John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, has imposed strict safeguards intended to ensure that the government's National Intelligence Estimates are based on credible information instead of the kinds of unsubstantiated claims that were the basis for prewar intelligence on Iraq, his top deputy said Thursday.
The deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, made clear that the change should be seen as a response to the intelligence failures on Iraq, most notably the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 that asserted that the Iraqis had chemical and biological weapons and were rebuilding their nuclear program. Those assertions were proved wrong, and a presidential commission said in March that the fault lay in part with failures by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and others to validate the reliability of their sources and to share their doubts with others.
General Hayden, testifying before a House Intelligence subcommittee, said the change was intended to give new, critical scrutiny to both human and technical intelligence, including reports from agents, satellite photographs and intercepted communications. Among the focuses, he said, will be "who said what, why, and why do we think this is true?"
The above is from Douglas Jehl's "Top Spy's No. 2 Tells of Changes to Avoid Error" in this morning's New York Times which wants desperately to be a news article but reads like instructions to a board game and counts that you share the Times' ability to forget Negropante's past as well as dispense with common sense.
The point of noting it is that when even Jehl's writing can't be mined for some gold, you know the New York Timid has had an off day (even for the Timid). Jehl's not fluffing, but he is left with providing minutes.
Fluffing comes via Elisabeth Bumiller's "U.N. Nominee Omitted Data at Hearings in the Senate."
Who but the Elite Fluff Patrol squad leader could file a piece where Bolton offers the John Roberts' excuse I-didn't-lie-or-obscure-I-just forgot. From the article:
"When Mr. Bolton completed his forms for the Senate he did not recall being interviewed by the inspector general," Mr. McCormack said in a telephone interview Thursday. Mr. McCormack reiterated that Mr. Bolton had not been questioned by the grand jury in the leak investigation.
The latest disclosure about Mr. Bolton came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strongly hinted that President Bush would bypass the Senate when Congress adjourns this weekend and temporarily appoint Mr. Bolton to the United Nations post. Another Republican official said Mr. Bush could name Mr. Bolton as early as next week, but the official would not let his name be used as the decision is Mr. Bush's.
When Condi's ready to rumble, Bumiller's ready to do her part. ("Minimization" is the only term for Bumiller's article.)
The print version of "I.R.A. Renounces Use of Violence; Vows to Disarm" tones down the rhetoric of an earlier draft that appeared online yesterday. (For instance the "organized crime" pull quote Krista and Eli both noted appears to be gone.) Eli's point about reporting on the mood in America from . . . England and Ireland does stand, however. It's apparently true because Brian Lavery and Alan Cowell (our man in London who could have pushed for coverage of the Downing Street Memo but didn't -- he apparently only wakes up when the issue is Ireland) say it's true. Eli's point about innuendo is still valid (Gerry Adams! Apparent I.R.A. commander! An allegation that doesn't appear in the BBC coverage, for instance). The insulting oversimplification of the historical conflict has been pulled from this version. But they haven't added one word about last week's attacks on Catholic Churches. No real surprise there. The Times long ago decided that the conflict was one-sided and you were engaging on one side or the other apparently.
We'll note developments in an issue that Elaine's been covering, Kevin Benderman's case. In the Times, Shaila Dewan has "Army Mechanic Is Acquitted on Desertion Charge:"
An Army mechanic who did not return to Iraq with his unit, saying he was opposed to war after seeing it firsthand, was acquitted yesterday of desertion, but convicted of a lesser charge of purposely missing his unit's deployment.
The mechanic, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, had applied for conscientious-objector status 11 days before his unit, the Third Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, Ga., went to Iraq on Jan. 8.
[. . .]
When threatened with a court-martial in January, Sergeant Benderman continued to show up for work at the base. He also spoke publicly about his change of opinion on war, saying that during his first tour in Iraq in 2003 he had seen officers refusing treatment to a burned girl and dogs eating corpses at mass graves.
You can visit the BendermanDefense.org for more coverage and I'm sure Elaine will be addressing it this evening.
We'll let Erika have the last word on the Times today, "A complete waste of time and tree."
On Democracy Now! today, the planned topics are:
* The White House releases thousands of pages of documents stemming from Supreme Court justice nominee John Roberts' service as an attorney for the Reagan administration. We'll speak with Ralph Neas of People for the American Way.
* Congress narrowly approves he Central American Free Trade Agreement by a 217-215 vote in the House. We'll get reaction.
