Raiding The Vault IV -- Read 'Em And Weep

I'm in the midst of a difficult week and can't write much at the moment ... but I can point you toward a few elderly posts which I hope will be ... um ... educational?

A short [!] post from April 24, 2005, is reproduced in full below. It's called "Read 'Em And Weep".

The conditions described here are still in effect -- only worse. We're still reading -- and still weeping.

~~~

This will not be pleasant, but I assure you it's necessary.

Read the following excerpts, and see if you can put two and two together:

Robert Kohler: Silent genocide: Depleted-uranium munitions are contaminating the world

[According to] former Livermore Labs geologist Leuren Moret .... depleted uranium turns into an infinitesimally fine dust after it explodes; individual particles are smaller than a virus or bacteria. And, “It is estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment.”

And DU dust is everywhere. A minimum of 500 or 600 tons now litter Afghanistan, and several times that amount are spread across Iraq. In terms of global atmospheric pollution, we’ve already released the equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs, Moret said.

The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse. DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code.

Thus, birth defects are way up in Afghanistan since the invasion: children “born with no eyes, no limbs, tumors protruding from their mouths … deformed genitalia,” according to the tribunal report. This ghastly toll on the unborn — on the future — has led Mohammed Daud Miraki, director of the Afghan DU and Recovery Fund, to coin the term “silent genocide” to describe the effects of this horrific weapon.

Riverbend: Baghdad Burning: The Cruel Month...

The weather is warm now. We often turn on the ceiling fan (or panka) in an attempt to move around the muggy air. April is a month of fresh beginnings all over the world but in Iraq, April is not the best of months. April is a month of muggy warmth and air thick with dust and sand- and now of occupation. We opened the month with a dust storm that left the furniture in our houses sand-colored with an opaque layer of dust. We breathed dust, ate dust and drank dust for a few days. The air is clearer now but everything is looking a little bit diminished and dirty. It suits the mood.

What a mood! Diminished and dirty and extremely deadly. April may be a cruel month, even in "normal times". But these times are definitely not normal. Every month is cruel in Iraq now. How could it be otherwise, when there's depleted uranium everywhere?

We breathed dust, ate dust and drank dust...

And we know what was in that dust...

Even in our time of unrelenting doublespeak, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" must be the most cynical lie of all. The only "freedom" conferred upon Iraq by this operation will be "Freedom from Worrying about the Future".

It's this simple: When you're breathing, eating and drinking dust, and that dust contains depleted uranium, there's no point in worrying about the future. Because there is no future.

Read Bob Kohler. Read Riverbend. Read 'em and weep.

Every American, every Brit, every Australian, every citizen of any country involved in the so-called "coalition", who is not doing his or her utmost to get this horror-show stopped, is silently complicit in this crime. And the crime, unless I am badly mistaken, will end up making Hitler's holocaust look like a picnic in the park.

Read 'em and weep. May God have mercy upon our souls.

Bob Koehler: Pre-Existing Conditions

Bob Koehler's latest column is a really good one, even by his standards. It starts like this:

Pre-Existing Conditions: Pact with the devil comes wrapped in many gaudy causes

Deep in the heart of the postwar hell that awaits many injured and emotionally shattered vets lies a memo so toxic with cynical irony it deserves to be posted on americasarmy.com, the U.S. Army’s official teen-entrapment Web site.

“We can’t fix every Soldier. We have to hold Soldiers accountable for their behavior. Everyone in life beyond babies, the insane, and the demented and mentally retarded have to be held accountable for what they do in life.”

Got that, Soldier?

These are the words — first outed by NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling in May — of Col. Steven Knorr, a psychiatrist and chief of the Behavioral Health Unit at Fort Carson, Colo., to his staff. Knorr is the officer who oversaw the discharge of thousands of soldiers, many suffering brain damage and other IED-related physical and psychological injuries, on the specious diagnosis “personality disorder,” a “pre-existing condition” the Army shrinks pulled out of their hats, which meant the GIs weren’t qualified for disability pay or even medical care. Billions of taxpayer dollars were saved.

The irony is in the word “accountable,” a bully word in the hands of the U.S. military, which sees itself as a veritable accountability machine, imposing it on others — the enemy — with a righteous fury that acknowledges no overkill, and imposing it on its own rank and file once they are no longer useful to the cause.

One no-longer-useful soldier — among the 22,500 discharged in the last six years with a pre-existing personality disorder — is Army Spc. Jon Town, who, according to a recent investigative piece in The Nation and other media accounts, was knocked unconscious by a 107-millimeter rocket while serving in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart.

But the Army has ruled that the hearing loss and headaches he has suffered ever since were the result of a pre-existing personality disorder, a diagnosis, like most if not all other such diagnoses, divined without input from family members or anyone who knew Town before he enlisted and passed the Army physical. No need, see. These guys all had dormant conditions that family members wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Only trained Army docs can determine their existence, after which they have no choice but to deny the poor schnooks disability pay and medical care.

