posted on February 2, 2004 07:47:58 AM new
I said this before the war started and everthing that is happening right now here and over there is what i said would happen, remember this is about fighting for coperate profits and not about freedom, how it will tax the citizens of the US and the World, finacially, and also how it will burden the local medical establisment and also how soldiers are treated during the war and after when wounded, the government will treat the GI's like s#it, this was said before the war started. These are letters from honest loyal law abiding brave Americans who served and are serving her country militarily
Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,
I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you — some more extreme than others — are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.
In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of #*!@: #*!@ from the news media, #*!@ from movies, #*!@ about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and #*!@ from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.
The essence of all this #*!@ was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.
When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
When that #*!@ story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.
What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me — just in country — and the people who had done those things to them.
What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.
My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.
So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.
And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong.
But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of #*!@ our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we started to ask is who put us in this position?
In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat #*!@ asses stuffed full of cordon bleu and caviar.
They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.
That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.
We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story.
I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something — something that craved other peole's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "#*!@ missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to #*!@ with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death — because they could.
The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can't take back.
It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.
Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way.
So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics — drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.
You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.
Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.
I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.
So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching #*!@ military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.
The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.
Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the loneliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how your humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.
They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots.
They are your enemies — The Suits — and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they #*!@ aren't there. You are
They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.
So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.
I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.
Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse.
Hold on to your humanity.
- by Stan Goff
retired Special Forces Master Sergeant, founder of the Bring Them Home Now campaign
posted on February 2, 2004 08:23:05 AM newHold on to your humanity.
Stan Goff
US Army (Ret.)
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier!
posted on February 2, 2004 09:56:31 AM new
Words From The Our
Troops On The Front-Lines
The Traveling Soldier
2-2-4
"Wow, 130,000 troops on the ground, nearly 500 deaths and over a billion dollars a day, but they caught a guy living in a hole. Am I supposed to be dazzled?" - Anonymous Army Specialist
"It's nothing like what the people back home have been hearing. They're saying the war's over. The war's not over. Now, it's more of a guerrilla war. The waste and frustration, everything that goes on over there, it's just a nightmare." - Army Sgt. Michael Badgley Jr.
"Everyone hears that morale is high and that is a bald-faced lie. The only people they ever talk to are these commanders. The reserve soldiers never get to speak their mind. We are the pawns of this war. We watch the active duty retire, and move to new assignments. We watch their tours end as we are still trapped because of poor post-war planning." - Reservist from Indiana
"At the beginning, it was very clear: get that maniac out of power, get him and his regime gone, and everything else would take care of itself. We reached that goal, and continued past that goal, and we've lost track of what we're doing. You can't leave, but you can't win. ... All they're doing now is getting people killed. ... There's not going to be any end in sight. It only takes a handful of people to hit a place, move on, and hit another place. It was effective in Vietnam, and it's effective here." - Sgt 1st Class John Bogle, 101st Airborne
"The equipment they tried to hand us was items that were bound for the trash pile. Vietnam-era flack vests held together by dental floss and a prayer won't keep us safe ... It was like pulling teeth trying to get the things we needed. As 'dirty reservists,' we didn't deserve the same respect, even though we're supposed to watch the active-duty's backs." - Nicholas Ramsey, reservist from Indiana, public affairs unit, Iraq
"You'd be surprised at how many of the guys I talked to in my company and others believed that the President's scare about Saddam's WMD was a bunch of #*!@ and that the real motivation for this war was only about money. There was also a lot of crap that many companies, not just Marine companies, had to go through with not getting enough equipment to fulfill their missions when they crossed the border. ... It amazes me with all the money our government spends on the military, all the foul-ups and screwed up things we've had to put up with during this campaign. We were promised to go home on June 8th, and found out that it was a lie and we got stuck doing missions for an extra three months. Even some of the most radical conservatives in our company including our company gunnery sergeant got a real bad taste in their mouth about the Marine Corps, and maybe even President Bush." - Lance Corporal George Batton, Marine Corps Reserves
"Man, they can't pay me enough to stay here. There's not enough money in the world to make me stay a month longer." - Anonymous Specialist, 4th Infantry Division commenting on the $10,000 three year re-up bonus announced by the Pentagon.
