GI SPECIAL 4C21

[Thanks to Soldier X, who sent this in.]

“I Feel A Huge Sense Of Betrayal That I Went And Risked My Life For A Lie”

[Thanks to PB, who sent this in.]

Mar 18 By PAUL BURKHARDT, Associated Press Writer

In Concord, N.H., nearly 300 peace activists marched about a mile from a National Guard armory to the Statehouse.

“I feel a huge sense of betrayal that I went and risked my life for a lie,” said Joseph Turcott, 26, a former Marine who served in the invasion.

Do you have a friend or relative in the service? Forward this E-MAIL along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, at home and inside the armed services. Send requests to address up top.

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

Danish Soldier Killed By Roadside Bomb Near Basra

Mar 24, 2006 (Reuters)

A Danish soldier was killed in southern Iraq on Thursday after his patrol vehicle hit a bomb by the side of the road near the city of Basra, the Danish central army command said.

“I can confirm that one Danish soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq,” a Danish army spokesman told Reuters, adding that one other soldier was injured in the incident.

Concord Native Injured

March 23, 2006 Media General

CONCORD: A Concord native serving with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division suffered serious injuries while serving in Iraq and has been flown to Washington, D.C., to recover, according to his family.

Jeffery Redman, 34, of Fort Campbell, Ky., suffered leg injuries, and for a while doctors were concerned they may have had to amputate a leg. Also, shrapnel ripped a hole into one of his hands, said Redman’s father, 61-year-old Joe Redman of Concord.

Joe Redman said his son was injured March 14 while on patrol in an Iraqi city. Jeffery Redman had just stepped out onto the street when the group came under a mortar attack.

“One hit right beside him,” Joe Redman said. “But he did have his armor on. If it hadn’t of been for that, who knows?”

Joe Redman said doctors have already told him it’ll take a skin graft to repair his right leg and that it took 37 units of blood to save his son’s life.

Fortunately fellow soldiers were nearby during the attack.

“If he had not been where he could get help right then he would have died,” Jeffery Redman’s mother, Mary, said. “He came close to bleeding to death.”

After his injuries in Iraq, Jeffery Redman was flown to a hospital in Germany. He was transported to Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Tuesday.

Redman often calls the hospital to try and learn the condition of his son, but still doesn’t know the full details. “This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through in my life,” Joe Redman said. “If I could, I’d take his place today.”

For Jeffery Redman, this was his second time in Iraq.

He enlisted in the National Guard when he was a senior at Central Cabarrus High School. After he graduated, he joined the U.S. Army and moved away from Concord around 1992 because of his military duties.

He moved away with his wife, Laura, whom he met at a nightclub in Charlotte about 11 years ago.

He and his wife, Laura, have three boys, 9-year-old Chase, 7-year-old Wolfgang and 2-year-old Cordarro.

It was Laura who called Joe Redman on March 14 to tell him the news about her husband. Joe Redman has been waiting to learn more about his son’s injuries, but supports his son’s work.

Joe Redman said Jeffery had re-enlisted in the army last year and was deployed to Iraq a second time in September. He’s served in the U.S. Army for almost 12 years now and had been in Iraq in 2002.

Jeffery Redman’s latest trip to Iraq had him help train Iraqi soldiers, Joe Redman said.

Before Jeffery Redman was injured, his father had talked to him. Jeffery had told him that he was going on a mission and wouldn’t be in contact with the family for 30 days.

“I just thought he was out somewhere training Iraqis” Joe Redman said.

Mercenary Killed

March 23, 2006 Orlando Sentinel

SANFORD: A man identified as being from Sanford was killed Monday while working in Iraq, authorities said.

Jeffrey L. Heard, 42, had been working for SOC-SMG, a Nevada security company, as a communications specialist in Iraq since September. Company officials said Heard lived in Sanford with his wife, Diahanna, and their two children, Kimber and Brian. His family could not be reached for comment.

Heard was part of a convoy transporting supplies when the lead vehicle, which he was in, was ambushed, company officials said. Two others were injured. They were treated and released from the hospital, authorities said.

US Iraq Casualties Stay High:
“The Rates At Which They Are Being Wounded Have Dramatically Increased”

March 22, 2006 by Martin Sieff (UPI)

Over the past month, the average rate at which U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq has significantly fallen, but the rates at which they are being wounded have dramatically increased.

U.S. mainstream media reports have focused only on the numbers being killed.

But over the past eight months, we have repeatedly emphasized in this column that the far larger numbers of U.S. troops wounded, especially those wounded too seriously to return to active duty, represent a far broader and more statistically significant figure of the scale of insurgent activity and the degree to which it is succeeding or failing to inflict significant casualties on U.S. forces.

