March 23, 2009
Posted by Jeff Huber
http://www.atlargely.com/2009/03/the-long-war-generals.html
If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.
--Anonymous U.S. military officer
As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language?
During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not satisfied that any of the active duty generals would toe the line sufficiently, brought his old cow tipping buddy Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to replace Shinseki. Rummy had sent an unmistakable message: it was his way or the exit ramp. The remaining generals either fell into lockstep or kept their own counsel, and we got four years of dead-enders in their last throes.
As the 2006 elections neared, almost everyone at Defense, including Rumsfeld, was talking about lowering public expectations for Iraq and beginning a drawdown of U.S. presence. Narcissus, however, wouldn’t let young Mr. Bush lose a war that could be lost on his successor’s watch. Levers were pulled, wheels turned, somebody shoved a pie in the Iraq Study Group’s face and, voila, out trotted the surge.
For the longest time we thought neoconservative academic Fred Kagan was the chief architect of the surge. Recently, Thomas E. Ricks told us that the real genius behind the Iraq escalation was David Petraeus’s 300 lb. lapdog Ray Odierno. That assertion required a worm-to-butterfly transformation of Odierno, whom Ricks had earlier portrayed as the bull in the china shop who single-handedly fomented the Iraq civil war. Now Odie’s the Desert Ox.
Whoever actually cooked up the surge, the Joint Chiefs and commander in Iraq General George Casey were dead set against it. But then the dope dealing commenced and the four-stars’ objections faded like the Chicago Cubs. The ground service generals were promised a larger Army and Marine Corps, Casey got the Army chief of staff assignment and Admiral Mike Mullen was promised the chairman’s job.
January 2007 was a key month in American history. On the fifth, the American Enterprise Institute published Fred Kagan’s Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq. On January 10, Mr. Bush announced that he would increase U.S. presence in Iraq by 21,000 troops. On the twelfth, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain endorsed the surge and became the de facto presidential candidate of the neoconservative movement.
January 2007 was also the month David Petraeus assumed command of international forces in Iraq. Tom Ricks kick started the public image campaign to make Petraeus into a five-star deity, describing the general in the media as a “fascinating character” who was “just about the best general in the Army” and, oh yeah, “quite ambitious.” Ricks noted Petraeus’s “very successful first tour in Iraq in 2003-2004,” referring to his command in Mosul, but did not mention how Mosul collapsed after Petraeus left and the bribes he’d been handing out dried up. That January was also the month the Bush administration promised to provide evidence that Iran was providing arms to Iraqi militants. The administration never did prove those accusations, but that didn’t prevent it from repeating them loudly and often.
One of the loudest Iran bashers was Petraeus, who didn’t even pretend to have credible proof Iran was arming Iraqi militants. Reminiscent of the joke about the man beating his wife, Petraeus simply challenged Iran to prove that they had stopped arming Iraqis. Then Irony cleared its throat: in August 2007 a story broke that in 2004, while in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus had lost track of 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols that couldn’t have walked anywhere but into the hands of the Iraqi militants Iran was supposedly arming. Irony might also mention that as Petraeus was arming the insurgency, Doctor Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College began work on the new counterinsurgency field manual that Ricks and others would later claim Petraeus “wrote.”
Petraeus pursued an aggressive information campaign that promoted the agenda he shared with the neocons to establish a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. His most outrageous publicity stunt was the March 2007 Baghdad shopping spree he staged for McCain and McCain’s office wife Lindsey Graham. At a news conference, McCain, Graham and other Republicans remarked that they could “mix and mingle unfettered” with Iraqis and that the market reminded them of “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time." The next day, the New York Times and other sources revealed that Petraeus had put more than 100 of his troops in harm’s way to provide security for a propaganda demonstration supporting the surge strategy and the McCain candidacy.
Admiral Mullen also tried to tip the election toward the GOP. In a July 2008 Joint Force Quarterly article, Mullen wrote that every day, troops asked him questions like “What if a Democrat wins? What will that do to the mission in Iraq?” (Italics Mullen’s.) The article’s title (Irony winks) was “From the Chairman: Military Must Stay Apolitical.”