"If someone invaded Texas, we'd do the same thing." - Lieutenant Colonel Kim Keslung, 21st Combat Support hospital, Balad, Iraq.
posted on February 2, 2004 10:01:01 AM new
"Marshall came to Iraq to die for a general's carpet"
Spec-4 Marshall L. Edgerton was 27 years old. He was from Rocky Face, Georgia. He was assigned to [deleted], 82nd Airborne Division. We are based in Fort Bragg, N.C. Marshall was killed December 11th when he was escorting a delivery truck into the 82nd Headquarters in Ramadi, Iraq. The news told you that a furniture truck blew up outside the compound, and that our excellent defenses prevented a lot more people from being killed. That's a load of #*!@. The truck blew up inside the compound, and the reason only 15 people were hurt and one American killed is plain luck. They make us get on every vehicle that enters the compound, and plenty of vehicles come. It's like playing Russian roulette.
We understand water trucks and gasoline trucks. We need that stuff, even though there are still plenty of ways they could detonate one of those too. Let me tell you what was being delivered though, and what Marshall Edgerton died for. A general is decorating his office here. It's a nice office, a luxury office you might say. And it needed a carpet to go with all the new furniture. Now while the grunts and we [deleted] can get along with field tables and folding chairs, of course the general has to trick out his office like he's a Roman caesar or something. So these furniture trucks come onto our compound when we already know that a lot of people out there want to kill us. This truck was loaded with carpet.
Marshall came to Iraq to die for a general's carpet. Marshall's family will grieve so a general could have carpet. What we really need here are big trucks that can haul away all the #*!@. And a few to get our asses back to an airport.
Don't give my name or email address. The truth can get you in a lot of trouble here.
Anonymous
posted December 15
Bring Them Home Now sound off board
posted on February 2, 2004 10:03:12 AM new
Guardsmen Killed By Pentagon Penny-Pinching
On November 2nd, 16 soldiers from the Illinois-Iowa National Guard were killed when their helicopter was shot down in Iraq. The chopper was not equipped with new defensive equipment to protect it from the shoulder-fired missiles that brought it down. The Illinois-Iowa unit was so under-equipped that soldiers said it qualified for "automatic mission-abort criteria"; but instead of being kept home until they got their gear, they were sent anyway.
The scandal is this: the National Guard brass decided to order only 50% of the ALQ-158 flare-launching systems actually needed for the Guard's Chinook fleet! “A conscious decision was made not to buy as many as we need,” said Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, director of the Army National Guard. He added, "It's a decision that has some level of risk with it." No kidding. "Somebody, someday, someplace said: 'We're going to accept some risk. We'll authorize the planes but not the equipment,'" commented Maj. Gen. Walter Pudlowski.
Tom Donnelly, a conservative military expert for the American Enterprise Institute and former policy director of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, explained the obvious: “It's a budget driven deal. These guys [guardsmen and reservists] are farther down the food-chain.”
Not only is this deal budget driven, the fact that about 40% of the troops in Iraq are reservists is budget-driven. The Pentagon is using part-time soldiers for the same reasons companies like Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Barnes and Noble prefer part-time workers: it's a lot cheaper. Part-timers get a less benefits (if any at all), get paid less, and are easier to fire and replace with new workers.
Reservists don't get the same equipment as those on active-duty, even though the Iraqi resistance doesn't discriminate between them when they attack U.S. troops. Almost 25% of GIs in Iraq, most of them reservists, STILL don't have ceramic plates for their vests – and that scandal broke in the news months ago!