The total number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq through Tuesday, March 21 since the start of U.S. operations to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003, was 2,319, according to official figures issued by the Department of Defense, a rise of 49 in the past 39 days or an average of just over 1.3 killed per day.

The good news is that this is a more than 60 percent improvement on the rate of 3.1 killed per day in early February. And it is a 350 percent improvement on the 33 U.S. soldiers killed in only seven days from Jan. 11 through Jan. 17, an average of 4.7 soldiers killed per day.

The bad news, however, is that in the 39 days from Feb. 11 through March 21, 616 U.S. soldiers were injured in Iraq, an average of 15.8 per day.

This was more than twice as bad as the Feb. 4-10 period when 47 U.S. soldiers were injured at an average rate of just under seven per day.

And it was also more than 36 percent worse than the rate of the five-day period from Jan. 30 through Feb. 3 when 58 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures, at an average rate of 11.6 per day.

IMPOSSIBLE MISSION
FUTILE EXERCISE
BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW!

US soldiers during Operation Swarmer north of Baghdad. (AFP/US Army/Jeremy Wood)

AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS

More Civilians Butchered In Afghanistan

Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2006

Afghan forces [translation: traitors working for the occupation] killed at least 15 people they claimed were Taliban rebels near the Pakistan border, but authorities have begun an investigation after area residents said the dead were tribesmen who wanted to attend a religious festival.

TROOP NEWS

THIS IS HOW BUSH BRINGS THE TROOPS HOME:
BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW

The coffin of U.S. Army SPC Jose Louis Ruiz, after his funeral in New York August 24, 2005. Ruiz was shot and killed in Mosul, Iraq, on August 15. REUTERS/Chip East

Guess What:
The Traitors In Washington DC Still Forcing Troops To Use 27,000 Deadly Humvees

[For years now, Rumsfeld and his lying, ass-kissing poodle dog generals have been telling the press and the public that everybody in Iraq and Afghanistan has those wonderful, safe new Humvees, and nobody has to go outside the wire in anything less.

[What a pack of lies.

[Below are the facts.

[Said it before, say it again: there is no enemy in Iraq. Iraqis and U.S. troops have a common enemy, whose purpose is nothing less than to kill them in pursuit of their Imperial dreams.

[The enemies of both are the politicians who rule in Washington DC, and the rich corporate elites who buy and sell them like so many streetwalking skanks. They are the enemy. Bring the war home now, against the real enemy. Payback is overdue. T]

March 27, 2006 By Gina Cavallaro, Army Times staff writer [Excerpt]

There are about 40,000 Humvees in use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of those, about 13,000 are Level 1: M1114s that come straight from the manufacturer with the most complete armor package.

The rest are Level 2: Humvees that have been up-armored and had their suspension adjusted for the weight, but have no top or bottom armor and no armor over the fuel tank.

One More Stinking Betrayal:
Army Abandons Soldier Facing 13 Years In Prison

3.22.06 Washington Post

Army Cpl. Kendall D. McKibben doesn’t understand why the military has refused a routine subpoena that he believes could help him avoid a 13-year prison sentence.

McKibben is charged with assaulting a police officer during what his doctors believe was an epileptic seizure related to his non-removed brain tumor.

But military officials won’t let his doctors testify.

More Troops Off To Bush’s Imperial Slaughterhouse

3.27.06 Army Times

Alabama Guard units to deploy

Three more Alabama National Guard units received orders to serve in Iraq, according to a press release.

About 685 soldiers, including 100 Arkansas Guard soldiers, are being mobilized.

In late March and early April, the 1st Battalion, 131st Aviation Regiment, which flies UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, will mobilize. Of the unit’s 400 soldiers, 100 are from Arkansas.

The 226th Area Support Group of Mobile will mobilize in late May, with its 135 soldiers supporting logistics operations in Iraq. The third unit, the 152nd Military Police Company, one of the newest units in the Alabama Guard, and its 150 soldiers will mobilize in late June.

*****************************************

Iowa Support call-up

Eighty soldiers with Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1034th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, have been ordered to serve one year in Iraq, the Iowa Army National Guard said March 9.

Iowa Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Gregory Hapgood said the unit will oversee transportation, maintenance, water purification and distribution, and fuel distribution.

*************************************

Wisconsin Unit mobilized

More than 400 Wisconsin National Guard soldiers have been called to active duty for a stint expected to involve overseas deployment to support Operation Iraqi Freedom, a Guard spokesman said March 13.

The soldiers of 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, will report April 19, Lt. Col. Tim Donovan said in a statement.

The mobilization of the Milwaukee-based 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, will last about 18 months, a year of which is expected to be overseas, Donovan said. The Oshkosh-based 1157th Transportation Company, with about 150 soldiers, expects to be mobilized in mid-June, Donovan said.

