Category: Iraq

Paul Hardcastle has updated his original song “19” made twenty five years ago, just released a few days back, I’ll let him explain

19/04/10  The Story of 19

25 Years ago, I recorded the song ’19’. The idea came about whilst watching a documentary which highlighted the plight of young men and women who fought in Vietnam. “In World War 2 the average age of the combat soldier was 26, in Vietnam he was 19.” These words really made me stop and think.

When I first approached Chrysalis Records with the Demo of ’19’ most people there didn’t believe it would get any attention as there would be no interest from the media, and I quote “the public don’t want to hear a song about war.”

Two people thought otherwise,

Well, well, well, is this one more isolated incident, under the command of one george w. bush, and with only one State National Guard or were similar incidents taking place in the lead up to the ‘surge’, i.e. escalation, and during other times, in Iraq to make sure there were enough needed warm bodies or were recruiters trying to keep their numbers up for their bonuses!

Mission Accomplished:

Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.

….”More than 100 were tortured. There were a lot of marks on their bodies,” said an Iraqi official familiar with the inspections. “They beat people, they used electricity. They suffocated them with plastic bags, and different methods.”

An internal U.S. Embassy report quoted Salim as saying that prisoners had told her they were handcuffed for three to four hours at a time in stress positions or sodomized. “One prisoner told her that he had been raped on a daily basis, another showed her his undergarments, which were entirely bloodstained,” the memo read.

….Maliki defended his use of special prisons and an elite military force that answers only to him; his supporters say he has had no choice because of Iraq’s precarious security situation. Maliki told The Times that he was committed to stamping out torture — which he blamed on his enemies.

It’s a nice bookend to this piece on Bagram under the Obama administration:

The prisoners, who were interviewed separately, all told very similar stories. Most of them said they had been beaten by American soldiers at the point of arrest before being taken to the prison.

Mirwais had half a row of teeth missing, which he said was from being struck with the butt of a gun by an American soldier.

No-one said they were visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross during their detention at the site, and they all said that their families did not know where they were.

In the small concrete cells, the prisoners said, a light was on all the time. They said they could not tell if it was night or day and described this as very disturbing.

Mirwais said he was made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.

Great achievements.  Dignitude we can believe in.

I’ll let this stand for itself. Read it, please.

Press release above the fold, and Letter To Iraq after the fold.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 15th, 2010

Contact:
Laura Taylor: 202-510-3711
[email protected]

VETERANS OF “WIKILEAKS” INCIDENT ANNOUNCE “LETTER OF RECONCILIATION” TO IRAQIS INJURED IN ATTACK

Two former soldiers from the Army unit responsible for the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” incident have written an open-letter of “Reconciliation and Responsibility” to those injured in the July 2007 attack,  in which U.S. forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees.

Ethan McCord and Josh Stieber deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16 in 2007. Ethan was on the ground at the scene of the shooting, and is seen on the video rushing one of the injured children to a U.S. Vehicle; “When I saw those kids, all I could picture was my kids back home”. Ethan applied for mental health support following this incident and was denied by his commanding officer.

Josh Stieber was not at the scene of the shooting but says similar incidents happened throughout his 14-month tour; “The acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war.” Josh states that these casualties demonstrate the impact of U.S. military policy on both the civilians and the soldiers on the ground.

Robert McKeon, the head of Veritas Capital, is about to profit in “the most lucrative deal of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” notes the Street Talk blog at Forbes. How did McKeon do it? By investing in private military contracting mercenaries, of course! Now the DynCorp owner is set to cash out his wartime investment.

DynCorp International, the… provider of services to the U.S. military, announced Monday that it has reached a $1.5 billion deal to be acquired by funds managed by Cerberus Capital Management. If the deal goes through, McKeon will have turned a $48 million personal investment in DynCorp into some $320 million for himself.

Ka-ching!

Street Talk describes the DynCorp deal as a “defining transaction for McKeon”. So, is McKeon the definition of a Wall Street war profiteer?

And a fight not worth fighting.  The NYT reports that 42 Americans died there, and many more Afghan soldiers, and one would imagine, even more local people (but they don’t bother to even mention that).  Why were Americans there?

“Occasionally a Taliban or Al Qaeda member was transiting through that location, but the Korangalis were by no means part of the insurgency,” he said. “Unfortunately, now they are because they were willing to accept any help to get us out.”

– NYT

So, if not Taliban or Al Qaeda, then who are these people we were killing?  

The broad outlines of basic animal motivation are easily stripped to bare bones: food deprivation motivates food seeking, sleep deprivation promotes sleep, sexual stimulation promotes reproductive behavior, and the prospect of imminent death by predation induces fear and anger which evoke defensive and offensive attack behaviors.  

Of course, when these existential dominant drives are not on the psychic regulatory and operational front-lines, other subordinate drives, such as curiosity and orienting and re-orienting reflexes, i.e., the careful examination of objects of thought, may successfully compete for operational space.  

Conversely, nothing obliterates subordinate drives such as curiosity and reasoned inquiry like the induction of primal homicidal mania.  

The man, dressed in a white shirt and dark pants, strides confidently down the middle of the suburban street, his camera bag slung over one shoulder, his co worker following behind, with other men in summer clothing ambling down the road.  He pauses to speak into his cell phone.

In the distance, helicopters hover.

Nearly 3 years later, what happened to him and companion as they walked to their next Reuters assignment is known.

(warning, graphic video below, noise and images, please do not view if you are prone to PTSD.)

A written commentary on this story may be seen here at Democratic Underground:

http://www.democraticundergrou…

The Columbia Journalism Review wrote about the release of the video by Wikileaks at the National Press Club here:  http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/…

the video is online here http://collateralmurder.com/

An epluribusmedia writeup by Michael Collins is here:

http://discuss.epluribusmedia….

In Iraq and Afghanistan, by this year, there have been 4705 American and Coalition forces killed in Iraq, and 1713 killed in Afghanistan, with the majority coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.  There have also been at least 462 private contractors killed  http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Co…

At least 139 journalists have been killed in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2009.  Of those, 7 were embedded with the military, and 132 were non embedded, or “unilateral.”   An astounding 117 of those 139 were Iraqis, with the rest being European or from other Arab nations, with just 2 being from the United States.

http://www.cpj.org/reports/200…

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Hypocrisy

Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com, Buy this cartoon

Hi, my name is Mike Gravel and I’m a former US Senator from the state of Alaska.  I’m standing in front of the Iwo Jima Memorial, and I’m blessed to live a block away, in fact, from my balcony I can look down at the Iwo Jima Memorial.

What this memorial represents is a sacrifice our young men have given for the safety of this country.  Today we are visited with threats to our safety, but they’re of a different kind.  They’re not of the kind of the Second World War, nor are they of the kind of the Cold War.  What we have today is global terrorism.