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Wednesday, November 26, 2003 |
FEATURED ARTICLES
- Stop Escalation of Iraq War: End the Occupation, by Dennis Kucinich
- At Least 17 U.S. Troops Have Committed Suicide in Iraq; Army Seeks Answers, AP
- Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy, L.A. Times
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- - President Abraham Lincoln (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864)
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - NOVEMBER
1868 -- Ignoring orders to kill only warriors, a U.S. Army contingent led by General Custer massacres 103 sleeping Cheyenne including Black Kettle, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre. This was called the "Battle of the Washita."
1968 -- The United Nations passes a resolution against capital punishment. The U.S. ignores it.
2000 -- In Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Gov. George W. shrub as winner in the state's presidential election, 2,912,790 to 2,912,253, a 537-vote margin.
RHINO HERE:
Dennis Kucinich was making media rounds Tuesday stating an eloquent case to bring the troops home, NOW. It seems to Rhino the most important position to be articulating & defending. Besides the tragedy of the ones killed each day, there's also a growing number of suicides. Even those who survive the battlefields, are facing a new kind of hell as the title of THE BOTTOM LINE suggests; "Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy." Yes PTSD is alive & brewing in Iraq and it's not even Post yet. Instead of Support Our Troops, maybe the slogan should be Heal Our Troops.
Kucinich: Stop Escalation of Iraq War: End the Occupation
Remarks by Congressman Dennis Kucinich
"The US forces in Iraq are escalating the war. Residential areas are now being attacked and flattened. Opposition forces in Iraq are likewise escalating their attacks. The President is talking about sending more troops to Iraq, while discussion of a draft continues to swirl. The US presence in Iraq is inciting violence around the world. This Administration is issuing new terror warnings even as its policies make Americans less safe. And yet, incredibly, Democratic candidates, including one who claims to have opposed the war, continue to support the occupation. "This occupation must end. The United States must go to the UN with a new resolution which will demonstrate that the United States is ready to take a new direction and bring the UN in and get the US out of Iraq...
MORE AT: http://www.kucinich.us/statements.htm#112203
At Least 17 U.S. Troops Have Committed Suicide in Iraq; Army Seeks Answers
By Randall Richard, The Associated Press. 11/22/03
Rebecca Suell wants answers, and not the ones the U.S. Army is giving her. Why does the Army keep calling the last letter her husband sent to her, the one he mailed from Iraq on June 15, a suicide note? Can taking a bottle of Tylenol really kill you? And how did he get his hands on a bottle of Tylenol in the middle of the desert anyway? The questions may differ, but experts say the desperate search for answers - and the denial - are usually the same.
Since April, the military says, at least 17 Americans - 15 Army soldiers and two Marines - have taken their own lives in Iraq. The true number is almost certainly higher. At least two dozen non-combat deaths, some of them possible suicides, are under investigation according to an AP review of Army casualty reports. No one in the military is saying for the record that the suicide rate among forces in Iraq is alarming. But Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American military commander in Iraq, was concerned enough, according to the Army Surgeon General's office, to have ordered a 12-person mental health assessment team to Iraq to see what more can be done to prevent suicides and to help troops better cope with anxiety and depression. ....
MORE: http://truthout.org/docs_03/112403D.shtml
8:18:50 AM 
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Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy
By Andrew M. Cockburn, L.A. Times, November 19, 2003
Among the less publicized incentives propelling Iraq overseer Paul Bremer's urgent dash to Washington last week was the concern in various quarters of the administration that the U.S. expeditionary force in Iraq was in a dangerously unstable state. "We are one stressed-out reservist away from a massacre," remarked one senior official closely involved in the search for an exit strategy.
He was expressing the fear that a soldier, possibly a reservist, pressed beyond endurance by the rigors and uncertainties of his or her condition in a hostile land far from home, might open up with a machine gun on an Iraqi crowd, with obviously disastrous consequences for the future of the occupation.
In case anyone considers this contingency unthinkably remote, examples already abound of overstressed U.S. soldiers behaving in a lethally trigger-happy fashion. As U.S. soldiers get more and more stressed, their tempers fray and you see more altercations on the streets, more browbeating of ordinary Iraqis by soldiers and, as a result, a general deterioration in the already tense relationship that helps convince Iraqis that the U.S. is nothing but an ugly, arrogant occupying army.
In traveling around Iraq, I always stay well away from American convoys, for reasons well known to all Iraqi drivers and best illustrated by an incident (by no means unique) outside Fallouja last month. Gunners in an armored column responded to a roadside bomb blast by opening up, apparently indiscriminately, with heavy automatic weapons on traffic moving in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway median. Six civilians died, including four in a single minivan, some of whom were decapitated. An 82nd Airborne spokesman was later quoted as insisting that "the use of force was justified."
Indiscriminate fire and other atrocities can be understood, if not explained, by the degree of stress endured by hot and exhausted soldiers terrified of an unseen enemy. U.S. Army Field Manual 22-51 addresses what it calls "misconduct combat stress behavior," which it deems most likely in guerrilla warfare. The manual notes that, "even though we may pity the overstressed soldier as well as the victims," such cases must be punished.
The manual also identifies other stress behaviors, including looting and pillaging, practices that many people in Iraq - including non-Iraqis - report is widespread among the occupation force....
MORE: http://truthout.org/docs_03/112103G.shtml
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7:20:15 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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