ann Scott Tyson, "U.S. Gaining World's Respect From Wars, Rumsfeld Asserts," the Washington Post, March 11, 2005 [scroll down])
George Bush on arriving for a meeting with families of the bereaved, including Cindy Sheehan and her husband on June 17, 2004: "So who are we honoring here?"
A teaser at the "Careers and Jobs" screen of GoArmy.com: "Want an extra $400 a month?" Click on it and part of what comes up is: "Qualified active Army recruits may be eligible for AIP [Assignment Incentive Pay] of $400 per month, up to 36 months for a total of up to $14,400, if they agree to be assigned to an Army-designated priority unit with a critical role in current global commitments."
Who Is in That Ditch?**Click here to read more of this dispatch.---
htt://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081405Z.shtmlSomeone Tell the President the War Is Over By Frank Rich, NYT Op-Ed columnist
The New York Times (Editorial) Sunday 14 August 2005
Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man? A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's number-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
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To see the photo of Cindy in this article, please go to
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081405D.shtml Smearing Cindy Sheehan By Farhad Manjoo
Salon.com Saturday 13 August 2005
Conservatives are attacking her as a dupe of the left who's exploiting her dead son. Some relatives have piled on too. But the grieving mother says her well-timed Crawford visit is "my idea, my mission, my vision." August was supposed to have been a quiet month for George W. Bush. Last year, the president cut short his customary weekslong vacation in order to campaign for reelection, so this year, unencumbered, he'd planned to spend more than a month in the sweltering heat of his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Then, last week, Cindy Sheehan, a grieving Northern California woman whose son was killed in Baghdad, Iraq in April 2004, showed up on Bush's vacation doorstep. She refuses to leave until Bush meets her in person. Nothing's been quiet in Crawford ever since.
It wouldn't be quite right to say that Sheehan's stand has vaulted the war back to the forefront of the national consciousness. Fresh horrors in Iraq daily are enough for that. But Sheehan is clearly forcing Bush to personally and publicly confront the consequences of his choices. And she's forcing reporters to pay attention, too. On Thursday, Bush was asked to respond to Sheehan's protest. "I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan," Bush said. "She feels strongly about her position. She has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America." But Bush also said that he disagrees with those Americans, like Sheehan, who want U.S. troops to pull out from Iraq. And he didn't suggest he'd be meeting with Sheehan anytime soon, either.
Sheehan insists that she's prepared to wait until Bush changes his mind. Sheehan, a founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, an antiwar group composed of families of troops killed in Iraq, has always been vocal in her opposition to the war. She participated in many rallies during the election last year, and even starred in an anti-Bush ad for MoveOn.org. She says that her late son Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist who was killed in a rocket attack just two weeks after getting to the battlefield, felt the same way. And just as Casey went to Iraq to do his duty, Cindy Sheehan says she's got to take a stand in Crawford to do hers.
As a matter of politics, Sheehan's stand is brilliant. Bush's chief political asset is his embrace of the troops and their families; the longer he refuses to meet with Sheehan, the more unconcerned -- and even callous -- Bush risks looking to the public. And by providing a genuine news event in the hot, sleepy confines of Crawford, she's gotten far more media attention than she garnered as the star of a MoveOn ad. She's been profiled in dozens of papers and hailed in a New York Times editorial. Consequently, she's also been smeared by the right. Pundits have pointed out Sheehan's apparent inconsistencies -- in the past, she said that she believed Bush cares about the troops who've died, and she spoke warmly of a brief visit with the president after Casey's death that she now recalls as insincere and impersonal. All this week Matt Drudge has hammered on Sheehan, publicizing criticism by some of her family members, who say they support Bush and the war. On the Tuesday edition of his show, Fox host Bill O'Reilly said Sheehan's behavior "borders on treasonous."
Conservatives have assailed Sheehan for her association with Michael Moore (she has been blogging on Moore's Web site) and the antiwar group Code Pink. Some depict her as the left's dupe, but Sheehan insists she came up with the idea for the Crawford visit on her own. In a telephone conversation with Salon on Friday afternoon, Sheehan explained her inconsistencies and defended her association with Moore and others on the left. Just before the call, Bush's motorcade sped by "Camp Casey," which is what Sheehan calls the protest stand she's erected in her son's memory. The cars didn't even slow down.
So the president just drove by you a few minutes ago?