* The Irish Republican Army orders an end to its armed campaign. We'll speakwith journalist Ed Moloney, author of "The Secret History of the IRA"
And we'll close by noting that BuzzFlash has picked the latest "winner" for their GOP Hypocrite of the Week. (We'll note this again, this afternoon.)
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Indymedia roundup
From Elaine and Ciaran on the newswire: The point blank killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the lack of charging or even suspension of those who killed him (1 shot to the shoulder, 7 to the head) and the New Labour rationalizations that lay a basis for more of these killings to come redefine what is considered as acceptable collateral damage in this war. Blair has decided that these Judge Dredd scenes are part of the price 'we' are willing to pay for his war on Iraq. Meanwhile, the Ahern led government has made us morally culpable in the indiscriminate killings in the U.S invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan and have of course transformed Shannon Airport, hosting 25,000 U.S. troops a month, into a soft and significant target.
The above is 1's "Remembering Jean Charles De Menezes And Ireland's Role In Unleashing Terror on Iraq" (Ireland's IMC) and was e-mailed by Lloyd.
Rita alerts us to William Hughes' "Did the Bishops Make 'A Devil's Pact' for Anti-Choice Judge?" (Baltimore Indymedia):
During the very close 2004 presidential election, the Catholic Bishops did everything but officially endorse the ultra-War Hawk, George W. Bush, Jr. I suspect, but I can't prove, that "a devil's pact" was hatched between the clerics and the Bush-Cheney Gang. The clerics would push for Bush's victory and he would oppose abortions and appoint an anti-choice judge to the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. Is John G. Roberts, Jr. that jurist?
[. . .]
Here is some background: On Aug. 3, 2004, only months before the presidential general election, the Knights of Columbus, (K of C), a Roman Catholic organization, held its annual convention in Dallas, Texas. (3) Despite the fact it is supposed to be a nonpolitical group, the guest speaker was none other than President George W. Bush, Jr., a candidate for reelection, who is also anti-abortion. He was then in a very tight race with the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, who was pro-choice on the abortion question. Many of the leading Catholic Bishops and Cardinals throughout the country showed up in Dallas to "bless" Bush at that event. Some had even spoken out before the Convention about denying Holy Communion to Kerry because of his liberal position on abortion. Oh, by the way, Texas is also the home base of Bush's chief of staff, and reputed brain, Karl Rove! Right after the K of C event, and only days before the Nov. 2nd election, on Oct. 21, 2004, another important political signal was sent to the Catholic community in America. Philadelphia's Cardinal Justin Rigali, a very influential prelate, met personally with Bush for a photo op in a church rectory, in Downingtown, PA. On Oct. 3, 2004, that same Cardinal Rigali had given a homily, which some observers read as a ringing endorsement of Bush’s candidacy. It was distributed to 1.5 million Catholics in the Philadelphia area. (4)
At that time, I remember raising this question: "Is the Church's silence on the Iraqi War a quid pro quo with the Bush-Cheney Gang for its pushing the Vatican's anti-abortion agenda?" At the K of C Convention, Bush announced to wild cheers from the gleeful prelates, that "religious organizations would receive part of $188 million in government grants this year for social service programs, the centerpiece of a White House 'faith-based' initiative." (5)
Levi e-mails to note Bruce's "Black Box Voting Board Member Arrested in San Diego" (San Diego Indymedia) (which appears to be a carry over from Black Box Voting):
Jim March, a member of the Black Box Voting board of directors, was arrested Tuesday evening for trying to observe the Diebold central tabulator (vote tallying machine) as the votes were being counted in San Diego's mayoral election (July 26). (- online discussion: http:/www.blackboxvoting.org -)
According to Jim Hamilton, an elections integrity advocate from San Diego, he and March visited the office of the registrar of elections earlier in the day. During this visit, March made two requests, which were refused by Mikel Haas, the San Diego Registrar of elections. 1) March asked that the central tabulator, the computer that tallies up the votes from all the precincts, be positioned so that citizens could observe it.
According to Hamilton, this would have required simply moving a table a few feet. 2) March also asked for a copy of the ".gbf" files -- the vote tally files collected during the course of tabulation ? to be provided for examination after the election. During the tallying of the election, the Diebold computer was positioned too far away for citizens to read the screen. Citizens could not watch error messages, or even perceive significant anomalies or malfunctions.
Unable to see the screen, March went into the office where the tabulator was housed. Two deputies followed him and escorted him out.