Fucked Up Troops Being Sent Back To Iraq:
“Doctors Pressured By Commanders Not To Identify Mental Conditions That Would Prevent Personnel From Being Deployed”

[Thanks to Alan S, who sent this in.]

March 19, 2006 By Rick Rogers, STAFF WRITER, Union-Tribune Publishing Co

Besides bringing antibiotics and painkillers, military personnel nationwide are heading back to Iraq with a cache of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications.

The psychotropic drugs are a bow to a little-discussed truth fraught with implications: Mentally ill service members are being returned to combat.

Officials from the Defense Department and Camp Pendleton, where some units have been to Iraq three times, said they don’t track personnel deployed while taking mental-health medication or the number diagnosed with mental illness.

But medical officers for the Army and Marine Corps acknowledge that medicated service members – and those suffering combat-induced psychological problems – are returning to war. And anecdotal evidence, bolstered by the government’s own studies, suggest that the number could be significant.

Buttressing the idea that large numbers of service members are medicated, more than 200,000 prescriptions for the most common types of antidepressants were written in the past 14 months for service members and their families, said Sydney Hickey, a spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association.

In addition, the Defense Department has not provided prescription totals for such antidepressants from before and after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

Mental-health care for service members and the Defense Department’s efforts to keep the mentally ill in uniform are becoming national issues, said Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md.

Robinson said three Army doctors have told him about being pressured by their commanders not to identify mental conditions that would prevent personnel from being deployed.

“They are being told to diagnose combat-stress reaction instead of PTSD,” he said. “That does two things: It keeps the troops deployable and it makes it hard for them to collect disability claims once they get out of the military.”

Robinson contends that the Pentagon is trying to control its spending on mental-health disabilities.

Overall, service members’ mental health is a hot-button subject because it goes to the cost of the war in dollars and lives, said Joy Ilem, an assistant national legislative director for the organization Disabled American Veterans.

“The (Department of Veterans Affairs) is very worried about the political implications of PTSD and other mental issues arising from the war,” Ilem said.

“They are talking about early outreach and treatment, but they are really trying to tamp down the discussion.”

Cmdr. Paul S. Hammer deals with such issues daily.

Hammer, a psychiatrist, is responsible for the Marine Corps’ mental-health programs during this deployment rotation. He confirmed that Marines with post-traumatic stress disorder and combat stress are returning to Iraq, though he would not say how many.

Hammer said deciding who is deployed is often anguishing.

Sometimes he has to tell Marine commanders that personnel they had counted on will not be deploying. In other instances, he said, “We’ll hold some guy’s feet to the fire and say, ‘This is what you signed up for, and you have to go.’”

It’s the tough calls that worry Adrian Atizado, a legislative director for Disabled American Veterans.

“Currently, the services will deploy a service member if the person is medically stable and it is determined that the deployment won’t aggravate (his) condition,” Atizado said. “How does one gauge that?

“This a gray area; this is asking a medical provider to make a decision based on the future. The medical providers are human beings. I have no doubt that they are looking out for the best interest of the service members, but they are under pressure to check off on their deployment.”

General Says Troops Not Coming Home:
[Same Old Lame Bullshit They’ve Been Throwing For Three Years Now]

March 20, 2006 Julian Borger in Washington and Jonathan Steele in Amman, The Guardian

The US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said that the troop withdrawals he had forecast for this spring or summer might have to wait until the end of the year or even 2007.

Army Times 3.27.06

Court Forbids Command To Deploy Anti-War Soldier

“The court will continue to protect him from retaliation and punishment as the Army processes his C.O. application,” said attorney Deborah Karpatkin.

March 21, 2006 Associated Press

FORT DRUM, N.Y.: The Army agreed Monday not to deploy a Fort Drum soldier to Afghanistan while his conscientious-objector application is pending, under terms of a judge’s order.

Sgt. Corey D. Martin, 24, applied for discharge as a conscientious objector Dec. 12. While his application was pending, with an investigating officer recommending approval, the Army ordered him deployed to Afghanistan on March 14.

But under a stipulation and order from U.S. District Judge David Hurd, the Army agreed not to deploy Martin before a final decision by its Conscientious Objector Review Board. Lawyers for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented Martin, said the order ensures the intelligence analyst’s rights will not be violated.

“The court will continue to protect him from retaliation and punishment as the Army processes his C.O. application,” said attorney Deborah Karpatkin.

Martin, of Brookings, S.D., joined the Army for a five-year enlistment in June 2001. He said he made the decision to join the Army at age 19, six months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In court documents, he said his anti-war feelings surfaced during a Christmas visit with his family in 2002. Martin said he discussed his feelings with his family and began reading anti-war literature.