Well, I think he did, but I didn't see him. A bunch of trucks drove by really fast and there were people in them. I didn't see if any of them was the president, though. Chances are he was in the motorcade.
But needless to say he didn't make any signal, meet with you or anything like that?
No. They sped by really fast. And I don't want him to get out and shake my hand and just say, you know, whatever whatever. That's not the kind of meeting I want.
What kind of meeting do you want?
I want the kind of meeting that holds him accountable for the words he's actually said.
Well, do you want to debate with him? What do you mean by that?
What I want to ask is, "What noble cause did my son die for?" And if he says that it was to get rid of Saddam or liberate the Iraqi people, I'm not going to buy it. I want him to know that 62 million Americans oppose the war in Iraq. [During the interview, Sheehan used the number 62 million as well as 62 percent to refer to the strength of the opposition to the war. Recent polls show that majorities of Americans -- in some surveys more than 60 percent -- disapprove of the way the president is handling the situation in Iraq.]
Yesterday at a press conference the president acknowledged that many people want us to pull the troops from Iraq, and he specifically referred to you. What's your response to what he said?
Why didn't he say what Casey died for? And I've also asked them to quit using my son's name in vain, to stop saying that we have to continue the mission in Iraq to honor the sacrifice of the fallen heroes.
So as far as you're concerned he didn't address your concerns yesterday, and you're still looking for a meeting with him? Will you stay out there until he meets with you?
Yes. I'm going to be out here for the whole month of August unless he meets with me. I think I've said that a billion times.
But, realistically, do you think he's going to meet with you?
Well, I'd say that nothing is impossible. But, you know, probably not.
Tell me what it's like out there.
It's really, really hot, but there's so many people here and our spirits are so high. We know we're doing a good thing. We have four Methodist ministers, and Bob Edgar [the general secretary of the National Council of Churches]. They came out and did a prayer service after the president drove by. And there's people with bright yellow hair, and there's people from all walks of life. It's really cool.
One of the things that your critics have said -- critics on the right -- is that you're making this into a media spectacle. And I've even heard people say that by being out there you're dishonoring the memory of your son and other people who died in the war. How do you respond to that?
Well, I believe I'm honoring my son and people who died in the war by using their sacrifices for peace and love, not for war and hatred. I can't speak for the other people whose children have died, but I can speak for my family and the other members of Gold Star Families for Peace. We believe we're honoring our children by working for peace.
And it has turned into a media circus. But that's not my fault. You know, I just came out here to confront the president and stop this war.
The media attention -- obviously, though, that's been helpful to your cause.
I believe it's very helpful to the cause. You know what, the war has gone off the front pages. It's gone off the mainstream media, and this has put it back on where it belongs, even if there has to be a grieving mother sitting outside Crawford, you know? I'm only really doing the media's job for them.
What do you think your efforts are doing for the larger antiwar movement?
I believe it's galvanizing the peace movement -- I like to call it "peace movement" because that has more of a positive connotation than "antiwar." I know that 62 percent of the American public believe the war was a mistake and we should bring our troops home. I think it's giving those people a voice. People are dropping everything and coming from everywhere around the country to be here in Crawford, Texas.
It's getting them off the fence to do something. Someone said that the opposite of good is not evil but apathy. This has really given people something to do.
You've always been against the war in Iraq, is that right?
Yes.
And I also want to ask about your son, his feelings about the war.
Casey disagreed with the war. He didn't feel George Bush was using the troops in an effective way. Or in a good way. And I begged him not to go because he knew it was wrong. But he said, "You know what, Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. And my buddies are going."
Last year you met with the president. Tell me how that came about, and tell me what happened during that meeting.
We were invited by the protocol office at Ft. Lewis, Wash. They said the president wanted to have a sit-down with us. And we decided we wouldn't use that time to debate the war with him. We wanted him to look at Casey, we wanted him to know about Casey, we wanted him to know what an indispensable part of humanity he was.
Tell me what the president was like during that meeting.
Well, he walked in and he said, "So who are we honorin' here?" He didn't know our name. He totally was disrespectful. He called me "Mom" the whole time. And he said some disrespectful things to us.
There's been an account of you saying that you did think he was respectful during that meeting. [In June 2004, Sheehan told the Reporter, a newspaper in her home of Vacaville, Calif., that she believed Bush was "sorry" and felt "some pain for our loss."]