Also that month, right after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki agreed with candidate Obama that 16 months would be the right interval for a withdrawal timeline, Mullen warned on FOX News that a withdrawal timeline would be “dangerous.” In his July JFQ article, Mullen wrote that “we [in the military] defend the Constitution” by “obeying the orders of the commander in chief.” He didn’t specify whether he meant obeying all commanders in chief or just the Republican ones, but he didn’t have to. Everybody got the message.
By mid-summer 2008, Petraeus had beaten Admiral William Fallon two out of three falls for control of Central Command, he had hand picked the next generation of Army generals, and young Mr. Bush had announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and if U.S. troops would redeploy from Iraq. Petraeus and his long war generals owned American foreign policy, and they were determined to keep it. Fortunately for them, their best course of action was obvious: they merely had to keep doing what they were doing, which was entrenching America deeper and deeper in to Iraq. If McCain pulled an upset in the election, great, he was already on board. The beauty part was that Obama would have to go along with what the long warriors wanted as well. If he crossed them openly, and things went poorly (which they’re bound to whether Obama follows their advice or not), it would be Obama’s fault for ignoring his generals. Defense secretary Robert Gates turned a nice trick in this vein during a recent interview on Meet the Press. He told David Gregory that the generals would obey the mandate to end the combat mission in Iraq by August 2010, but if they “had had complete say in this matter, they would have preferred that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”
Obama played into the long war strategy by insisting he would finish the job in Afghanistan. Now his generals are pushing him into an aimless escalation of that conflict that will likely make us the latest superpower to embalm itself in that part of the world. Nobody in the Pentagon is taking the Iraq Status of Forces agreement’s December 2011 deadline seriously. The ink on the SOF was barely dry when both Mullen and Odierno smirked that “three years is a long time,” and that the situation cold change. Gates claims that Obama himself may force Maliki to renegotiate the agreement. Thanks to Ricks, Odierno is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015. And if anyone thinks to question the need to sustain these two wars, the long generals can always tell another lie about Iran (like Mullen did recently when he said the Iranians have enough fissile material to make a bomb—they don’t) and claim that our presence in Iraq and the Bananastans is necessary to keep Iran contained.
Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution, which means far more to them than the Constitution they swore to protect or the country they’re supposedly defending. In a finer era of American journalism, editorial pages across the nation would have demanded the forced retirement of every four-star on active duty. Today’s big news media, unfortunately, are either afraid of the Pentagon or in its corner. Congress has been on life support for nearly a decade, and as we have discussed, Obama political constraints are considerable.
It’s up to what few retired or active duty generals of integrity we have left to confront the junta in a very public “have you no sense of decency?” moment.
Unfortunately, that would amount to generals ratting out fellow generals, which would violate their honor code.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
What Happened to the War?
by Laurence M. Vance
March 20, 2009
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance167.html
As of today, March 20, it has now been six years since the United States invaded Iraq. Yes, the United States still has tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, although we don’t hear much about the war any more. What happened to the war?
The war should have been an issue in the election. It wasn’t. And thanks to the disaster that is the Republican revolution that wasn’t, it didn’t even have to be. We hardly heard about the war after the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions. Republicans were perfectly willing to exchange one war criminal for another. Many Democrats only opposed the war because it was a Republican war. And now that Obama is president, no one from either party seems to mind that he wants to send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
The war is still an immoral, aggressive, unjust, unconstitutional, unnecessary, and senseless war that that violates every "just war" principle ever formulated. It was a manufactured war based on manipulated intelligence, bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction, and an assortment of other lies.
The war is still making terrorists and enemies of the United States. Although Fred Barnes wrote (in the Weekly Standard) that the invasion of Iraq was "the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another," we know that it was instead, as Lt. Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, described it: "The greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."
The war is still draining the treasury. The cakewalk that was supposed to cost $50 billion has bled U.S. taxpayers for almost a trillion dollars. About $12 billion was spent fighting the Iraq war each month last year. It costs about $390,000 to deploy one soldier to Iraq for one year. The cost for a lifetime of support and medical care for each severely wounded American soldier is in the millions.
The war is still resulting in the deaths of Iraqis – thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation and the genocide we unleashed. The latest estimate of the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration, and continued by the Obama administration, is about 1 million. Additionally, there are the millions of Iraqis who are wounded, disabled, displaced, homeless, refugees, widows, or orphans.
