What IS the impact of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? How did it impact us out in the field? Exactly WHY should it finally be repealed?
I’ll tell you after the fold…
Category: Iraq
May 07 2009
The Bush Administration Skeleton Key – Fear.
There is always the need, when one is looking at something complex and sprawling, to have a skeleton key, a filter that brings the overall arch of the story into focus whenever you get lost in the myriad details. For the last 8 years we have not had enough information about the actions of the Bush administration to develop such a skeleton key, this, however, has now changed. It turns out there is a single unifying factor which runs from August 2001 to January 20th 2009; fear.
May 05 2009
HONORING THE FALLEN: US Military KIA, Iraq & Afghanistan/Pakistan – April 2009
Iraq, Rapidly becoming the Forgotten War!!
There have been 4,603 coalition deaths — 4,286 Americans, 2 Australians, 1 Azerbaijani, 179 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 1 Czech, 7 Danes, 2 Dutch, 2 Estonians, 1 Fijian, 5 Georgians, 1 Hungarian, 33 Italians, 1 Kazakh, 1 Korean, 3 Latvian, 22 Poles, 3 Romanians, 5 Salvadoran, 4 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 2 Thai and 18 Ukrainians — in the war in Iraq as of May 5 2009, according to a CNN count. { Graphical breakdown of casualties }. The list below is the names of the soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors and Coast Guardsmen whose deaths have been reported by their country’s governments. The list also includes seven employees of the U.S. Defense Department. At least 31,230 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. View casualties in the war in Afghanistan.
May 05 2009
KBR linked to “the vast majority” of fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan
April Stephenson, the director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), told the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan on Monday that Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is connected to “the vast majority” of alleged fraud cases in the Iraq and Afghanistan combat zones.
Plus, the majority of the $13 billion in “questioned” and “unsupported” bills to the Pentagon were submitted by KBR, reports the Washington Post. “KBR’s work accounts for 43 percent of the Pentagon’s audited Iraq contracting dollars”.
“I don’t think we’re aware of a program, contract or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals,” Stephenson said…
Stephenson also revealed that some $553 million in payments have been suspended or blocked because contract officials questioned them or said they were invalid.
Since 2004, 32 cases of alleged bribery, overbilling, or other fraud have been sent to the inspector general for possible legal action.
May 02 2009
May One – Rerun/Recycled/New President/FooledAgain
Reminder more or less that May 1 is the International Worker’s Day and early American labor rights protesters initiated it. It’s an American tradition – not a Communist tradition. And it’s a pagan tradition from the dawn of time.
I hope you all had a great May Day. As I post this it’s still May 1 from the CDT zone westward. For those who saw the original post, you can just skip it or get refreshed. For those who haven’t seen it, it has some interesting background on the history of the day.
Herewith, a recycled essay:
May 1.
A lot of Americans have apparently been brainwashed during their formative years. Especially the crowd over at the site that shall not be named. The vast majority associate the first day of the month of May as a Soviet Communist celebration day. Then again a sizable number of Uhmericans think Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities. Oh, and the wiretapping started after 9/11 and not like late February or early March of 2001.
May first was a holiday before there was a May. It’s a cross-quarter day. That means it falls about halfway between a solstice and an equinox. Back before keyboards, laser mice and high-speed internet connections people used to notice these things. The only thing that emitted light, besides fire, was in the sky. You can check out the sky anytime. Just click here. Cool, huh? And you didn’t have to let go of your mouse to do it.
So back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, and I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode where Spock and McCoy have to build a time-machine thingie with 1930s tech, or even the dark ages of eight bit processors, RAM limits of 65536 bytes and machine code, I’m talking real stone and real bear. Hell, sabre-tooth tiger and wooly mammoth times. Back when chipped flint was high-tech. In the time of neo-pagans (not to be confused with the neopaganists of today).
Together with the solstices and equinoxes (Yule, Ostara, Midsummer, and Mabon), these form the eight solar holidays in the neopagan wheel of the year. They are often celebrated on the evening before the listed date, since traditionally the new day was considered to begin at sunset rather than at midnight.
Festival name Date Sun’s Position
Samhain 1 Nov (alt. 5-10 Nov) ? 15° ?
Imbolc 2 Feb (alt. 2-7 Feb) ? 15° ?
Beltane 1 May (alt. 4-10 May) ? 15° ?
Lughnasadh 1 Aug (alt. 3-10 Aug) ? 15° ?There are Christian and secular holidays that correspond roughly with each of these four, and some argue that historically they originated as adaptations of the pagan holidays, although the matter is not agreed upon. The corresponding holidays are:
* St.Brigids Day (1 Feb), Groundhog Day (2 Feb), and Candlemas (2 or 15 Feb)
* Walpurgis Night (30 Apr) and May Day (1 May)
* Lammas (1 Aug)
* Halloween (31 Oct), All Saints (1 Nov), and All Souls’ Day (2 Nov)Groundhog Day is celebrated in North America. It is said that if a groundhog comes out of his hole on 2 February and sees his shadow (that is, if the weather is good), there will be six more weeks of winter. February 2nd marks the end of the short days of winter. Because average temperatures lag behind day length by several weeks, it is (hopefully) the beginning of the end of winter cold.
