The People's Record

Feature: Our veterans – the elephant in the room?
May 7, 2013

Apart from when the occasional veteran makes the headlines and is arrested (perhaps for carrying out a training run fully kitted up and armed; or by posting borderline material on facebook and being detained and sectioned under Section 922(g)(4) of the US Code) once our marines have stepped down from active duty, very little is heard of them and that seems to be the way the government likes it.

They must be feeling uneasy to say the least at the growing movement of veterans who are standing up and voicing their concerns about the way in which our country is governed and the Constitution being undermined by successive rafts of legislation, some of which is pushed through without adequate consultation or proper procedure. The government would have us believe that these few “voices in the wilderness” belong to misfits, miscreants and malcontents – that most veterans are happily adjusted to everyday society and living out their lives in the bosom of their family as productive citizens.

Myth versus reality

Truth is there is a huge gulf between the myth foisted upon us by the government and the reality. Many of these veterans start out their career in the US forces with high ideals and a vision of serving their country and protecting their family and others like it; young men and women with a clear conscience, a deep sense of moral duty and strong loyalty to their government. By the time they have done a tour or three they come back as different people with a totally changed perspective. We are fed images and news reports by the media of spouses and little children welcoming back the homecoming heroes and heroines, smiling faces, happy tears and a good helping of the American dream, complete with cream and sugar. We aren’t shown the rows of flag draped coffins; we aren’t told about the conditioning imposed on these service men and women to psychologically prepare them for the battlefront or about the drugs which are forced on them to make sure they remain emotionally stable during their tour of duty. In 2012 more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in the war zone. In fact, 6,500 veterans killed themselves that year alone – that equates to 1 every hour and 20 minutes.

The harsh reality is that these men and women come home, having seen things they won’t talk of to anyone other than another veteran, tired, disillusioned, often traumatized and diagnosed with PTSD, unable to easily step back into their old lives. It is no wonder that so many isolate themselves from others in the community, very often becoming reliant on alcohol or drugs (prescription or illegal) to make it through each day. It is telling that the US government has stepped up their Veterans Alcohol and Drug Dependence Rehabilitation Program, providing support for former service members at an ever growing number of drug and alcohol detox centers across the States. For drug and alcohol detox in Massachusetts, as an example, there are centers in almost every town and city across the state – something like 64 all in all. Those that make it through the transition back into civilian life and survive or avoid addiction have gone on to become some of the harshest critics of our government.

People like Adam Khokesh, who served in the US Marine Corps Reserves in Iraq, have become vocal opponents of the very government they swore to obey when they joined the forces. They have seen through the illusion that government and media have fed to communities everywhere and are joining together to voice their opposition to today’s politics specifically and to war across the board. These highly trained personnel of yesterday have become today’s conscience of the nation, highlighting injustice, false flag events and illegal or immoral activities, including wars against other sovereign states. Groups like Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans against the War now actively oppose government and governmental policy, standing against the very things they previously stood for before the veil was torn from their eyes. The treatment many of them receive only serves to underline the government’s self interest and it is telling that the government considers veterans to be a danger, with Homeland Security classifying returning US veterans as a potential terrorist threat.

With something like 20 states wanting to secede from the United States, it may be that those same veterans who no longer support the corrupt political structure will be the vanguard of our changing world. When a country as large as the United States, with the influences it has across the globe, undergoes radical change it will surely impact us all.

-Written & submitted for The People’s Record by Evelyn Roberts

Lovely submission from Evelyn Roberts. Thank you so much. Veterans are part of the story, and they are, complicated victims of the system in their own way. Of course, the communities they are trained & instructed to destroy are also a big part of the conversation – they are victims of the system and are subjected to a whole different kind of horror because it. We would be remiss to not feature stories about both.

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Protest clashes & random attacks leave 111 killed, 233 wounded across Iraq
April 24, 2013

Security personnel fought demonstrators at sit-in camps in at least two predominantly Sunni cities. The highest number of casualties occurred in Hawija. The clashes led to several curfews and road closures across the country. They also encouraged two ministers to quit their posts. Overall, at least 111 people were killed and 233 more were wounded in those clashes and other violence.