I think you should read the whole thing. But then I always say that about Bob Koehler.

And I'm reminded of Chris Floyd, who wrote:

This is a remarkable state of affairs: a militarist faction that doesn't even take care of its soldiers. Once again, we see a glaring example of the blind and brutal stupidity that is the hallmark of the Bush White House. (And this stinking fish most definitely rots from the head.) The early Caesars had the good sense to keep their legions sweet, especially the Praetorian Guard; even Saddam Hussein knew enough to take good care of his Republican Guard. But the Bushists merely chew up their soldiers and spit them out, like drunks heaving after a binge.

I continue to believe, more firmly than ever, that the destruction of the American military is going according to plan. The flip-side of that plan, of course, is the establishment of a loose network of private armies ... that just happen to be beyond the reach of the law.

[related links]

Speed Bump: Will Mass Murder In Nisoor Square Slow The Growth Of Blackwater?

Bush Hates America: US Troops Face 'A Circular Firing Squad' In Iraq

Bush Hates America: Iraqi Weapons Caches Are Still Open!

Still In Denial: Bob Woodward's Modified Limited Hangout

Bob Koehler: Piercing The Myth

Bob Koehler's most recent column is a really good one, but that's no surprise.

Presence of Mind: Piercing the myth of redemptive violence

“I knew the situation was serious. I was shaking all over. But I was amazed by the complexity of my mind — the most clear part was just the speed and agility of my mind. I immediately began talking to him in a calm voice and engaged in eye contact. But he was not in his eyes. He was in his own world — pointing a gun at me.”

Is this a good time to address the big lie? You know, the lie about our stark, raving helplessness in the face of armed danger and malevolence? Fortress Gun Nut has the whole country hostage to the big lie that a safe America is an armed America, and yet as our stockpile of weaponry, domestic and otherwise, increases, so does our fearfulness, and so does the danger.

And the heroes are often indistinguishable from the perps. We’re all heroes in our own minds. We all watch the movies and imbibe the whack ’n’ win culture. We all learn that real justice must be delivered at the point of a sword that is terrible and swift.

Christian theologian Walter Wink calls it the myth of redemptive violence, this self-evident conviction — as old as Mesopotamia, as current as the Saturday morning cartoons — that violence is effective and free of unwanted consequences. Six millennia of evidence to the contrary hasn’t changed anything because myth is impervious to empirical data. It’s born anew with every war, every special-effects extravaganza from Hollywood, every loner’s sad plot for revenge. And so many people profit from it.

Excellent stuff. And there's more where that came from...

Bob Koehler: 'Disciples Of Yossarian'

I don't link to Bob Koehler often enough. Bob's an editor for Tribune Media Services in Chicago, and he writes a weekly column as well. I know him (in the virtual way) through the pro-democracy movement, and he's always been really friendly and generous. [As a blogger dealing with a mainstream media person, I can't deny I love that reaction. And yes, I have had other sorts of reactions from other mainstream people, but let's not go there just now.]

I don't know much about Bob's editing because who can tell what he's worked on? His weekly columns are so carefully crafted I can tell he's a stickler for detail. And I love that about him too. Most of all I love his writing. Bob Koehler kicks butt in a direct and heartfelt way every week, and sometimes (like this week) he really gets rolling, and then he's even more fun to read, in my slightly frozen opinion. Anyway...

This week Bob sticks his foot even further than normal up the butt of the monster Ike warned us about, with a piece whose theme features the central character of my favorite novel ever ever ever. So in addition to linking to Bob's site, I feel compelled to repost his column in full, and to scribble a frozen little introduction for it, a reasonable facsimile of which follows:

The summer before my senior year in high school, I got sick and was more or less bedridden for six weeks, time I spent reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the same book. After a month and a half I had read it seven times and I believe it had re-routed the connections in my brain because after my six weeks alone with Catch-22, I never again saw anything in quite the same way, ever ever ever.

If you haven't read Catch-22, you're missing a treat and a half; briefly: it's about a WWII American bomber squadron attacking Italy. The central character, Yossarian [played by Alan Arkin in the Mike Nichols film -- see top photo], hates flying missions but does it anyway (not that he has any choice) and whenever he reaches the number of missions required to complete a tour of duty (therefore supposedly earning a trip home) Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions! Oops! There's a catch! It's a "Catch-22".

But that's not the only catch.

Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian he can get out of flying if he's crazy. But there's a catch -- another Catch-22: Anybody who doesn't want to fly in a war is obviously not crazy, so Yossarian must be sane and therefore he has to keep flying.

It turns out that "Catch-22" covers an enormous category of insanities. Any rule or regulation that generates contradictions (and contradictions abound in this very carefully crafted work of ironic fiction) is called a "Catch-22".

