Iraq War Grief Daily Witness (photo) Day 280

18 Comments

1. 

   RubDMC on March 29, 2006 at 3:44 pm

   

   Click on the candle to copy the image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment.

   ” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
   from Dirge Without Music
   by Edna St. Vincent Millay

2. 

   Man Eegee on March 29, 2006 at 3:54 pm

   

   …until the tears flow no more.

3. 

   dada on March 29, 2006 at 4:03 pm

   

   Peace

4. 

   scribe on March 29, 2006 at 4:07 pm

   I want to send
   my heart-full
   to those who
   need it most
   and tell you
   you are not
   alone

5. 

   ask on March 29, 2006 at 4:11 pm

   
   Iraq talks falter as gunmen kill eight in Baghdad shop

6. 

   shermanesqe on March 29, 2006 at 5:03 pm

   

   How can these children not grow up absolutely hating us?  I’m so sad for their young lost lives.

7. 

   Damnit Janet on March 29, 2006 at 5:41 pm

   They are OUR children. All of them. Can’t they see that?? Can’t they understand that killing children doesn’t make another child safe??  

8. 

   cotterperson on March 29, 2006 at 5:51 pm

   

   Impeach NOW

9. 

   jimstaro on March 29, 2006 at 6:01 pm

   
   Light A Candle For
   Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
   and For The Children – Innocence Lost!

   ~~~

   Riverbend – Uncertainty… – Baghdad Burning

   ~~~

   Eighteen More Veterans Administration Medical Centers Are Under The Ax
   By David Robert Crews
   Mar 27, 2006, 16:55

   ~~~

   
   Soldier on patrol walks past two women in burkhas. (AP FILE)

   Afghanistan: The Forgotten War
   Story aired: Wednesday, March 29, 2006

   Here & Now speaks with author Sebastian Junger about his story on “The Forgotten War,” published in this month’s Vanity Fair.

   LISTEN TO DISCUSSION

   America’s Forgotten War
   More than four years after the invasion of Afghanistan, 20,000 U.S. soldiers are still there, pitting their diplomatic skills–and massive airpower–against the Taliban’s terror tactics
   By SEBASTIAN JUNGER

   ~~~~~