Security forces triggered a deadly riot in Hawija, when they tried to arrest suspects allegedly taking refuge at a protest camp. At least 39 civilians were killed in the initial clash. They were possibly unarmed. Three soldiers were killed as well. About 153 people were wounded, both soldiers and demonstrators. Security forces claimed to have liberated 18 children who were being used as shields.

Nine policemen were killed and five more were wounded when gunmen attacked three checkpoints on highways leading to Tikrit.

In Baghdad, seven people were killed and at least 17 more were wounded in a pair of blasts near a Doura mosque.

Gunmen stormed a police base in Suleiman Pak when they killed six security personnel and wounded 11 others. At least one gunman was killed and six more were wounded.

Four dumped bodies were found in Falluja.

In Baaj, a roadside bomb killed a soldier and wounded two more.

A body was found in Iskandariya.

Gunmen wounded four soldiers in Garma, then set fire to two vehicles.

Gunmen reportedly took over checkpoints in Riyadh and brought down a helicopter. The government denied the downing, but 13 militants were killed when security forces were called out.

Armed clashes also took place at a sit-in in Ramadi, where six soldiers were killed. One soldier was kidnapped. The provincial council demanded the removal of military forces from protest camps.

In Mosul, a bomb killed a policeman and wounded two more.

Mortars in Muqdadiya killed nine and wounded 25 more.

Six were killed and eight more were wounded in a blast in eastern Iraq.

In Haswa, bombs targeting a Sahwa member’s family killed five of them including children.

Source

This is what Obama’s Drone War looks like.

The CIA uses tactics considered to be war crimes under international law, such as the double-tap method that targets rescuers & family members, even those attending funerals, with a second strike in the same area. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims.

There have been between 282 and 535 civilians who have been credibly reported as killed, including more than 60 children. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. 

Samiullah Khan, a Waziristan-based journalist, eyewitness & field researcher in drone casualties on his experience: “There was of course a drone up in the air – in that area they seem to be up 24 hours a day. About five minutes into the interview I heard a massive noise from an attack and all the glass in the house broke. I ran out, though the Taliban were urging me not to approach the site. I saw people crying ‘Help us, help us’, there was a huge fire. Since everyone in the [damaged] house was dead or injured, the only people who could help were other villagers or the Taliban I’d been interviewing.

Many people were badly burned. We put three in my pick-up truck and took them to Miranshah town – doctors there told us they were unlikely to live, each having 90 per cent burns to his body. Back in Danda Darpakhel more people had come to the attack site to help with the rescue, thinking that the danger had now passed after 30 minutes. But the drones returned and fired again. If I had been there I would have been caught in that explosion. People there were killed, including two of my friends. They were good people. One was a student; the other ran a stall at the local bazaar. Neither was involved with the Taliban.” 

The latest drone strike killed one to three people in Pakistan on March 10. Several others were injured. The victims’ identities are still unknown.

“The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.” - Pfc. B. Manning on the Collateral Murder video, which shows a US Apache helicopter indiscriminately firing on more than a dozen people, including a journalist & rescuers, in Iraq in 2010. Two children were also seriously injured in the attack.

Listen to Manning in their owns words in the leaked audio from the court martial proceeding despite a court ban on recordings. You can also download it here.

Revealed by Pfc. B. Manning & WikiLeaks: The Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centers
March 7, 2013

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. “Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private B. Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after they pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador’s security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is “opposed to human rights abuses.” Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: “During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad … and the relevant Iraqi leaders.”

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units’ involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called “Terrorism In The Hands of Justice.”

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus’s office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.

“General Petraeus’s special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured,” said Samari. “Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn’t want the torture victims shown on TV.”

Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. “But General Petraeus does not agree with torture,” he added. “To suggest he does support torture is horseshit.”

Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. “Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying.”

Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.

Source

After their arrest, Manning was then tortured in a military prison for revealing information about torture. The torturers themselves have walked away scot-free & unharmed even to this day.

The stories about human rights violations at the hands of the US are virtually endless. The people of the US government are the terrorists. 

In spending $60 billion to rebuild Iraq, the US has wasted more than $9 billion in taxpayer funds. 
March 7, 2013

One decade after the US invaded Iraq, the reconstruction effort has been largely deemed a failure. In his final report to Congress, a 171-page assessment titled “Learning from Iraq”, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen concluded that the costs of the war far surpassed the results.