Because at the end of the meeting, I said, "What are we doing here, Mr. President? We didn't vote for you in 2000, we're not going to vote for you this time. We're lifelong Democrats."
And he said, "It's not about politics." So we said, OK, we wouldn't use it about politics and we tried to put a positive spin on it. But if you read the whole article you'll see we already had misgivings about what was going on. A lot has been taken out of context.
Well, you said, "I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis ... I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss." Do you still think he feels some pain for your loss?
No, no, I don't think he does at all. Because it was all about politics. When he talks about how he meets with the families and they say, "Mr. President, we pray for you" -- you know what, that's not true. He used it for politics, because he doesn't go to funerals and stuff like that. That's what it was all about.
I'm just trying to get a sense, though, when you said that he feels some pain for your loss -- you didn't really mean that then, or at least you don't think that now?
I don't even know what I meant back in June of 2004. I was in shock, I was in grief. I'm still in a deep state of grief but I'm not in shock anymore. When he said it was not about politics I believed him. But he made it all about politics and that's when I stopped believing him.
Yesterday there was a report -- I'm not sure how accurate it is -- but it was apparently a statement from other members of your family that said they disagree with what you're doing.
I think it's accurate. I think my husband's family did write that. But I don't really give -- I don't care what they wrote. Because, No. 1, it's their opinion and they're entitled to it. But No. 2, they called him something like "our dear Casey." You know they're hypocrites. They didn't even know Casey. They didn't spend any time with him in his life, and now they're using his death for political reasons, I think.
Casey's my hero because of the way he lived, not because of the way he died. For these people who never ever went out of their way to spend any time with him to actually dare speak for him, I think it's hypocritical. Casey lived a great life and he was an honorable man and he died in a dishonorable war.
What about other members of your family -- are there people in your family who do agree with you?
My immediate family, Casey's dad and my three children and my sister, we're all on the same page. And I really think that some of my husband's siblings are with us too.
And I want to say something else, too. They said they support the troops. You know what? I support the troops. How's anything I'm doing showing that I don't support the troops?
What about parents of other soldiers who've been killed?
I would say the majority would agree with what I'm doing, because the majority of Americans think that this war is based on lies and deceptions and they think it was a mistake and they want the troops to come home.
Do you hear from many others?
I hear from them all the time, I do. We had a lot of military families speak out here. We have a lot here whose kids are still in harm's way, and whose kids have died.
One thing I want to ask you is about the other groups that are supporting you. Some people on the right have been saying that you're being "used" -- that's the quote I've heard. You're being used by extreme left-wing groups. How do you respond to that?
I respond that this was my idea. This was my mission. This was my vision. And what we're all doing is we're working for peace. And all these groups together are working for peace. And they're helping me with my vision. You know they're not using me, and maybe I'm using them because they're helping me out tremendously in this action.
But what about the pragmatics of it -- if you associate with someone like Michael Moore do you risk losing the mainstream?
I think Michael Moore is an amazing man, an amazing, brave man. And I think people are probably going to start saying don't associate with Cindy Sheehan. People who speak truth to power somehow are marginalized in this country.
I know you're going to be out there for the month of August. How long do you think the media's going to pay attention to you? Do you worry about that?
I don't really care. I didn't come out here to do this for the media. I came out here to do this to end the war. If the mainstream media's not here we've got blogs, we've got the Internet. It'll still keep going. Smart America will know what's going on. They're the ones who are going to put pressure on the elected officials to effect any change.
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Farhad Manjoo is a
Salon staff writer.
t r u t h o u t IssuesIt Takes a Village to Smear Cindy Sheehan By Arianna Huffington
HuffingtonPost.com Friday 12 August 2005
The right wing attacks on Cindy Sheehan - desperate, pathetic, and grasping at straws - expose much less about their target than about the attackers. I mean, trying to slime a grieving Gold Star mom because she is inconveniently questioning the reasons her son was sent off to die in Iraq? Why that would be like trashing a much-decorated war hero or outing an undercover CIA agent ...
Oh, right ...
How much longer can the Bushies get away with mauling the very values they profess to stand for before their supporters start getting wise to the fact that the only value they really value is power?
Think about it, they've shown absolutely no compunction about turning the sleaze machine on an undercover agent who'd spent her career working to protect us from weapons of mass destruction, a Silver Star/Purple Heart veteran who volunteered to fight in a war the administration chickenhawks gamed the system to avoid, and now the mother of a dead soldier.