Lapping Up Millions For War Profiteering An Old Bush Family Tradition

March 23, 2006 Los Angeles Times

William H.T. Bush, uncle of President Bush, is collecting $2.7 million in cash and stock from the recent sale of a company that profited from the war.

Anti-War Demonstrators Collecting $ Millions For Attack By Oakland Scum Cops

March 20, 2006 By CAROLYN MARSHALL, New York Times, by way of Tom Condit tomcondit@igc.org

OAKLAND, Calif., March 19:

A clash between the police and antiwar protesters here nearly three years ago will cost the City of Oakland more than $2 million, including dozens of payouts to people injured when officers fired wooden dowels, bean bags and rubber pellets.

The Oakland City Council is scheduled Tuesday to approve the final payments related to the incident, which was the most violent of many protests nationwide in the early weeks of the Iraq war.

At least 58 people were injured, including nine longshoremen who were caught in the crossfire on their way to work.

The protesters said they had been behaving peacefully and accused the police of using excessive force. A lawsuit against the city, the Police Department and several officers, which led to the settlement payments, accused the authorities of civil rights violations.

The demonstration had been organized to draw attention to two shipping companies that were assisting the government’s military efforts. American President Lines was under contract to ship weapons to the military in Iraq, and Stevedoring Services of America held the government contract in 2003 to operate the port at Umm Qasr, Iraq.

The city has already paid more than $1 million to settle most of the claims. The payouts, from $5,000 to $500,000, cover medical costs associated with the injuries, which included broken bones and grapefruit-size welts and in some cases required operations and skin grafts.

Mr. Chanin estimated that the settlement would ultimately cost the city over $2 million, including $1.5 million in payments to the plaintiffs, plus legal fees and costs associated with the new crowd-control policy.

That tally does not include the cost of hiring an outside lawyer to help with the case, which the city said would add well over $500,000.

IRAQ RESISTANCE ROUNDUP

Assorted Resistance Action

The wreckage of a police car damaged in a car bomb attack, in Baghdad March 23, 2006. (AP Photo/ Mohammed Hato)

March 23, 2006. AFP & SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer & Reuters

At least 15 people, mostly policemen, have been killed after a car bomber rammed the entrance of a Baghdad anti-terrorism unit.

“A suicide car bomber drove into the entrance of the headquarters of this unit charged with major crimes, killing 15 people including 10 police and wounding 35, mostly police,” a security source said.

He says the attack was carried out around 11:00am (local time) in the central Baghdad district of Wahda.

The blast shook the surrounding area and sent a thick plume of smoke into the sky.

A policeman who survived the blast says that the bomber managed to get into the complex before blowing himself up.

“Many citizens had come to sort out administrative business when the suicide bomber, driving a red pickup, smashed through the door and exploded his car inside the headquarters’ entrance,” said Abdel Moneim.

In the roadside blast in Baghdad’s mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Azamiyah, two policemen and two bystanders were killed, according to police Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali. At least two policemen were wounded, he said.

A witness says he saw the driver get out of the car, walk over to a small food stall, order something, extract a remote control device from his pocket, set off the bomb and disappear.

Another policemen has been killed and three more injured by a roadside bomb in Babylon, 60 kilometres south of the capital.

A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in western Baquba, killing four policemen, a police source said.

The chief of the Iraqi army in Kirkuk, Major General Anwar Muhammed Ameen, escaped a roadside bomb attack on a road 45 km southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk, Police Colonel Sarhat Qadir said.

A car bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in al-Maghrib street, northern Baghdad, killing three policemen and wounding six civilians, a police source said.

One policeman was killed and another three injured when their patrol was struck by a roadside bomb in the town of Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

Police said that one Iraqi army soldier was killed and another wounded when a roadside bomb was detonated near their patrol on a road between Latifiya and Iskandariya, south of Baghdad.

Two policemen were killed and two were wounded when guerrillas ambushed their convoy in north Baghdad, an attack that police said was an aborted attempt to free detainees being transferred to the northern city of Mosul.

A car bomber attacked an Iraqi army patrol near the U.S. Al Asad air base and killed nine soldiers in Baghdady near the town of Haditha, 200 km (125 miles) west of Baghdad.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE RESISTANCE
END THE OCCUPATION

FORWARD OBSERVATIONS

Dear Christian Right:

Photo from the I-R-A-Q (I Remember Another Quagmire) portfolio of Mike Hastie, US Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71. (For more of his outstanding work, contact at: (hastiemike@earthlink.net) T)

From: Mike Hastie
Sent: March 19, 2006 8:11 PM
Subject: Dear Christian Right

To G.I. Special:

Dear Christian Right,

I’ll give you permission to give me a lecture on the sins of abortion, if I can give you a lecture on the sins of the United States government killing hundreds of thousands of children in Vietnam and Iraq.