It’s been Groundhog Day in Iraq for five seven years now. But who’s counting?
UPDATE: we’ve been lobbing explosives into Afghanistan since Clinton’s time. The definition of insanity is repeating the same act and expecting a different result. Our MIC PWOT is insane – but it keeps their funding flowing while we lose our jobs and homes.
It’s 2010 now and nothing has really changed that much, has it? I hope you enjoyed this May Day. It’s a day for Working Class Heroes.
There’s more:
May 01 2009
“Long time passing:
Mothers Speak about War and Terror”
Courage to Resist and Susan Galleymore. April 29, 2009
Courage to Resist co-founder Susan Galleymore made international headlines by taking the extraordinary and even dangerous step of traveling to Iraq to visit her US Army son stationed on a military base in the so-called Sunni Triangle, north of Baghdad. She is now on tour to promote her new book “Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror”.
What Susan found in Iraq – the horrors of war which was at once heartbreaking and compelling – challenged her to continue her journey interviewing mothers in war zones including Iraq, Israel and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan and the US. These powerful first-person stories offer dramatic insight into the impact of war on mothers, families, communities, and cultures around-the-world.
Apr 29 2009
Abu Ghraib Cremation Ovens Controversy
[Recently posted at the Daily Kos – please see questions about (unwarranted?) banning below]
On the holocaust anniversary yesterday, President Obama spoke eloquently about other holocausts in Rwanda and Somalia. But he steered clear of discussing the human remains and ashes in US run prisons overseas:
there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right. “We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,” Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. “It was this huge circular thing. We just didn’t know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew—bodies.” Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. “It had bones in it,” he said, and he called it the crematorium.
This was reported by award winning journalists in The New Yorker just over a year ago. But for obvious reasons I've never heard any politician mention it.
Now that it's suddenly appropriate to discuss illegal US torture policy – and in honor of the holocaust anniversary – is it possible we can investigate why our soldiers report that Iraqi detainees were evidently burned in ovens?
- Freiheit's diary :: ::
Yesterday Obama said, “part of the responsibility for the Holocaust rests with people who accepted the assigned role of bystander.”
I think he means it. So maybe he was too busy to read The New Yorker during the primaries.
Rather than be bystanders, let's make sure he sees the article today.
Apr 25 2009
In Their Boots: Fractured Minds
Four soldiers navigate the difficult path to recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI), the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Season 2, Episode 2: In Their Boots: Fractured Minds
Related Organizations
TIRR Foundation / Project Victory
HomePage, In Their Boots: Watch the first and second episodes of this years series, second is the one above. And watch the episodes from last year at the site, as well as all the referring links for veterans, military, military families and civilians.
Apr 24 2009
THE history as it should be remembered
There are plenty of good diaries, essays and articles about the timeline of torture. Let’s remember this history, THE history, as it should be remembered.
More after the fold…
Apr 23 2009
You Should Demand Answers As This:
Brave Afghan Vet Demands Answers from Congress
From the Testimony Today, 4.23.09, by the Soldiers of Today, on Afghanistan! Brave New Foundation weaves one soldiers opening remarks with the opening remarks, in Congress, of a brother ‘Nam Soldier from our Years Past and another Congressional Hearing!
Apr 21 2009
The Bush Administration’s Stunning Geneva Hypocrisy
by Jason Leopold, April 20, 2009
Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions’ protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.
“If there is somebody captured,” President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, “I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.”
Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq’s government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Conventions in particular.
“It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found and punished as war criminals,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.
That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the BBC that “the Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners.. They’re not supposed to be tortured or abused; they’re not supposed to be intimidated; they’re not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we’re going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they’ve got to stop.”
At a March 25, 2003, press briefing about progress in the US-led invasion, Secretary Rumsfeld said, “This war is an act of self-defense, to be sure, but it is also an act of humanity…. In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
Read the whole article here:
http://www.antemedius.com/content/bush-administrations-stunning-geneva-hypocrisy
Apr 19 2009
Baghdad, City of Walls – Video Documentary
Crossposted from Antemedius
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer and journalist from Iraq.
He began documenting life on the streets of Baghdad in 2001 and, when the Iraq war started two years later, he reported for The Guardian newspaper on those parts of the Iraqi capital that were simply too dangerous for outsiders to cover. But growing violence forced him to leave the city.
In Baghdad, City of Walls Ghaith returns to the streets of a Baghdad now divided by security walls separating the city’s Sunni and Shia residents.
Thousands of homeless roam the streets, children grow up hating Americans, the dead are buried in improvised cemeteries and there is electricity for only three hours a day.
Ghaith’s ability to move around the city despite the dangers, gives us a unique insight into this Baghdad and to a story so far untold.
Baghdad, City of Walls aired in England in early April 2009. View the program in 4 parts below.