Not to spoil any endings, but: After reading it seven times in a row, I decided to model my life after Orr, one of Yossarian's buddies, who pledged "to live forever or die in the attempt". Orr used to crash on virtually every mission, and claimed Yossarian was crazy for not wanting to fly with him.

The author of this massively twisted tale of life in the Air Force, Joseph Heller, thus became and still remains my favorite American novelist ever ever ever, with the possible exception of Mark Harris, of whom we spoke quite a while ago here. Most of the people I know who love Catch-22 are lukewarm (at best) about most of Heller's other work, all of which I consider top-notch, so I am in a very small minority to praise Heller so highly. But then again, as I've said, I was sick, and my synapses were rearranged.

On a minor side note, I must say it frosts my already frozen rump to be accused of anti-Semitism, (as all 9/11 truth-seekers are, not to mention all those who are in any way critical of Israel!), when some of the people I love the most (both online and in real life) are Jewish, and especially when I would crawl for miles over broken glass to meet the Jewish-American novelist Joseph Heller -- but most unfortunately Joe Heller passed away in 1999.

Sigh. RIP Joe Heller.

I apologize for the ramble but on the other hand I thought you might be interested.

This week's column from Bob Koehler brought all that back to mind, and much more too.

DISCIPLES OF YOSSARIAN

By Robert C. Koehler | Tribune Media Services

Following on the heels of his flirtation with violent “decisiveness” toward Pakistan, Barack Obama got twisted up even further in the conflicting loyalties that complicate the lives of Democratic presidential candidates and the people who vote for them. Pretty soon the other candidates were in there with him, like cats in the yarn.

After declaring in a speech last week that he might order military strikes on Pakistan border areas to take out suspected al-Qaida camps, he was asked by an AP reporter if he’d use nuclear weapons against al-Qaida in Pakistan.

I pause here a moment to ponder the insanity of this question, or what I might call the “Yossarian moment” it produces, referring, of course, to Joseph Heller’s notorious central character in the World War II novel “Catch-22,” whose everyman sanity stood in constant amazed contrast to the routine insanities of war, like people all the time trying to kill each other. This is a Yossarian moment on steroids, reporter to almighty-deity-in-chief wannabe: When killing thine enemies, sir, would you be inclined to take ’em out 50,000 at a swath? A hundred thousand? A million?

We’ve been thinking the unthinkable for 62 years now, so long that only a dazed disciple of Yossarian, apparently, stumbles today on the idea that “the button” is still — still! — within human reach. Otherwise, our horror over this, or at least the media’s horror, has worn down over the decades to a smooth sense of normalcy.

Yossarian’s ... I mean Obama’s ... response was illuminating — a burst of idealism, uncensored, unsophisticated, uncompromised. One might even suppose he spoke as “himself”: “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” he said.

Then, uh-oh, the Presidential Candidate took over, quickly adding the preposterous caveat: “... involving civilians.”

What? Non-civilian mass slaughter only? On its face, this is arguably the dumbest comment to date of the 2008 presidential campaign. But it’s also much more than that. It’s a sudden, stunning glimpse at the Truth About Presidential Campaigns: that the front-running candidates, the big-time players, the ones who might actually capture their party’s nomination, are only nominally running for president of the United States — president, that is, of that unruly mob of 300 million struggling, unpredictable and possibly peace-craving souls out there, including you and me.

In point of fact, they’re running for president of the Establishment — the power structure, the interlocking status quo of economic and geopolitical interests that knows what it wants and sets the parameters of policy: the war machine, in short; the military-industrial-media complex.

“Let me scratch that,” Obama went on. “There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

Close call! Idealism off the table.

But it didn’t end there. Not quite. The painfully “presidential” Hillary Clinton, who, we can be certain, has been sand-blasted free of every last embarrassing protrusion of “it takes a village” idealism over the last 15 years, was asked to weigh in. “Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons,” she said, laying out the rules of the game.

“Presidents, since the Cold War, have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace,” she went on. “And I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.”

Joe Biden, a second-tier rival for the nomination, had to be more succinct. Channeling the invisible powers a U.S. president must serve, he pronounced Obama “naive,” the ultimate condemnation. Let’s move on, shall we?

Well, no, let’s not. This fleeting moment in the making of a presidential candidate is a sobering reality dunk for every last unreconstructed disciple of Yossarian in the bleachers, or for every disciple of Albert Einstein, who famously observed: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Those of us who believe in a genuinely peace-rooted, nuke-free, disarmed future — who believe that violence doesn’t work and see this confirmed almost daily in the headlines (190,000 AK-47s and other U.S.-distributed weapons missing in Iraq, many of which are almost certainly being used against us) — must take note. No leading U.S. politician is on our side or ever will be until we succeed at crashing the party.

The paradoxes of today’s violence may be strangling the future as we look on, but they’re so easily ignored by servants of the status quo, who will grab any irrelevant historical precedent (the Cold War is over, Hillary) to justify the continuation of the highly profitable myth that peace must gorge itself on blood.