The war is still destroying the lives of American soldiers and their families. Many thousands of U.S. soldiers have been severely wounded. Hundreds of these have had limbs amputated. Untold numbers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Defense Department doctors have recently reported that there may be as many as 360,000 U.S. soldiers who have suffered wartime brain injuries. Some returning soldiers will spend the rest of their lives unable to hold down a job. Others will live out their days as physical and/or emotional basket cases.
The war is still killing American soldiers. When I wrote about the war on its third anniversary, 2,317 American soldiers had died for a lie. On the fourth anniversary, that number had risen to 3,218. On the fifth, 3,992. The number of dead American soldiers is now up to 4,259. Although the total number of American deaths per year is falling, there are two ways in which American deaths are rising: military suicides and the war Afghanistan. There were more American soldiers who killed themselves in January of this year than died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military suicides are not only up for the fourth year in a row, they are at the highest level they have ever been. The number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan is now up to 666.God only knows how many men from Obama’s 17,000-troop surge will be added to that number. Yet, none of these soldiers had to die. They died neither for our freedoms nor the freedoms of anyone else. They all died in vain.
What happened to the war? Nothing happened to the war. It is still just as wrong as ever. It is still just as deadly ever. I’m afraid that most Americans, like Rhett Butler, just don’t give a damn. As William Lloyd Garrison once said: "The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead."
Laurence M. Vance [lmvance@juno.com] writes from Pensacola, FL.
March 20, 2009
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance167.html
As of today, March 20, it has now been six years since the United States invaded Iraq. Yes, the United States still has tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, although we don’t hear much about the war any more. What happened to the war?
The war should have been an issue in the election. It wasn’t. And thanks to the disaster that is the Republican revolution that wasn’t, it didn’t even have to be. We hardly heard about the war after the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions. Republicans were perfectly willing to exchange one war criminal for another. Many Democrats only opposed the war because it was a Republican war. And now that Obama is president, no one from either party seems to mind that he wants to send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
The war is still an immoral, aggressive, unjust, unconstitutional, unnecessary, and senseless war that that violates every "just war" principle ever formulated. It was a manufactured war based on manipulated intelligence, bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction, and an assortment of other lies.
The war is still making terrorists and enemies of the United States. Although Fred Barnes wrote (in the Weekly Standard) that the invasion of Iraq was "the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another," we know that it was instead, as Lt. Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, described it: "The greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."
The war is still draining the treasury. The cakewalk that was supposed to cost $50 billion has bled U.S. taxpayers for almost a trillion dollars. About $12 billion was spent fighting the Iraq war each month last year. It costs about $390,000 to deploy one soldier to Iraq for one year. The cost for a lifetime of support and medical care for each severely wounded American soldier is in the millions.
The war is still resulting in the deaths of Iraqis – thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation and the genocide we unleashed. The latest estimate of the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration, and continued by the Obama administration, is about 1 million. Additionally, there are the millions of Iraqis who are wounded, disabled, displaced, homeless, refugees, widows, or orphans.
The war is still destroying the lives of American soldiers and their families. Many thousands of U.S. soldiers have been severely wounded. Hundreds of these have had limbs amputated. Untold numbers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Defense Department doctors have recently reported that there may be as many as 360,000 U.S. soldiers who have suffered wartime brain injuries. Some returning soldiers will spend the rest of their lives unable to hold down a job. Others will live out their days as physical and/or emotional basket cases.
The war is still killing American soldiers. When I wrote about the war on its third anniversary, 2,317 American soldiers had died for a lie. On the fourth anniversary, that number had risen to 3,218. On the fifth, 3,992. The number of dead American soldiers is now up to 4,259. Although the total number of American deaths per year is falling, there are two ways in which American deaths are rising: military suicides and the war Afghanistan. There were more American soldiers who killed themselves in January of this year than died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military suicides are not only up for the fourth year in a row, they are at the highest level they have ever been. The number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan is now up to 666.God only knows how many men from Obama’s 17,000-troop surge will be added to that number. Yet, none of these soldiers had to die. They died neither for our freedoms nor the freedoms of anyone else. They all died in vain.
What happened to the war? Nothing happened to the war. It is still just as wrong as ever. It is still just as deadly ever. I’m afraid that most Americans, like Rhett Butler, just don’t give a damn. As William Lloyd Garrison once said: "The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead."