According to Hamilton: "He was not belligerent, not at all. After he went inside the tabulator room he came [was escorted] out and he said clearly 'I'm not resisting.' They handcuffed him, took him out of the building. They put him in a squad car. They're going to take him to the police station, book him and take him to jail," said Hamilton. "He's getting charged with a felony, 'interfering with an election official.'"
At Black Box Voting, Jim March offers more in "In His Own Words: Jim March on taking back his civil rights:"
"Arright. There’s been a LOT of discussion of this and it’s time I spoke up for myself...The CORE reason for doing this is to establish our civil right to observe elections. Right now a lot of county election officials in California and across America don’t believe in that right; they are dead set on taking it away from us piece by piece as elections become electronic and increasingly “automated” – and you can take that last term as meaning “in the control of the vendors”... I’ve said it to Diebold, I’ll say it to these clowns: bring it on. You picked this fight, not me. You don’t trample my civil rights without consequences. ...The real trick will be to try and make those consequences happen before November, establishing the principle of open access to this stuff statewide.
Gareth e-mails to note Scotland IMC's "Carnival for Full Enjoyment - What Really Happened:"
Edinburgh's Carnival For Full Enjoyment was roundly condemned by the police, Edinburgh City Council and the mass media. But what was this anti G8 action really about? And what really happened on the capital's streets on 4th July? Here for the first time the Carnivalistas give their own account of the day....
The Carnival for Full Enjoyment writes:
"The Carnival for Full Enjoyment took over the streets of central Edinburgh on 4th July. Despite a level of police violence rarely seen at demonstrations in Scotland, Princes Street - the capital's main street - was occupied and closed for the whole afternoon and till late in the evening. A significant number of local people were involved along with internationals.
"Despite heavy-handed police action, the day was an impressive show of what people can do to take back the streets."
The aim of the day was to encourage resistance to wage slavery, benefits slavery, debt slavery and army slavery. "This is a chance to link everyday struggles against the bosses and politicians here in Scotland with the struggles of working class people throughout the world. Let's tell the G8 and all rich bloodsuckers: we owe you nothing. You owe US. You have stolen the whole world from us. Now we are organising to take it back."
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
__________________________________________________
The above is 1's "Remembering Jean Charles De Menezes And Ireland's Role In Unleashing Terror on Iraq" (Ireland's IMC) and was e-mailed by Lloyd.
Rita alerts us to William Hughes' "Did the Bishops Make 'A Devil's Pact' for Anti-Choice Judge?" (Baltimore Indymedia):
During the very close 2004 presidential election, the Catholic Bishops did everything but officially endorse the ultra-War Hawk, George W. Bush, Jr. I suspect, but I can't prove, that "a devil's pact" was hatched between the clerics and the Bush-Cheney Gang. The clerics would push for Bush's victory and he would oppose abortions and appoint an anti-choice judge to the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. Is John G. Roberts, Jr. that jurist?
[. . .]
Here is some background: On Aug. 3, 2004, only months before the presidential general election, the Knights of Columbus, (K of C), a Roman Catholic organization, held its annual convention in Dallas, Texas. (3) Despite the fact it is supposed to be a nonpolitical group, the guest speaker was none other than President George W. Bush, Jr., a candidate for reelection, who is also anti-abortion. He was then in a very tight race with the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, who was pro-choice on the abortion question. Many of the leading Catholic Bishops and Cardinals throughout the country showed up in Dallas to "bless" Bush at that event. Some had even spoken out before the Convention about denying Holy Communion to Kerry because of his liberal position on abortion. Oh, by the way, Texas is also the home base of Bush's chief of staff, and reputed brain, Karl Rove! Right after the K of C event, and only days before the Nov. 2nd election, on Oct. 21, 2004, another important political signal was sent to the Catholic community in America. Philadelphia's Cardinal Justin Rigali, a very influential prelate, met personally with Bush for a photo op in a church rectory, in Downingtown, PA. On Oct. 3, 2004, that same Cardinal Rigali had given a homily, which some observers read as a ringing endorsement of Bush’s candidacy. It was distributed to 1.5 million Catholics in the Philadelphia area. (4)
At that time, I remember raising this question: "Is the Church's silence on the Iraqi War a quid pro quo with the Bush-Cheney Gang for its pushing the Vatican's anti-abortion agenda?" At the K of C Convention, Bush announced to wild cheers from the gleeful prelates, that "religious organizations would receive part of $188 million in government grants this year for social service programs, the centerpiece of a White House 'faith-based' initiative." (5)
Levi e-mails to note Bruce's "Black Box Voting Board Member Arrested in San Diego" (San Diego Indymedia) (which appears to be a carry over from Black Box Voting):
Jim March, a member of the Black Box Voting board of directors, was arrested Tuesday evening for trying to observe the Diebold central tabulator (vote tallying machine) as the votes were being counted in San Diego's mayoral election (July 26). (- online discussion: http:/www.blackboxvoting.org -)
According to Jim Hamilton, an elections integrity advocate from San Diego, he and March visited the office of the registrar of elections earlier in the day. During this visit, March made two requests, which were refused by Mikel Haas, the San Diego Registrar of elections. 1) March asked that the central tabulator, the computer that tallies up the votes from all the precincts, be positioned so that citizens could observe it.