~~~

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can send him email at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at Common Wonders dot com.

© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Thanks again, Bob. You Rock! And thanks to Joe Heller too.

One last tangent: I once met a youngster who told me his first name was Yossarian. I didn't believe it at first but the guy who introduced us knew the family and swore it was true. Yossarian started to explain the origin of his name, and seemed relieved to find out no extended dissertation was necessary. He said, "I'm named after a character from a book." I said, "Of course!" He said, "Catch-22 is my dad's favorite book." I said, "No kidding!" And that was the end of that.

Yossarian turned out to be a very impressive 14-year-old. Sharp, quick, funny, very well-informed, the works. I haven't seen or heard of him in a long time, and I have no idea how he's doing but I certainly wish him well.

Please forgive me for a moment...

Hey Yossarian: if you read this, send me some email, will you?

Bob Koehler: The Hearts Of All Sane Men

Here's a new piece from Bob Koehler that's just too good to cut, in which Bob piles on many vital truths reflected in a couple of the events we were discussing recently, here and in related comments (or here).

I've taken a few liberties, added a few images and a few links as well as a bit of emphasis, but Bob's been a good friend -- and a very generous one -- and I know he believes in liberty, so I think we'll be ok.

So we bomb a school and then are aghast when seven children die. “If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that air strike would have occurred,” a spokesman for what the media still bother to call “the coalition” said afterward, by way of explanation if not apology.

The public has mostly tuned out of these wars. Of those who still pay attention, many do so from behind Fortress Patriotism, with its ramparts of cliche: “freedom isn’t free,” etc. Thus when children die and it’s our fault and publicity is unavoidable, the media will usually remove the stinger from each tiny death, and keep the American conscience untroubled, by putting the deaths in the larger context of U.S. strategy or mission.

“The coalition goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties,” said William Wood, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan.

We bombed the eastern Afghanistan compound, which contained a mosque and a madrassa (Islamic school), this past Sunday because we were hunting insurgents who may have been involved in the massive suicide bombing of a bus a few hours earlier in Kabul, which had killed as many as 35 people and wounded 52.

Got it? Next question . . .

But I linger in anger and wounded silence because, lacking belief in the pretext, stated goals or covert agenda of any of Bush’s wars, I have no way to numb myself to their tactics, which, no matter how you frame or justify them, amount to hunting individual Taliban or al-Qaida suspects, in populated areas, with bombs and missiles, all but guaranteeing a high collateral kill count. We’ve been doing this from the very start. How did we come to believe we had that right?

“The way chosen by the United States (after World War II) was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs. . . . No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.”

This is Dwight David Eisenhower, near the end of the Korean War — April 1953, addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors — seeming to lay down for all time what mattered about America and what sort of hope it brought to Planet Earth. The speech was called “The Chance for Peace.” In it, Ike let loose about how fed up he was with the Cold War economy, making a famous cost-benefit analysis:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. . . . We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.”

