Casualties

The Pentagon sank to a new low this week in their attempt to sell the Afghanistan War to the American people. At their Martin Luther King, Jr., Day observance, a Pentagon official actually claimed that if King were alive today, he might support the war.

This is simply not true. As shown in our new video, Dr. King could not have been more clear in his 1967 speech denouncing the Vietnam War:

 

Chilcot to grill Blair on how he 'misled' Iraq war inquiry

Panel recalls former PM to answer 'grave doubts' about the veracity of his original evidence

AFP/Getty Images: An Iraq inquiry source said of Blair: 'There is a feeling... he wilfully misrepresented the facts'

16 January 2011 - Tony Blair will face allegations that he has "misled" members of the Iraq inquiry when he returns to give evidence to the panel this week.

On Saturday, January 8, 2011, a Tucson Safeway became harm’s way.

For many. Someone’s wife. Someone’s mother. Daughter. Sister. Friend. Someone’s husband. Someone’s father. Son. Someone.

Witnesses to the rampage forever will be changed.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords remains in critical condition, a bullet to the head, fired by a 22-year-old gunman with a Glock. Six people were killed, including nine-year-young Christina Green.

The day after the massacre, members of the House participated in a conference call to discuss vigilance and informing local police of their whereabouts. Both Republicans and Democrats are calling for civility and have put on hold repeal of the healthcare law while they craft a resolution to commemorate the victims.

And discuss how to protect THEMSELVES.

This from Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee:

We ought to cool it, tone it down, treat each other
with respect, respect each other’s ideas and even

This report was aired on the PBS News Hour last night.

AIR DATE: Jan. 14, 2011

Giffords' Staff Keeps Office Open While Coping With Shooting's Aftermath

SUMMARY Members of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' staff have kept her office open, even as the Congresswoman fights to recover from a gunman's attack. Tom Bearden reports from Tucson. Transcript

A couple of cuts from the shows transcript:

And who controls the drug trade, not those street corner sellers nor the ones they work for, it's controlled by wealthy suits around this planet and more lucrative then running corporations or playing craps on wall street!

Jan. 14, 2011 - The government of Afghanistan is fighting a losing battle against drugs because of soaring street prices for heroin and opium derivatives , a minister said.

Mohammed Azhar, deputy minister for counter-narcotics, told The Washington Post despite the 10-year occupation by NATO troops fighting the Muslim extremist Taliban and al-Qaida factions, peasant farmers are still growing poppies to feed the drug market.

 

And this says what about this Country and Society,

Security was tight Friday morning as the hearse entered the church
parking lot and U.S. marshals checked the IDs of everyone entering the
lot. Four big coach buses brought dozens of judges who knew Roll over
the years.

One Hell Of Allot!!

Security tight at funeral for slain Arizona judge

By Charles M. Young

The Anti-American Manifesto
(Seven Stories Press)
by Ted Rall

Lots of books collect all the low-hanging fruit in the abundant orchard of corporate state crime and arrange it into a more or less digestible feast, and then they all conclude with a ringing exhortation to elect more Democrats to Congress, or build a third party, or challenge the legality of war through the courts, or write well-reasoned letters of protest to The New York Times, or impeach whoever is president, or go to more demonstrations, or drip more snark on the ruling class.

The reader sits alone at night with the question, “Is that all there is?”

Ted Rall seeks to answer that question in The Anti-American Manifesto. At the beginning of chapter one (“Kill the Zombie Empire”), he quotes the U.S Criminal Code that advocating the overthrow of the government by violence is unlawful, and then he advocates the overthrow of the government by violence.

By John Grant

Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
- Paul Simon, 1964

The same year the Tet Offensive in Vietnam made it clear that war was a quagmire there was a spate of domestic political assassinations in America. It was a highly polarized and volatile time when people struggled with issues of race and class. Civility suffered.

Forty-three years later, the similarities are stark. The economy is distressed to the point poor and working class Americans are fearful and uncertain about the future. Meanwhile, the world of high finance has rebounded and is again thriving; and the military budget consumes more than half of US tax resources.

January 11, 2011 - ELIZABETH JACKSON: It was called America's Secret War.

From 1964 and 1973, the US dropped 260 million cluster submunitions on Laos in a covert mission to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines.

Not only did the mission fail ... it left a deadly legacy; 80 million unexploded bombs scattered across the Laos countryside.