While high-level officers wrack their brains over whether to under-equip their troops by 50%, 25% or 75%, soldiers are getting killed on a daily basis in Iraq with no end in sight. The important thing to realize is that not only is the troop rotation and the equipment shortages "budget-driven", the whole war itself is "budget driven." It's not about making Americans safer: Iraq had no WMD to speak of, and the only link between Iraq and Al-Qaida is between Bush's ears. It's not about bringing democracy to Iraq: the U.S. plan for a "power handover" in July will mean that hand-picked stooges (the Governing Council) get to pick other stooges (regional caucuses), who then get to pick more stooges (disguised as a "national assembly", and the last set of appointed stooges will "invite" U.S. troops to stay in Iraq! It's not about reconstruction either: Halliburton and Bechtel are pocketing billions of tax-payer dollars and have almost no work done anywhere in Iraq to show for it.
Bottom line, this war is about the bottom line; it's about making the rich in America richer and the power-brokers in Washington, D.C. more powerful by controlling the world's second largest oil reserve and establishing permanent military bases in the Middle East. That's why we say bring all the troops home NOW.
posted on February 2, 2004 02:04:40 PM new
You’ll get paid – when the “war on terrorism” is over!
Back in December 2003, Congress approved a special deployment allowance worth up to $600 a month but service men and women may never see a dime of it. The new allowance would pay $200 per month to anyone deployed more than 191 days in a row, $600 to anyone deployed 211 days in a row and more than 450 cumulative days out of the previous two years.
Deployment clocks were halted in the weeks after September 11th because President Bush declared a national emergency and have not been restarted. Pentagon officials anticipate that even if the freeze on deployment clocks is lifted, they'd be reset to zero and past deployment days would not count! With over a hundred thousand troops deployed for year-long tours of duty in Iraq, in addition to the thousands in Afghanistan, the brass would rather not spend money on soldiers but on fat contracts for defense industry corporations.
One aide to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee said that the Pentagon's deployment clock scam came as “no surprise.”
“I would not be shocked, quite frankly, if nobody ever received this pay. I don't see deployed days being counted until the war on terrorism is declared over – if that were to ever actually happen.” Vice-President Dick Cheney has even said that the war on terrorism “may never end, at least not in our life times.”
So don't hold your breath for those checks.
The Pentagon actually has the legal right to do this rip-off. Congress approved the 2004 Defense Authorization Act, leaving intact the loophole that allows the Dept. of Defense to stop counting deployed days in the interests of "national security," and even added a provision to the bill that would allow the DoD to declare that deployed days won't count for people with certain skills in certain units. The loopholes were requested by the Bush administration, Congress passed the bill overwhelmingly and Bush signed it into law on last year.
Stealing service people's pay isn't just a Bush or Rumsfeld thing, or a Republican thing - almost all the Democrats in Congress voted for the bill too. This is just one more example of why the real enemy is at home, not in Iraq.
posted on February 2, 2004 02:47:11 PM new
I've heard that newspaper laves a image of the topic on your p(&#*%#, corn cobs are for liberals. I prefer to print sky's topics & use that, that way sky gets the respect he deserves.
"If you believe you can tell me what to think, I believe I can tell you where to go. Not all of us are sheep....."
posted on February 2, 2004 05:25:04 PM new
HALLIBURTON SUBSIDIARY SERVES UNSAFE FOOD IN IRAQ
11.01.2004 [15:39]
On July 17, 2003, HEATHER YARBROUGH flew to Kuwait to start a new job: monitoring the quality and safety of food served to soldiers on U.S. military bases in Iraq. Her employer was the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) Government Services division of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney that has contracts with the U.S. government to support military personnel in the field and to help with Iraq reconstruction. Yarbrough never dreamed she'd be fired a month later for what in her view was simply an effort to implement the Army's own safety and sanitation standards. Nor did she imagine that she'd be telling congressional staffers about potentially dangerous food being served to U.S. soldiers by ESS Support Services, a food-service subcontractor to Halliburton. …… It was Aug. 6, opening day for the camp's dining facility. "Two thousand five hundred anxious soldiers, many waiting to eat their first cooked meal in months, stood around us [at a ribbon-cutting ceremony]," she wrote later in her Web log. "Dinner was served on time, and it appeared to be a smooth operation." But the next evening, when Yarbrough started her first 12-hour overnight shift, she was shocked at conditions in the kitchen. Freezers and