“You think if you throw money at a problem, you can fix it. It was just not strategic thinking,” Kurdish government official Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, told auditors of the report.

“You can fly in a helicopter around Baghdad or other cities, but you cannot point a finger at a single project that was built and completed by the United States,” Iraq’s acting interior minister told Bowen, who said that dumping so much money into a warzone simply created a “triangle of political patronage” that instigated further corruption.

Bowen interviewed numerous American and Iraqi officials, many of whom criticized the US for taking on too many large projects without consulting Iraqis. When American troops withdrew, many of these projects were largely abandoned and Iraq continues to look as broken as before.

Additionally, Americans “wore out [their] welcome” by planning to “do it all and do it our way” – all while wasting taxpayer dollars, Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns told the inspector general.

The US has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants, which comes out to about $15 million for each day of the conflict. A $2.4 billion fund set up by Congress to rebuild Iraq’s water and electricity systems and to provide food, healthcare and governance was largely wasted. President George W. Bush asked for $20 billion more just a few months after the March 2003 invasion to accomplish these goals.

Abandoned projects include a 3,6000-bed prison that cost $40 million but was never finished or used and a $108 million wastewater treatment center that still remains unfinished. The US also spent millions repairing infrastructure they blew up, including a $75 million pipeline and a $29 million bridge in north-central Iraq. Contractors were also found to have overcharged the US government for supplies, with one contractor charging the Pentagon $900 for a $7 control switch.

“Waste and fraud at the levels we saw are a symptom of a failure to have a structure in place to effectively plan for stabilization and reconstruction operations, execute such operations and be held accountable for them,” Bowen said in an interview with Business Week.

The failures in Iraq have raised concern over the future of Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal of US troops. The US government has spent $90 billion on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan over the course of 12 years, which US officials are afraid could go to waste if oversight isn’t coordinated better.

Ten years after the American invasion of Iraq, the country remains impoverished and plagued by near-daily deadly bombings. Few people have access to electricity and clean water, and some projects that the US spent millions on have been reduced to nothing but rubble.

“If we had better controls and better planning, better oversight, better quality assurance, better quality control all in place, we would have wasted less – for sure. There is no doubt about that,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Bowen.

Source

The point of the construction contracts was never to build anything; the objective was to funnel expensive contracts into the pockets of friends & families & owners of the political entities that awarded the contracts. Mission accomplished.

Pfc. B. Manning pleads guilty to misusing classified data; pleads not guilty to aiding the enemy under the Espionage Act
February 28, 2013

The U.S. Army private accused of providing diplomatic cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website pleaded guilty on Thursday to misusing classified material, but denied the most serious charge in the case, aiding the enemy.

Private First Class B. Manning, 25, entered the pleas prior to the court martial, which is set to begin on June 3, in a case that centers on the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history.

“I believe that if the general public … had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” Manning, dressed in full military uniform, testified calmly.

Reading from a 35-page statement as they remained seated next to their lawyers, the short, slight private described their feelings after they submitted the secret information to WikiLeaks.

“I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience,” said Manning, who spoke under oath for more than an hour.

At the hearing, Manning pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, through their attorney. Manning, who has been jailed at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia for more than 1,000 days (Note: the legal limit is 120 days), could face life imprisonment if convicted of that charge.

Manning pleaded guilty to a series of 10 lesser charges that they misused classified information at the hearing before military judge Colonel Denise Lind. They face a maximum of 20 years in prison for those charges.

Under a ruling last month by Lind, Manning would have any sentence reduced by 112 days to compensate for the markedly harsh treatment they received during their confinement. While at Quantico, Manning was placed in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day with guards checking on them every few minutes. (Plus psychologically tortured, which is rarely mentioned)

Manning admitted to unauthorized possession and willful communication of information from military databases, including the Combined Information Data Network Exchange Iraq and Combined Information Data Network Exchange Afghanistan.

They also admitted to misuse of documents from the U.S. Southern Command pertaining to Guantanamo Bay, a memo from an unnamed intelligence agency, and records from a military operation in Farah province in Afghanistan.