He went on for a while with such comparisons, finally thundering: “This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Can we stand so much unbuffered idealism in a single dose? “This is one of those times in the affairs of nations,” he said, “when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?”

Read it and wince. Whatever turning point we were at 54 years ago has slipped quietly beyond “the hearts of all sane men” and now we hunt evil from the sky, bomb schools and affect surprise at the carnage. This affectation is the last pale remnant of American idealism and morality.

But what’s most disturbing about Ike’s speech is that either he delivered it with his fingers crossed or he had no control over the malevolent forces then operating in America’s name. Even as he spoke, for instance, the CIA was meddling with Mohammad Mossadegh’s democratically elected, populist government in Iran, which fell four months later; and the next year, the CIA engineered a similar coup in Guatemala.

Even as he spoke, fallout from the U.S. military’s above-ground nuclear-testing program in Nevada was poisoning livestock, milk and people — and government spokesmen were assuring millions of irradiated downwinders, privately dismissed by the Atomic Energy Commission as “a low-use segment of the population,” that they were perfectly safe. In fact, they were guinea pigs.

In the Eisenhower years, America’s overt role on the world stage was to be a powerful force for good, but in its shadows, it was fighting a dirty war and preparing for a dirtier one. The toll to be exacted on the future would be cancer, global rancor, terrorism and an eroded value system in which even torture has a good name.

As Ike spoke about peace, the nation’s soul was on loan to the Cold War -- and we never got it back!!

Thank you, thank you, Bob Koehler! He's one of the very best, IMVHO. Visit his site and spend some time in his archives and see if you don't agree with me.

Bob Koehler: Devil Weed

Here's a rarity: a column by one online friend about another.

The friends are Bob Koehler (photo ==>) and Bernie Ellis (<==) respectively. Bob is (among other things) a columnist whose work has appeared here once in a while; Bernie is (among other things) an election integrity advocate. And that's how all our paths crossed.

Back in July of 2005, Bob and Bernie were both kind enough to participate in the first annual one and only "BradBlog Blogathon", for which event it was my honor to serve as host (and to contribute a few articles).

The other guest bloggers, by the way, were Clint Curtis, Bob Fitrakis, Larisa Alexandrovna, David Cobb, Chris Floyd, Gandhi, Josh Mitteldorf, and John Amato. And they all contributed good articles and/or live-blogged very interesting threads (in other words, all these links lead to gold!). But I digress.

Fast forward to the present, or nearly so, anyway. Bernie has been ...

Wait a minute. I'm getting ahead of myself here. I should know better.

The thing to do is let Bob tell the story.

Devil Weed
Dark shadow of ignorance hangs over Bernie's farm

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So of course a guy like Bernie Ellis — who signs his letters with this catchphrase, and who lives it in so many ways, doing what needs to be done, putting himself in the vanguard of vital social movements like the one for fair elections (which is how I know him) — would eventually get nailed for crossing a line.

How easy to have played it safe, but Ellis, who until a year and a half ago lived on a 187-acre farm 40 miles southwest of Nashville, Tenn., and worked as a public health epidemiologist, had been growing, along with other crops, a small amount of medical marijuana on his farm. The recipients over the years, via their social workers, were terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients, who obtained nausea and pain relief from what has been called (by no less than Francis Young, a Drug Enforcement Administration law judge) “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”

For reasons that will probably forever remain murky, Ellis’ farm was raided in August 2002. A few days earlier, a local dealer had tried to buy some pot from him and was told to shove off, so the suspicion lingers that the dealer turned him in. Two helicopters swooped overhead and eight or nine officers of the Tennessee Marijuana Eradication Task Force entered his property — a lot of hoo-hah, you might think, for seven pounds of weed, worth about $7,000.

Ellis was interrogated for two hours and freely “confessed” to his activities. Indeed, at the very moment of the raid he’d been crafting recommendations, at the request of New Mexico’s then-Gov. Gary Johnson, on how that state could establish a program making cannabis available immediately to patients in need. He gave the officers a printout of his proposal. How guilty can you get?

“I said this from the beginning,” Ellis told me. “I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing.”

And he wasn’t arrested. The Task Force officers did some checking around and learned that Ellis was not only well known but highly respected among county officials. His troubles didn’t begin till the federal government became interested in his case — and this gets at the core outrage of the whole matter. The zeal to keep marijuana criminalized in the face of so much evidence — it has 50 to 100 therapeutically beneficial subcomponents and has been studied in connection with the treatment and control of Alzheimer’s, brain tumors, epilepsy, MS and even schizophrenia, among much else — emanates from the federal level.