According to Hamilton, this would have required simply moving a table a few feet. 2) March also asked for a copy of the ".gbf" files -- the vote tally files collected during the course of tabulation ? to be provided for examination after the election. During the tallying of the election, the Diebold computer was positioned too far away for citizens to read the screen. Citizens could not watch error messages, or even perceive significant anomalies or malfunctions.
Unable to see the screen, March went into the office where the tabulator was housed. Two deputies followed him and escorted him out.
According to Hamilton: "He was not belligerent, not at all. After he went inside the tabulator room he came [was escorted] out and he said clearly 'I'm not resisting.' They handcuffed him, took him out of the building. They put him in a squad car. They're going to take him to the police station, book him and take him to jail," said Hamilton. "He's getting charged with a felony, 'interfering with an election official.'"
At Black Box Voting, Jim March offers more in "In His Own Words: Jim March on taking back his civil rights:"
"Arright. There’s been a LOT of discussion of this and it’s time I spoke up for myself...The CORE reason for doing this is to establish our civil right to observe elections. Right now a lot of county election officials in California and across America don’t believe in that right; they are dead set on taking it away from us piece by piece as elections become electronic and increasingly “automated” – and you can take that last term as meaning “in the control of the vendors”... I’ve said it to Diebold, I’ll say it to these clowns: bring it on. You picked this fight, not me. You don’t trample my civil rights without consequences. ...The real trick will be to try and make those consequences happen before November, establishing the principle of open access to this stuff statewide.
Gareth e-mails to note Scotland IMC's "Carnival for Full Enjoyment - What Really Happened:"
Edinburgh's Carnival For Full Enjoyment was roundly condemned by the police, Edinburgh City Council and the mass media. But what was this anti G8 action really about? And what really happened on the capital's streets on 4th July? Here for the first time the Carnivalistas give their own account of the day....
The Carnival for Full Enjoyment writes:
"The Carnival for Full Enjoyment took over the streets of central Edinburgh on 4th July. Despite a level of police violence rarely seen at demonstrations in Scotland, Princes Street - the capital's main street - was occupied and closed for the whole afternoon and till late in the evening. A significant number of local people were involved along with internationals.
"Despite heavy-handed police action, the day was an impressive show of what people can do to take back the streets."
The aim of the day was to encourage resistance to wage slavery, benefits slavery, debt slavery and army slavery. "This is a chance to link everyday struggles against the bosses and politicians here in Scotland with the struggles of working class people throughout the world. Let's tell the G8 and all rich bloodsuckers: we owe you nothing. You owe US. You have stolen the whole world from us. Now we are organising to take it back."
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
__________________________________________________
Indymedia focus on Iraq
Thunder rumbles over Fort Carson as Pamela Knott weeps inside the Army base's chapel. Minutes later, she tells television and newspaper reporters that the pouring rain soothed her during the memorial service for her son, Pfc. Joseph Knott, who was killed by a remote-controlled explosive device while on patrol in Iraq.
Journalists hover, adjusting cameras and scrawling in notebooks, asking the same questions and getting the same sorrowful responses, again and again and again.
With the war unofficially entering its 29th month -- though President George W. Bush was seen under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" more than 26 months ago -- almost 1,780 American troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Of those, 121 have been memorialized on the base in southeastern Colorado Springs.
The Knotts, whose son was memorialized with three other soldiers on May 24, say Joseph's death is part of the big price Americans must pay to bring freedom to a people oppressed by former dictator Saddam Hussein. Pamela Knott says her son helped make the United States safer.
Not everyone feels this way. A June Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans think the war isn't worthwhile. It's the lowest level of support since the war's start in March 2003. In another poll, 52 percent of respondents said they believe the world has become less secure because of the war, which Bush maintains is a major and inexorable component of the nation's broader fight against terrorism.