Manning, an Army intelligence officer, was arrested in May 2010 while serving in Iraq and charged with downloading thousands of intelligence documents, diplomatic cables and combat videos and forwarding them to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks began exposing the U.S. government secrets in the same year, stunning diplomats around the world and outraging U.S. officials who said damage to national security from the leaks endangered U.S. lives.

Source

Manning faces life in a military prison for exposing war crimes while those who actually commited the war crimes have not been arrested, let alone charged.

FREE MANNING!

‘West pitting Syrian rebels against Hezbollah’
February 23, 2013

RT: You have recently been to Syria - with the West pushing for democratic change there, do you think the Syrians will actually get that after the violence they’ve endured for so long?

Danny Makki: I think there is much consensus among the Syrian people and in Syria that there has to be democratic change but there is a very big difference between democratic change from the grassroots level and what is being supported and funded by Western countries in Syria now. What we see now is terrorism. And people have to differentiate between a freedom fighter and a terrorist. I don’t think this is pathway to democracy, I think in fact this is a  pathway to a failed state.

RT: The Free Syrian Army has apparently set an ultimatum for Hezbollah, threatening to shell its positions in Lebanon. Lebanon is itself divided over the civil war in neighboring Syria, what could the consequences be if large-scale violence spills over there?

DM: With the Syrian crisis there is a danger of it spilling across borders to Iraq, or Lebanon, or even Turkey. The biggest problem in Lebanon is that some of the Western countries are really trying to pit one of the Islamist movements against each other – the Sunni FSA against the Shia Hezbollah. It’s essentially a policy of divide and conquer, which is being instigated media-wise by the West, create divisions and fractures within Arab Syrian and Lebanese societies. And this is the issue they are working today.

By pitting the FSA Hezbollah they are create more division and tension between Syria and Lebanon. And we’ve seen with recent conflict in Tripoli in northern Lebanon that the Syrian crisis is not necessarily in Syria. Syria is the linchpin of the region and there is great tension both in Syria and Lebanon. And there is great fear and anxiety that the struggle in Syria could spill into Lebanon. Lebanon had its own civil war which was very bloody and killed hundreds of thousands. So Lebanon is very scared at the moment of the Syria crisis turning into a Lebanese crisis.

RT:  On Monday, Syria said it is prepared to talk to the armed opposition groups, which it has long-dismissed as terrorists – is it a positive change on the way?

DM: In any state terrorism inside the country is a red line that cannot be crossed. We cannot accept terrorism in any country in the world – whether in Syria, America or Britain, or Russia. However there has to be a level of negotiations and dialogue internally speaking to at least have a ceasefire.

There has to be a level of openness between the Syrian government and between rebel forces maybe to instigate exchanges of prisoners, ceasefires in certain areas, to let humanitarian aid reach areas which are under rebel control. These all are issues that have to be negotiated for. And it shows that the Syrian government is not taking the path of an in-transition government. They truly do want to see diplomacy and dialogue to solve this and the fact that they are willing to negotiate with theses armed groups signifies a change of policy in terms of [that] they comprehend there can be no military solution and that any solution which comes within the Syrian crisis at this current moment in time has to be a political solution to stop the suffering of the people and to find a real exit and negotiated settlement to his ongoing crisis.

Source

Cartoons’ source

The poor fighting the rich man’s war: A look at homeless veterans

23% of homeless population are veterans
33% of male homeless population are veterans
47% Vietnam Era
17% post-Vietnam
15% pre-Vietnam
67% served three or more years
33% stationed in war zone
25% have used VA Homeless Services
85% completed high school/GED, compared to 56% of non-veterans
89% received Honorable Discharge
79% reside in central cities
16% reside in suburban areas
5% reside in rural areas
76% experience alcohol, drug, or mental health problems

No NATO, No War! Iraq & Afghanistan veterans return their medals at NATO Summit

Victims of Fallujah’s health crisis are stifled by western silence
October 26, 2012

Four new studies on the health crisis in Fallujah have been published in the last three months. Yet, one of the most severe public health crises in history, for which the US military may be to blame, receives no attention in the United States.

Ever since two major US-led assaults destroyed the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, Fallujans have witnessed dramatic increases in rates of cancers, birth defects and infant mortality in their city. Dr Chris Busby, the author and co-author of two studies on the Fallujah heath crisis, has called this “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”.