The bombs have killed or maimed more than 20,000 people since the war ended and they're a major obstacle to economic development in one of Asia's poorest nations.

This year, Australia signed a new international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

A Senate committee is currently considering a bill to ratify the treaty but critics say the bill doesn't go far enough to help end the scourge of cluster munitions.

By Dave Lindorff

There is, it cannot be denied, a tendency on the part of many Americans to grab for their guns, if not actually, then figuratively.

And let’s face it, we also have an awful lot of guns to reach for. The FBI estimates that it’s 200 million, not counting the guns owned by the military, and the National Rifle Assn. says that’s a number that rises by close to five million a year.

And we sure do use ‘em. NY Times columnist Bob Herbert says 150,000 people have been killed by guns in the US just in the first decade of this new century. Clearly it’s not just Tucson, capital of the Arizona county that also includes the gunslinger town of Tombstone, that is the Wild West. This whole country is gun-crazy.

By Kevin Zeese

The case of Private Bradley Manning raises legal issues about his pre-trial detention, freedom of speech and the press, as well as proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Putting aside Manning’s guilt or innocence, if Bradley Manning saw the Afghan and Iraq war diaries as well as the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks what should he have done? And, what should be the proper response of government to their publication?

AFGHANISTAN: Call for help for IDPs, deportees in Helmand

10 January 2011 (IRIN) - Thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from insurgency-hit Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, need food assistance urgently, officials told IRIN.

About 900 displaced families in the provincial capital Lashkargah have little or no means to feed themselves and their children this winter, according to Ghulam Farouq Noorzai, director of Helmand’s refugees and returnee affairs department.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) confirmed that of the 3,800 families displaced from Nad Ali and Marjah districts during a major counterinsurgency operation in February 2010, about 900 (300 from Nad Ali and 600 from Marjah) still remain in Lashkargah.

Jan 9, 2011 - Author and journalist Nir Rosen has written a book titled "Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World" which provides an in depth look at the consequences of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Press TV interviewed Nir Rosen regarding his views on the US-led Iraq and Afghan invasions and his travel experiences in both countries.

 

By Dave Lindorff

At the local YMCA today, I ran into a boy who was a childhood friend of my son. As my son goes to a public arts high school in Philadelphia outside of our local school district, I don't see much of his old grade-school friends any more. This boy, who used to be over at our house years ago at least once a week, recognized me right away, and said, "Hey Mr. Lindorff, I haven't seen you in years. How's Jed!"

I was impressed by how he'd grown up, tall and strong looking. He was headed for the basketball court. I asked him, since both he and my son are seniors this year, where he was applying for college, and he stunned me by saying he had signed up for the Marines. "I'm going to be going in after graduation," he said proudly. "The recruiter came to school, and he convinced me it's a good move."

I asked him what he planned to do, and he said, "Helicopter gunner! I'm really excited and proud!"

In the beginning, chemicals collided and catalyzed, evolving a system of development from non-living to living things, proteins and nucleic acids interacting--greeting and meeting, dating and mating—in a metaphorical dance of romance. The recipe to make more was born. Now, chemicals portend the end. So much tells us so. An eye for an eye doesn’t just blind the world; it annihilates. The blueprint for reproduction becomes one of destruction.

I’m not relaxed.

Sen. Lindsay Graham advocates permanent military presence in Afghanistan, despite an objection from Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government.

And despite the deaths of thousands of military men and women during Bush’s war—the War OF Terror that passed seamlessly to Commander Obama. Last week, two US troops died in Iraq where combat ENDED months ago. Because the president told us so, even announcing the improved name of the non-war: Operation New Dawn.

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — January 7, 2011 - Twenty servicemen from New York City whose bodies have gone unclaimed for months or longer will receive full military honors at national veterans cemetery service.

The mass service will be held Saturday at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. The Department of Veterans Affairs says it’s the largest of it kind in U.S. history.

It’s part of a national initiative in recent years to clear a massive backlog of unburied or unclaimed remains of both veterans and non-veterans.

And does Anyone hear these patriotic constitution readers, or any of their supporters, even mention their wars of choice or the veterans and families of?!?!

Army efforts don't stem Fort Hood suicides

6 January 2010 - The Army's largest post saw a record-high number of soldiers kill themselves in 2010 despite a mental health effort aimed at reversing the trend.

The Army says 22 soldiers have either killed themselves or are suspected of doing so last year at its post at Fort Hood in Texas, twice the number from 2009.