refrigerators weren't working. Food was spoiling. The kitchen workers were exhausted, and some of them weren't following basic sanitation practices. "It became apparent to me that much of the food served at the banquet the night before was ... possibly dangerous," she wrote. At 2 a.m. Yarbrough saw a lone kitchen worker spreading mayonnaise onto several thousand slices of bread for the next day's sandwiches. He was halfway through the job, and the mayonnaise had sat in open bowls for hours. The kitchen's air conditioner had moderated the desert heat somewhat, but it had also spewed dust over the worker, the mayonnaise and the bread. Yarbrough conferred with a kitchen supervisor, and they agreed that the mayonnaise and partially made sandwiches should be thrown away. ….She'd read her job description carefully and knew that she was responsible for the quality and safety of food served on her shift. She was also certified in safety and sanitation by the National Restaurant Association, and was constantly referencing the Army's food-safety manual, known as TB Med 530. There were 160 employees in the massive kitchen, and when she saw workers returning from breaks without washing their hands or using spoiled BBQ sauce, she was going to continue speaking to them directly instead of wasting time searching for the night manager. Over the next few days, Yarbrough trained kitchen workers in sanitation methods and taught seminars on botulism, E. coli and other dangerous bacteria. The kitchen crews seemed to be paying more attention to safety. "Overall, this is much better," she wrote Aug. 10 in her journal. …..She planned to give the same talk to day cooks, but she was suspended the next day, relieved of duty and told to pack up and be ready to take the next convoy back to Kuwait. Yarbrough's supervisor told her she was being fired for wearing a dirty shirt, leaving work early once and other infractions. But Yarbrough felt certain these were bogus charges. … Yarbrough also has concerns about the working and living conditions of the third-country nationals who serve in dining facilities and other capacities at bases throughout Iraq and Kuwait. "Third-country nationals have no rights, no papers and no access to medical care," said Yarbrough. "They are allowed no communication with their families and cannot leave the gravel surrounding the dining facilities where they work," she said. "I am amazed that Americans don't know anything about the TCNs [third-country nationals] doing all the work over there," she said. "CNN is in Tikrit right now, eating at that dining facility. Why haven't TCNs been interviewed? Indians speak English." Aside from her humanitarian concerns, Yarbrough worries that desperate and alienated third-country nationals could pose a security risk to U.S. soldiers. On her Web log, Yarbrough has posted detailed chronological stories and supporting materials, including a transcript and photocopies of her Camp Iron Horse journal.
posted on February 2, 2004 05:37:12 PM new
Waiting for the wealthy to sacrifice in this war
By Cynthia Tucker
Originally published January 26, 2004
IN HIS STATE of the Union address, President Bush declared the nation still at war.
That's not quite true.
A part of the nation is at war - a slice of America where patriotism runs deeper than pockets, where parents don't belong to country clubs and children don't attend exclusive private schools. The duty of defending the nation has largely fallen to the less affluent; the all-volunteer military is disproportionately drawn from blue-collar homes.
If the war on terror were as important as the president claims - and the threat of Islamist fanatics a danger that will confront us for at least a generation - you'd think that military service would have taken on more urgency among Americans of all income brackets.
But it hasn't.
There has been no marked upturn in military recruitment since the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
Without a draft, affluent Americans have felt free to turn their attention to other matters - the stock market, the tax-deductible Range Rover, the children's chances for admission to an exclusive college. The deaths of more than 500 American soldiers in Iraq have stirred little comment among the chattering classes, whose children are not at risk.
"People are forgetting," said Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University. "We're not losing the sons and daughters of America's leaders, but basically minorities and working-class whites."
The all-volunteer military, unlike the Vietnam-era draft, doesn't draw from the poorest of the poor, either. High-tech weaponry demands recruits who are literate and disciplined. White recruits tend to come from families with a median income of $33,500 a year, while black recruits tend to hail from families with a median income of about $32,000 annually.
"Affluenza" and the loosening of civic ties have dampened the sense of duty that might otherwise compel children of the middle class to join the military. You rarely see graduates of Harvard or Yale signing up for the Marines. They're headed for Wall Street or law school. Nor is it typical for children of the affluent to dream of attending a military academy.