In the years since the 2004 sieges, Fallujah was the most heavily guarded city in all of Iraq. All movement in and out of Fallujah was monitored by the occupying forces. The security situation made it nearly impossible to get word out about Fallujans’ nascent health crisis. One of the first attempts to report on the crisis was at the seventh session of the UN Human Rights Council in the form of the report, Prohibited Weapons Crisis: The Effects of Pollution on the Public Health in Fallujah by Dr Muhamad Al-Darraji. This report was largely ignored. It wasn’t until thefirst major study on the health crisis was published in 2010 that the issue received mainstream media attention in the UK and Europe.

To this day, though, there has yet to be an article published in a major US newspaper, or a moment on a mainstream American TV news network, devoted to the health crisis in Fallujah. The US government has made no statements on the issue, and the American public remains largely uninformed about the indiscriminate harm that our military may have caused.

The report presented at the seventh session of the Human Rights Council gave anecdotal evidence gathered at the Fallujah General Hospital. It included a stomach-turning collection of pictures of babies born with scaly skin, missing and deformed limbs, and horrifying tumors. Two years later, Dr Busby and his team of researchers sought to verify the claims in this report. What they found was that, in addition to shocking increases in pediatric cancers, there had also been an 18% reduction in male births. Such a finding is a well-known indication of genetic damage. The authors conclude that:

“These results support the many reports of congenital illness and birth defects in Fallujah and suggest that there is evidence of genetic stress which appeared around 2004, one year before the effects began to show.”

In a follow up study, in which Dr Busby was a co-author, hair, soil and water samples were taken from Fallujah and tested for the presence of heavy metals. The researchers expected to find depleted uranium in the environmental samples. It is well known that the US used depleted uranium weapons in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war; and Iraqis, at least, are well aware of the increases in cancers and infant mortality rates in the city of Basrah, which was heavily bombarded during Desert Storm. However, what the researchers found was not depleted uranium, but man-made, slightly enriched uranium.

Dr Busby has been the most visible scientist behind these studies, and for that reason, a lot of criticism has been directed at him. He is considered by many to be a “controversial” figure, which only means that his research has often challenged official government positions. His studies on Fallujah have similarly earned the title of “controversial”. Many journals were afraid to publish his second study because of “pressure” from “outside people”. “Outside people” means types like Roger Helbig – a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force who is well-known for publishing online attacks on those who take a critical stance against uranium weapons – and pressure groups with similar agendas.

Some have criticized the methodology of this study, and they have used this as an excuse to dismiss the entire issue. But as other experts have noted:

“The role of ‘quick and dirty’ studies like this one, conducted under difficult conditions, is not to inform policy, but rather to generate hypotheses about important questions when resources are not yet available and other research methods are not possible.”

Busby is not the only researcher who takes “controversial” positions. His findings are complimented by the work of Dr Dai Williams, an independent weapons researcher. Williams has been investigating what he calls “third generation uranium weapons” (pdf). He has found patents for weapon systems that could use undepleted uranium, or slightly enriched uranium, interchangeably with tungsten, either as a dense metal or as a reactive metal. Undepleted and slightly enriched uranium have also been found on other battlefields (Afghanistan (pdf) and Lebanon). These findings lead researchers like Dr Williams to believe that there is a new generation of weapons being used, possibly by the US and Israeli militaries, that could have serious indiscriminate health effects on the populations living near bombing targets.

Many people have dismissed these hypotheses as speculative, and with that, they dismiss the research, the issue and the suffering of the people on the ground. What these naysayers fail to understand is that hypotheses are always speculative to a degree – they are informed, but they are claims intended to be verified or falsified. This is the nature of the scientific method. First, you observe certain phenomena in the world, then you come up with a hypothesis to explain those phenomena. Then, you conduct an experiment to test your hypothesis.

Many of these naysayers have not responded to these studies by calling for more research and investigation to test the hypotheses of Dr Busby or Dr Williams. Rather, they dismiss these hypotheses because they don’t like their moral and political implications. In doing so, they show a great deal of antipathy for the scientific method and the pursuit of truth. But more importantly, they also dismiss the suffering of the people of Fallujah, and all people affected by these issues.