Laurence M. Vance [lmvance@juno.com] writes from Pensacola, FL.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Cheney's Mission Accomplished
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
by Juan Cole
http://www.juancole.com/2009/03/cheneys-mission-accomplished.html
Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."
What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?
- An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.
- It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.
- Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.
- In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.
- Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.
- Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.
- $32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.
- Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.
- The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.
- The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.
Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.
The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.
by Juan Cole
http://www.juancole.com/2009/03/cheneys-mission-accomplished.html
Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."
What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?
- An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.
- It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.
- Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.
- In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.
- Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.
- Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.
- $32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.
- Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.
- The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.
- The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.
Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.
The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Monday, March 02, 2009
Don't Sell Kathleen Short
by Mary Pitt
March 2, 2009
I have been watching the news reports about the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. There was a time when she was considered a possible candidate for the job of Vice-President and there is no reason why those who write the news for television should not have done their homework on her qualifications. However, after the announcement was made of her new appointment, they treated her like a total unknown and spoke briefly about her eight-year career as Kansas Insurance Commissioner before she won the governorship of our "red state" not once, but twice.
Kathleen (the name by which Kansans speak of her with varying degrees of reverence, depending on our political leanings), literally imbibed politics with her Pablum since her father, John Gilligan, was Governor of the State of Ohio, and the father of her husband, Gary, was once US Representative from the State of Kansas. She is an accomplished politician and earned honors from both sides of the aisle in establishing many programs in Kansas that are of benefit to the poor and, particularly, to children. The MSNBC newscast early in the day could only refer to her one big defeat as Governor in failing to get full-coverage health care for all children in the State. They did not mention the Kansas Health Wave program which allows working parents of young children to "buy in" to a program similar to Medicaid and provides a means for working, low-income women to provide affordable medical care for their children rather than giving up their jobs and living on welfare.
She also bore ultimate responsibility for the administration of the Federally-funded programs for the poor as well as the Home and Community-Based Services, which saved the State a lot of money by allowing handicapped and retarded people to live in their own homes in the community rather than in nursing homes or the horrendous State institutions. As the parent of a severely handicapped daughter, it was a godsend to have her near home for her remaining years and I will be eternally grateful.
As State Insurance Commissioner Kathleen blocked the takeover of the customer-owned Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas by a national corporation, thus saving the people in the State from the great premium increases that would have been inevitable under the new ownership. She kept honest those insurance companies who did operate in Kansas by strict oversight and enforcement of their policy provisions. Most important, she knows the insurance business thoroughly and will surely hold their feet the fire once the new medical-care plan is ready for implementation.
Kathleen is a sweet, compassionate person and, rather than boasting of her performance, she often appeared apologetic that she could not accomplish even more for the people of her State. She is a good Catholic who ran afoul of the Church for her opposition to measures that would have abolished abortion because she felt that it is a religious matter in which the State has no right to intrude. How sad that such good people are having to choose between Church and State for having stood up for their Constitutional separation!
It is with a great deal of trepidation that Kansas surrenders this great leader to the rest of the nation. There is no really ready replacement among the Democratic leadership of the State but perhaps there will be by the next election in 2010. Do not worry about her ability to cope with Congressional opposition in her new job. She has had six years of experience with a solid Republican Legislature and she drove them like a 20-mule team with a soft voice and a long whip, accomplishing more in the area of social services than any Governor in the last 30 years.
Go with our love, Kathleen! And in the words of the late, great Tip O'Neill, "Never forget where you came from and who sent you here." In addition, if they don't treat you right, come on back home! We love you.
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
March 2, 2009
I have been watching the news reports about the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. There was a time when she was considered a possible candidate for the job of Vice-President and there is no reason why those who write the news for television should not have done their homework on her qualifications. However, after the announcement was made of her new appointment, they treated her like a total unknown and spoke briefly about her eight-year career as Kansas Insurance Commissioner before she won the governorship of our "red state" not once, but twice.
Kathleen (the name by which Kansans speak of her with varying degrees of reverence, depending on our political leanings), literally imbibed politics with her Pablum since her father, John Gilligan, was Governor of the State of Ohio, and the father of her husband, Gary, was once US Representative from the State of Kansas. She is an accomplished politician and earned honors from both sides of the aisle in establishing many programs in Kansas that are of benefit to the poor and, particularly, to children. The MSNBC newscast early in the day could only refer to her one big defeat as Governor in failing to get full-coverage health care for all children in the State. They did not mention the Kansas Health Wave program which allows working parents of young children to "buy in" to a program similar to Medicaid and provides a means for working, low-income women to provide affordable medical care for their children rather than giving up their jobs and living on welfare.
She also bore ultimate responsibility for the administration of the Federally-funded programs for the poor as well as the Home and Community-Based Services, which saved the State a lot of money by allowing handicapped and retarded people to live in their own homes in the community rather than in nursing homes or the horrendous State institutions. As the parent of a severely handicapped daughter, it was a godsend to have her near home for her remaining years and I will be eternally grateful.
As State Insurance Commissioner Kathleen blocked the takeover of the customer-owned Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas by a national corporation, thus saving the people in the State from the great premium increases that would have been inevitable under the new ownership. She kept honest those insurance companies who did operate in Kansas by strict oversight and enforcement of their policy provisions. Most important, she knows the insurance business thoroughly and will surely hold their feet the fire once the new medical-care plan is ready for implementation.
Kathleen is a sweet, compassionate person and, rather than boasting of her performance, she often appeared apologetic that she could not accomplish even more for the people of her State. She is a good Catholic who ran afoul of the Church for her opposition to measures that would have abolished abortion because she felt that it is a religious matter in which the State has no right to intrude. How sad that such good people are having to choose between Church and State for having stood up for their Constitutional separation!
It is with a great deal of trepidation that Kansas surrenders this great leader to the rest of the nation. There is no really ready replacement among the Democratic leadership of the State but perhaps there will be by the next election in 2010. Do not worry about her ability to cope with Congressional opposition in her new job. She has had six years of experience with a solid Republican Legislature and she drove them like a 20-mule team with a soft voice and a long whip, accomplishing more in the area of social services than any Governor in the last 30 years.
Go with our love, Kathleen! And in the words of the late, great Tip O'Neill, "Never forget where you came from and who sent you here." In addition, if they don't treat you right, come on back home! We love you.
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
It's Time For The Madness To Stop
By Sheila Samples
March 2, 2009
Sometimes it's hard to come to grips with the truth -- especially if that truth is about our own country, and is in direct opposition to everything we've been taught since childhood. Patriotism is in our genes, and through the years it has been a national conviction that, if our country needed us, serving in the military to protect our freedom was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do. We still believe that. We still leap to our feet at the first beat of a drum at a military parade, clutch our hearts at the sight of the Stars and Stripes, weep at the refrain of the National Anthem. However, far too many of us succumb to the pomp and pageantry of war -- of mission accomplished -- with little concern for the human beings who made that possible -- what they went through, what they're still going through -- so we can maintain our arrogant national pride.
From the beginning, those in the military have served their country with unswerving loyalty. They continued to march even after Henry Kissinger belched out the truth that Duty--Honor--Country is a one-way street because "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy. And, it has long been a dead-end street for those captured or left behind on foreign soil -- for those who return from battlefields maimed both mentally and physically, and for those who are innocent victims of malicious life-destroying experiments who have no chance of the extent of their injuries being recognized and are refused the necessary health care.
The most ghastly experiment the military ever conducted was Operation Crossroads, a series of "Manhattan Project" tests requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships and equipment. After bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before, US officials knew the effect of massive radiation on human beings and animals. They had to know. So what else were the thousands of navy personnel positioned on ships from five to eight miles from the Bikini Atoll bomb site in the central Pacific if not guinea pigs?
One young sailor stationed at the Bikini Atoll in 1946 was Anthony Guarisco who, like thousands of others, has suffered horribly for the last 63 years as a result of radiation poisoning and like those others, has been denied the proper health care. Guarisco is the founder of both the National and International Alliance of Atomic Veterans. In 1994, Academy Award-winning team Vivienne Verdon-Roe and Michael Porter produced a documentary, "Experimental Animals," featuring Guarisco who, very calmly, describes the horrors of that 1946 July. (Note: Ecological Options Network has just re-released "Experimental Animals" on-line and as a DVD, because EON filmmaker/activist Jim Heddle says, "we think it's as relevant today as it was when it was produced.")
The first bomb -- Able -- was dropped from a B-29 on July 1. As a health precaution, military personnel in the area were told to "cover their eyes." Guarisco said it was awesome. He said it immediately "came home to me what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could see how 55-65 thousand people could die in one-and-a-half seconds."
But the second one -- Baker -- was beyond awesome. Guarisco said it was detonated beneath the ocean from a depth of 90 feet, and "sucked a target array of approximately 100 ships into the air like little toys. I saw the U.S. Arkansas soar into the air about 200 feet and come down in two pieces. I saw aircraft carriers just flinging around as if they were toys."
According to the Navy's historical report, "The inability to complete inspections on much of the target fleet threatened the success of the operation after BAKER. A program of target vessel decontamination was begun in earnest about 1 August. This involved washing the ships' exteriors using work crews drawn from the target ships' companies under radiological supervision of monitors equipped with radiation detection and measurement devices. Initially, decontamination was slow as the safe time aboard the target ships was measured only in minutes. As time progressed, the support fleet itself had become contaminated by the low-level radioactivity in marine growth on the ships' hulls and seawater piping systems."
Ironically, although the ships were towed out of the area just 10 days after the blast where the work could be done in uncontaminated water, no warning was given to the human experimental animals, who were allowed to swim in contaminated water, walk barefoot on beaches and breathe poisonous air.
Guarisco said, "We went back into the ground zero area immediately after each of the detonations, and I spent a total of 67 days in the Bikini lagoon within one mile of the epicenter. And I became ill after the second detonation, approximately four or five days after that...I had symptoms similar to having a bad case of influenza. I had welts on my body -- I broke out with welts -- and it was scary for me. I was urinating blood, I was very sick."
And Guarisco wasn't the only one who became ill. In a 1998 National Radio Project interview with Michael O'Rourke, who monitors veterans health issues for the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Guarisco said, "Other people on my ship were also feeling very sick. And for many, many years I thought that, well, certainly if there was anything wrong surely they would let me know. But," he said, "I found out many years later that’s not how it is. You know, the government and the U.S. military are not about to say anything about anybody who’s exposed to high levels or low levels of radiation. It was hard for me to come out of denial, to understand that I was dealing with people who really were not interested in anything else but waiting for me to die."
Guarisco says that, in one -- two -- blinding flashes, "we saw what World War III will look like. We have seen the firestorm, we have been witness to the sacrilegious devastation that nuclear weapons put forth, and we have seen our brother and our sister veterans die from being exposed to this terribleness." He says the bottom line of nuclear weapons is the bottom line of the profit margin -- that "deterrent" or "first strike" are fear code words used to keep the population at bay and to pave the way for the nuclear industry to keep building more expensive (profitable) weapons.
In his March 2008 tribute to both of his parents, Guarisco's son, Vincent, goes into greater detail about his father's lifelong battle, not only with the effects of radiation but with the nuclear industry and government itself. For more than 60 years, both Anthony and Mary Guarisco were out there, militant activists armed with the truth, relentlessly attempting to derail the nuclear train before it goes over the cliff, taking human survival with it.
The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Although we have avoided the instant, negative repercussions of another Nagasaki or Hiroshima, we have nevertheless managed to contaminate most of the world with Depleted Uranium.
In 2006, Japanese professor Dr. K. Yagasaki, by using the known amount of uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb -- about the size of a two-litre milk container -- calculated that a ton of DU used on the battlefield results in the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima bombs worth of radiation released into the atmosphere. So, when it was reported that 2,000 tons of DU were dropped on Iraq from 2003 to 2006, we need to understand that what was released in the Iraqi atmosphere, and then spreading worldwide, was the equivalent of 200,000 Hiroshima bombs.
The total amount of DU the US has used since 1991 is approximately 4,600 tons (1,000 in the first Gulf War, 800 in Kosovo, 800 in Afghanistan and a further 2,000 tons in the second Iraq war.) This amounts to approximately 460,000 Hiroshima bombs, ten times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from all previous nuclear testing worldwide. And, it's important to note this calculation was three years ago. Since that time, we've had three more years of non-stop DU bombing...
Throughout the '60s, the US conducted numerous toxic and chemical weapons tests on its military personnel. In July 2008, Nic Maclellan, journalist, researcher and development worker in the Pacific, wrote...
"Under Project SHAD, the US Navy conducted six tests in the Marshall Islands and off the coast of Hawai’i between 1964-68. Pentagon documents released in 2002 show the US Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors, and sprayed a germ toxin on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
"These Cold War-era experiments to test the Navy's vulnerability to toxic warfare involved about 4,300 US military personnel, mostly from the Navy. Most were never informed that the tests were being conducted, breaching all ethical principles about informed consent for test subjects."
It's time that we, as a nation, not only face the truth -- but come to grips with it. Those who serve with such trust and loyalty cannot imagine that they are, at best, "experimental animals" to be used and cast aside by ruthless corporate thugs.
How many generations of Anthony Guariscos must we lose before we realize that "support the troops" means protect the troops? Like Guarisco said, we must stand up, stand together and demand the abolition of all nuclear weapons if human beings on this planet are to survive.
It's time for the madness to stop. Before we are all atomic veterans.
Sheila Samples http://sheilastuff.blogspot.com/ is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@wichitaonline.net
March 2, 2009
Sometimes it's hard to come to grips with the truth -- especially if that truth is about our own country, and is in direct opposition to everything we've been taught since childhood. Patriotism is in our genes, and through the years it has been a national conviction that, if our country needed us, serving in the military to protect our freedom was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do. We still believe that. We still leap to our feet at the first beat of a drum at a military parade, clutch our hearts at the sight of the Stars and Stripes, weep at the refrain of the National Anthem. However, far too many of us succumb to the pomp and pageantry of war -- of mission accomplished -- with little concern for the human beings who made that possible -- what they went through, what they're still going through -- so we can maintain our arrogant national pride.
From the beginning, those in the military have served their country with unswerving loyalty. They continued to march even after Henry Kissinger belched out the truth that Duty--Honor--Country is a one-way street because "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy. And, it has long been a dead-end street for those captured or left behind on foreign soil -- for those who return from battlefields maimed both mentally and physically, and for those who are innocent victims of malicious life-destroying experiments who have no chance of the extent of their injuries being recognized and are refused the necessary health care.
The most ghastly experiment the military ever conducted was Operation Crossroads, a series of "Manhattan Project" tests requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships and equipment. After bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before, US officials knew the effect of massive radiation on human beings and animals. They had to know. So what else were the thousands of navy personnel positioned on ships from five to eight miles from the Bikini Atoll bomb site in the central Pacific if not guinea pigs?
One young sailor stationed at the Bikini Atoll in 1946 was Anthony Guarisco who, like thousands of others, has suffered horribly for the last 63 years as a result of radiation poisoning and like those others, has been denied the proper health care. Guarisco is the founder of both the National and International Alliance of Atomic Veterans. In 1994, Academy Award-winning team Vivienne Verdon-Roe and Michael Porter produced a documentary, "Experimental Animals," featuring Guarisco who, very calmly, describes the horrors of that 1946 July. (Note: Ecological Options Network has just re-released "Experimental Animals" on-line and as a DVD, because EON filmmaker/activist Jim Heddle says, "we think it's as relevant today as it was when it was produced.")
The first bomb -- Able -- was dropped from a B-29 on July 1. As a health precaution, military personnel in the area were told to "cover their eyes." Guarisco said it was awesome. He said it immediately "came home to me what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could see how 55-65 thousand people could die in one-and-a-half seconds."
But the second one -- Baker -- was beyond awesome. Guarisco said it was detonated beneath the ocean from a depth of 90 feet, and "sucked a target array of approximately 100 ships into the air like little toys. I saw the U.S. Arkansas soar into the air about 200 feet and come down in two pieces. I saw aircraft carriers just flinging around as if they were toys."
According to the Navy's historical report, "The inability to complete inspections on much of the target fleet threatened the success of the operation after BAKER. A program of target vessel decontamination was begun in earnest about 1 August. This involved washing the ships' exteriors using work crews drawn from the target ships' companies under radiological supervision of monitors equipped with radiation detection and measurement devices. Initially, decontamination was slow as the safe time aboard the target ships was measured only in minutes. As time progressed, the support fleet itself had become contaminated by the low-level radioactivity in marine growth on the ships' hulls and seawater piping systems."
Ironically, although the ships were towed out of the area just 10 days after the blast where the work could be done in uncontaminated water, no warning was given to the human experimental animals, who were allowed to swim in contaminated water, walk barefoot on beaches and breathe poisonous air.
Guarisco said, "We went back into the ground zero area immediately after each of the detonations, and I spent a total of 67 days in the Bikini lagoon within one mile of the epicenter. And I became ill after the second detonation, approximately four or five days after that...I had symptoms similar to having a bad case of influenza. I had welts on my body -- I broke out with welts -- and it was scary for me. I was urinating blood, I was very sick."
And Guarisco wasn't the only one who became ill. In a 1998 National Radio Project interview with Michael O'Rourke, who monitors veterans health issues for the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Guarisco said, "Other people on my ship were also feeling very sick. And for many, many years I thought that, well, certainly if there was anything wrong surely they would let me know. But," he said, "I found out many years later that’s not how it is. You know, the government and the U.S. military are not about to say anything about anybody who’s exposed to high levels or low levels of radiation. It was hard for me to come out of denial, to understand that I was dealing with people who really were not interested in anything else but waiting for me to die."
Guarisco says that, in one -- two -- blinding flashes, "we saw what World War III will look like. We have seen the firestorm, we have been witness to the sacrilegious devastation that nuclear weapons put forth, and we have seen our brother and our sister veterans die from being exposed to this terribleness." He says the bottom line of nuclear weapons is the bottom line of the profit margin -- that "deterrent" or "first strike" are fear code words used to keep the population at bay and to pave the way for the nuclear industry to keep building more expensive (profitable) weapons.
In his March 2008 tribute to both of his parents, Guarisco's son, Vincent, goes into greater detail about his father's lifelong battle, not only with the effects of radiation but with the nuclear industry and government itself. For more than 60 years, both Anthony and Mary Guarisco were out there, militant activists armed with the truth, relentlessly attempting to derail the nuclear train before it goes over the cliff, taking human survival with it.
The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Although we have avoided the instant, negative repercussions of another Nagasaki or Hiroshima, we have nevertheless managed to contaminate most of the world with Depleted Uranium.
In 2006, Japanese professor Dr. K. Yagasaki, by using the known amount of uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb -- about the size of a two-litre milk container -- calculated that a ton of DU used on the battlefield results in the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima bombs worth of radiation released into the atmosphere. So, when it was reported that 2,000 tons of DU were dropped on Iraq from 2003 to 2006, we need to understand that what was released in the Iraqi atmosphere, and then spreading worldwide, was the equivalent of 200,000 Hiroshima bombs.
The total amount of DU the US has used since 1991 is approximately 4,600 tons (1,000 in the first Gulf War, 800 in Kosovo, 800 in Afghanistan and a further 2,000 tons in the second Iraq war.) This amounts to approximately 460,000 Hiroshima bombs, ten times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from all previous nuclear testing worldwide. And, it's important to note this calculation was three years ago. Since that time, we've had three more years of non-stop DU bombing...
Throughout the '60s, the US conducted numerous toxic and chemical weapons tests on its military personnel. In July 2008, Nic Maclellan, journalist, researcher and development worker in the Pacific, wrote...
"Under Project SHAD, the US Navy conducted six tests in the Marshall Islands and off the coast of Hawai’i between 1964-68. Pentagon documents released in 2002 show the US Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors, and sprayed a germ toxin on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
"These Cold War-era experiments to test the Navy's vulnerability to toxic warfare involved about 4,300 US military personnel, mostly from the Navy. Most were never informed that the tests were being conducted, breaching all ethical principles about informed consent for test subjects."
It's time that we, as a nation, not only face the truth -- but come to grips with it. Those who serve with such trust and loyalty cannot imagine that they are, at best, "experimental animals" to be used and cast aside by ruthless corporate thugs.
How many generations of Anthony Guariscos must we lose before we realize that "support the troops" means protect the troops? Like Guarisco said, we must stand up, stand together and demand the abolition of all nuclear weapons if human beings on this planet are to survive.
It's time for the madness to stop. Before we are all atomic veterans.
Sheila Samples http://sheilastuff.blogspot.com/ is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@wichitaonline.net
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