The right wing smear machine whirrs on - using its media mouthpieces to do this dirtiest of dirty work. First it was the lie that Sheehan had, in the words of Drudge, "dramatically changed her account" of her June 2004 meeting with Bush. Despite the fact that this supposed flip-flop was a total distortion created by taking quotes out of context, the story quickly made its way into the hands of conservative bloggers ... and allowed the TV jackal-pack to start tearing away at Sheehan's flesh. For all the details on how this went down, check out Media Matters blow-by-blow description. The lowlights included Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin tag-teaming up to push the idea that Sheehan's "story hasn't checked out". O'Reilly also claimed Sheehan "is in bed with the radical left", and, later suggested "this kind of behavior borders on treasonous" ... and, for bad measure, tried to slime Sheehan by linking her with "people who hate this government, hate their country".
Rush Limbaugh played his usual role, parroting the flip-flop party line, saying that Sheehan was "trying to pull a little bit of a swindle" and that "she'd been totally co-opted by ... the whole Michael Moore leftist mentality." Fred Barnes piled on, saying of Sheehan: "She's a crackpot" (no doubt using the same video-based diagnostic technique pioneered by Bill Frist). And Michelle Malkin went all Patricia Arquette on the case, using her heretofore unpromoted ESP powers to let us know that Sheehan's dead son Casey wouldn't approve of "his mother's crazy accusations".
Beyond contempt. But I will say this for these sleazeballs: they are nothing if not resilient. After the Cindy as Flip-Flopper story was revealed as a very poorly done hatchet job, a second load of sludge was quickly dumped: the ludicrous statement from the (ahem) "Sheehan Family" condemning Cindy's "political motivations and publicity tactics" (run under a banner headline proclaiming "Family of Fallen Soldier Pleads: Please Stop, Cindy").
Where do I start with this piece of manufactured offal? How about the fact that no one put their names on the statement, which was "signed" by "Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins". Don't these folks have names? The only name attached to the "Sheehan Family" statement (delivered to Drudge via email with permission "to distribute as you wish") belongs to Cherie Quartarolo who describes herself as Casey's aunt and godmother. So did I miss something? Since when does godmother outrank mother? What I really want to know is: how does Casey's second-cousin-twice-removed feel about Cindy's vigil? How about his ex-brother-in-law's cleaning lady?
Cindy deals with all this very succinctly in her latest post, but suffice it to say that Casey's dad and their three other children are all supportive of what Cindy is doing. Hmm ... I always thought conservatives were big proponents of the importance of the nuclear family. Does James Dobson know about this attempt to undermine the primacy of a mother?
I guess it takes a village to trash a grieving Gold Star Mom.
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This insightful article was written almost a year ago. Yet it is very apropos for today, especially in light of Cindy Sheehan and her Camp Casey vigil. As Doctorow so aptly illustrates, Bush is an unfeeling, uncaring president who holds nothing but disdain for those he governs. Indeed, George W. Bush does not know what death is.The Unfeeling President By E.L. Doctorow
The East Hampton Star Thursday 09 September 2004
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life ... they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing - to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
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** This is a
www.truthout.org t r u t h o u t Editorial, August 13,2005.
Scotsman.comSun 14 Aug 2005
How Blair is losing his War on Terror
IRAQ IAN MATHER, FRASER NELSON AND ALEX MASSIE
IN WASHINGTON
IT ALL sounded so simple. Winding up his pre-summer holiday press conference 10 days ago, Tony Blair dealt with Iraq in a single sentence. The international forces would "help the country get democracy," he declared, "and then leave as soon as the security forces in Iraq are in the position... to look after their own security".
Tomorrow, another step will be taken on the road to Iraq 'getting' democracy when its new constitution is unveiled. With January's elections having been completed, Iraq will move along the path to peace and prosperity. It will not be long before British and American troops can leave; surely not too long either until the wisdom of Blair and George Bush's enlightened intervention is finally borne out. Except that today the reality is very different. What should have been a historic week for Iraq dawns today with pessimism gripping Washington, London and the Middle Eastern nation itself. It is summed up in the words of Saleh al-Mutlak, a member of Iraq's constitutional committee and a spokesman for the influential Sunni group, the Iraqi Committee for National Dialogue. Looking ahead towards the creation of the constitution tomorrow, he says: "We hoped this day would never come."