One weapon system that may use uranium, in some form or another, is the SMAW-NE (Shoulder-fired Multipurpose Assault Weapon – Novel Explosive). My former unit battle-tested this weapon for the first time in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury in 2004. It is not my intention irresponsibly to lay blame on the US military, but there is a potential connection between this weapons system and the health crisis in Fallujah – and this connection needs to be investigated.

There are also other avenues of investigation besides uranium weapons. One recent study examines the possible contributions of mercury and lead to the health crisis in Iraq. Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Defects in Iraqi Cities, by Al-Sabbak et al, compared the levels of lead and mercury in hair, nail and teeth samples from Fallujah and Basrah. The study found that the population studied in Fallujah had been exposed to high levels of “two well-known neurotoxic metals, Pb and Hg”.

In Basrah, the authors found even higher levels of lead exposure than in Fallujah. Basrah has the highest ever reported level of neural tube defects, and the numbers continue to climb. The authors of this study note:

“Toxic metals such as mercury (Hg) and Pb are an integral part of war ammunitions and are extensively used in the making of bullets and bombs … the bombardment of al-Basrah and Fallujah may have exacerbated public exposure to metals, possibly culminating in the current epidemic of birth defects.”

The conclusion of this study is not abstract, and it is not merely an intellectual or medical issue. It has real world importance. The modern means of warfare may be inherently indiscriminate. This is a scientific finding worthy of discussion at the highest levels of academia, politics and international affairs. While it may yet get some attention outside the borders of the United States, its “controversial” nature (its implications of the US military’s guilt in creating possibly the worst public health crisis in history) ensures that it will be ignored at all costs by the callous and corrupt US government and its subservient media establishment.

Ultimately, it may not be the case that either lead alone, or uranium alone, is the sole cause of the health crisis in Fallujah. It could be a combination of the two agents, or something different entirely. But this is an empirical question that demands further investigation. Methodology and proper science are important, but we must remember that science is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. The welfare of the people of Fallujah should be our ends, and our goal should be to help them. Those who choose misguided political allegiance over the pursuit of truth, and those who use methodological flaws to dismiss real-world suffering, have already lost their humanity.

What we need to do to help Fallujans is clear. More studies need to be done to figure out what is harming those poor children, and then steps need to be taken to ensure that this never happens again. But first, we must find a way to overcome the stifling silence of governments.

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This is only part of the legacy the United States has left in Iraq.

US and Israel to launch major military drill ”Austere Challenge 2012”, involving nearly 5,000 troops aimed at Iran.

October 19, 2012

The United States and Israel are set to launch a major military exercise in a show of unity aimed at Iran, despite friction between American and Israeli leaders over how to counter Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The air defence drills, dubbed “Austere Challenge 2012,” will unfold later this month and last about three weeks, with 3,500 US troops and 1,000 Israeli forces taking part, officers said on Wednesday.

“This is the largest exercise in the history of the longstanding military relationship between the US and Israel,” said Lieutenant General Craig Franklin, 3rd Air Force Commander, who is overseeing the drill along with his Israeli counterpart, Brigadier General Nitzan Nuriel.

“This exercise will improve the cooperative missile defence of Israel and will promote regional stability and help ensure a military edge,” Franklin told reporters in a teleconference.

But the drill is about more than missile defenses.

The elaborate exercise takes place at a politically charged moment, amid speculation about a possible Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran, a hotly contested US presidential election weeks away and parliamentary polls expected in Israel within a few months.

‘Strong message’

The drill’s “scenario is to deal with threats from all fronts”, Nuriel, the Israeli commander, told the same phone conference.

“Anybody can get any type of message he wants from this exercise. The fact we are practicing together and working together is a strong message by itself.”

In a report this year to congress, the Pentagon warned that Iran’s missiles could hit Israel and Eastern European countries, including an extended-range version of the Shahab-3 and a medium-range ballistic missile with a range of 2,000km.

The missile threat, combined with the crisis over Iran’s disputed nuclear program, prompted Israeli authorities in August to test a SMS public alert system designed to warn the population of an imminent attack.

In the works for two years, the joint exercise originally was scheduled for April but was postponed at Israel’s request, without an official explanation.

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Despite widespread disapproval, we keep moving closer and closer to war with Iran. If you listen to the election rhetoric, it sounds like the United States and Israel will be engaging Iran militarily either way, unfortunately. 