What you hear, may give you panic attacks.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall know God.

Mike Hastie
Vietnam Veteran
March 19, 2006

SOLDIERS ALIVE:
[The Doing Side Of War]

Despite the book’s honesty about some of the horrors of war, the inevitable question for anyone reading Soldiers Alive today is: “How can somebody be in the middle of a massacre without realizing it?”

SOLDIERS ALIVE
Ishikawa Tatsuzo,
Zeljko Cipris (Translator)
University of Hawaii Press, 2003
216 pages $18

Review by DAVID WHITEHOUSE, International Socialist Review, 12/05

ONE EVENING, the regimental headquarters of an invading army — a commandeered house — suddenly burst into flames. Soldiers found a shabbily dressed young man nearby and accused him of setting the fire. They fetched an interpreter, who began a quick interrogation:

In a quiet voice, the youth briefly replied. The interpreter suddenly struck him across the face. The youth staggered.…

“What did he say?” asked the watching soldiers.

“Bastard says setting fire to his own house is his own business!”

A corporal grabbed the young man, took him to the edge of the village, and hacked him to death.

This incident forms the opening scene of Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s Soldiers Alive, a short, haunting novel about the Japanese invasion of China. Written in 1938, just weeks after the events it describes, the book was banned in Japan during the war. It has just recently appeared in English.

Ishikawa did not intend to write an antiwar book.

The translator, Zeljko Cipris, notes in a useful historical introduction that, “Ishikawa aims to deglamorize the war against China, not denounce it.”

This aim lies behind the title, as Cipris explains: “The soldiers are “alive” not only because they have not yet been killed, but also because they are creatures of flesh and blood rather than idealized models of chivalrous virtue.”

Ishikawa based the novel on interviews with Japanese soldiers in the then-capital of China, Nanjing. He arrived in January 1938, just three weeks after the city’s capture and shortly after the peak of what is known as the Nanjing massacre.

The massacre involved the rape of 20,000 women and the murder of some 200,000 civilians and captured soldiers.

The soldiers probably didn’t tell Ishikawa the worst details, but he learned enough to create a vivid picture of how such atrocities come to happen.

The novel focuses on a half-dozen soldiers from a single company as they fought their way 170 miles inland from Shanghai. Historians note that the Nanjing massacre really began on this campaign.

As they dashed to Nanjing, the army outran its supply lines and had to steal their provisions from the Chinese. After knocking down an old woman who tenaciously fought to keep her only ox, Ishikawa’s soldiers felt released from the inhibitions of peacetime:

“The soldiers felt elated. This continent teemed with boundless riches; one merely had to take them. A vista was opening up before them in which the inhabitants’ rights of ownership and private property were like wild fruits for the soldiers to pick as they chose.”

Even the company priest, Gencho, joined in dehumanizing — and killing — the Chinese. Supposedly unarmed, he picked up a shovel in one battle and “dealt one lethal blow after another, the rosary at his wrist dryly rattling.”

Gencho could not bring himself to pray for the Chinese, even for the dead. “When I think of them as my comrades’ enemies,” he told his commander, “I hate them.”

The war changed the other soldiers, too. One, a romantic, became a sadist, a bachelor of science became a detached killer, and a petrified lieutenant set examples of bravery because he fought in a blind rage.

Their personalities converged on corporal Kasahara’s, a peasant youth to whom “killing enemy soldiers was no different than killing carp.… The one emotion that did move him mightily was a virtually instinctive love for his comrades.” Given Ishikawa’s pro-war stance, it is with regret but no irony that he calls Kasahara “a splendid soldier, the very epitome of a soldier.”

They faced a harrowing fight to take Wuxi, a city of 200,000 that they later burned to the ground. But first, the men went in search of women:

“Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot.… Enemy stragglers were still hiding in the area and many of the inhabitants had arms, but this did not make the soldiers hesitate in the least. They felt themselves the mightiest creatures alive.”

They returned wearing the silver wedding bands of the women they had raped, joking, “It’s a memento of my late wife.”

As time went on, civilian resistance grew, and a girl “of eleven or twelve” shot down a Japanese lieutenant from close range. This infuriated the soldiers, and the high command issued an order giving permission to shoot “anyone who resists, civilians included.”

As Chinese soldiers retreated toward Nanjing, the pursuing Japanese captured more and more of them — but this was a problem:

“Soldiers about to take part in heavy fighting could hardly afford to guard and shepherd them along. The simplest method of disposal was to kill them. But even killing was difficult once the hordes of prisoners had been brought in. The explicit order to kill captives was not actually given out, but it was the general course of action indicated by the top command.”

The soldiers’ fury increased all the more as fleeing Chinese fighters tore off their uniforms and blended into the civilian population.

As Cipris notes, “the narrative of Soldiers Alive drives toward a violent conclusion that does not entirely take place” — the rest of the massacre in Nanjing. But Ishikawa makes the atrocity comprehensible, even if his soldier-interviewees kept him unaware of its extent.

The whitewash of the incident continues in Japan’s popular press. And early this year, the government approved a new textbook that downplays this and other wartime atrocities; a move that provoked anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Modern-day Japanese novelist Makoto Oda recently provided some insight when he contrasted how things look from “the doing side of war” with the view from the “downside.”

In these terms, Ishikawa interviewed those who were on the doing side, and he wanted to believe them.

This is a point to keep in mind when we hear the next reports about an assault on some faraway Fallujah.

Here’s A Big Fucking Surprise:
Tapes Of Saddam Reveal There Were No WMDs:
“We Have Nothing”

March 21, 2006 By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq:

Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they’d given up banned weapons.

“We don’t have anything hidden!” a frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.

At another, in 1996, he wondered whether U.N. inspectors would “roam Iraq for 50 years” in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. “When is this going to end?” he asked.

The newly released documents are among U.S. government translations of audiotapes or Arabic-language transcripts from top-level Iraqi meetings dating from around 1996-97 back to the period soon after the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.N. Security Council sent inspectors to disarm Iraq.

Saddam’s inner circle entertained notions of reviving the programs someday, the newly released documents show. “The factories will remain in our brains,” one unidentified participant told Saddam at a meeting, apparently in the early 1990s.

At the same meeting, however, the ex-president, who is now on trial for crimes against humanity, led a discussion about converting chemical-weapons factories to beneficial uses.

When a subordinate complained that U.N. inspectors had seized equipment at the plants useful for pharmaceutical and insecticide production, Saddam jumped in, saying they had “no right” to deny the Iraqis the equipment, since “they have ascertained that we have no intention to produce in this field (chemical weapons).”

Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon.

“We played by the rules of the game,” Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. “In 1991, our weapons were destroyed.”

Amer Mohammed Rashid, a top weapons program official, told a 1996 presidential meeting he laid out the facts to the U.N. chief inspector.

“We don’t have anything to hide, so we’re giving you all the details,” he said he told Rolf Ekeus.

In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a postinvasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.

Saddam’s goal in the 1990s was to have the Security Council lift the economic sanctions strangling the Iraqi economy, by convincing council members Iraq had eliminated its WMD.

But he was thwarted at every turn by what he and aides viewed as U.S. hard-liners blocking council action.

The inspectors “destroyed everything and said, ‘Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment,”’ Saddam said at one meeting. “We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to (verify).

“Don’t think for a minute that we still have WMD,” he told his deputies. “We have nothing.”

How It Is

2006 Minnesota Wellness Publications, by David Bonello [Veteran] [Excerpt]

The terrorists have won and they will continue to win, as long as they are in the White House and in congress.

What do you think? Comments from service men and women, and veterans, are especially welcome. Send to thomasfbarton@earthlink.net. Name, I.D., address withheld unless publication requested. Replies confidential.

OCCUPATION REPORT

2003: SOWING THE WIND
2006: REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

A U.S. Army digger destroys one of several houses in Ramadi June 3, 2003. REUTERS/Aladin Abdel Naby

[Fair is fair. Let’s bring 150,000 Iraqis over here to the USA. They can kill people at checkpoints, tear down their houses with dozers and diggers, overthrow the government, put a new one in office they like better and call it “sovereign,” and “detain” anybody who doesn’t like it in some prison without any charges being filed against them, or any trial.]

[Those Iraqis are sure a bunch of backward primitives. They actually resent this help, have the absurd notion that it’s bad their country is occupied by a foreign military dictatorship, and consider it their patriotic duty to fight and kill the soldiers sent to grab their country. What a bunch of silly people. How fortunate they are to live under a military dictatorship run by George Bush. Why, how could anybody not love that? You’d want that in your home town, right?]

“In the States, if police burst into your house, kicking down doors and swearing at you, you would call your lawyer and file a lawsuit,” said Wood, 42, from Iowa, who did not accompany Halladay’s Charlie Company, from his battalion, on Thursday’s raid. “Here, there are no lawyers. Their resources are limited, so they plant IEDs (improvised explosive devices) instead.”