Welcome to the Bush administration’s other bogus war: the war on drugs. Science be damned. Rationality, compassion and state’s rights be damned. What matters is the continual drawing of random and arbitrary borders, which are then ruthlessly defended no matter what. And with the drawing of borders comes the creation of enemies, and in the world of herbs, marijuana is the enemy — the devil weed, no matter how medically useful.

As Ellis noted, “Every federal commission since Nixon has recommended reclassifying marijuana, allowing it to re-enter the medical pharmacopoeia.” Yet the feds have been known to prosecute medical marijuana growers even in states that have legalized it. Twelve have done so, including, most recently, New Mexico, whose law, signed last month by Gov. Bill Richardson, incorporates the recommendations Ellis was working on at the time of the raid.

No matter. In federal court, Ellis was prosecuted as an ordinary drug dealer and convicted. Though his sentence was relatively lenient — an 18-month term in a federal halfway house, which ends in May — he has incurred some $70,000 in legal debt and, far more frightening, faces the loss of his farm in a federal civil action.

The Nashville community has rallied to his support, and a series of benefits are planned. If you’re interested in contributing to the cause, see www.saveberniesfarm.com.

“If you really do believe what you’re doing is not wrong, then you’ve threatened the foundation of their legitimacy,” Ellis said. “You’ve raised your head above the foxhole.”

For my friend Bernie’s sake, I truly hope the forces of rationality are successful. And I recoil at the idea that his beautiful farm, where he has lived for four decades, could be fed into the maw of “example,” a reminder to like-minded others that an ignorant and arrogant administration is in power right now and will impose the Dark Ages on all of us for as long as it can.

Thanks once again to Bob and Bernie: please support the effort to save Bernie's farm (if you can), and do be sure to bookmark Bob's excellent "Common Wonders", where there's a new column every week and the archives are worth their weight in gold pixels.

Bob Koehler: Hold The Mushrooms!!

Bob Koehler is a wonderful columnist IMVHO and this week he brought us some really good news, so I would be guilty of negligence if I didn't share it. In Bob's words:

Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest — the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago — enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win.

This unprecedented development must be savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas — which would have raised a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what — has been scrapped for good. After several postponements and a round of power-point presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did nothing but fuel people’s outrage, it ain’t gonna happen.

“There was such a public outcry,” said Salt Lake City resident Mary Dickson of Downwinders, one of the organizations leading the fight against the blast, the possibility of which revived hellish memories of the era of above-ground testing that ended in 1962. “I like to think the people will prevail, so I can go on thinking this fighting we do does matter,” Dickson, a cancer survivor, told me. “I just want people to know, if they think they can’t make a difference, look at this case.”

“Back in the ’50s,” said Idahoan Preston Truman, who heads Downwinders, “we were given a booklet on the first day of kindergarten that said, ‘You people who live near the test site are, in a very real sense, active participants in this nation’s testing program.’ Well, I think it just got demonstrated!”

Great stuff here from our friend in Chicago. Please click through and read the whole article. It's well worth the few minutes it'll take you.

A Few Bad Men

Bob Koehler:

And where is it that the Vice Lords meet the Aryan Nation? Why, in Baghdad, of course — where, in one of the less obvious unanticipated consequences of W’s disastrous war, potential domestic terrorists and “army of one” nutjobs are getting top-notch weapons instruction and plenty of target practice. It’s sure to come in handy when they get home.

With the military unable to meet recruitment goals for an unpopular war, gangbangers and white supremacists are having a far easier time getting “moral waivers” to enlist, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center called “A Few Bad Men,” as well as an investigative series in the Chicago Sun-Times in May. The upshot: a future compromised in yet another way, as we train and further desensitize the psychologically fragile and psychotically embittered.

Some of them, baptized in hellfire, could, like Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad and a long list of others, turn around and bite us. Bush’s war to promote terror — the perfect self-sustaining fear machine — isn’t just generating an endless supply of hardened enemies beyond our borders. It is also creating the conditions of social breakdown and psychological blowback within our borders. Guess what? Under Plan Bush, we’ll never be safe.

Among the costs of mobilizing for and waging war — even a “good war,” with huge popular support — is a general cheapening of human life. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them,” Lt. Gen. James Mattis famously blurted out about the Iraqis during a panel discussion in San Diego a year and a half ago, to much applause from couch-potato warriors everywhere.