Embedded deep in such polls is an indefinable malaise, where Americans somehow have become numb to the great human suffering taking place in Iraq, says Robert Schulzinger, professor of history and director of international affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"I'm only speculating, but I wonder if people are not talking much about the war out of some kind of embarrassment for thinking they were wrong," he says. "They're now changing their minds. They're now thinking it wasn't worth it. They're now discouraged."
The above, e-mailed by Brandon, is from Michael de Yoanna's "Paying the Price: As soldiers are buried, America tunes out" (The Colorado Springs Independent).
It's early Friday morning and we're doing the Indymedia roundup with my apologies to everyone for the delay. I got home late, got off the phone with Elaine a little while later and thought I was just resting my eyes but ended up falling into a deep sleep.
We're pulling from the Indymedia items members sent on Iraq for this entry.
Lori e-mails, from The Boulder Weekly, Doug Monroe's "Liars, Liars" which also has to do with Iraq:
Much attention is focused now on the Downing Street memo, the leaked British document that suggests President Bush and his administration tailored intelligence to support his decision to attack Iraq.
The memo--despite being ignored for nearly six weeks by much of the American media, which dealt instead with Duluth's runaway bride and Michael Jackson's acquittal--has bubbled up through the Internet and into Congress. It's helping Americans see how Bush and his administration fabricated the reasons they publicly gave for war against Saddam Hussein.
But 5th District Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., didn't need the British memo. He began asking questions about the origins of the war during Bush's first term. In fact, he believes Bush decided to go to war with Iraq before he even moved into the White House.
A member of the new Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, Lewis recently told a group of senior Democratic House leaders, "It was time for us to break our silence. We had been too silent."
In a telephone interview, Lewis said, "We've been very frustrated with the administration not giving us a timetable about getting out, and we continue to lose so many of our young men and young women." At a Democratic House leadership luncheon in Washington last week, he said, "We need to organize and start speaking up and speaking out to stop this madness."
Lewis' doubts about the Iraq adventure go back to the beginning, when the administration was saying it had made no decision about going to war in Iraq. Regarding a briefing with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, Lewis said, "I asked her point-blank in a Democratic caucus meeting whether the decision had been made to go to war --whether there had been a meeting with her, along with President Bush, [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and others--and she denied it. But apparently, even before [Bush] took office, there was some conscious decision that they would have a war with Iraq and they would find the necessary means and message to justify it.
Portland e-mails to note Brian Bogart's "America Programmed for War: The Long War: from NSC68 to 2005" (Eugene Weekly):
A single policy decision made in secluded chambers of the White House shortly after World War II explains why our financial and intellectual creativity focuses on lethal technologies, why 51 percent of our taxes go to defense and less than 5 percent go to education, why there are 6,000 military bases in the U.S. and 1,000 U.S. bases overseas, why comprehensive agendas support warfighting and weak agendas address human services and the environment, and why our top industry since 1950 remains the manufacture and sale of weapons.
Our dilemma stems from the postwar adoption of a military-based rather than a people-based economy. This policy, authored by Wall Street's Paul Nitze, is embodied in NSC68, a document signed by President Truman in 1950. Along with then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Nitze convinced -- some say coerced -- Truman into recognizing the Soviet Union as an evil and imminent threat, and into adopting NSC68 and launching the Cold War.
Assessing key indicators in 1947 and '48, Truman's advisors acutely feared an economic collapse back into the Depression, and, as Noam Chomsky points out, there was scant debate among them: "It wasn't really a debate because it was settled before it started, but the issue was at least raised -- should the government pursue military spending or social spending?"
All U.S. military actions from 1950 to 2005 flow from this decision, made without the consent of the American people. There is no fundamental difference between the Cold War and today's so-called permanent war on terror -- perfect fuel for our military-based economy. For 55 years, America has been waging a crime against humanity, a crime for profiteers. I call it the Long War because "permanent" is defeatist.
As satellite photos and extensive post-Cold War interviews have revealed (including interviews with Acheson, Nitze, and Paul Wolfowitz, our current Deputy Secretary of Defense), no Soviet threat existed in 1950. NSC68 was a for-profit ploy. Paul Wolfowitz cites Nitze and Acheson among his role models [. . .]