Has the Afghan surge been a complete failure?

October 2, 2012

It was arguably the most important foreign policy decision of Barack Obama’s first term as US president. Now new data suggests that the Afghan surge has been a military failure.

“Afghanistan is an extremely varied country and there are a lot of different attitudes. I think that we sometimes assume that bringing in services would automatically win over hearts and minds, when in reality sometimes just the intrusion of any outsider … was actually destabilising.”

- Frances Bown, a fellow at the council on foreign relations

With just over a month until the election, the US military has withdrawn the last of the 33,000 troops Obama sent to Afghanistan in December 2009.

But according to data released by the NATO command in Afghanistan or ISAF obtained by Wired magazine the Taliban’s momentum is fiercer now than before the surge.

Insurgent attacks may be lower than last year, but they are significantly higher when compared to 2009 before the surge was launched. And the number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent attacks in August 2012 was the highest for three years.

The surge was presented as the culmination of Obama’s careful deliberation - a sign of the qualities he brought to his role as commander in chief.

That the decision has so little to show for the cost in lives and money should be a major issue on the campaign trail. But with Republican candidate Mitt Romney seemingly loathe even to mention Afghanistan, it is not.

“The fact is that the Taliban has been able to vastly increase the numberof IED attacks that are effective in causing casualties on the part of the foreign troops. If you look at the figures for actual casualities from those attacks - its really quite dramtic.”

Gareth Porter, an investigative reporter

And beyond a vague promise to withdraw American troops by the end of 2014 neither the president nor Romney seem to have any clear vision for the future.

NATO’s lack of confidence in the Afghan forces that were meant to be strengthened by the surge was made abundantly clear when the US temporarily scaled back joint operations earlier this month after a string of so-called green on blue attacks. Operations did resume on Thursday but with far stricter safeguards in place.

So has the surge been a complete failure? And how will it impact the upcoming US presidential elections?

Inside Story US 2012, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, discusses with guests: Lieutenant colonel Tony Shaffer, a former US intelligence officer who has served two combat tours in Afghanistan; Frances Bown, an international affairs fellow at the council on foreign relations; and Gareth Porter, an investigative reporter and historian.

“From day one of the surge all we [the US] have been doing is adding fiction to the friction - there’s no actual achievable objectives within the military context of this effort … The real issue is something that this administration has not been able to grasp. It’s all about the ideology – the tribal nature of the environment. Because they’ve never grasped that, they have continued to use a western methodology without understanding what they are actually going to try to achieve and what is sustainable.”

Tony Shaffer, a former US intelligence officer

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Glenn Greenwald: Iraqi-American is imprisoned by US for saving his family from US sanctions

September 29, 2012

I’m currently traveling around the US on a speaking tour, and as I’vewritten before, one of the prime benefits of doing that is being able to meet people and their families whose lives have been severely harmed by the post-9/11 assault on basic liberties. Doing that prevents one from regarding these injustices as abstractions, and ensures that the very real human costs from these government abuses remain vivid.

Such is the case with the treatment of Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer who just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the “crime” of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives inIraq - including his blind mother - during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family’s suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.

Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi’s son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi’s son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master’s student in MU’s School of Journalism. The travesty of this case - and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family - is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.

Hamoodi came with his wife to the US in 1985 to work toward his PhD in nuclear engineering from MU and, not wanting to return to the oppression of Saddam’s regime, stayed in the US. He was offered a research professor position at the university, proceeded to have five American-born children, all of whom he and his wife raised in the Columbia community, and then himself became a US citizen in 2002.

But US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death ofat least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jonesabout the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime “killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history”.

The sanctions regime decimated Hamoodi’s family. His elderly blind mother was unable to buy basic medication. His sister, one of 11 siblings back in Iraq, suffered a miscarriage because she was unable to buy $10 antibiotics. His brother, a surgeon, was earning the equivalent of $2 per month and literally unable to feed his family.

Hamoodi was earning a very modest salary at the time of roughly $35,000 per year from the university, but - as would be true for any decent person of conscience - could not ignore the extreme and growing suffering of his family back in Iraq. Because sending money into Iraq from the US was physically impossible, he set up a bank account in Jordan and proceeded to make small deposits into it. From that account, small amounts of money - between $20 and $100 - were dispersed each month to his family members.