Such glibness notwithstanding, the actual desensitization process the military must employ to turn raw recruits into killers is serious and often irreversible.
...
We are, in short, inflicting a lot of bad dudes on innocent Iraqis and we will ultimately inflict them back on ourselves. Turns out the cost of waging a pointless war is even higher than the cost of waging one that has rational justification. The social degradation is deeper when we wave a soiled flag.

Read it and weep.

Reading Bob Koehler

The following links lead to excellent columns by Bob Koehler. They used to reside on the sidebar but now they have a post of their own...

• It's time for the world's destitute to stop subsidizing the rich
  Bad debt


• Underlying hysteria sets stage for vote suppression
  Fear of riffraff


• Let's risk the mockery and say out loud that it's time to stop
  The last war?


• All the charm of the draft — and then some
  The Counter-Recruiters


• Mother's Day, a baby boy and the future of the human race
  The Helpless God


• Readers respond to recent columns
  Moonbat lefty for fair elections


• Maybe we can't have election reform without media reform
  Citizens in the rain


• If they can disable an election, what's coming next?
  Democracy's Abu Ghraib


• The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?
  The silent scream of numbers


• Did the U.S. military deliberately target journalists in Baghdad?
  Killing the witnesses


• Two hours with a dying man changed her whole life
  The Father Wound


• Prolonging a life for the sake of cockeyed compassion and right-wing politics
  Morality circus


• A militarized society spawns killers with clear consciences
  Trickle-down violence


• Voting rights are once more at the forefront of the civil rights movement
  Peeling back the mandate


• What kind of future does Nevada's new Test Site museum point to?
  Nuclear exchange


• Nun's slaying focuses world attention on plight of rainforest
  A rosewood coffin


• The worse things get in Iraq, the more quickly it will come back
  Vietnam Syndrome


• U.S. air war on the insurgents casts a wide net
  Save the Iraqis


• Can Iraq's election be any more legit than our own?
  Crack in the bell


• To U.S. media, Bush's deeds matter far less than his words
  The impunity bubble


• Does a pregnant woman have the right to divorce an abusive husband?
  Family Values


• Have we stopped torturing detainees or not?
  America the Hideous


• Ongoing political and economic disasters are off the radar screen
  One tsunami a day


• Troops 'honored' with hollow grief, clinical depression and photo-op glory
  Let the Music Play


• there's more in the archives
  Common Wonders: Previous Columns

the Blogathon is coming ... and you're invited!

We're gearing up for a big weekend at The Brad Blog, and you're invited!


Investigative blogger and radio-show host Brad Friedman is lining up what looks like a killer radio show. It'll be his first live show in two weeks, after a holiday weekend rebroadcast. I'll have more on that for you later in the week.

Others are getting ready for a big weekend of live blogging. The following very distinguished guest bloggers will each spend at least two hours online, fielding your questions and comments:

David Cobb: 2004 Green Party Presidential Candidate
Larisa Alexandrovna: Raw Story Journalist
John Amato: Blogger from Crooks & Liars
Bob Koehler: Journalist with the Times Media Syndicate
Bob Fitrakis: Journalist and Author
Clint Curtis: "Vote-Rigging Software" Whistle-Blower
last and definitely least, in an utterly transparent effort to be 'fair and balanced', we'll have an undistinguished guest blogger as well:
Winter Patriot: ubiquitous blogger and very quiet whisperer

In a rare and very welcome move, Editor & Publisher ran a story last week about Bob Koehler's upcoming appearance; the story was covered lightly and perhaps a bit reluctantly by Brad and you can read more about it here.

You can help us to publicize this event and we really hope you'll decide to do that. One easy way to do this is to download flyers promoting the event, copy them and distribute them as widely as possible. Flyers are available in several different flavors: please click here for a post containing a list of options and links to same.

For more details on the BLOGATHON itself, please start here.

Bob Koehler Hits Hard

He's been an eloquent guest on The Brad Show and I've been reading his columns. His piece on Depleted Uranium hit me hard and I wrote about it here. Now Bob Koehler has hit me hard again, with his newest column, The Counter-Recruiters: All the charm of the draft — and then some. I was doing ok until I got to this part:

"We have to understand that one of the things that happens in war is, truth dies," said Ray Parrish, a Chicago-based counselor for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who left a well-paying job with full benefits to work with GIs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And he's hearing the same expressions of disillusionment, anger and betrayal that he heard when he counseled Vietnam vets and battled the VA to get them their rights. He's seeing the same shattered psyches, the same wrecked lives, the same post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The first vets over there are the ones having the worst time," he told me recently. "During the invasion part of the war, there was very little thought put into pulling the trigger and a lot of innocent civilians were being killed. The ones who pulled the triggers are the ones who are having the car accidents now."