OCCUPATION ISN’T LIBERATION
BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

OCCUPATION PALESTINE

Anti-Israel Rabbis Vow Hamas Support

[Thanks to JM, who sent this in. She writes: There were Jews in Palestine when it was divided to create a Jewish state. The original Palestinian Jews had lived there for thousands of years. Those still in Israel are usually treated as second class citizens who opposed the State. The original Neturei-Karta rabbis belonged to this group and it is to be expected that they support the democratically elected Hamas government. Note Hammas has Palestinian Christians in its ranks and I believe the new cabinet will include one Christian and one woman.]

22 March 2006 AFP

A group of anti-Zionist rabbis has visited the Palestinian parliament to pledge their support for the prospective Hamas-led government.

The rabbis from the small ultra-Orthodox movement Neturei Karta, which this month sent a delegation to Iran, travelled to the West Bank town of Ram Allah to express their support for the Islamic group.

The group rejects the existence of the state of Israel as contrary to Jewish law and believes the land should be returned to Palestinians.

Neturei Karta believe that no Jewish state should be created before the coming of the messiah.

“We are true Jews who have come to the Palestinian Legislative Council today to proclaim our allegiance to the new Hamas regime,” said a spokesman for the group.

“We came to express our complete support for the Palestinian people. We consider ourselves Palestinians and, like them, we regard ourselves as under Zionist occupation.”

Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik called an adjournment of parliament, controlled by Hamas since its January election victory, so that the 14 rabbis, led by spiritual leader Moshe Hirsh, could be welcomed by legislators.

The anti-Zionist movement once represented a stronger current within ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but its membership has dropped to about 400 families in Israel, with supporters in Britain and the US.

Hirsh, proclaiming himself a Palestinian Jew, served as Jewish affairs adviser to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

[To check out what life is like under a murderous military occupation by a foreign power, go to: www.rafahtoday.org The foreign army is Israeli; the occupied nation is Palestine.]

DANGER: POLITICIANS AT WORK

U.S. CONFUSES INSURGENTS WITH PRESCRIPTION DRUG PLAN
Military Launches ‘Operation Incomprehensible Program’ Across Iraq

March 21, 2006 The Borowtiz Report

In an effort to confuse Iraqi insurgents, the Pentagon announced today that the U.S. had begun bombarding insurgent positions with copies of President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug plan.

At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that the idea of confusing the insurgents with the President’s Medicare plan was hatched last week, after Mr. Bush appeared at a series of town hall meetings at which seniors in his audience seemed thoroughly bewildered by the intricate new program.

“We realized, if this prescription drug plan is that confusing in English, imagine how incoherent it would seem once it was translated into Arabic,” Secretary Rumsfeld said.

As soon as Pentagon planners seized upon the idea of using the President’s plan to confuse the insurgents, Operation Incomprehensible Program was launched.

According to Secretary Rumsfeld, U.S. warplanes pounded insurgent positions in the cities of Tikrit and Najaf with copies of the prescription drug plan in the early morning hours of Monday.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that satellite photos of those positions have been encouraging thus far, showing dozens of Iraqi insurgents reading the prescription drug plan and scratching their heads.

The Defense Secretary said he was hopeful that Operation Incomprehensible Program would leave the Iraqi insurgents totally baffled, but he hinted that the Pentagon had other tactics up its sleeve: “We are fully prepared to bombard them with copies of my press briefings.”

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Telling the truth – about the occupation or the criminals running the government in Washington – is the first reason for Traveling Soldier. But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance – whether it’s in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces. Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces. If you like what you’ve read, we hope that you’ll join with us in building a network of active duty organizers. www.traveling-soldier.org/ And join with Iraq War vets in the call to end the occupation and bring our troops home now! (www.ivaw.net)

CLASS WAR REPORTS

Asian Workers Rebel At Dubai Skyscraper:
“2,500 Workers Chased And Beat Security Officers”
“Everyone Is Angry Here. No One Will Work”

[Thanks to C, who sent this in. He writes: Unprecedented]

March 22, 2006 AP

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)

Asian workers angered by low salaries and mistreatment smashed cars and offices in a riot that interrupted construction Wednesday of what is meant to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, including a luxury hotel run by Giorgio Armani.

The violence, which caused an estimated $1 million damage, illustrated the growing unrest among foreign workers who are the linchpin of Dubai’s breathtaking building boom.

Some 2,500 workers on the Burj Dubai tower and surrounding housing developments chased and beat security officers Tuesday night, then broke into offices where they smashed computers and files, witnesses said. They said about two dozen cars and construction machines were wrecked.

When the laborers, who work for the Dubai-based firm Al Naboodah Laing O’Rourke, returned to the vast construction site Wednesday, they demanded better pay and employment conditions and refused to return to work.