   ~~~~~

   “Never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another.”

   *
   Walkin’ To New Orleans, Sunday March 19th 2006, 3rd Anniversary of the 2nd Iraq War, Flash Video Last Day Of March

   *
   ‘3’-bushFlash Video

   • 

     jimstaro on March 29, 2006 at 7:45 pm

     AGENT ORANGE

     SPEECH BY DAVID CLINE,
     PRESIDENT OF VETERANS FOR PEACE, USA
     AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE VIETNAM AGENT ORANGE
     RELIEF AND RESPONSIBILITY CAMPAIGN

     First let me thank the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/dioxin for organizing this international conference and to the Agent Orange Vets from Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada who have traveled here to participate.

     The US delegation I am leading is made up of Agent Orange vets Frank Corcoran, Joan Duffy, Ralph Steele Dan Shea.

     I was an infantryman with the 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi and Tay Ninh in 1967 and was wounded 3 times but do not suffer from dioxin related health conditions myself.

     When I came back from the war,  I had knowledge of the use of Agent Orange having seen sprayed areas and knew that they destroyed nature but had no knowledge of the negative effects these defoliants had on human beings.

     I remember in 1969 a veteran I knew named Jeff Sharlett died of cancer at age 27 in the Miami, Florida Veterans Hospital and thinking it was strange that someone so young had cancer.

     Over the years other friends of mine got sick or had deformed children or sometimes died. Mike Keegan and John Miffin who died and John and Rena Kopystenski who had several children with birth defects are among them. So this issue has always been personal to me.

     In 1977, a woman who worked as a claims representative at the Chicago Veterans Administration named Maude DeVictor was the first person to really put two and two together when she witnessed the VA higher-ups denying veterans claims and covering up their health problems and the connections to dixon exposure.

     The next year, 1978, a veteran name Paul Reutershan who was sick with cancer got on television and said “my government killed me in Vietnam and I didn’t even know it”. He began a lawsuit against the chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange, Blue, White, Purple etc. but he never lived to see that lawsuit completed because he died within the year.

     The reason that this lawsuit was started was because the VA was denying veterans claims for medical treatment and compensation and according to US law, citizens cannot sue the government for these type of claims.

     From 1978-1984 the lawsuit continued and was eventually settled, although many veterans opposed the settlement for millions of dollars. Sadly many veterans got very little of that money since the army of lawyers who got involved got a good portion of it in legal fees.

     I have been a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War since 1970 and that organization played a critical role in launching the movement for justice for Agent Orange vets, supporting Maude Devictor who became the godmother of the movement, recruiting veterans to joining the lawsuit and raising general public awareness of this issue.

     But we always believed that while the chemical companies had responsibility and should be held liable, the primary responsibility lay with the US government which ordered and continued to use these poisons after they were becoming aware of the negative effects on people. Instead of changing course, they covered up the facts and kept using them until 1971. After that they gave their remaining supplies to the former Army of the Republic of Vietnam who continued to use them until 1975 when that regime ceased to exist.

     In VVAW, our demand has always been Testing, Treatment and Compensation for Agent Orange Victims. We never thought the lawsuit against the chemical companies was the answer, but rather a way to continue putting pressure on the US government.

     Finally progress was made on that front when in 1991, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act, acknowledging several conditions as being dioxin related for purposes of medical treatment and disability compensation. It also established a mechanism for the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine to review new studies and make recommendations to the Secretary of the Veterans Administration for expanding the recognized conditions.

     Currently there are thirteen conditions acknowledged by the VA including two conditions among veterans children but over 27 conditions have been rejected since there was a finding by the IOM of not enough scientific research to indicate a connection to dioxin exposure.

     So many veterans are still not being treated with any fairness. And how does someone give justice to all those who have died? The hidden casualties of the Vietnam War continue to grow but the struggle continues as well.

     And today we need to talk about the other side of the coin, not just American, Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian veterans but the people of Vietnam as well.

     Remember also that these chemicals were also used in parts of Cambodia and Laos as well as along the DMZ in Korea and in Panama.

     In the United States we began the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign to support the efforts of VAVA and join with concerned veterans and people in other countries to demand Justice for ALL Agent Orange Victims!

     While the Campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace, it is made up of war veterans, Vietnamese-Americans, peace activists, environmentalists and other friends of Vietnam. We are supporting the international petition drive in support of the VAVA lawsuit and recently sponsored a 10 city speaking tour by 4 VAVA members.

     We are also planning to encourage sympathetic representatives and senators to introduce legislation in Congress for the US government to step up to the plate and provide compensation and medical assistance, if not for political reasons, then fro moral and humanitarian purposes. It is time to really heal the wounds of that war, not to ignore them or let them fade into history.

     Let me make on last point. This is a struggle to expose and end the use of chemical weapons by all nations but especially by my government. This is not just about something that happened over 30 years ago. Today the Bush administration has led our country and the world into another invasion and occupation, this time in Iraq and is now used Depleted Uranium that will in time poison US troops and Iraqi citizens. They have also used White Phosphorus bombs against whole cities like Fallujah.

     It is time for humanity to demand an end to these weapons as part of our efforts to abolish war. That is what Veterans For Peace is pledged to work for. That will only come through the determined efforts of all of us, throughout the world.

