Friday, September 10, 2004

Psychological Casualties FEATURED ARTICLES - JOIN THE RHINO IN SUPPORTING THE WORK OF ACT - Massacre Draws Self-Criticism in Muslim Press, NY Times - BOTTOM LINE:  The Price Of Valor, The New Yorker QUOTE OF THE DAY "We should be asking questions right now that would let us know if soldiers have killed. Knowing the extent and the severity of stress related to killing in combat would help the government ease the soldiers' transition to civilian life. We should be in a position to help them, and we absolutely don't know how. As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we're causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we're accomplishing is worth the harm we're causing. The Army is reluctant to label any of its heroes as psychological casualties. The military's concern is that if we get into this business of talking about killing people, we're going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience." - - Retired Colonel Harry Holloway, (A U.S. Army psychiatrist for 30 years / From today's Bottom Line) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - September 10th 1976 -- Author, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo dies. He wrote the antiwar novel "Johnny Got His Gun". The most talented member of the Hollywood Ten, a group who refused to testify before the 1947 U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities about alleged communist involvement, he was blacklisted & spent 11 months in prison. After his blacklisting, he wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms. Dalton Trumbo Bio http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAtrumbo.htm "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist" http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/11-17-97/boston_books_2.html "Redirecting the Canon - Red Hollywood" http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/0896/08096a.html 2001 -- On the day before the 9/11 attacks on the US, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in FBI financing for counter-terrorism programs. And why does this man still have his job? RHINO HERE: As I write this (Thursday night), thousands of Americans are holding candlelight vigils across the country commemorating the 1000, mostly youthful, Americans who have died thus far in the Iraq war. Those thousand represent a priceless loss to so many families. But no one should forget the 6,000 & climbing military wounded who are returning daily to the mercy of their loved ones & the Veterans Administration Hospital System which struggles for funding, staff & resources. Then there's what  Lieutenant Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist based in Bethesda, has called "the dead elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about." That is, the returning soldiers who have looked into the eyes of the humans, that they then killed. The Psychological Casualties of the neo-con foreign policy.  Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE appeared in The New Yorker, July 7, 2004. Entitled,  "The Price Of Valor; We train our soldiers to kill for us. Afterward, they're on their own,"  An important aspect rarely pondered by the American Electorate. I also call your attention today to a wave of Islamic media pundits who've been speaking out against the hijacking of their religion's beautiful legacy by what Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, general manager of satellite TV Al Arabiya, calls, "neo-Muslims" with their, "global message of hate and a universal war cry." An important development toward what peace is possible. But first, I ask you for a bit of help. The organization, America Coming Together (ACT), currently has over 1500 paid canvassers knocking on doors in battleground states. Founded by the folks who created Emily's List (Early Money Is Like Yeast), the nation's largest grassroots political network,  ACT seeks to operate the largest get-out-the-vote operation in history for the November election. But the election is just 54 days away. If you're not making time to work in a swing state, & if you can afford it, please make a financial contribution to ACT via the link below. The Rhino has committed to raising $10,000 for ACT & my big plan is for you guys to all chip in.  If you've ever thought of making a financial contribution to the work of Rhino's Blog, (something I've never requested) please consider making that offering now. I believe this will be political contributions, very well spent. Your support is needed now more than ever. Here's the link to contribute to the Rhino's Blog 10,000 countdown. The clock is ticking, ACT now at.   http://acthere.com/seeUser.php?memberID=4995 JOIN THE RHINO IN SUPPORTING THE WORK OF ACT I'm working with ACT to defeat George Bush and elect democrats to federal, state and local office in 2004.  I'm also in a contest with thousands of ACTivists around the country for some great prizes. Will you help me reach my goals? ACT is an incredible organization focused on electing democrats up and down the ticket in the 17 battleground states.   Now, with Election Day just weeks away, I'm helping them build the largest get-out-the-vote operation in history.   Will you help me today?  Will you make a contribution to help me achieve my ACTivist goal?  Just $25 or $50 will make a huge difference. Please join me today by visiting my ACT activism page at: http://acthere.com/seeUser.php?memberID=4995 Massacre Draws Self-Criticism in Muslim Press By John Kifner, NY Times,  September 9, 2004 BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 8 - The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has touched off an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world. "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims," Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the widely watched satellite television station Al Arabiya said in one of the most striking of these commentaries. Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat, Mr. Rashed said it was "shameful and degrading" that not only were the Beslan hijackers Muslims, but so were the killers of Nepalese workers in Iraq; the attackers of residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar, Saudi Arabia; the women believed to have blown up two Russian airplanes last week; and Osama bin Laden himself... ...Mr. Rashed recalled that in the past, leftists and nationalists in the Arab world were considered a "menace" for their adoption of violence, and the mosque was a haven of "peace and reconciliation" by contrast. "Then came the neo-Muslims," he said. "An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry."... MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/international/middleeast/09arabiya.htm 7:09:52 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - The Price Of Valor We train our soldiers to kill for us. Afterward, they're on their own "SEND THIS ARTICLE TO A REPUBLICAN!" The Price Of Valor We train our soldiers to kill for us. Afterward, they're on their own. by DAN BAUM, The New Yorker, July 7, 2004 ... Since Vietnam, the Army has not had to dwell on how soldiers are affected by the killing they do. The first Gulf War was very short, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were largely fought from long range, with airpower and artillery, which rendered the killing abstract. In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known-as General Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts"-but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have "looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed." American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, "There's just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they're all dead." Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they'd done, a pall would settle over them. Kilner and a number of observers inside and outside the Army worry that the high rate of closeup killing in Iraq has the potential to traumatize a new generation of veterans. Worse, they say, the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs avoid thinking or talking about it. Although both organizations have produced reams of studies on every other aspect of combat trauma-grief, survivor's guilt, fear, and so on-the aftereffects of taking an enemy's life are almost never studied. "... ...Last week, the Army released a new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found that roughly sixteen per cent of Iraq veterans suffer from P.T.S.D. or depression; of these, fewer than forty per cent have sought professional help. Al Batres, a Vietnam veteran who runs the network of storefront centers, says that nearly eight thousand veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have come to the clinics so far. Some thirty-three hundred Iraq veterans have been treated for mental-health problems at V.A. hospitals; the V.A. is girding itself for a flood of psychological cases. "We're very busy," Batres said. "The more conflicted the community that sent you, the more difficult is the readjustment period." The study released by the Army last week did ask soldiers about specific combat experiences, and it confirmed, finally, that one of the factors responsible for P.T.S.D. cases was "killing enemy combatants." But the Army, understaffed and underequipped in Iraq to begin with, is struggling to win a war and to keep as many of its soldiers alive as possible. As for the V.A., its budget has been strained by rising medical costs and by an aging veteran population; providing the same level of therapy that, say, the New York Police Department gives a cop involved in a shooting incident would be an unimaginable burden. Veterans since the American Revolution have complained that the government doesn't do enough for them. Given what combat does to soldiers, it's hard to imagine any amount of services being "enough."... READ IT ALL AT: http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040712fa_fact "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) 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. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:29:29 AM    comment

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