Americans have abandoned the "ancient republican tradition that citizenship entailed a duty to contribute to the nation's defense," writes Boston University Professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, in his analysis of U.S. power, American Empire.
"Increasingly, the high regard that middle-class Americans accorded to those volunteering for military service was akin to that which American Catholics felt for fellow believers who embraced the celibacy of religious life: A choice worthy of the highest respect, it was also peculiar to the point of being unfathomable. For most people, that choice was one that they preferred to see someone else's son or daughter make," Mr. Bacevich writes.
Perhaps because other people's sons and daughters were going off to war, Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq. Perhaps for the same reason, Congress now seems unconcerned about the increasingly clear evidence that the president made false claims in promoting this war.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a critic of the Iraq war strategy, has noted the lack of combat experience in the White House and among the Defense Department's top hands.
"They were my contemporaries. They should have been there [Vietnam], and they found a way not to serve," General Zinni has said. "And where are their kids? Are their kids serving? My son is in the Marines."
So far, patriotism among the affluent classes has amounted to sticking an American flag decal on the tax-deductible Hummer. But a continuing war on terror - if, indeed, the threat is as grave as the president says - will require greater sacrifices from all Americans. There simply are not enough blue-collar soldiers to do all the fighting and dying for the rest of us.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun.
posted on February 2, 2004 06:47:47 PM new
Can you believe this? Bush is all but admitting he made a terrible mistake and still people here are making excuses for him. I guess the right cannot admit they are wrong even when the facts are staring them straight in the face.
posted on February 2, 2004 09:38:08 PM new
See, the thing is that Bush didn't lie about sex. Therefore, to many people, he hasn't done anything wrong. War & death are OK...sex is a no-no.
******
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on February 2, 2004 11:16:06 PM new
So removing Saddam Hussien was a terrible mistake? That's almost as dumb as John Kerry saying that the threat of terrorist attacks is being exagerated.
Comments like that are going to give Bush a landslide win. Anybody wanna bet?
posted on February 3, 2004 01:39:09 AM new
There goes ebayauctionguy, Greenspan’s one time personal economic indicator; prophesising again.
”Comments like that are going to give Bush a landslide win. Anybody wanna bet?”
Just as sound as one of his previous predictions.
posted on February 3, 2003 03:16:37 PM http://www.vendio.com/mesg/read.html?num=28&thread=167316
“ Thanks to our massive defense budget, Iraqi civilian casualties will be minimal. We have plenty of precision guided munitions and so only Iraqi soldiers who don't surrender will die. And maybe a few human shield volunteers.
After a two day long barrage of cruise missiles, Iraqi soldiers will be surrendering to CNN News reporters. I don't think it will last longer than a week. It's kind of ironic that spending so much on defense will actually save hundreds if not thousands of lives. American and Iraqi lives.”
posted on June 20, 2003 12:38:46 PM
By ebayauctionguy, while discussing topic: THE WHITE HOUSE LIED -- EX-CIA DIRECTOR
“Wasn't ex-CIA director Stansfield Turner appointed by Bill Clinton? Sounds like politics to me.”
posted on February 3, 2004 04:27:44 AM newSo removing Saddam Hussien was a terrible mistake?
So, the end justifies the means? It was "preemptive war" and it makes us no better than the countries we fought in the past for committing the same crime. Or, are we, in your minds, exempt from the standards we've so gallantly set for other countries?
For the sake of one man, a lot of innocent people were killed and maimed. Millions of others are now feeling the financial effects of the decision of one man not intelligent enough to check his facts before acting. In fact, he wasn't "acting", he was "reacting".
posted on February 3, 2004 05:10:50 AM new
like i said...it's about corperate greed, notice the kickbacks going on.....
Halliburton Subsidiary Agrees to Temporary Halt in Billing for Troop Meals
By Robert Burns The Associated Press
Published: Feb 3, 2004
WASHINGTON (AP) - With Pentagon auditors raising the possibility of overcharging, a Halliburton Co. subsidiary has agreed to stop billing the government for feeding U.S. troops in Kuwait while a dispute is settled.