When other Iraqi nationals in his Missouri community heard of his helping his family, they wanted to help theirs as well. So Hamoodi began accepting similar amounts of money from a small group of Iraqis and ensured those were disbursed to their family members suffering under the sanctions regime. From 1993 until 2003, when the sanctions regime was lifted after the US invasion, Hamoodi sent an average of $25,000 each year back to Iraq, totaling roughly $250,000 over the decade: an amount that fed and sustained the Iraqi relatives of 14 families in Columbia, Missouri, including his wife’s five siblings.

Nobody, including the US government, claims that these amounts were intended for anything other than humanitarian assistance for his family and those of others in his community. Everyone, including the US government, acknowledges that these funds were sent to and received only by the intended recipients - suffering Iraqi family members - and never got anywhere near Saddam’s regime, terrorist groups, or anything illicit. As a Newsweek article on the Hamoodi case made clear:

“The cash … was doled out mostly in dribs and drabs, even the authorities concede; $40 a month to the son of a friend trying to eat while attending medical school, $80 to Hamoodi’s blind mother. There was no suggestion that Hamoodi … aided terrorists, or that the money wound up in Saddam Hussein’s hands; his elaborate email trail served as receipts, as tidy as his bookkeeping at the store.

“‘I would get messages from my sisters, I have 11 siblings,’ he says, as he shares a somber meal - piquant red peppers from South Africa, French cheeses, crusty baklava - with his wife and sons at the long dining room table. ‘They would be starving. Starving. So I did what anyone, any American, would do.’”

But in 2002 and 2003, Hamoodi was not just a nuclear engineer. He was also a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s plan to attack Iraq. And his position as a nuclear engineer made him a particularly potent threat to the case for that invasion, as he continuously insisted that Saddam did not have an active nuclear weapons program and that the case for the war was grounded in lies. In his antiwar activism, he emphasized how much already-suffering Iraqi civilians would suffer more, and how the invasion would lead to mass instability.

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Eleven years later, we are still at war
September 11, 2012

Eleven years later, we are still at war. Bullets, mortars and drones are still extracting payment. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions have paid in full. Children and even those yet to be born will continue to pay for decades to come.

On a single day in Iraq last week there were 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilians and wounding another 235. On Sept 9th, reports indicate 88 people were killed and another 270 injured in 30 attacks all across the country. Iraq continues in a seemingly endless death spiral into chaos. In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President, Obama claimed he ended the war in Iraq, well… not quite.

The city of Fallujah remains under siege. Not from U.S. troops, but from a deluge of birth defects that have plagued families since the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus by U.S. forces in 2004. No government studies have provided a direct link to the use of these weapons because no government studies have been undertaken, and none are contemplated.

Dr. Samira Alani, a pediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, told Al Jazeera, “We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine. There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we’ve never seen them until now.” The photographs are available on line if you can bear to look at what we have wrought. George W. Bush will loudly proclaim his “Pro-life” bona fides, and he’ll tell you he believes “that every child, born and unborn, ought to be protected in law and welcomed into life.” Apparently, “every child” doesn’t apply to the children of Fallujah, and the “law” doesn’t apply to George W. Bush.

Our soldiers, some physically damaged by IED’s, some mentally destroyed by PTSD, will pay for these wars for the rest of their days. Drug and alcohol abuse is out of control. Suicide among the troops is an epidemic. 2,916 Americans were lost in the towers on that fateful day, many, many more have perished in the intervening years.

Today we will be asked to honor the men and woman of our armed forces, but what does honoring the veterans entail? In its most recent report, The Veterans Administration estimates about 107,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Mental illness plagues 45% of homeless vets and 70% suffer from some kind of substance abuse. So how do you honor our veterans? Are “Support Our Troops” ribbons still in vogue? How does our government honor our veterans other than use them as political pawns in stump speeches and cannon fodder for their wars?

84,000 American troops remain in Afghanistan. While the occupation is rarely mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media, that doesn’t mean the killing has stopped. On average, one U.S. soldier dies everyday. Not an enormous sum, unless it is your mother, father, son or daughter that has perished. Few Americans notice. Afghan loses are not reported. They have loved ones who grieve as well.

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