     The great American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass said:

     “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

     This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will”

     With that as our watchword, lets make this conference a call to all the people of the world.

     JUSTICE FOR ALL AGENT ORANGE VICTIMS!

   • 

     jimstaro on March 30, 2006 at 4:34 am

     “I can’t thank them enough because they feel for Iraq and Iraqi peoples’……..

10. 

    DuctapeFatwa on March 29, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    Over five days earlier this month, around 200 veterans, military families and survivors of hurricane Katrina walked 130 miles from Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans…

    Michael Blake is at the front of the march. The 22-year-old from New York state is not quite sure how he ended up in the military; the child of “a feminist mom and hippy dad”, he says he signed up thinking that he would have an adventure, never imagining that he would find himself in Iraq. He served from April 2003 to March 2004, some of that time as a Humvee driver. Deeply disturbed by his experience in Iraq, he filed for conscientious objector status and has been campaigning against the war ever since.

    He claims that US soldiers such as him were told little about Iraq, Iraqis or Islam before serving there; other than a book of Arabic phrases, “the message was always: ‘Islam is evil’ and ‘They hate us.’ Most of the guys I was with believed it.”…

    Blake says that the turning point for him came one day when his unit spent eight hours guarding a group of Iraqi women and children whose men were being questioned. He recalls: “The men were taken away and the women were screaming and crying, and I just remember thinking: this was exactly what Saddam used to do – and now we’re doing it.”

    Becoming a peace activist, he says, has been a “cleansing” experience. “I’ll never be normal again. I’ll always have a sense of guilt.” He tells us that he witnessed civilian Iraqis being killed indiscriminately. It would not be the most startling admission by the soldiers on the march.

    “When IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] would go off by the side of the road, the instructions were – or the practice was – to basically shoot up the landscape, anything that moved. And that kind of thing would happen a lot.”..

    Blake, an activist with IVAW for the past 12 months, is angry that American people seem so untouched by the war, by the grim abuses committed by American soldiers. “The American media doesn’t cover it and they don’t care. The American people aren’t seeing the real war – what’s really happening there.”

    We are in a Mexican diner in Mississippi when Alan Shackleton, a quiet 24-year-old from Iowa, stuns the table into silence with a story of his own….”And I ran over a little kid and killed him …

    “We are very, very sorry for what we did to the Iraqi people,” he says the next day…

    Jody Casey left the army five days ago and came straight to join the vets. The 29-year-old is no pacifist…What upset him the most about Iraq? “The total disregard for human life,” he says, matter of factly. “I mean, you do what you do at the time because you feel like you need to. But then to watch it get kind of covered up, shoved under a rug … ‘Oh, that did not happen’.”…

    IEDs go off and [you] just zap any farmer that is close to you. You know, those people were out there trying to make a living…

    Casey told us how, from the top down, there was little regard for the Iraqis, who were routinely called “hajjis”, the Iraq equivalent of “gook”. “They basically jam into your head: ‘This is hajji! This is hajji!’ You totally take the human being out of it and make them into a video game.”

    It was a way of dehumanising the Iraqis? “I mean, yeah – if you start looking at them as humans, and stuff like that, then how are you going to kill them?”

    He says that soldiers who served in his area before his unit’s arrival recommended them to keep spades on their vehicles so that if they killed innocent Iraqis, they could throw a spade off them to give the appearance that the dead Iraqi was digging a hole for a roadside bomb.…

    “you could basically kill whoever you wanted – it was that easy. You did not even have to get off and dig a hole or anything. All you had to do was have some kind of picture. You’re driving down the road at three in the morning. There’s a guy on the side of the road, you shoot him … you throw a shovel off.”

    The IVAW, says Hatcher, “is becoming our religion, our fight – as in any religion we’ve confessed our wrongs, and now it’s time to atone.”…

    “We want the Iraqi people to know that we stand with them,” says Blake, “and that we’re sorry, so sorry….

    Thomas Brinson survived the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. “Iraq is just Arabic for Vietnam, like the poster says – the same horror, the same tears,” he says.

    Sitting on a riverbed outside New Orleans, Blake turns reflective. “I met an Iraqi at one of the public meetings I was talking at recently. He came up to me and told me he was originally from the town where I had been stationed. And I just went up to this complete stranger and hugged him and I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ And you know what? He told me it was OK. And it was beautiful …” He starts to cry. “That was redemption”.

    nerdified link

    bold mine

    • 

      Damnit Janet on March 29, 2006 at 6:09 pm

      Eman, the Iraqi journralist, said to me. She said that if Americans knew that they too were soccer moms, with cell phones and jobs… that they’d wouldn’t ignore their slaughter.

      She said it’ a terrorist way of thinking to think “well they’re better off dead” – that – “their way of life wasn’t good anways”.

      Eman is me, you, all of us.  

      • 

        DuctapeFatwa on March 29, 2006 at 8:50 pm

        There would probably be some Americans who would favor only killing the poor ones, who don’t have kids on soccer teams or cell phones. There is a definite preference in US society for more affluent people, you can see it even in the US domestic policy…

11. 

    alohaleezy on March 29, 2006 at 9:37 pm

    IMPEACH the BASTARD!

    NOW!

12. 

    supersoling on March 30, 2006 at 7:32 am

    

13. 

    vieravisionary on March 30, 2006 at 10:14 am

    

    During these times of war and pain, may we all stop and spend a moment in prayer and remembrance to all whose lives are affected by war and loss.  May we truly pray for real and lasting peace.  Pray for forgiveness of those who have wronged us and those we have wronged as well.

    May the Creator hear our prayers and grant us the grace and strength to listen with our hearts and act with love and caring.

14. 

    Salunga on March 30, 2006 at 10:58 am