Erika e-mails to note, from the Philadelphia City Paper, Brian Hickey's "Ms. deYoung Goes to Washington: A Philly native wants Americans to realize how wasting Billions in Iraq is ruining our lives at home:"
Chances are you've heard very little about [Marie] deYoung, or her cause. There's a reason for that: She and her fellow advocates -- namely U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and the rest of the Democratic Party -- have found themselves howling into the winds of war when they call for fiscal accountability in Iraq.
In short, they believe the powers-that-be have ignored the skyrocketing costs involved and, thanks to that lack of oversight, Halliburton, the Texas-based defense contractor that provides support services to soldiers in the field, has delivered bills containing more than $1.4 billion in "questioned" and "unsupported" charges.
Critics have focused on how Halliburton, through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), has received billions in "cost-plus" contracts. (KBR is an engineering and construction firm; Halliburton is its parent company. As such, what KBR earns, Halliburton earns.) In a cost-plus contract, a company gets paid for the work it does and also receives an additional bonus percentage based on the amount of money it spends. Such an arrangement, critics claim, is tailor-made for abuse; the more a company bills, the bigger the bonus check.
[. . .]
If what deYoung claims is true -- and she dutifully and exhaustively provides evidence to back up every claim from her five months working as an $8,800-a-month KBR subcontracts administrator -- we all should be furious.
The money deYoung says has been wasted would cover, for example, most of the cash-strapped Philadelphia School District's $1.9 billion budget for 2006, educating more than 200,000 students in more than 270 schools.
That cash could also have purchased life-saving body armor for soldiers who've come home maimed or dead. Instead, it's been spent on $85,000 SUVs that are abandoned in the desert when they get flat tires.
It funded the 100 KBR workers who partied at luaus -- one, in the wake of the 2004 Good Friday convoy attacks that left several KBR workers dead -- and dipped their feet in the "uniquely unpolluted azure waters" of the $10,000-a-night hotel they leased in Kuwait while soldiers huddled in $139 tents during sandstorms.
Now whistleblower deYoung wants to know what taxpayers would think if they knew their tax money allows Halliburton to charge $45 for a case of soda and $100 for a 15-pound bag of laundry. Or that these controversy magnets are reaping billions in profits while soldiers are forced to eat meals that, if they're not a year past their expiration dates, are accented with the delicious seasoning of bullets and shrapnel.
Kayla e-mails to steer us to Douglas Nelson's "Local Peace Groups Meet on Depleted Uranium Munitions" (DC Indymedia):
Representatives from local peace groups and concerned citizens met to view a German film, "The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium and the Dying Children" Sunday, July 17 in Takoma Park, MD. The DC and northern VA chapter ofVeterans for Peace sponsored the event. DC Antiwar Network, Code Pink, Military Families Speak Out, several DC and MD based labor groups and various local organizations were represented.
This film, a German public television documentary, follows the work of Dr. Siegwart Horst-Gunther, who first demonstrated hard evidence of US and allies use of Depleted Uranium (DU) during the 1991 Gulf War and today. "The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children" documents uranium contamination in Iraq following aerial bombardment and armored tank assaults by U.S. and allied forces. The story is told by citizens of many nations and opens with comments by two British vets, Kenny Duncan and Jenny Moore, describing their exposure to radioactive, so-called 'depleted' uranium (DU), weapons and the congenital abnormalities of their children.
Dr. Siegwart-Horst Günther, a former colleague of Albert Schweitzer, andTedd Weyman of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) traveled to Iraq, from Germany and Canada respectively, to assess uranium contamination inIraq. As an M.D., Dr. Günther is especially interested in the health effects that can be caused by such contamination. Dr. Jenan Hassan brought Dr. Günther and the film-makers through the Mother and Children's Hospital inBasra. Over 300 tons of uranium weapons were used by coalition forces in 1991 during Gulf War I, and some of the heaviest use was in Basra, in southern Iraq. There we glimpse an on-going health catastrophe--a ten-fold increase in cancers and a twenty-fold increase in congenital deformities.
Throughout his travels, Tedd Weyman regularly took Geiger-counter readings and soil and water samples for laboratory analysis. As well as a bombed television station, and areas where tanks shelled buildings and vehicles, Weyman visited city streets and scrap yards where children played on the remains of destroyed vehicles.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
Journalists hover, adjusting cameras and scrawling in notebooks, asking the same questions and getting the same sorrowful responses, again and again and again.
With the war unofficially entering its 29th month -- though President George W. Bush was seen under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" more than 26 months ago -- almost 1,780 American troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Of those, 121 have been memorialized on the base in southeastern Colorado Springs.