The chaos in Iraq was highlighted last month by the horrific murder of American journalist Steven Vincent. What shocked many was the location and the reason behind Vincent's death. It took place in the southern city of Basra, scene of dozens of reassuring images over the last two years of British troops chatting amiably to local people. The pictures have served to make Iraq's second city a byword for tolerance amid the growing nightmare. Vincent was killed, it is understood, by Islamic extremists for the crime of working with an unmarried female interpreter. The woman, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.
Vincent's murder has focused the world's attention on the fact that even in quiescent southern Iraq the fundamentalists have taken over. If even Basra has fallen then where else in Iraq is there now any hope of a peaceful transition to democracy?
The murder of Vincent is just one of a growing number of gruesome episodes in a wider power struggle as Iraq approaches a pivotal moment in its transition to democracy. It is a struggle which many fear will end up with Iraq's Shia majority - who were held back under the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein - breaking up the country and forming a new hardline theocracy. All the while, British and American diplomats are forced to simply shrug their shoulders and accept it - after all, this is what their nations fought for.
Another incident summing up the tensions last week saw the Sunni mayor of Baghdad, Alaa Tamimi, in hiding after being evicted from his office by dozens of gunmen.
They later transpired to be bodyguards for the Baghdad governor, Hussein Tahhan, a rival for the mayor's job, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shi'ite political party relishing its first taste of power after decades of suppression under Saddam.
"What happened to me was unbelievable. It was horrifying and very dangerous to be treated in such a manner," Alaa Tamimi said from his hideout. "The municipality was invaded by armed forces. This is terror. It's a lot worse than in Saddam's time."
Nakedly aggressive assaults like this are now pushing Iraq perilously close to all-out civil war. And it is becoming increasingly bloody.
July was a record month at Baghdad's main mortuary, where bodies are piling up so quickly that they often have to be buried before they can be identified.
A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase over June, and more than 60% were victims of shootings, clear proof that the violence in Baghdad is getting worse.
The figures exclude casualties from bombings. Those bodies are not taken for autopsy because the cause of death is already known.
Two attempts to quantify the violence, by the UN Development Programme and by Iraq Body Count, a web site, have each come up with about 24,000 violent deaths in the two years since the invasion, or an average of 1,000 a month. "In the days of Saddam, we had maybe 16 shootings a month," said mortuary director Faed Bakr. "Now we have more than that every day."
Against this backdrop of anarchy and violence, politicians attempting to frame Iraq's new democracy are floundering. The negotiators have agreed that the country be called the Iraqi Federal Republic and that Islam be the religion of the state - but they are still deadlocked on Islamic law and autonomy for Kurds.
The failure to find agreement bodes ill. At root cause is the intransigence of the Shi'ite politicians who, following January's elections, are now in a position of strength.
The elections resulted in the Shi'ites taking a grip on the country. Two leading parties, the United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqi List, together won 62% of the vote and 180 of 275 seats in the interim National Assembly. These parties have chosen the top leaders of the interim government, and will dominate any future government.
As "C-Day", as the Americans are calling tomorrow, approaches the Shi'ites have become bolder in their demands. Last week they demanded the creation of a "Shiastan" in southern Iraq, raising the prospect of an oil-rich fiefdom dominated by conservative Muslim clerics.
To the dismay of the Iraqi Sunnis, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), one of the main ruling parties, called for the creation of a federal southern state in the new constitution. "Regarding federalism, we think that it is necessary to form one entire region in the south," he told tens of thousands of chanting supporters.
If this nightmare scenario were to come about, the new "Shiastan" would encompass the Gulf oil fields and almost half of Iraq's 26 million population. Since Sciri's cleric leaders have strong ties to Iran, Iran's theocracy could end up dominating the oil-rich region.
Already Shi'ite conservatives, who have emerged after decades of repression under Saddam's rule, are seeking to impose Islamic rule in the Shi'ite heartland of the south, closing alcohol shops, curtailing music and encouraging women to wear head scarves.
Vincent's murder has been linked to this new fundamentalism.
The Shi'ites can argue that all they are doing is following the example of the Kurds, who are demanding federalism to maintain control over the three northern provinces. The Kurds also want to expand their self-ruled region to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, from which thousands of Kurds were expelled by Saddam. This prospect of a Kurdish north, a Shia south, and a Sunni interior is frightening, say experts - as it would deprive Sunnis of almost all of Iraq's oil reserves, situated in the south and north.
Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says: "If Kurds continue to try to push Sunni Arabs off this land and claim the oil below it for themselves, they risk creating a precedent that could lead to a Sunni Arab ghetto within Iraq, deprived of oil or much fertile farmland. It would be a long-term source of instability. Whoever gets the land, the oil revenue should be shared."
The prospect of regional autonomy dismays the Sunnis, who fear being marginalised in the centre of Iraq. The consequences of that marginalisation are already being borne out. While they make up just 20% of the population they provide 90% of the insurgency's active fighters and most of its new recruits.
The fear is that if the Sunnis are further oppressed, their strongholds will become what Afghanistan was in the 1990s - a safe haven for jihadists, who will intensify their attacks on the Shi'ite-dominated security forces and mobilise against Kirkuk or other oil-rich sectors of the country.
Meanwhile, fears of a Shia 'theocracy' are also being expressed by women's rights campaigners. Women's groups had been invited to take part in drafting the constitution to try to stop religious Shi'ites proposing laws to extend the power of clerics over matters of family law.
"We're against federalism because we are against sharia. That is our fear," said Ghareba Ghareb of the Iraqi Women's Association.
They also want women to run at least 10 of Iraq's 30-odd government ministries, and the number of places reserved for women on party lists raised to 40% in future elections. Most of all, they want a promise of respect for women's rights.
But the Shi'ite leadership is relying on women to carry much of the fight over the role of Islam. The conservative cause is being led by women, who are members of the dominant Shi'ite alliance under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, who see the new constitution as an opportunity to bring Iraq's laws into harmony with Islam's version of divine law.
A compromise is now being drawn out. The negotiators agreed that Islam "would be a source of legislation" in the new nation, but that laws derived from other religions - as well as secular legislation - would carry weight, too.
But the deal could also have serious repercussions for Iraqi women. Among aspects of Islamic law that could be incorporated are provisions that would allow men as many as four wives and reduce the amount of money allotted to women in inheritances.
Even ardent supporters of the war in Britain and the US now concede that this prospect of a faction-ridden, semi-theocracy was not what hundreds of coalition troops died to create. And the strain in the US is now beginning to tell.
As Bush drove away from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Friday afternoon, he passed a protest of grieving, angry mothers who are demanding that the President meet them to explain his Iraq policies. The women are fast becoming the focal point of a nation's concerns and fears over a war that has dragged on longer, and cost more lives, than most Americans ever imagined would be possible.
In Washington, the question of whether the battle for Iraq has been lost is no longer confined to irredentist anti-war Democrats. According to Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official now working at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute: "The insurgency has gained momentum as a result of failed US policy and well-meaning but wrong-headed assumptions."
Rubin, who has spent more time outside Baghdad's "Green Zone" than the majority of US officials, worries that American policy in Iraq is "fatally flawed" and that the coalition's continuing presence, both military and civilian, may at best be a one step forwards, one step backwards problem, condemning Iraq to boundless insecurity. The disturbing question is, to which no one has a good answer, is the American presence in Iraq helping or hurting? Rubin says: "The progress evident in Baghdad - new stores, private banks, Internet cafes - is largely despite us rather than because of us."
Just 38% of the American public believes the President is doing a good job in Iraq and a new poll this week found that 56% of the electorate wanted some or all US troops to be brought home now. Support for the war is slipping away at home as the insurgency continues to rage, claiming more American lives, and US commanders appear unable to counter it effectively.
In Britain, the Foreign Office is resigned to the tightening grip of religious parties over Iraq's new civic apparatus - and the acceptance that ideas about equality and women's rights may be sacrificed in the bid for stability. William Patey, the UK's ambassador to Iraq, admits the world may well have to accept a theocratic state. "Having a democratic election in which you have theocracy is okay, as long as that can be changed and is not a once-and-for-all election," he said.
The war to topple Saddam was won long ago. But the dread question being asked across London and Washington now is: will what replaces him be any better?
This article:
http://www.scotsman.com/?id=1777462005 Tony Blair's leadership:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=926
How Can the US Ever Win, When Iraqi Children Die like This? By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
The Independent UK Saturday 13 August 2005
There's the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky. Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and - this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year - they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he's the one who still cannot believe his son is dead - or what the Americans told him afterwards.