That is a rate of 47 deaths per 100,000, compared with a 20-per-100,000 rate among civilians in the same age group and a 22-per-100,000 rate Army-wide.

By John Grant

The War On Drugs, fought mostly in poor and person-of-color communities (despite the fact that whites are more than 70 percent of all drug users) has contributed dramatically to the growth of a prison-industrial-complex that is quickly sapping resources from education, job training and other vital programs.          
-- Tim Wise

I’ve taught creative writing in Philadelphia’s maximum-security prison for ten years. I joke with the inmates that most of them are POWs in the Drug War. Of course, most of the men in the class are African American.

Last week only two men showed up for the class, which gave me and my co-teacher the opportunity to talk with them about their lives.

Photo: Contributor/IRIN: A displaced family in a camp erected in an orchard in Diyala province, about 90 km east of Baghdad (file photo)

5 January 2011 - Iraq’s new government plans to tackle internal displacement and closely monitor and assist Iraqi refugees abroad, the country’s newly appointed migration and displacement minister said on 3 January.

January 3, 2011 - After a long year of watching the slow death of her husband, Army Sgt. William McKenna, Dina McKenna decided the final goodbye should be dignified without painful lingering.

 

snip

He was deployed in 2003 and was awarded several awards and medals during two tours in Iraq. It was there he breathed fumes from burning garbage pits outside of the military bases - leading to his fatal cancer, his wife believes.

Don't deny detainees their day in court

Indefinite detention of post-Sept. 11 detainees without charge or trial is not the American way.

January 4, 2011 - The idea that every person deserves his or her "day in court" is a fundamental principle in the United States and many countries worldwide. Yet more than nine years after 9/11, the United States remains paralyzed not just about how to give the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody around the world their day in court but about whether to give them that day in court.

Reflections of war on display

January 4, 2011 - A mural that commemorates civilian casualties that happened during the Afghanistan war is currently on display at Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum.

“Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan” opened at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum on December 9 and will remain on display through January 30. Before making it to New York, it had made its debut at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Meeting House.

How Deadly Weapons Continue to Rule Daily Life

Tread carefully In Xieng Khouang, a mother steadies her son as he walks along a rusted bomb casing. Arantxa Cedillo for TIME

Dec. 31, 2010 - At the Vienthong primary school in Laos' Xieng Khouang province, six students take out hand puppets made from clothing scraps and colored felt. Their audience — a class of around 15 children ages 3 to 5 — sits in a semicircle in a darkened classroom as the young puppeteers begin the show.

Notice the No Mention of the Wars of Choice especially by the incoming pols and real noticeable as to those so called outraged teabaggers their supporters and their corporate financed talking heads and cable TV outlet!!

Military kids taking more psychiatric drugs

Prescriptions increase as families struggle with repeated deployments

Mitch Green: From left, Zach Radenz, Army Lt. Col. Blaine Radenz, Tricia Radenz and James Radenz stand in the room where Daniel Radenz, then 12, took his life in June 2009. The room has since been converted into a den.

Surprised? Not!! Revisionist history as to War is a constant, can't ruin the upward movement of ranking officers, their military futures and possible comfortable, and highly profitable, retirements after in the defense industry, politics and other! After all they're not in the fire-base's, running the wars from miles away and in these modern times thousands of miles away!

By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 American sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well know is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

It’s been so cold I’ve powered on the elliptical trainer. I prefer running through my neighborhood, in sunshine, observing people, reading bumper-sticker messages, and breathing fresh air.

I was on the exerciser, though, and consumed enough by the monotony (groan) to glance OFTEN at the mounting minutes. I was thinking about cutting the workout short but, instead, decided to reverse and go backwards. Backwards, backwards, my legs worked, and, suddenly, I was struck by a thought--the possibility that I could continue this redirection and undo time. I could accelerate the pace until the mile display indicated a negative as I ellipti-seized the past. Faster and faster, I would retreat to a place in my life that carried the promise of fullness, satisfaction, those days when the children were young and more was right in my world.

By John Grant

On December 18, David House, an MIT researcher, visited Bradley Manning at the Quantico, Virginia, military prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. Other than Manning’s attorney, House is the rare person allowed to visit him.

House’s report is quite thorough in pointing out instances where the military authorities are lying -- or to use philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s formulation, “bullshitting” -- about how the 23-year-old Army intelligence worker is being treated.

Here’s some of psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye’s comment on House’s report: