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Thursday, November 6, 2003 |
FEATURED ARTICLES
- Oiling up the draft machine?, Salon.com
- The Wounded Come Home, Time Magazine
- The Wounded
Who Never Die, San Francisco Chronicle
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable
human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would
have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no
viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our
principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for
handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq,
thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed
the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish.
Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be
an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
- - George H.W. Bush (from his memoirs, "A World Transformed," written
in 1998)
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - NOVEMBER 11th
1868 -- The Fort
Laramie Treaty signed between The Great
Sioux Nation & the
apparently not so great United States of America whose armies failed
for 10
years
to defeat the Sioux (better
known as the Lakota, Dakota & Nakota peoples). Meant
to keep non-Indian settlers out of the Paha Sapa (The
Black Hills), all the white
men's bets on the treaty were off as soon as gold
was found.
1913 -- South Africa: Gandhi leads Great March into Transvaal.
1961 -- A devastating
fire breaks out in the elegant Bel Air-Brentwood
section of Los Angeles. In 3 days, it destroys 638 homes, including Zsa Zsa Gabor's & Dick
Nixon's.
http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/611106_BelAirFire/110761_belair_heraldexaminer_1.htm
RHINO HERE:
The Chickenhawk Database defines a chickenhawk as:
Chickenhawk n. A
person enthusiastic about
war,
provided someone else fights
it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with
war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity
in that person's youth.
Chickenhawk
The gang of men (& Condi) who have rationalized & manipulated the
U.S. into this war are
people who one way or the other managed to keep themselves from ever serving
in the military themselves (save Colin). And yet Rhino fears they sleep well
at night in spite of their responsibility for ruining the lives of countless
young men & women & their families. And now, to be sure
they have enough troops for Rummie's "long, hard slog," they 're
busy quietly hiring new staff for draft boards across America.
Meanwhile, with the body count of our troops rising daily, and the shrub gang
doing it's best to keep images of the bags away from the limelight, there's been
little coverage of the wounded (estimated to number 3 times the dead), until
this week, when Time Magazine did an extensive report entitled, "The Wounded
Come Home."
Today's RHINO'S
BOTTOM LINE by Harley Sorensen asks, Do the wounded
ever die? Because the official list of U.S. casualties doesn't seem to
reflect many deaths from the scores of wounded.
I called my Senators yesterday to ask why their voices weren't heard screaming,
NO! along with Senator Byrd, on the 87 BILLION vote. I urge you to do
the same.
Oiling up the draft machine?
The Pentagon is quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide.
While officials say there's no cause to worry, some experts aren't so sure.
By Dave Lindorff, Salon.com, Nov. 3, 2003
The community draft boards that became notorious for sending reluctant young
men off to Vietnam have languished sinced the early 1970s, their membership ebbing
and their purpose all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago,
on an obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration
quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life. Especially
for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam, it is an ominous flashback
of a message. Even floating the idea of a draft in the months before an election
would be politically explosive, and the Pentagon last week was adamant that the
push to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. Increasingly,
however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting
that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard
slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice
but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation's military in a time of global
instability...
MORE AT SALON: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/03/draft/index_np.html
The Wounded Come Home
For every soldier who dies in Iraq, many more are injured.
TIME takes an up-close look at the battle they face after the shooting
is over
By MARK THOMPSON, Time Magazine , Monday, Nov. 03, 2003
...The medic, the wounded soldiers and their comrades began a frantic race
against the clock. Buddies pressed their hands into Castro's hip wound to keep
him from bleeding to death. The wound was so massive that his tourniquet was
useless. He handed it to Wyatt, who needed two to stanch the blood flowing from
his femoral artery. Amid the mayhem, Meinen, who had been manning a 50-cal. machine
gun, noticed that he didn't have any feeling in his right foot. "It felt
like it had gone to sleep on me, so I picked my foot up and was trying to massage
it, trying to get the feeling back," he says. "But then it dawned on
me: it wasn't even connected. So I put it on the floor."...
MORE: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031110-536257,00.html
8:00:36 AM 
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The Wounded Who Never Die
by Harley Sorensen, San Francisco Chronicle , 11/3/03
If we were to believe our government (and who does?), our military doctors are the best in the world. Nobody ever dies in their care. Common sense tells us we're being lied to again.
If you follow the news even loosely, you know that American soldiers and Marines are killed and wounded on a daily basis in Iraq. Just offhand, the number of wounded appears to be three times the number killed. So, roughly -- very roughly -- one can estimate about 1,000 troops wounded in Iraq. It could be twice that, or more. I think it's a lot more.
Our man in Iraq (I call him Sgt. Mike) e-mails the three steps in dealing with the wounded. If the wounds are minor, Sgt. Mike says, the troops are patched up in Iraq and sent back to their units. Troops with major injuries are flown to Germany for treatment, and from there to the United States. But, judging from press reports, none of these wounded ever dies. Maybe I don't know where to look, but I haven't been able to find one single report of a soldier who died later of his or her injuries. Not one. Isn't that curious?
If you go to the Department of Defense news Web site www.dod.mil/news/, you can find the names of newly killed GIs: 46 reported in the month of October. A few of those casualties died before October. No explanation is given for the delay in reporting. I was unable to find any listings that said someone died recently from injuries or wounds suffered some time ago...
READ IT ALL AT: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1103-06.htm
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Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged.
SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT:
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http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES)
Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
All copyrights belong to original publisher.
6:44:10 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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