Values stand-down or no values stand-down, the recruiters will not begin telling teenagers anytime soon about post-traumatic stress disorder; high vet suicide rates (among Vietnam vets, it has been estimated to be triple the number of names on The Wall); or today's equivalent of Agent Orange, depleted uranium, which, when breathed in, can devastate health over the long term and, especially cruel to young couples, cause birth defects.

Supplying this information is the job of the counter-recruiters, and the fact that they're out there is one of the most important stories of the war. The vets themselves are the counter-recruiters, telling the truth to high school students.

This is the way back from post-traumatic stress disorder - the way for shattered men and women to redeem themselves and rejoin the human race. "It's part of the healing," Parrish said. "That's what the vets are doing - making sure the recruiters don't sell at all."

Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? This is what we're witnessing, slowly, one wised-up teenager at a time.

Thanks, Bob. Got me again!

Expect Less ...

... and you won't be disappointed!

The busiest part of my year starts now. It runs for the next 10 days or so. I will blog as often as I can, but that may not amount to very much.

I have done some serious work on the sidebar lately. Please explore it if you have time to do so. There's plenty of good reading there, from the likes of Manuel Valenzuela, Robert Parry, Robert Fisk, Robert Koehler, and of course Ernest Partridge and his friends at The Crisis Papers.

You may feel compelled to wish me luck and/or to point me at stories that are too good to miss; if you wish to do any of these things, please leave a comment for me on this thread. Lowly and nearly frozen indeed...

Expect normal service to resume around the middle of May.

Read 'Em And Weep

This will not be pleasant, but I assure you it's necessary.

Read the following excerpts, and see if you can put two and two together:

Robert Kohler: Silent genocide: Depleted-uranium munitions are contaminating the world

[According to] former Livermore Labs geologist Leuren Moret .... depleted uranium turns into an infinitesimally fine dust after it explodes; individual particles are smaller than a virus or bacteria. And, “It is estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment.”

And DU dust is everywhere. A minimum of 500 or 600 tons now litter Afghanistan, and several times that amount are spread across Iraq. In terms of global atmospheric pollution, we’ve already released the equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs, Moret said.

The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse. DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code.

Thus, birth defects are way up in Afghanistan since the invasion: children “born with no eyes, no limbs, tumors protruding from their mouths … deformed genitalia,” according to the tribunal report. This ghastly toll on the unborn — on the future — has led Mohammed Daud Miraki, director of the Afghan DU and Recovery Fund, to coin the term “silent genocide” to describe the effects of this horrific weapon.

Riverbend: Baghdad Burning: The Cruel Month...

The weather is warm now. We often turn on the ceiling fan (or panka) in an attempt to move around the muggy air. April is a month of fresh beginnings all over the world but in Iraq, April is not the best of months. April is a month of muggy warmth and air thick with dust and sand- and now of occupation. We opened the month with a dust storm that left the furniture in our houses sand-colored with an opaque layer of dust. We breathed dust, ate dust and drank dust for a few days. The air is clearer now but everything is looking a little bit diminished and dirty. It suits the mood.

What a mood! Diminished and dirty and extremely deadly. April may be a cruel month, even in "normal times". But these times are definitely not normal. Every month is cruel in Iraq now. How could it be otherwise, when there's depleted uranium everywhere?

We breathed dust, ate dust and drank dust...

And we know what was in that dust...

Even in our time of unrelenting doublespeak, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" must be the most cynical lie of all. The only "freedom" conferred upon Iraq by this operation will be "Freedom from Worrying about the Future".

It's this simple: When you're breathing, eating and drinking dust, and that dust contains depleted uranium, there's no point in worrying about the future. Because there is no future.

Read Bob Kohler. Read Riverbend. Read 'em and weep.

Every American, every Brit, every Australian, every citizen of any country involved in the so-called "coalition", who is not doing his or her utmost to get this horror-show stopped, is silently complicit in this crime. And the crime, unless I am badly mistaken, will end up making Hitler's holocaust look like a picnic in the park.

Read 'em and weep. May God have mercy upon our souls.