"It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn't know what they'd done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends' mother, kept shouting in Arabic: "There is a boy under this vehicle."
According to Selim al-Sammerai, the Americans' first reaction was to put handcuffs on the two other boys. But a Lebanese Arabic interpreter working for the Americans arrived to explain that it was all a mistake. "We don't have anything against you," she said. The Americans produced a laminated paper in English and Arabic entitled "Iraqi Claims Pocket Card" which tells them how to claim compensation.
The unit whose Bradley drove over Yassin is listed as "256 BCT A/156 AR, Mortars". Under "Type of Incident", an American had written: "Raid destroyed gate and doors." No one told the family there had been a raid. And nowhere - but nowhere - on the form does it suggest that the "raid" destroyed the life of the football-loving Yassin al-Sammerai.
Inside Yassin's father's home yesterday, Selim shakes with anger and then weeps softly, wiping his eyes. "He is surely in heaven," one of his surviving seven sons replies. And the old man looks at me and says: "He liked swimming too. "
A former technical manager at the Baghdad University college of arts, Selim is now just a shadow. He is half bent over on his seat, his face sallow and his cheeks drawn in. This is a Sunni household in a Sunni area. This is "insurgent country" for the Americans, which is why they crash into these narrow streets at night. Several days ago, a collaborator gave away the location of a group of Sunni guerrillas and US troops surrounded the house. A two-hour gun-battle followed until an Apache helicopter came barrelling out of the darkness and dropped a bomb on the building, killing all inside.
There is much muttering around the room about the Americans and the West and I pick up on this quickly and say how grateful I am that they have let a Westerner come to their home after what has happened. Selim turns and shakes me by the hand. "You are welcome here," he says. "Please tell people what happened to us." Outside, my driver is watching the road; it's the usual story. Any car with three men inside or a man with a mobile phone means "get out". The sun bakes down. It is a Friday. "These guys take Fridays off," the driver offers by way of confidence.
"The Americans came back with an officer two days later," Selim al-Sammerai continues. "They offered us compensation. I refused. I lost my son, I told the officer. 'I don't want the money - I don't think the money will bring back my son.' That's what I told the American." There is a long silence in the room. But Selim, who is still crying, insists on speaking again.
"I told the American officer: 'You have killed the innocent and such things will lead the people to destroy you and the people will make a revolution against you. You said you had come to liberate us from the previous regime. But you are destroying our walls and doors.'"
I suddenly realise that Selim al-Sammerai has straightened up on his seat and his voice is rising in strength. "Do you know what the American said to me? He said, 'This is fate.' I looked at him and I said, 'I am very faithful in the fate of God - but not in the fate of which you speak.'"
Then one of Yassin's brothers says that he took a photograph of the dead boy as he lay on the ground, a picture taken on his mobile phone, and he printed a picture of it and when the Americans returned on the second day they asked to see it. "They asked me why I had taken the picture and I said it was so people here could see what the Americans had done to my brother. They asked if they could borrow it and bring it back. I gave it to them but they didn't bring it back. But I still kept the image on my mobile and I was able to print another." And suddenly it is in my hands, an obscene and terrible snapshot of Yassin's head crushed flat as if an elephant had stood upon it, blood pouring from what had been the back of his brains. "So now, you see," the brother explains, "the people can still see what the Americans have done."
In the heat, we slunk out of al-Jamia yesterday, the place of insurgents and Americans and grief and revenge. "When the car bomb blew up over there," my driver says, "the US Humvees went on burning for three hours and the bodies were still there. The Americans took three hours to reach them. Al the people gathered round and watched." And I look at the carbonised car that still lies on the road and realise it has now become a little icon of resistance. How, I ask myself again, can the Americans ever win?
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** This poignant article was re-posted from
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081305D.shtml (t r u t h o u t)
THE "FREE" PRESS - John Swinton's 'toast' before the New York Press Club
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I just came across this 'gem' and had to share it with my readers. Kudos to John Swinton for having the courage to tell it like it is. ---- Annamarie THE "FREE" PRESS
John Swinton, former Chief of Staff for the prestigious New York Times, called by his peers, "The Dean of his profession" was asked to give a toast before the New York Press Club.Swinton responded with this statement:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it! There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print."
"I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job!"
"If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread! You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting to an independent press?" "We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes.
"We are the jumping jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes!"
Reference:
http://www.vialls.com/archives/freepress.html