In a sympathy strike, thousands of laborers building a terminal at Dubai International Airport also lay down their tools.

“Everyone is angry here. No one will work,” said Khalid Farouk, 39, a laborer with Al Naboodah. Others said their leaders were asking for pay raises. Skilled carpenters on the site earn $7.60 per day, with laborers getting $4 per day.

The riot was a rare outbreak of violence, but it was not the first sign of discontent among the foreigners who form the overwhelming majority of private sector workers in most oil-rich Gulf countries.

There have been strikes in recent months in Qatar and Oman. In April, Bangladeshis stormed their own embassy in Kuwait, protesting working conditions that human rights activists have denounced as “slave-like.”

Millions of foreign workers have flooded Gulf nations, outweighing the population of citizens in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In Saudi Arabia, foreign workers make up about 21 percent of the population of more than 26 million, but labor unrest is rare in the tightly controlled country.

The foreigners are professionals like doctors, scientists, businessmen and oil workers; skilled laborers such as electricians; or do unskilled jobs in restaurants or homes. Human rights groups have often decried abuse of low-paid foreign workers by their employers, particularly of women in domestic labor.

In the Emirates, where some estimates say more than three-quarters of the population of around 5 million people are foreigners, migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere have provided the low-wage muscle behind one of the world’s great building booms.

Dubai, one of seven emirates making up the country, hosts some 300,000 South Asians working in the construction field alone, helping propel it from a primitive town of 20,000 five decades ago to a gridlocked metropolis of 1.5 million — only 12 percent of whom are citizens.

But workers complain their employers often withhold pay. They enjoy few legal protections and no minimum wage, work in the extreme heat, and many of them live in military-style desert camps.

Angry workers in the Emirates held more than two dozen strikes over unpaid salaries last year, mainly in Dubai. The Labor Ministry responded with a crackdown on companies, helping win back pay and other benefits for some workers.

On Wednesday, crowds of blue-garbed workers milled in the shadow of the gray concrete Burj Dubai, now 36 stories tall, while leaders negotiated with officials from the company and the Ministry of Labor.

An Interior Ministry official who investigates labor issues, Lt. Col. Rashid Bakhit Al Jumairi, said the workers were petitioning Al Naboodah, one of the Emirates’ biggest construction conglomerates, for overtime pay, better medical care and humane treatment by foremen.

Hundreds Of Thousand March Against French Capitalists And Politicians:
Street Fighting Breaks Out

Firemen extinguish a burning car set on fire at the end of a student demonstration in Paris, March 23, 2006. REUTERS/Franck Prevel [Reuters]

[Thanks to C, who also sent this in.]

Mar 23, 2006 By Matthew Bigg and Sophie Louet, (Reuters) [Excerpts]

Organizers said between 450,000 and 550,000 people rallied across France, with about 140,000 taking to the streets in Paris in protest against a contract they say will create “Kleenex workers” whom employers can throw away at will.

Rampaging French youths set fire to cars and looted shops in Paris on Thursday.

Aides said [Prime Minister] Villepin would meet senior trade union officials on Friday to try to defuse a crisis that has triggered a national strike threat and drawn hundreds of thousands of protesters on to French streets.

In Paris, riot police fired tear gas in clashes with youths, dubbed “casseurs” by the French, in the Invalides areas near the Foreign Ministry, Reuters witnesses said.

Youths threw stones at police.

Police said 220,000 people protested throughout France and about 23,000 youths rallied in Paris.

Dozens of young people, many wearing masks or hoods, overturned cars.

Police said about 60 people were injured in the capital, 27 of them police officers, and 141 were arrested.

Clashes also erupted in the western city of Rennes, where about 300 to 400 youths battled with police.

Unions have called a one-day national strike for Tuesday to demand the withdrawal of the CPE, which allows employers to fire people aged under 26 at any stage during a two-year trial period, without stating a reason.

President Jacques Chirac has increased pressure on his prime minister to renew contact with unions, said the newspaper Le Parisien, suggesting Villepin’s job was now at stake.

“If things don’t change very quickly, the prime minister will be fired,” it quoted one government source as saying.

About two-thirds of French voters want the CPE withdrawn, a survey showed on Thursday.

OCCUPATION ISN’T LIBERATION
BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

NEED SOME TRUTH? CHECK OUT TRAVELING SOLDIER

Telling the truth – about the occupation or the criminals running the government in Washington – is the first reason for Traveling Soldier. But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance – whether it’s in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces. Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces. If you like what you’ve read, we hope that you’ll join with us in building a network of active duty organizers. www.traveling-soldier.org/ And join with Iraq War vets in the call to end the occupation and bring our troops home now! www.ivaw.net

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