Halliburton said in a statement Monday that its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary agreed to suspend billing "while the company works with the government to improve the counting method" for meals served.
The company had been charging the government for the projected number of meals instead of the actual number served. Pentagon auditors are questioning whether that amounted to overcharging, since the projected number of meals was significantly higher than the number served.
Halliburton said, however, that the issue was how to improve meal planning, not how much was charged.
The Kellogg Brown & Root decision to stop billing for meals until the matter is resolved is "not any sort of admission" of wrongdoing, Halliburton's statement said. "It is an agreement to temporarily delay billing while KBR and the government jointly determine the best way to estimate how many meals to prepare."
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the matter Monday, said Pentagon auditors are questioning more than $16 million in alleged overcharges by Kellogg Brown & Root for meals at Camp Arifjan, a huge U.S. military logistics base south of Kuwait City.
Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said she could not confirm the $16 million figure.
The Journal reported that rather than repay the $16 million directly, Kellogg Brown & Root agreed to deduct the sum from future bills to the government.
The Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, reported in Tuesday's editions that the dispute potentially covers more than $27 million for meals in both Kuwait and Iraq.
The Pentagon already has in progress a criminal inquiry into possible overcharging involving another Halliburton contract: the company's deal to supply gasoline to Iraqi civilians.
Last month Kellogg Brown & Root reimbursed the Pentagon $6.3 million after disclosing that two employees had taken kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor in return for work providing services to U.S. troops in Iraq.
Houston-based Halliburton has complained repeatedly that criticism of its work in Iraq is politically motivated, in part because of its past ties with Vice President Dick Cheney, the company's chairman from 1995 to 2000.
posted on February 3, 2004 05:21:45 AM new
Read people, this is where and how your tax dollars are being spent.....
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
The situation in Iraq’s schools-which Bechtel was supposed to have repaired over the summer-is not much better. Complaints about shoddy or undone school repairs have recently brought high-level outside scrutiny. An internal study by U.S. Army personnel, surveying Iraqi education ministry staff and school principals and recently leaked to Cox Newspapers, strongly criticized Bechtel’s attempts to renovate Iraqi schools.
"The new fans are cheap and burned out immediately upon use. All inspected were already broken," wrote a U.S. soldier. "Lousy paint job. Major clean-up work required. Bathrooms in poor condition," wrote another about a different school.
Much of the criticism focuses on Bechtel's Iraqi subcontractors. "The contractor has demanded the schools managers to hand over the good and broken furniture. The names of the subcontractors are unknown to us because they did not come to our office," wrote an Iraqi school planner.
"In almost every case, the paint jobs were done in a hurry, causing more damage to the appearance of the school than in terms of providing a finish that will protect the structure. In one case, the paint job actually damaged critical lab equipment, making it unusable."
Bechtel officials defend their work. "The people at Bechtel really care about this one. We've all got kids. We've all been to school. In a country with a lot of hurt, this is meaningful. So, it's a system, it's people who care and it's being done in the middle of chaos, chaos evolving into something more orderly and more Iraqi," Bechtel's Gregory Huger, a manager in the reconstruction program, told a Cox reporter.
To find out for ourselves, we visit four Baghdad schools (all listed as renovated by Bechtel), beginning with Al-Harthia, a low white building that houses 570 elementary school students. Here we meet Huda Sabah Abdurasiq, who loses no time in showing us all that is wrong. The rain leaks through the ceiling, shorting out the power. The new paint is peeling and the floor has not been completely repaired, she says.
Most shocking to Huda is the price tag: “I could fix everything here for just $1,000. Mr. Jeff [a Bechtel sub-contractor] spent $20,000!” she fumes. She went to the district council and complained and then marched off to the convention center to confront the military. “They were very angry and spoke to our councilmember Hassan but nothing happened. And we have no receipts for money spent. It’s useless, they won’t do a thing,” she says.