The Knotts, whose son was memorialized with three other soldiers on May 24, say Joseph's death is part of the big price Americans must pay to bring freedom to a people oppressed by former dictator Saddam Hussein. Pamela Knott says her son helped make the United States safer.
Not everyone feels this way. A June Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans think the war isn't worthwhile. It's the lowest level of support since the war's start in March 2003. In another poll, 52 percent of respondents said they believe the world has become less secure because of the war, which Bush maintains is a major and inexorable component of the nation's broader fight against terrorism.
Embedded deep in such polls is an indefinable malaise, where Americans somehow have become numb to the great human suffering taking place in Iraq, says Robert Schulzinger, professor of history and director of international affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"I'm only speculating, but I wonder if people are not talking much about the war out of some kind of embarrassment for thinking they were wrong," he says. "They're now changing their minds. They're now thinking it wasn't worth it. They're now discouraged."
The above, e-mailed by Brandon, is from Michael de Yoanna's "Paying the Price: As soldiers are buried, America tunes out" (The Colorado Springs Independent).
It's early Friday morning and we're doing the Indymedia roundup with my apologies to everyone for the delay. I got home late, got off the phone with Elaine a little while later and thought I was just resting my eyes but ended up falling into a deep sleep.
We're pulling from the Indymedia items members sent on Iraq for this entry.
Lori e-mails, from The Boulder Weekly, Doug Monroe's "Liars, Liars" which also has to do with Iraq:
Much attention is focused now on the Downing Street memo, the leaked British document that suggests President Bush and his administration tailored intelligence to support his decision to attack Iraq.
The memo--despite being ignored for nearly six weeks by much of the American media, which dealt instead with Duluth's runaway bride and Michael Jackson's acquittal--has bubbled up through the Internet and into Congress. It's helping Americans see how Bush and his administration fabricated the reasons they publicly gave for war against Saddam Hussein.
But 5th District Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., didn't need the British memo. He began asking questions about the origins of the war during Bush's first term. In fact, he believes Bush decided to go to war with Iraq before he even moved into the White House.
A member of the new Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, Lewis recently told a group of senior Democratic House leaders, "It was time for us to break our silence. We had been too silent."
In a telephone interview, Lewis said, "We've been very frustrated with the administration not giving us a timetable about getting out, and we continue to lose so many of our young men and young women." At a Democratic House leadership luncheon in Washington last week, he said, "We need to organize and start speaking up and speaking out to stop this madness."
Lewis' doubts about the Iraq adventure go back to the beginning, when the administration was saying it had made no decision about going to war in Iraq. Regarding a briefing with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, Lewis said, "I asked her point-blank in a Democratic caucus meeting whether the decision had been made to go to war --whether there had been a meeting with her, along with President Bush, [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and others--and she denied it. But apparently, even before [Bush] took office, there was some conscious decision that they would have a war with Iraq and they would find the necessary means and message to justify it.
Portland e-mails to note Brian Bogart's "America Programmed for War: The Long War: from NSC68 to 2005" (Eugene Weekly):
A single policy decision made in secluded chambers of the White House shortly after World War II explains why our financial and intellectual creativity focuses on lethal technologies, why 51 percent of our taxes go to defense and less than 5 percent go to education, why there are 6,000 military bases in the U.S. and 1,000 U.S. bases overseas, why comprehensive agendas support warfighting and weak agendas address human services and the environment, and why our top industry since 1950 remains the manufacture and sale of weapons.
Our dilemma stems from the postwar adoption of a military-based rather than a people-based economy. This policy, authored by Wall Street's Paul Nitze, is embodied in NSC68, a document signed by President Truman in 1950. Along with then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Nitze convinced -- some say coerced -- Truman into recognizing the Soviet Union as an evil and imminent threat, and into adopting NSC68 and launching the Cold War.
Assessing key indicators in 1947 and '48, Truman's advisors acutely feared an economic collapse back into the Depression, and, as Noam Chomsky points out, there was scant debate among them: "It wasn't really a debate because it was settled before it started, but the issue was at least raised -- should the government pursue military spending or social spending?"
All U.S. military actions from 1950 to 2005 flow from this decision, made without the consent of the American people. There is no fundamental difference between the Cold War and today's so-called permanent war on terror -- perfect fuel for our military-based economy. For 55 years, America has been waging a crime against humanity, a crime for profiteers. I call it the Long War because "permanent" is defeatist.
As satellite photos and extensive post-Cold War interviews have revealed (including interviews with Acheson, Nitze, and Paul Wolfowitz, our current Deputy Secretary of Defense), no Soviet threat existed in 1950. NSC68 was a for-profit ploy. Paul Wolfowitz cites Nitze and Acheson among his role models [. . .]
Erika e-mails to note, from the Philadelphia City Paper, Brian Hickey's "Ms. deYoung Goes to Washington: A Philly native wants Americans to realize how wasting Billions in Iraq is ruining our lives at home:"
Chances are you've heard very little about [Marie] deYoung, or her cause. There's a reason for that: She and her fellow advocates -- namely U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and the rest of the Democratic Party -- have found themselves howling into the winds of war when they call for fiscal accountability in Iraq.
In short, they believe the powers-that-be have ignored the skyrocketing costs involved and, thanks to that lack of oversight, Halliburton, the Texas-based defense contractor that provides support services to soldiers in the field, has delivered bills containing more than $1.4 billion in "questioned" and "unsupported" charges.
Critics have focused on how Halliburton, through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), has received billions in "cost-plus" contracts. (KBR is an engineering and construction firm; Halliburton is its parent company. As such, what KBR earns, Halliburton earns.) In a cost-plus contract, a company gets paid for the work it does and also receives an additional bonus percentage based on the amount of money it spends. Such an arrangement, critics claim, is tailor-made for abuse; the more a company bills, the bigger the bonus check.
[. . .]
If what deYoung claims is true -- and she dutifully and exhaustively provides evidence to back up every claim from her five months working as an $8,800-a-month KBR subcontracts administrator -- we all should be furious.
The money deYoung says has been wasted would cover, for example, most of the cash-strapped Philadelphia School District's $1.9 billion budget for 2006, educating more than 200,000 students in more than 270 schools.
That cash could also have purchased life-saving body armor for soldiers who've come home maimed or dead. Instead, it's been spent on $85,000 SUVs that are abandoned in the desert when they get flat tires.
It funded the 100 KBR workers who partied at luaus -- one, in the wake of the 2004 Good Friday convoy attacks that left several KBR workers dead -- and dipped their feet in the "uniquely unpolluted azure waters" of the $10,000-a-night hotel they leased in Kuwait while soldiers huddled in $139 tents during sandstorms.
Now whistleblower deYoung wants to know what taxpayers would think if they knew their tax money allows Halliburton to charge $45 for a case of soda and $100 for a 15-pound bag of laundry. Or that these controversy magnets are reaping billions in profits while soldiers are forced to eat meals that, if they're not a year past their expiration dates, are accented with the delicious seasoning of bullets and shrapnel.
Kayla e-mails to steer us to Douglas Nelson's "Local Peace Groups Meet on Depleted Uranium Munitions" (DC Indymedia):
Representatives from local peace groups and concerned citizens met to view a German film, "The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium and the Dying Children" Sunday, July 17 in Takoma Park, MD. The DC and northern VA chapter ofVeterans for Peace sponsored the event. DC Antiwar Network, Code Pink, Military Families Speak Out, several DC and MD based labor groups and various local organizations were represented.
This film, a German public television documentary, follows the work of Dr. Siegwart Horst-Gunther, who first demonstrated hard evidence of US and allies use of Depleted Uranium (DU) during the 1991 Gulf War and today. "The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children" documents uranium contamination in Iraq following aerial bombardment and armored tank assaults by U.S. and allied forces. The story is told by citizens of many nations and opens with comments by two British vets, Kenny Duncan and Jenny Moore, describing their exposure to radioactive, so-called 'depleted' uranium (DU), weapons and the congenital abnormalities of their children.
Dr. Siegwart-Horst Günther, a former colleague of Albert Schweitzer, andTedd Weyman of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) traveled to Iraq, from Germany and Canada respectively, to assess uranium contamination inIraq. As an M.D., Dr. Günther is especially interested in the health effects that can be caused by such contamination. Dr. Jenan Hassan brought Dr. Günther and the film-makers through the Mother and Children's Hospital inBasra. Over 300 tons of uranium weapons were used by coalition forces in 1991 during Gulf War I, and some of the heaviest use was in Basra, in southern Iraq. There we glimpse an on-going health catastrophe--a ten-fold increase in cancers and a twenty-fold increase in congenital deformities.
Throughout his travels, Tedd Weyman regularly took Geiger-counter readings and soil and water samples for laboratory analysis. As well as a bombed television station, and areas where tanks shelled buildings and vehicles, Weyman visited city streets and scrap yards where children played on the remains of destroyed vehicles.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)