We head over to Al-Wathba school, easily in the worst condition of all the schools we visit. Ahmad Abdu-satar, a friendly man in a dapper suit who has worked here for two years, shows us the toilets and sinks: new brass taps and doors painted a dark blue but the sinks are in a terrible state, they don’t look like they have been touched in a decade. There is no new paint on any of the walls, and, like the previous school, the playground is flooded.
”I’ve been thinking of turning it into a swimming pool,” he remarks sarcastically. “Honestly, nothing has changed since Saddam’s time. I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We tell him that budgets have been slashed in America and teachers fired en masse, but he repeats his question: “I ask you, would American children use these toilets?” We are forced to concede that the answer is no.
”We have no books, no stationary, nothing. At least we had that in Saddam’s time. Yes, our salaries have gone up, but so have prices. When I asked the contractor why they didn’t finish the job, they said: we don’t work for you, we work for the Americans.”
We stop briefly at the Al Raja’a school, but it is still being repaired. Jamal Salih, the guard, shows us around, then complains that he had asked the contractor to fix his house, but they refused. We take a peek inside, surprising his two daughters and wife who are busy preparing a meal of potato chips for lunch. The workers also invite us to join them for their falafel lunch, but we decline and hasten to the last stop of the day before the school closes at one p.m.
This is Hawa school, run by Batool Mahdi Hussain. Hussain is a tall woman, dressed all in brown, including her traditional Islamic headscarf. She appears young for the 11 years she has spent at this school, which she recently took over when the parents voted her in as headmistress after the war. Like the two previous headmistresses, she is eager to talk and show us around.
She is also bitter about the contractors. The school has a fresh coat of paint on the outside with all of the characters from the Disney version of Aladdin, complete with the genie and the prince.
But, she says, things are worse than under Saddam. “UNICEF painted our walls and gave us new Japanese fans. They painted the cartoons outside. When the American contractors came, they took away our Japanese fans and replaced them with Syrian fans that don’t work,” she says angrily.
We are joined by the school guard, Ali Sekran, who speaks a few words of English. He repeatedly uses his AK-47 as a pointer to help Hussain illustrate all the problems. We pray that the gun isn’t loaded.
The headmistress takes us to the toilets where a new water system has been installed, pipes, taps and a motor to pump the water. The problem is the motor doesn’t work so the toilets reek with unflushed sewage. She then uncovers a new drain cover to show us that it is nothing but a cover. She walks quickly, not waiting for the camera to catch up, a whirlwind of show-and-tell. “These doors, the hinges are broken. We were supposed to get steel doors, we got wooden doors. The new paint is peeling off. There isn’t enough power to run our school.”
We notice a brand new blackboard. Hussain says that the teachers paid for it out of their own pocket. As we bid farewell, she walks us out of the gate and points to the construction debris in the road.
“They didn’t even take their rubbish with them. They gave us no papers to tell us what they had done and what they did not do. We had to pay to haul the trash. Honestly, the condition of our school was better before the contractors came.”
posted on February 14, 2004 11:37:34 AM newKay: Bush Should Admit Error on Iraq WMD
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay is advising President Bush to acknowledge he was wrong about hidden storehouses of weapons in Iraq and move ahead with overhauling the intelligence process.
In an Associated Press interview, Kay said the "serious burden of evidence" suggests Saddam Hussein did not have caches of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons at the beginning of the Iraqi war, but was seriously engaged in developing missiles.
"You are better off if you acknowledge error and say we have learned from it and move ahead," Kay said in a 90-minute session Thursday with AP editors and reporters.
"I'm afraid if you don't acknowledge error, and everybody knows why you are afraid to acknowledge error, your political opponents will seize on it, the press will seize on it, and no one will give you credit," Kay said.
Since resigning last month, Kay has said repeatedly that U.S. intelligence was wrong in claiming that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and advanced nuclear weapons programs. Those programs were the main justification for the Iraq war.
, and the last set of appointed stooges will "invite" U.S. troops to stay in Iraq! It's not about reconstruction either: Halliburton and Bechtel are pocketing billions of tax-payer dollars and have almost no work done anywhere in Iraq to show for it.
